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• Silverlight Cream Monday WP7 App Review # 1

  - by Dave Campbell

  I'm going to try something here... if it seems useful, I'll continue, if it doesn't, I'll stop... so give me feedback! There are *lots* of Apps in the WP7 Marketplace, and heaven help me, but the Marketplace sucks for finding stuff. I won't rehash what's already been said in the blogs, but I agree with one and all. I went out last Saturday to find 2 apps that I knew were released, and couldn't do so on my device. Even in the Zune app, it took quite a while to find them... ok, I'll back off a bit, because I just found out I can do 'Search' now if I know the name... I didn't think that was working before. So my thought is on Monday (like today), I will post a review of 5 apps/games I either use or have played with on my device. These are strictly my opinions, you understand, but hey... it's better than a poke in the eye with an iPhone! A few disclaimers:     Feel free to write me about your app and tell me about it. While it would be very cool to receive a whole bunch of xap files to review, at this point, for technical reasons, I'm unable to side-load my device. Since I plan on only doing this one day a week, and only 5, I may never get caught up, so if you send me some info, be patient. Re: games ... remember I'm old... I'm from the era of Colossal Cave and Zork. Duke-Nukem 2D and Captain Comic were awesome. I don't own an XBOX or any other game system, so take game reviews from my perspective -- who knows, it may be refreshing :) I won't pay for an app or game just to try it. If you expect me to test-drive your app, it's going to have to have a Free Trial. In this Issue:   Jingo! is the first app I bought, just to see what the experience was like. It's very much like a game we used to play in school in the Army in 1971 on paper we passed around. Sort of a cross between hangman and Mastermind, you try to figure out the hidden word in 5 tries. You get really good at 5-letter words after a while. I like this because you have to think, and you're not pressured by a clock Jingo! is by James Furdell and is $1.99 I reviewed René Schulte's Pictures Lab a while back, and have not changed my mind. This is an excellent app for playing with any photo on your device... one you've just taken, one you've synced from your PC, or one you've saved from email. I like this because you can get some cool effects for your photos, and it just works. Pictures Lab is by Schulte Software Development and is $1.99 Since I work as a consultant, and from home, I wanted something I could track my time with. I've test-driven all the contenders I could find so far on the phone, and so far I like ONTRACK! the best. If asked, I have some suggestions, but it's probably just the way I work or think. What I do like is I can tap a project to start/stop/restart a counter, and at the end of the day it shows me how much time I've been working. If there's a way to make an adjustment in case you forget to tap the counter, I don't know how to do it, and that's my biggest complaint. I like this because you can get a daily readout which you can also email as a spreadsheet. The daily results display is very good. ONTRACK! is by Qmino and is $2.99 Remember Item 4 above... I've been playing guitar for 48 years... obviously since before the invention of 'tuners', so I'm not as dependent upon these as some folks are. I've tried some in the past and have always felt I can do just as good by ear (I have perfect relative pitch). So, I gave this app by András Velvárt a dance just to see how it works, and it is surprisingly good. If you're used to one of the stage tuners this may take a little getting used to, but it does the job. The difference with this one is there is no real 'null' point inside which you can think your guitar is in tune. The soundwave stays visible on the device, and if it's moving to the right, your string is flat, if it's moving to the left, your string is sharp. Getting it exact might be tricky, but it is exact! If you need to rely on a tuner, this is a good choice in my opinion, exactly because of the sensitivity.. tune up with this and you're dead-on. Guitar Tuner is by Kinabalu Innovation Limited and is $0.99 Popper 2 is the WP7 version of a wildly popular game by Bill Reiss named Dr. Popper. You can get a trial, or you can now get a free lite version of the game. Popper 2 is a fast-paced bubble breaker game. I find it something fun to play when I just want to buzz out, but maybe the best review is that my daughter didn't want to give my phone back when I showed it to her, and always wants to grab my phone to play 'that game'. A fun distraction with great graphics and a great price Popper 2 is by Blue Rose Systems, LLC and is $1.29 Let me know what you think of the idea of doing reviews, or the layout/whatever, and Stay in the 'Light!   Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• game performance

  - by iQue

  I'm making a game for android, and earlier today I was trying to add some cool stuff to my game. The problem is this thing needs like 5 timers. I build my timers like this: timer += deltaTime; if(timer >= 2.0f){ doStuff; timer -= 2.0f; } // this timers gets stuff done every 2 secs Will having to many timers like this, getting checked every frame, screw up my games performance? The effect I wanted to add was a crosshair every 2 sec, then remove it after 2 sec and do a timed animation. So an array of crosshairs dependent on a bunch of timers to be exact. This caused my game to shut down when used, so thats why Im wondering if using that many timers causes my game to flip out.

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• Windows Phone 7 UserExtenedProperties opinion...

  - by webdad3

  I was thinking of a way to some how connect my phone user base to my site user base. Right now if an item gets added to the site via the phone the userId is generic and the site displays it as SmartPhoneUser. I was thinking it might be cool to display the unique phone id by using the UserExtenedProperties, however, after reading Nick Harris's blog about it I'm thinking it may not be a good idea as I don't want users to think I'm up to anything nefarious. So I'm wondering if there are any suggestions out there on how to accomplish this task. Right now my site uses the JanRain module that allows multiple logins from other sites (Facebook, Yahoo, Google etc.). Any thoughts on how I can accomplish what I want to do without using the ExtendedProperties?

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• Setting up Oracle Linux 6 with public-yum for all updates

  - by wcoekaer

  I just wanted to give you a quick example on how to get started with Oracle Linux 6 and start using the updates we published on http://public-yum.oracle.com. Download Oracle Linux (without the requirement of a support subscription) from http://edelivery.oracle.com/linux. Install Oracle Linux from the ISO or DVD image Log in as user root Download the yum repo file from http://public-yum.oracle.com # cd /etc/yum.repos.d # wget http://public-yum.oracle.com/public-yum-ol6.repo If you want, you can edit the repo file and enable other repositories, I enabled [ol6_UEK_latest] by just setting enabled=1 in the file with a text editor. Run yum repolist to show the registered channels and you see we are including everything including the latest published RPMs. Now you can just run yum update and any time we release new security errata or bugfix errata for OL6, they will be posted and you will automatically get them. It's very easy, very convenient and actually very cool. We do a lot more than just build OL RPMs and distribute them, we have a very comprehensive test farm where we test the packages extensively.

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• AJI Report #20 | Devin Rader On Usability and REST

  - by Jeff Julian

  Devin is one of our great friends from days of ole'. Devin was a great community leader in St. Louis .NET space. The then moved to New Jersey to work at Infragistics where he was a huge asset for the .NET and Usability communities. He is now at Twilio as an evangelist and you will see him pretty much at every cool conference promoting Twilio and educating the masses. In this show, we talk about what Usability is and how developers can understanding what the how to solve problems with usability and some of the patterns we can use. Devin really wants to bring the focus back to the beginning of knowing who your users are and we talk about how to produce personas of the users of our products. We dive into REST for the second piece of this podcast. Devin helps us understand more about REST and what goes into a RESTful application or service. Listen to the Show Twilio Site: http://www.twilio.com Twitter: @DevinRader LinkedIn: Profile Link

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• Do I create new site or add to existing site?

  - by nitbuntu

  Hi, Suppose, as an example, I have a website with the address, www.cool-gifts.com and I'm getting regular sales and its a worthwhile site, but no great fireworks. After research I find that there is a great market for '2nd hand stuff' and I'd like to serve that market. Would it be best to add '2nd hand stuff' as an additional category of gifts in my existing site....or, since the 2nd hand stuff is a market in itself, would I be better off investing time and energy bringing up a whole new site (www.used-stuff.com)? If I had employees and financial resources, it probably would be a no-brainer...start a new site. But, what if you are a small guy, with limited resources? So...new site....or add to existing site?

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• links worth clicking&hellip;

  - by Chris Williams

  Scanning my Twitter feed almost always proves to be fruitful when looking for cool/interesting links to share. Here are a few of the highlights: I read this blog post from Justin Angel today, pretty interesting stuff: Windows Phone 7 – Unlocked ROMs  Looks like there’s a lot of good stuff floating just under the surface in the latest build of the WP7 Emulator. (Courtesy of @JustinAngel) Next up is this video titled Game Design Tutorials: From Seconds to Hours of Gameplay. If you’re into Indie Game Development, or just like watching videos… this one is pretty short at 5 minutes, but contains some good information about increasing the duration of fun gameplay in your game. (Courtesy of @Kei_tchan) If you are a Firefly (or Castle, or Dr. Horrible’s Singalong Blog) fan, check out this Facebook campaign to get Nathan Fillion to host SNL: http://tinyurl.com/2dh5m67  It worked for Betty White, so why not, right? (Courtesy of @DGalloway42)

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• Print Your Favorite Video Game Character in 3D

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  Beloved video game characters of yesterday are perfect candidates for 3D printing with their simple and block-based sprite shapes. Read on to learn more about the process and mathematics of turning 2D sprites into 3D models. Courtesy of Mikola Lysenko, a computer scientist and mechanical engineer, we’re treated to not just a tutorial on how to create a 3D shape from a 2D seed image, but the mathematics behind figuring out exactly what that 2D sprite should look like if stretched out into three dimensions. Hit up the link below for his tour of techniques including multiview stereo reconstruction and space carving (and why he went with one technique over the other)–the explanation of his process is just as interesting as the cool results it yields. Turning 8-Bit Sprites into Printable 3D Models [via Hack A Day] How To Create a Customized Windows 7 Installation Disc With Integrated Updates How to Get Pro Features in Windows Home Versions with Third Party Tools HTG Explains: Is ReadyBoost Worth Using?

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• A Visual Studio Release Grows in Brooklyn

  - by andrewbrust

  Yesterday, Microsoft held its flagship launch event for Office 2010 in Manhattan.  Today, the Redmond software company is holding a local launch event for Visual Studio (VS) 2010, in Brooklyn.  How come information workers get the 212 treatment and developers are relegated to 718? Well, here’s the thing: the Brooklyn Marriott is actually a great place for an event, but you need some intimate knowledge of New York City to know that.  NBC’s Studio 8H, where the Office launch was held yesterday (and from where SNL is broadcast) is a pretty small venue, but you’d need some inside knowledge to recognize that.  Likewise, while Office 2010 is a product whose value is apparent.  Appreciating VS 2010’s value takes a bit more savvy.  Setting aside its year-based designation, this release of VS, counting the old Visual Basic releases, is the 10th version of the product.  How can a developer audience get excited about an integrated development environment when it reaches double-digit version numbers?  Well, it can be tough.  Luckily, Microsoft sent Jay Schmelzer, a Group Program Manager from the Visual Studio team in Redmond, to come tell the Brooklyn audience why they should be excited. Turns out there’s a lot of reasons.  Support fro SharePoint development is a big one.  In previous versions of VS, that support has been anemic, at best.  Shortage of SharePoint developers is a huge issue in the industry, and this should help.  There’s also built in support for Windows Azure (Microsoft’s cloud platform) and, through a download, support for the forthcoming Windows Phone 7 platform.  ASP.NET MVC, a “close-to-the-metal” Web development option that does away with the Web Forms abstraction layer, has a first-class presence in VS.  So too does jQuery, the Open Source environment that makes JavaScript development a breeze.  The jQuery support is so good that Microsoft now contributes to that Open Source project and offers IntelliSense support for it in the code editor. Speaking of the VS code editor, it now supports multi-monitor setups, zoom-in, and block selection.  If you’re not a developer, this may sound confusing and minute.  I’ll just say that for people who are developers these are little things that really contribute to productivity, and that translates into lower development costs. The really cool demo, though, was around Visual Studio 2010’s new debugging features.  This stuff is hard to showcase, but I believe it’s truly breakthrough technology: imagine being able to step backwards in time to see what might have caused a bug.  Cool?  Now imagine being able to do that, even if you weren’t the tester and weren’t present while the testing was being done.  Then imagine being able to see a video screen capture of what the tester was doing with your app when the bug occurred.  VS 2010 allows all that.  This could be the demise of the IWOMM (“it works on my machine”) syndrome. After the keynote, I asked Schmelzer if any of Microsoft’s competitors have debugging tools that come close to VS 2010’s.  His answer was an earnest “we don’t think so.”  If that’s true, that’s a big deal, and a huge advantage for developer teams who adopt it.  It will make software development much cheaper and more efficient.  Kind of like holding a launch event at the Brooklyn Marriott instead of 30 Rock in Manhattan! VS 2010 (version 10) and Office 2010 (version 14) aren’t the only new product versions Microsoft is releasing right now.  There’s also SQL Server 2008 R2 (version 10.5), Exchange 2010 (version 8, I believe), SharePoint 2010 (version 4) and, of course, Windows 7.  With so many new versions at such levels of maturity, I think it’s fair to say Microsoft has reached middle-age.  How does a company stave off a potential mid-life crisis, especially when with young Turks like Google coming along and competing so fiercely?  Hard to say.  But if focusing on core value, including value that’s hard to play into a sexy demo, is part oft the answer, then Microsoft’s doing OK.  And if some new tricks, like Windows Phone 7, can gain some traction, that might round things out nicely. Are the legacy products old tricks, or are they revised classics?  I honestly don’t know, because it’s the market’s prerogative to pass that judgement.  I can say this though: based on today’s show, I think Microsoft’s been doing its homework.

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• Dynamic User Specific CSS Selection at Run Time

  I had a cool question while I was at MIX. A developer needed the ability to have his site render pages using a CSS file selected based on some user specific criteria. ASP.NET 4 controls generate CSS friendly output and more and more we web developers are using CSS for layout etc. Using multiple CSS files in our site wide templates we can not only provide different aesthetic experiences but we can chage the style based on the device type (Printer ot Phone) or the special needs of the end user...Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Friday Fun: Pirates – Arctic Treasure

  - by Asian Angel

  In this week’s game a ‘cool’ adventure awaits as you and your merry band of pirates sail the Arctic seas in search of treasure. Work as quickly as you can using your trusty cutlass, explosives, and other items you find along the way to free up the treasure and sail away with riches untold. HTG Explains: Does Your Android Phone Need an Antivirus? How To Use USB Drives With the Nexus 7 and Other Android Devices Why Does 64-Bit Windows Need a Separate “Program Files (x86)” Folder?

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• Oracle Applications Day 2012. Experience the Global Innovation of Management Applications

  - by antonella.buonagurio

  10 ottobre 2012 – Milano, East End Studios | 17 ottobre 2012 - Roma, Officine Farneto Sono aperte le iscrizioni per partecipare agli appuntamenti dedicati alla comunità di Clienti e Partner: un’occasione imperdibile a Milano e Roma per condividere le soluzioni più innovative e le esperienze più significative sulle scelte strategiche per affrontare le sfide attuali e future. Iscriviti sul sito sito Oracle Applications Day 2012 ti offre l’opportunità di partecipare al concorso fotografico Oracle I.M.A.G.E. e vincere un iPad! Scatta le immagini che per te descrivono i cinque concept dell’evento (Innovation, Management, Applications, Global, Experience) ed inviale tramite il tuo smartphone. Per partecipare al contest visita la pagina Concorso sul sito E non dimenticare ORACLE RED! Diventa protagonista della comunicazione visiva dell’Oracle Applications Day: scatta la tua immagine Red Oracle e postala su INSTAGRAM con il cancelletto/hashtag #OracleApps_Red. Le tue foto potranno diventare lo slideshow che verrà proiettato in apertura dei lavori. Per ulteriori informazioni visita il sito Non perdere l’evento più “social cool” dell’anno! Il Team Oracle

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• SOA Suite demo pod at OOW 2012

  - by Simone Geib

  Visit us in the exhibition hall at Oracle Open World from Monday October 1st till Wednesday October 3rd. You'll have the opportunity to meet our engineering team and product managers and learn what SOA Suite is about and all the cool stuff you can do with it. Come to get a general demo, ask specific questions, give feedback or just have discussions with the Oracle SOA team. You can find us at Moscone South, Right - S-229. And don't forget to check out the Focus on SOA and BPM document for an overview of all SOA and BPM sessions

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• Recommended method towards making custom maps for a 2d game?

  - by Qasim

  I am planning on making a 2D game, however different from my last personal projects I want this one to have enhanced graphics, with custom-designed levels. My previous 2d platformers were tile-based, in which I made a map editor for to create levels. However, I am wondering the best way to implement custom designed maps? For say, some grass is a litter higher than others, flowers here and there, cool drawings and structures along the way, etc. instead of just the same old tiles over and over again. I am thinking but I just can't grasp the idea of how to implement it. I have seen it done in other games and am interested to see how they accomplish it, but can't get my hands on some source code. :(

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• First of all...

  - by devboy00

  First of all, this is going to be about my long (hopefully not) and painful (most definitely) climb back into the saddle after spending all of the intervening years between .NET 1.1 and now being a PHB.  I've half-heartedly attempted to get back up to speed a couple of times, but THIS time I actually have some coding to do, AND the geeks are so amped up about all of the new technologies, I really have to do this. So...  Once again, .NET 1.1.  Right now I'm getting ready to work on a site that incorporates Fluent nHibernate, MVC, Spark, and some conventions based coding practices.  Along the way, I'll have to learn about Lambda expressions and other cool stuff that I've missed out on in the last bazillion years since I seriously coded.  Hopefully this will be a guide, or a warning for those of you who feel the need to get off the sidelines and get back into the game. Yeah, that's it for now.

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• Silverlight Cream Monday WP7 App Review # 2

  - by Dave Campbell

  Today's Review (alphabetic order): GooNews, Grocery Shopping List, Need for Speed, SurfCube, and United Nations News. I'm a day late if these are going to be 'Monday' posts, but there are lots of apps, lots of goodness, and lots of email, so I might try to do 2 a week, we'll see. So once again I've got a small review of 5 apps that are either on my phone or have been. Disclaimers at the end. In this Issue:   GooNews is a very cool app from Shawn Wildermuth (AgiliTrain). I don't know if he uses this as a demo during his instruction, but it definitely serves a purpose... wanna pick up the top news items from Google on a never-ending basis? ... this is it. You can add your own keyword searches, and send stories to InstaPaper or share via email. I like this because it brings me the news quickly and updated, and works great. GooNews is by AgiliTrain and is Free This was a request by the author, and actually surprised me. I'm a big one for lists, but I would have just done a OneNote list to SkyDrive and to my phone. This app is a lot more than that, but will take you some setup to make it be 'yours'. For obvious reasons, there are no unit prices on things, so you have to set that up to get some idea of the cost of what you're shopping for. But if you do that, you'll get a nice total. Lots of thought went into the various categories and you can add your own. There's a bit of animation on the category selection that's nice. He seems to have covered all the bases necessary to use this, even shopping 'plans' that can be saved, and emailing of lists. As I said, I'm more of a raw list person, but if you take the time to set this up, it should work very nicely for you. Grocery Shopping List is by Grocery Shopper and is $0.99 ($1.99 after Feb 1) with a free trial. This was my 2nd commercial game I bought, and the one I've played the most. I ran the trial, thought it worked great, and bought it. I've had a lot of fun with this... there's no gas pedal.. your foot is in the carbeurator from the GO!, and unless you wanna tap the screen and brake like a little girl, just hang onto the steering wheel (the phone), and guide your way through. Hours of fun and challenges here. I like this because it's got some challenge to it, and the cars seem to be very realistic in their reactions. Need for Speed Undercover is by Electronic Arts is $4.99 and has a free trial. SurfCube Browser is another app by the folks that did the GuitarTuner I reviewed on Monday. You have to see SurfCube to believe it. You've probably seen the YouTube video, if not check SilverlightCream number 1017. The app works very solid, and just as the video demonstrates. I downloaded and tried this, and it immediately did 2 things: bought it, and pinned it to my start page. I like this because it's fun to work with, and it works great as a browser. I'm about *this* close to replacing the IE tile on my front page with SurfCube. SurfCube Browser is by Kinabalu Innovation Limited and is $1.99 and has a free trial. Coming in with another News app is United Nations News by Justin Angel. This is definitely a news aggregator for 'grown ups'... news, photos, videos, and radio broadcsts from the international community all in one very slick app. This is an amazingly well thought-out and complete app. Even better yet, Justin has the code on CodePlex. A very well-done International news aggregator. United Nations News is by Justin Angel and is Free. A few disclaimers: Feel free to write me about your app and tell me about it. While it would be very cool to receive a whole bunch of xap files to review, at this point, for technical reasons, I'm unable to side-load my device. Since I plan on only doing this one day a week (twice if I find time), and only 5, I may never get caught up, so if you send me some info, be patient. Re: games ... remember I'm old... I'm from the era of Colossal Cave and Zork. Duke-Nukem 2D and Captain Comic were awesome. I don't own an XBOX or any other game system, so take game reviews from my perspective -- who knows, it may be refreshing :) I won't pay for an app or game just to try it. If you expect me to test-drive your app, it's going to have to have a Free Trial. I'm still playing with the format, comments are welcome. I decided I should alphabetize the list today... so there's no order implied Let me know what you think of the idea of doing reviews, or the layout/whatever, and Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• Suggest-a-Session for Oracle Develop 2010: Last chance to get your paper submitted.

  - by olaf.heimburger

  While working with Oracle Technologies at customer projects we all come across solutions and ideas that are worth to share with a greater audience. When you missed the Call For Paper for Oracle OpenWorld and Oracle Develop you have the chance to get in. The Oracle Mix Community provides a tool called Suggest-a-Session for submitting and voting the sessions you would like to attend. My Suggestions When you pass by, do not forget to vote for my sessions. These are: Real-World Single Sign-On and ADF Security The Personal Newsletter Generator: Implement Cool Applications with ADF Faces Thank you for your support.

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• Green IT : Microsoft et Google peuvent mieux faire, selon le rapport annuel de Greenpeace

  Green IT : Microsoft et Google peuvent mieux faire, selon le rapport annuel de Greenpeace Quand les écolos mettent leur nez dans le milieu de l'informatique, certaines firmes se font tapper sur les doigts. De bons points ont cependant été accordés à Cisco et Ericsson, qui sont arrivés en première position des entreprises informatiques ayant le moins d'impact sur les changements climatiques. Malgré son lobbying en faveur des énergies propres et ses investissements dans les énergies renouvelables, Google obtient un mauvais résultat et se place à la 6éme position. Greenpeace a publié en début de semaine sont Cool IT Leaderboard annuel. Si la première place a été attribuée à Cisco, c'est à cause de ...

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• Oracle Database 12c is here!

  - by Maria Colgan

  Oracle Database 12c was officially release today and is now available for download. Along with the software release comes a whole new set of collateral that explains in detail all of the new features and functionality you will find in this release. The Optimizer page on Oracle.com has all the juicy details about what you can expect from the Optimizer in Oracle Database12c.  There you will find the following 3 new white papers; What to expect from the Oracle Optimizer in Oracle Database 12c SQL Plan Management with Oracle Database 12c Understanding Optimizer Statistics with Oracle Database 12c Over the coming months we will also present an in-depth series of blog posts on all of the cool new Optimizer features in 12c so stay tuned for that and happy reading! +Maria Colgan

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• Is "code that generates code" really all that great?

  - by Jaxo

  I was looking through CodePen's "popular pens" and I noticed this cool little spiral animation somebody made with a seemingly ridiculously small amount of code. This is quite impressive until you click the headings for HTML and CSS to show the "compiled" versions of the same code. Suddenly the 3 lines of HAML and ~40 lines of SCSS turns into a gigantic monster of repetition. Here's where my question comes in: Is it acceptable to do something like this in practice? Don't get me wrong - I love using preprocessors to help me write code faster, but in some cases it looks like it's an automatic copy-paste machine.

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• GLSL Shader Effects: How to do motion blur, etc?

  - by DevilWithin

  I am not sure how right it is to ask this question, but still here it goes. I have a full 2D environment, with sprites going around as landscape, characters, etc And to make it more state-of-art looking, i want to implement a motion blur effect, similar to modern FPS's (i.e. crysis) blur when moving fast the camera. In a sidescroller, the desired effect is having this slight blur appearing to give the idea of fast movement, when the camera is moving. If anyone could give me some tips on doing this, im assuming in a pixel shader, i'd be grate. Also, if anyone has other good tips on cool pixel shader effects for 2D games it would be awesome, like some stylizing post fx, such as previous Prince of Persia illustrative style. Thanks

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• Five development tools I can't live without

  - by bconlon

  When applying to join Geeks with Blogs I had to specify the development tools I use every day. That got me thinking, it's taken a long time to whittle my tools of choice down to the selection I use, so it might be worth sharing. Before I begin, I appreciate we all have our preferred development tools, but these are the ones that work for me. Microsoft Visual Studio Microsoft Visual Studio has been my development tool of choice for more years than I care to remember. I first used this when it was Visual C++ 1.5 (hats off to those who started on 1.0) and by 2.2 it had everything I needed from a C++ IDE. Versions 4 and 5 followed and if I had to guess I would expect more Windows applications are written in VC++ 6 and VB6 than any other language. Then came the not so great versions Visual Studio .Net 2002 (7.0) and 2003 (7.1). If I'm honest I was still using v6. 2005 was better and 2008 was simply brilliant. Everything worked, the compiler was super fast and I was happy again...then came 2010...oh dear. 2010 is a big step backwards for me. It's not encouraging for my upcoming WPF exploits that 2010 is fronted in WPF technology, with the forever growing Find/Replace dialog, the issues with C++ intellisense, and the buggy debugger. That said it is still my tool of choice but I hope they sort the issue in SP1. I've tried other IDEs like Visual Age and Eclipse, but for me Visual Studio is the best. A really great tool. Liquid XML Studio XML development is a tricky business. The W3C standards are often difficult to get to the bottom of so it's great to have a graphical tool to help. I first used Liquid Technologies 5 or 6 years back when I needed to process XML data in C++. Their excellent XML Data Binding tool has an easy to use Wizard UI (as compared to Castor or JAXB command line tools) and allows you to generate code from an XML Schema. So instead of having to deal with untyped nodes like with a DOM parser, instead you get an Object Model providing a custom API in C++, C#, VB etc. More recently they developed a graphical XML IDE with XML Editor, XSLT, XQuery debugger and other XML tools. So now I can develop an XML Schema graphically, click a button to generate a Sample XML document, and click another button to run the Wizard to generate code including a Sample Application that will then load my Sample XML document into the generated object model. This is a very cool toolset. Note: XML Data Binding is nothing to do with WPF Data Binding, but I hope to cover both in more detail another time. .Net Reflector Note: I've just noticed that starting form the end of February 2011 this will no longer be a free tool !! .Net Reflector turns .Net byte code back into C# source code. But how can it work this magic? Well the clue is in the name, it uses reflection to inspect a compiled .Net assembly. The assembly is compiled to byte code, it doesn't get compiled to native machine code until its needed using a just-in-time (JIT) compiler. The byte code still has all of the information needed to see classes, variables. methods and properties, so reflector gathers this information and puts it in a handy tree. I have used .Net Reflector for years in order to understand what the .Net Framework is doing as it sometimes has undocumented, quirky features. This really has been invaluable in certain instances and I cannot praise enough kudos on the original developer Lutz Roeder. Smart Assembly In order to stop nosy geeks looking at our code using a tool like .Net Reflector, we need to obfuscate (mess up) the byte code. Smart Assembly is a tool that does this. Again I have used this for a long time. It is very quick and easy to use. Another excellent tool. Coincidentally, .Net Reflector and Smart Assembly are now both owned by Red Gate. Again kudos goes to the original developer Jean-Sebastien Lange. TortoiseSVN SVN (Apache Subversion) is a Source Control System developed as an open source project. TortoiseSVN is a graphical UI wrapper over SVN that hooks into Windows Explorer to enable files to be Updated, Committed, Merged etc. from the right click menu. This is an essential tool for keeping my hard work safe! Many years ago I used Microsoft Source Safe and I disliked CVS type systems. But TortoiseSVN is simply the best source control tool I have ever used. --- So there you have it, my top 5 development tools that I use (nearly) every day and have helped to make my working life a little easier. I'm sure there are other great tools that I wish I used but have never heard of, but if you have not used any of the above, I would suggest you check them out as they are all very, very cool products. #

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• Interactive training site for Javascript complete with code challenges [closed]

  - by Chase Florell

  A few months ago I discovered a cool course called Rails for Zombies. This is a great site that allows us to write code and see the results. It takes us through the paces to get us up to speed with Rails. You have to pass each level (including code challenges) before being taken to the next level, and it gets you grounded in the fundamentals of Rails. I'm wondering if an interactive tutorial site exists for Javascript? One that will walk me through the paces of writing better Javascript, and challenge me along the way.

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• Check out What's New in Oracle UPK 3.6.1 and Tutor 12.2

  - by [email protected]

  Attend our new feature webinar to learn what's new in Oracle UPK 3.6.1 and Oracle Tutor 12.2 and discover how you can reduce costs, mitigate risk and drive ROI in your organization. Hit the Ground Running: Get New Application Users Productive from Day One will feature an overview of Oracle UPK & Tutor as well as provide a good look at the new, cool things you can do with sound and presentation outputs! Register Now! Wednesday, April 28, 2010 | 9 a.m. PT / 12 noon ET/ 6 p.m. CET Duration: 60 minutes

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• Overheating on Dell Studio XPS 1645

  - by pjtatlow

  So I was wondering if anyone else has come upon this problem, and/or has come up with a solution. When I use my Ubuntu partition, my computer becomes extremely hot, and the fan runs very noisily for a very long time. If I reboot into windows while this is happening, my computer actually begins to cool down while doing the exact same tasks. Thinking this might just be a bug with Ubuntu, I installed fedora on another partition, and the same problem occurs. Is this a problem with the kernel? Cpufreq tells me that my CPU is running at 933 MHz out of a possible 1.6 GHz from my Intel Core i7 CPU Q70. For anyone who wants more information, I have 8 GB of memory, and an ATI Mobility Raedon HD 5730 Graphics Card. I'm open to any ideas anyone might have. Thanks in advance!

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