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• ALSA samples capture: cannot open device

  - by Randagio

  I'm quite new to Linux (Lubuntu 12.04 for sake of precision) and ALSA programming at all. I'm trying to write a C program to capture audio from internal PC microphone for processing it. So as first step I google a bit and I found this article for capturing audio samples A tutorial on using the ALSA Audio API but when I compile it and execute it with: ./capture "default" or ./capture "hw:0,0" and all the possible variants on theme it always raises the error: cannot open device hw:0,0 (no such file or directory). So the issue is: what is the name of the mic audio device to pass as parameter to record the audio from mic ? The mic is working ok because the Sound Recorder program records sounds perfectly and I can playback them. The output of the aplay -l is the following : **** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices **** card 0: I82801DBICH4 [Intel 82801DB-ICH4], device 0: Intel ICH [Intel 82801DB-ICH4] Subdevices: 1/1 Subdevice #0: subdevice #0 card 0: I82801DBICH4 [Intel 82801DB-ICH4], device 4: Intel ICH - IEC958 [Intel 82801DB-ICH4 - IEC958] Subdevices: 1/1 Subdevice #0: subdevice #0 and this is the amixer output (cut) Simple mixer control 'Master',0 Capabilities: pvolume pswitch penum Playback channels: Front Left - Front Right Limits: Playback 0 - 31 Mono: Front Left: Playback 31 [100%] [0.00dB] [on] Front Right: Playback 31 [100%] [0.00dB] [on] Simple mixer control 'Master Mono',0 Capabilities: pvolume pvolume-joined pswitch pswitch-joined penum Playback channels: Mono Limits: Playback 0 - 31 Mono: Playback 4 [13%] [-40.50dB] [on] Simple mixer control 'PCM',0 Capabilities: pvolume pswitch penum Playback channels: Front Left - Front Right Limits: Playback 0 - 31 Mono: Front Left: Playback 31 [100%] [12.00dB] [on] Front Right: Playback 31 [100%] [12.00dB] [on] Simple mixer control 'CD',0 Capabilities: pvolume pswitch cswitch cswitch-exclusive penum Capture exclusive group: 0 Playback channels: Front Left - Front Right Capture channels: Front Left - Front Right Limits: Playback 0 - 31 Front Left: Playback 0 [0%] [-34.50dB] [off] Capture [off] Front Right: Playback 0 [0%] [-34.50dB] [off] Capture [off] Simple mixer control 'Mic',0 Capabilities: pvolume pvolume-joined pswitch pswitch-joined cswitch cswitch-exclusive penum Capture exclusive group: 0 Playback channels: Mono Capture channels: Front Left - Front Right Limits: Playback 0 - 31 Mono: Playback 22 [71%] [-1.50dB] [on] Front Left: Capture [on] Front Right: Capture [on] Simple mixer control 'Mic Boost (+20dB)',0 Capabilities: pswitch pswitch-joined penum Playback channels: Mono Mono: Playback [off] Simple mixer control 'Mic Select',0 Capabilities: enum Items: 'Mic1' 'Mic2' Item0: 'Mic1' Simple mixer control 'Stereo Mic',0 Capabilities: pswitch pswitch-joined penum Playback channels: Mono Mono: Playback [off] so for aplay it seems I have no recording device, but for amixer I've got the mic, a mic boost and mic stereo as well with all those gorgeous stuffs on their place !!. If so, how could my Sound Recorder record the audio without any problem at all ?!?! For sure I'm giving the wrong device name to the command line for capturing audio but I'm loosing the hope for finding the correct one ! Please help....before I tear my hair out !!!

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• Get the Picture: Pinterest for Marketers

  - by Mike Stiles

  When trying to determine on which networks to conduct social marketing, the usual suspects immediately rise to the top; Facebook & Twitter, then LinkedIn (especially if you’re B2B), then maybe some Google Plus to hedge SEO bets.  So at what juncture do brands get excited about Pinterest? Pinterest has been easy for marketers to de-prioritize thanks to the perception its usage is so dominated by women. Um, what’s wrong with that? Women make an estimated 85% of all consumer purchases. So if there are indeed over 30 million US women active on it monthly, and they do 92% of the pinning, and 84% are still active on it after 4 years, when did an audience of highly engaged, very likely sales conversions become low priority? Okay, if you’re a tech B2B SaaS product like the Oracle Social Cloud, Pinterest may not be where you focus. But if you operate in the top Pinterest categories, which are truly far-reaching, it’s time to take note of Pinterest’s performance to date: 40.1 million monthly users in the US (eMarketer). Over 30 billion pins, half of which were pinned in the last 6 months. (Big momentum) 75% of usage is on their mobile app. (In solid shape for the mobile migration) Pinterest sharing grew 58% in 2013, beating Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. (ShareThis) Pinterest is the 3rd most popular sharing platform overall (over email), with 48% of all sharing on tablets. Users referred by Pinterest are 10% more likely to buy on e-commerce sites and tend to spend twice that of users coming from Facebook. (Shopify) To be fair, brands haven’t had any paid marketing opportunities on that platform…until recently. Users are seeing Promoted Pins in both category and search feeds from rollout brands like Gap, ABC Family, Ziploc, and Nestle. Are the paid pins annoying users? It seems more so than other social networks, they’re fitting right in to the intended user experience and being accepted, getting almost as many click-throughs as user pins. New York Magazine’s Kevin Roose laid it out succinctly; Pinterest offers a place that’s image-centric, search-friendly, makes things easy to purchase, makes things easy to share, and puts users in an aspirational mood to buy. Pinterest is very confident in the value of that combo and that audience, with CPM rates 5x that of the most expensive Facebook ad, plus (at least for now) required spending commitments and required pin review by Pinterest for quality. The latest developments; a continued move toward search and discovery with enhancements like Guided Search to help you hone in on what interests you, Custom Categories, and the rumored Visual Search that stands to be a liberation from text. And most recently, Pinterest has opened up its API so brands can get access to deeper insights into the best search terms and categories in which to play ball, as well as what kinds of pins stand to perform best in those areas. As we learned in our rundown this week of Social Media Examiner’s Social Media Marketing Industry Report, around 50% of marketers specifically intend on upping their use of Pinterest. If you’re a big believer in fishing where the fish are, that’s probably an efficient position to take. @mikestiles @oraclesocialPhoto: Adam Lambert_Gorwyn, freeimages.com

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• Evaluating Scrum - is it okay to have people with multiple roles in a Scrum team?

  - by Wayne M

  I'm evaluating some Agile-style methodologies for possible introduction to my team. With Scrum, is it allowable to have the same person perform multiple roles? We have a small team of four developers and a web designer; we don't really have a lead (I fulfill this role), QA testers or business analysts, and all of our development tasks come from the CIO. Automated testing is seen as a total waste of time, and everything focuses on speed and not quality. What will happen is the CIO will come up with a development task (whether a feature or a bug) and give it to a developer (not to the whole team, to an individual, often in private or out of the blue) who is then expected to get it completed. The CIO doesn't gather requirements beyond the initial idea (and this has bitten us before as we'll implement something only to find out that none of the end users can use the feature, because they weren't consulted or even informed about it before we developed it, and in a panic we'll be told to revert the change) but requires say in/approval of everything that we do. First things first, is a Scrum style something to consider to introduce some standards and practices? From reading, Scrum seems to rely on a bit more trust and communication and focuses more on project management than on development, which is something we are completely devoid of as we don't have any semblance of project management at present. Second, if it can work is it unreasonable for someone, let's say myself, to act as both ScrumMaster and a developer? Or for a developer to also be the Product Owner (although chances are this will be the CIO, who isn't a developer)? I realize the Scrum Master and the Product Owner should be different people but at the same time I don't think we have anyone who has the qualities of a Product Owner (chances are it would turn into a "I need all these stories, I don't care how but get it done" type of deal and/or any freeze would be unfrozen on a whim). It seems to me that I might need to pick and choose pieces of Scrum/XP/Lean to compensate for how things are done currently, as it's highly unlikely that the mentality can be changed; for instance Pair Programming would never fly (seen as a waste, you get half the tasks done if you need two people for everything), TDD would be a hard sell, but short cycles would be welcomed.

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• How does interpolation actually work to smooth out an object's movement?

  - by user22241

  I've asked a few similar questions over the past 8 months or so with no real joy, so I am going make the question more general. I have an Android game which is OpenGL ES 2.0. within it I have the following Game Loop: My loop works on a fixed time step principle (dt = 1 / ticksPerSecond) loops=0; while(System.currentTimeMillis() > nextGameTick && loops < maxFrameskip){ updateLogic(dt); nextGameTick+=skipTicks; timeCorrection += (1000d/ticksPerSecond) % 1; nextGameTick+=timeCorrection; timeCorrection %=1; loops++; } render(); My intergration works like this: sprite.posX+=sprite.xVel*dt; sprite.posXDrawAt=sprite.posX*width; Now, everything works pretty much as I would like. I can specify that I would like an object to move across a certain distance (screen width say) in 2.5 seconds and it will do just that. Also because of the frame skipping that I allow in my game loop, I can do this on pretty much any device and it will always take 2.5 seconds. Problem However, the problem is that when a render frame skips, the graphic stutter. It's extremely annoying. If I remove the ability to skip frames, then everything is smooth as you like, but will run at different speeds on different devices. So it's not an option. I'm still not sure why the frame skips, but I would like to point out that this is Nothing to do with poor performance, I've taken the code right back to 1 tiny sprite and no logic (apart from the logic required to move the sprite) and I still get skipped frames. And this is on a Google Nexus 10 tablet (and as mentioned above, I need frame skipping to keep the speed consistent across devices anyway). So, the only other option I have is to use interpolation (or extrapolation), I've read every article there is out there but none have really helped me to understand how it works and all of my attempted implementations have failed. Using one method I was able to get things moving smoothly but it was unworkable because it messed up my collision. I can foresee the same issue with any similar method because the interpolation is passed to (and acted upon within) the rendering method - at render time. So if Collision corrects position (character now standing right next to wall), then the renderer can alter it's position and draw it in the wall. So I'm really confused. People have said that you should never alter an object's position from within the rendering method, but all of the examples online show this. So I'm asking for a push in the right direction, please do not link to the popular game loop articles (deWitters, Fix your timestep, etc) as I've read these multiple times. I'm not asking anyone to write my code for me. Just explain please in simple terms how Interpolation actually works with some examples. I will then go and try to integrate any ideas into my code and will ask more specific questions if need-be further down the line. (I'm sure this is a problem many people struggle with).

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• Getting Started with Kinect for Windows.

  - by Vishal

  Hello folks,      Recently I got involved in a project for building a demo application for one of our customers with Kinect for Windows. Yes, something similar what Tom Cruise did in the movie Minority Report. Waving arms, moving stuff around, swipes, speech recognition, manipulating computer screens without even touching it. Pretty cool!!! The idea in the movie showed us how technology would be after 50 years from that day.   Minority Report Movie clip.           Well, that 50 years of time frame got squeezed and recently on Feb 1st 2012, Microsoft released the official Kinect for Windows SDK. That’s just 10 years from the movie release. Although, the product is in it early stages but with developer creativity and continuously improving hardware, those features shown in the movie are not very far away from becoming a reality. Soon after releasing the SDK, Microsoft again announced in March the release of its new Kinect for Windows SDK version 1.5 which is coming out in sometime May. More history about Kinect. Anyways, so for a newbie with Kinect, where would you start. Here is what I would suggest you can do. Watch the Kinect for Windows Quick start Series by Den Fernandez. Download the Kinect for Windows SDK and start playing around with the demos in it. It also comes with some basic Kinect documentation. Coding4Fun Kinect Projects | Lot many more videos and open sources projects information. Kinect for Windows Session at Techdays NL demo by Jesus Rodriguez. Book: Beginning Kinect Programming with the Microsoft Kinect SDK.  | I did go through few of the chapters in this book and based on that, it does talk deeply about core Kinect concepts but in very easy to understand way. I would definitely suggest this book for any Kinect developers. I liked the way it explained the Gestures recognition in Chapter 6. Buy your Kinect device from either Amazon or NewEgg. You will get it cheaper then buying it from Microsoft Store. Personally, I love Newegg.com as I never had any order related or shipping issues with them. I always hate developing UI application but well, you would need to get your hands dirty with WPF too in order to work with Kinect. So get started with WPF concepts too. I will keep adding stuff to the list once I come across them but so far the above list would definitely get you started building your first Kinect apps. Till then Happy Kinecting…!!!!! Thanks, Vishal Mody

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• Microsoft Build 2012 Day 1 Keynote Summary

  - by Tim Murphy

  So I have finally dried the tears after watching the Keynote for Build 2012.  This wasn’t because it was an emotional presentation, but because for the second year I missed the goodies.  Each on site attendee got a Surface RT, a Lumia 920 and a voucher for 100GB of SkyDrive storage. The event was opened with the announcement that in the three days since the launch of Windows 8 over 4 million upgrades have been sold.  I don’t care who you are that is an impressive stat.  Ballmer then spent a fair amount of time remaking the case for the Windows and Windows Phone platforms similar to what we have heard over the last to launch events. There were some cool, but non-essential demos.  The one that was the most fun was the Perceptive Pixel 82” slate device.  At first glance I wondered why I would ever want such a device, but then Ballmer explained it’s possible use for schools and boardrooms.  The actually made sense. Then things got strange.  Steve started explaining features that developers could leverage.  Usually this type of information is left to the product leads.  He focused on the integration with the Charms features such as Search and Share. Steve “Guggs” Guggenheim showed off an app that would appeal to my kids from Disney called “Agent P” which is base on Phineas and Ferb.  Then he got to the meat of the presentation.  We found out that you could add a tile that can be used to sell ad space.  In the same vein we also found out that you could use Microsoft’s, Paypal’s or any commerce engine of your own creation or choosing. For those who are interested in sports and especially developing sports apps you would have found the small presentation from Michael Bayle of ESPN.  He introduced the ESPN app which has tons of features.  For the developers in the crowd he also mentioned that ESPN has an API available at developer.espn.com. During the launch events we were told apps were coming.  In this presentation we were actually shown a scrolling list of logos and told about a couple of them.  Ballmer mentioned specifically Twitter, SAP and DropBox.  These are impressive names that were just a couple of the list impressive names. Steve Ballmer addressed the question of why you should develop for the Windows 8 platform.  He feels that Microsoft has the best commercial terms for developers, a better way to build apps than other platforms and a variety of form factors.  His key point though was the available volume of customers given the current Windows install base and assuming even a flat growth of the platform.  This he backed with a promise that Microsoft is going to do better at marketing and you won’t be able to avoid the ads that they are bringing out. The last section of the key note was present by Kevin Gallo from the Windows Phone team.  This was the real reason I tuned into the webcast.  He impressed upon those watching that the strength of developing for the Microsoft platform is the common programming model that now exist.  While there are difference between form factor implementations you can leverage code across them. He claimed that 90% of developer requests for Windows Phone 8 had been implemented.  These include: More controls with better performance Better live tiles including lock screen integration Speech support in custom apps Easier submission to the market place App camera integration VOIP and chat support Bluetooth and NFC support Native C++ development Direct 3D development   The quote from Kevin that stood out for me was that “Take your Dramamine and buckle your seatbelt type of games are coming to Windows Phone 8”.  He back this up by displaying a list of game development frameworks and then having Unity come out and do a demo. Ok, almost done … The last two things of note for me were the announcement that the SDK is immediately available at dev.windowsphone.com and that they were reducing the cost of an individual developer account to $8 for the next 8 days. Let the development commence. del.icio.us Tags: Build 2012,Windows 8,Windows Phone 8,Windows Phone

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• Node.js Lockstep Multiplayer Architecture

  - by Wakaka

  Background I'm using the lockstep model for a multiplayer Node.js/Socket.IO game in a client-server architecture. User input (mouse or keypress) is parsed into commands like 'attack' and 'move' on the client, which are sent to the server and scheduled to be executed on a certain tick. This is in contrast to sending state data to clients, which I don't wish to use due to bandwidth issues. Each tick, the server will send the list of commands on that tick (possibly empty) to each client. The server and all clients will then process the commands and simulate that tick in exactly the same way. With Node.js this is actually quite simple due to possibility of code sharing between server and client. I'll just put the deterministic simulator in the /shared folder which can be run by both server and client. The server simulation is required so that there is an authoritative version of the simulation which clients cannot alter. Problem Now, the game has many entity classes, like Unit, Item, Tree etc. Entities are created in the simulator. However, for each class, it has some methods that are shared and some that are client-specific. For instance, the Unit class has addHp method which is shared. It also has methods like getSprite (gets the image of the entity), isVisible (checks if unit can be seen by the client), onDeathInClient (does a bunch of stuff when it dies only on the client like adding announcements) and isMyUnit (quick function to check if the client owns the unit). Up till now, I have been piling all the client functions into the shared Unit class, and adding a this.game.isServer() check when necessary. For instance, when the unit dies, it will call if (!this.game.isServer()) { this.onDeathInClient(); }. This approach has worked pretty fine so far, in terms of functionality. But as the codebase grew bigger, this style of coding seems a little strange. Firstly, the client code is clearly not shared, and yet is placed under the /shared folder. Secondly, client-specific variables for each entity are also instantiated on the server entity (like unit.sprite) and can run into problems when the server cannot instantiate the variable (it doesn't have Image class like on browsers). So my question is, is there a better way to organize the client code, or is this a common way of doing things for lockstep multiplayer games? I can think of a possible workaround, but it does have its own problems. Possible workaround (with problems) I could use Javascript mixins that are only added when in a browser. Thus, in the /shared/unit.js file in the /shared folder, I would have this code at the end: if (typeof exports !== 'undefined') module.exports = Unit; else mixin(Unit, LocalUnit); Then I would have /client/localunit.js store an object LocalUnit of client-side methods for Unit. Now, I already have a publish-subscribe system in place for events in the simulator. To remove the this.game.isServer() checks, I could publish entity-specific events whenever I want the client to do something. For instance, I would do this.publish('Death') in /shared/unit.js and do this.subscribe('Death', this.onDeathInClient) in /client/localunit.js. But this would make the simulator's event listeners list on the server and the client different. Now if I want to clear all subscribed events only from the shared simulator, I can't. Of course, it is possible to create two event subscription systems - one client-specific and one shared - but now the publish() method would have to do if (!this.game.isServer()) { this.publishOnClient(event); }. All in all, the workaround off the top of my head seems pretty complicated for something as simple as separating the client and shared code. Thus, I wonder if there is an established and simpler method for better code organization, hopefully specific to Node.js games.

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• Java Spotlight Episode 104: Devoxx 4 Kids

  - by Roger Brinkley

  Stephan Jannsen talks about the new Devoxx 4 Kids that he launched this last weekend in Belgium. Right-click or Control-click to download this MP3 file. You can also subscribe to the Java Spotlight Podcast Feed to get the latest podcast automatically. If you use iTunes you can open iTunes and subscribe with this link:  Java Spotlight Podcast in iTunes. Show Notes News WebSocket JSR Early Draft (JSR 356) JAX-RS 2 Public Draft (JSR 339) JMS2, JAX-RS 2, WebSocket, JSON integrated in GlassFish 4 Promoted Builds Java EE 7 Revised Scope - Q2 2013 JavaOne Content Available for Free Please try Oracle's Java Uninstall Applet OpenJDK Community and Project Scorecard Experimental new utility to detect issues in javadoc comments PermGen Elimination project is promoting JDK bug migration milestone: JIRA now the system of record Project Jigsaw: On the next train New OpenJDK Projects: ThreeTen & Project Sumatra Events Oct 15-17, JAX London, London, United Kingdom Oct 20, Devoxx 4 Kids Français, Brussels, Belgium Oct 22-23, Freescale Technology Forum - Japan, Tokyo, Japan Oct 23-25, EclipseCon Europe, Ludwigsburg, Germany Oct 30-Nov 1, Arm TechCon, Santa Clara, United States of America Oct 31, JFall, Hart van Holland, Netherlands Nov 2-3, JMaghreb, Rabat, Morocco Nov 5-9, Øredev Developer Conference, Malmö, Sweden Nov 13-17, Devoxx, Antwerp, Belgium Nov 20-22, DOAG 2012, Nuremberg, Germany Dec 3-5, jDays, Göteborg, Sweden Dec 4-6, JavaOne Latin America, Sao Paolo, Brazil Feature InterviewStephan Janssen is a serial entrepreneur that has founded several successful organizations such as the Belgian Java User Group (BeJUG) in 1996, JCS Int. in 1998, JavaPolis in 2002 and now Parleys.com in 2006. He has been using Java since its early releases in 1995 with experience of developing and implementing real world Java solutions in the finance and manufacturing industries. Today Stephan is the CTO of the Java Competence Center at RealDolmen. He was selected by BEA Systems as the first European (independent) BEA Technical Director. He has also been recognized by the Server Side as one of the 54 Who is Who in Enterprise Java 2004. Sun has recognized in 2005 his efforts for the Java Community and has engaged him in the Java Champion project. He has spoken at numerous Java and JUG conferences around the world.Devoxx 4 KidsNew to Java Programming Center -- Young Developers What’s Cool "Here is the draft proposal to add a public Base64 utility class for JDK8." Default methods for jdk8: request for code review Raspberry Pi Model B now ships with 512MB of RAM JDuchess roadshow on the Island of Java. Nety and Mila from Meruvian.First week roadshowSecond week roadshowThird week part 1

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• Strange rendering in XNA/Monogame

  - by Gerhman

  I am trying to render G-Code generated for a 3d-printer as the printed product by reading the file as line segments and the drawing cylinders with the diameter of the filament around the segment. I think I have managed to do this part right because the vertex I am sending to the graphics device appear to have been processed correctly. My problem I think lies somewhere in the rendering. What basically happens is that when I start rotating my model in the X or Y axis then it renders perfectly for half of the rotation but then for the other half it has this weird effect where you start seeing through the outer filament into some of the shapes inside. This effect is the strongest with X rotations though. Here is a picture of the part of the rotation that looks correct: And here is one that looks horrible: I am still quite new to XNA and/Monogame and 3d programming as a whole. I have no idea what could possibly be causing this and even less of an idea of what this type of behavior is called. I am guessing this has something to do with rendering so have added the code for that part: protected override void Draw(GameTime gameTime) { GraphicsDevice.Clear(Color.Black); basicEffect.World = world; basicEffect.View = view; basicEffect.Projection = projection; basicEffect.VertexColorEnabled = true; basicEffect.EnableDefaultLighting(); GraphicsDevice.SetVertexBuffer(vertexBuffer); RasterizerState rasterizerState = new RasterizerState(); rasterizerState.CullMode = CullMode.CullClockwiseFace; rasterizerState.ScissorTestEnable = true; GraphicsDevice.RasterizerState = rasterizerState; foreach (EffectPass pass in basicEffect.CurrentTechnique.Passes) { pass.Apply(); GraphicsDevice.DrawPrimitives(PrimitiveType.TriangleList, 0, vertexBuffer.VertexCount); } base.Draw(gameTime); } I don't know if it could be because I am shading something that does not really have a texture. I am using this custom vertex declaration I found on some tutorial that allows me to store a vertex with a position, color and normal: public struct VertexPositionColorNormal { public Vector3 Position; public Color Color; public Vector3 Normal; public readonly static VertexDeclaration VertexDeclaration = new VertexDeclaration ( new VertexElement(0, VertexElementFormat.Vector3, VertexElementUsage.Position, 0), new VertexElement(sizeof(float) * 3, VertexElementFormat.Color, VertexElementUsage.Color, 0), new VertexElement(sizeof(float) * 3 + 4, VertexElementFormat.Vector3, VertexElementUsage.Normal, 0) ); } If any of you have ever seen this type of thing please help. Also, if you think that the problem might lay somewhere else in my code then please just request what part you would like to see in the comments section.

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• Is there any good hosting for asp.net and MySQL

  - by HAJJAJ

  HI every one ,I have account with one of the hosting company, and i did my project in asp.net and I used MySQL for the database. the hosting company is not giving me the full privileges to create new user or to create new stored procedure!!! this is what they said for me: Due to the shared nature of our environment we had to make some modifications to your procedure (namely the definer). We also had to review your procedure to determine if it would be compatible with our environment. While your procedures will work (via phpMyAdmin or some other interface), it is unlikely they will be accessible via the Connector/.NET (ADO.NET) that your application is likely using. This is due to a security restriction with how that connector works in shared environments. http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/connector-net-programming-stored.html "Note When you call a stored procedure, the command object makes an additional SELECT call to determine the parameters of the stored procedure. You must ensure that the user calling the procedure has the SELECT privilege on the mysql.proc table to enable them to verify the parameters. Failure to do this will result in an error when calling the procedure." Unfortunately, giving read privileges on the mysql.proc table will give you access to the data of our other customers and that is not an acceptable risk. If your application can only work using stored procedures, then MSSQL will probably be the better option for your site. I apologize for the inconvenience and the wait to have this ticket completed. So is there any good hosting that any body already used it to publish his asp.net and mysql project ??? this is one of my stored procedure and i think it's sample and it will not harm any other uses!!: -- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- Routine DDL -- Note: comments before and after the routine body will not be stored by the server -- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- DELIMITER $$ CREATE DEFINER=`root`@`localhost` PROCEDURE `SpcategoriesRead`( IN PaRactioncode VARCHAR(5), IN PaRCatID BIGINT, IN PaRSearchText TEXT ) BEGIN -- CREATING TEMPORARY TABLE TO SAVE DATA FROM THE ACTIONCODE SELECTS -- DROP TEMPORARY TABLE IF EXISTS TEMP; CREATE temporary table tmp ( CatID BIGINT primary key not null, CatTitle TEXT, CatDescription TEXT, CatTitleAr TEXT, CatDescriptionAr TEXT, PictureID BIGINT, Published BOOLEAN, DisplayOrder BIGINT, CreatedOn DATE ); IF PaRactioncode = 1 THEN -- Retrive all DATA from the database -- INSERT INTO tmp SELECT CatID,CatTitle,CatDescription,CatTitleAr,CatDescriptionAr,PictureID,Published,DisplayOrder,CreatedOn FROM tbcategories; ELSEIF PaRactioncode = 2 THEN -- Retrive all from the database By ID -- INSERT INTO tmp SELECT CatID,CatTitle,CatDescription,CatTitleAr,CatDescriptionAr,PictureID,Published,DisplayOrder,CreatedOn FROM tbcategories WHERE CatID=PaRCatID; ELSEIF PaRactioncode = 3 THEN -- NOSET YET -- INSERT INTO tmp SELECT CatID,CatTitle,CatDescription,CatTitleAr,CatDescriptionAr,PictureID,Published,DisplayOrder,CreatedOn FROM tbcategories WHERE Published=1 ORDER BY DisplayOrder; END IF; IF PaRSearchText IS NOT NULL THEN set PaRSearchText=concat('%', PaRSearchText ,'%'); SELECT CatID,CatTitle,CatDescription,CatTitleAr,CatDescriptionAr,PictureID,Published,DisplayOrder,CreatedOn FROM tmp WHERE Concat(CatTitle, CatDescription, CatTitleAr, CatDescriptionAr) LIKE PaRSearchText; ELSE SELECT CatID,CatTitle,CatDescription,CatTitleAr,CatDescriptionAr,PictureID,Published,DisplayOrder,CreatedOn FROM tmp; END IF; DROP TEMPORARY TABLE IF EXISTS tmp; END

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• How do I import my first sprites?

  - by steven_desu

  Continuing from this question (new question - now unrelated) So I have a thorough background in programming already (algorithms, math, logic, graphing problems, etc.) however I've never attempted to code a game before. In fact, I've never had anything more than minimal input from a user during the execution of a program. Generally input was given from a file or passed through console, all necessary functions were performed, then the program terminated with an output. I decided to try and get in on the world of game development. From several posts I've seen around gamedev.stackexchange.com XNA seems to be a favorite, and it was recommended to me when I asked where to start. I've downloaded and installed Visual Studio 2010 along with the XNA Framework and now I can't seem to get moving in the right direction. I started out looking on Google for "xna game studio tutorial", "xna game development beginners", "my first xna game", etc. I found lots of crap. The official "Introduction to Game Studio 4.0" gave me this (plus my own train of thought happily pasted on top thanks to MSPaint): http://tinypic.com/r/2w1sgvq/7 The "Get Additional Help" link (my best guess, since there was no "Continue" or "Next" link) lead me to this page: http://tinypic.com/r/2qa0dgx/7 I tried every page. The forum was the only thing that seemed helpful, however searching for "beginner", "newbie", "getting started", "first project", and similar on the forums turned up many threads with specific questions that are a bit above my level ("beginner to collision detection", for instance) Disappointed I returned to the XNA Game Studio home page. Surely their own website would have some introduction, tutorial, or at least a useful link to a community. EVERYTHING on their website was about coding Windows Phone 7.... Everything. http://tinypic.com/r/10eit8i/7 http://tinypic.com/r/120m9gl/7 Giving up on any official documentation after a while, I went back to Google. I managed to locate www.xnadevelopment.com. The website is built around XNA Game Studio 3.0, but how different can 3.0 be from 4.0?.... Apparently different enough. http://tinypic.com/r/5d8mk9/7 http://tinypic.com/r/25hflli/7 Figuring that this was the correct folder, I right-clicked.... http://tinypic.com/r/24o94yu/7 Hmm... maybe by "Add Content Reference" they mean "Add a reference to an existing file (content)"? Let's try it (after all- it's my only option) http://tinypic.com/r/2417eqt/7 At this point I gave up. I'm back. My original goal in my last question was to create a keyboard-navigable 3D world (no physics necessary, no logic or real game necessary). After my recent failures my goal has been revised. I want to display an image on the screen. Hopefully in time I'll be able to move it with the keyboard.

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• Card deck and sparse matrix interview questions

  - by MrDatabase

  I just had a technical phone screen w/ a start-up. Here's the technical questions I was asked ... and my answers. What do think of these answers? Feel free to post better answers :-) Question 1: how would you represent a standard 52 card deck in (basically any language)? How would you shuffle the deck? Answer: use an array containing a "Card" struct or class. Each instance of card has some unique identifier... either it's position in the array or a unique integer member variable in the range [0, 51]. Shuffle the cards by traversing the array once from index zero to index 51. Randomly swap ith card with "another card" (I didn't remember how this shuffle algorithm works exactly). Watch out for using the same probability for each card... that's a gotcha in this algorithm. I mentioned the algorithm is from Programming Pearls. Question 2: how to represent a large sparse matrix? the matrix can be very large... like 1000x1000... but only a relatively small number (~20) of the entries are non-zero. Answer: condense the array into a list of the non-zero entries. for a given entry (i,j) in the array... "map" (i,j) to a single integer k... then use k as a key into a dictionary or hashtable. For the 1000x1000 sparse array map (i,j) to k using something like f(i, j) = i + j * 1001. 1001 is just one plus the maximum of all i and j. I didn't recall exactly how this mapping worked... but the interviewer got the idea (I think). Are these good answers? I'm wondering because after I finished the second question the interviewer said the dreaded "well that's all the questions I have for now." Cheers!

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• Arrive steering behavior

  - by dbostream

  I bought a book called Programming game AI by example and I am trying to implement the arrive steering behavior. The problem I am having is that my objects oscillate around the target position; after oscillating less and less for awhile they finally come to a stop at the target position. Does anyone have any idea why this oscillating behavior occur? Since the examples accompanying the book are written in C++ I had to rewrite the code into C#. Below is the relevant parts of the steering behavior: private enum Deceleration { Fast = 1, Normal = 2, Slow = 3 } public MovingEntity Entity { get; private set; } public Vector2 SteeringForce { get; private set; } public Vector2 Target { get; set; } public Vector2 Calculate() { SteeringForce.Zero(); SteeringForce = SumForces(); SteeringForce.Truncate(Entity.MaxForce); return SteeringForce; } private Vector2 SumForces() { Vector2 force = new Vector2(); if (Activated(BehaviorTypes.Arrive)) { force += Arrive(Target, Deceleration.Slow); if (!AccumulateForce(force)) return SteeringForce; } return SteeringForce; } private Vector2 Arrive(Vector2 target, Deceleration deceleration) { Vector2 toTarget = target - Entity.Position; double distance = toTarget.Length(); if (distance > 0) { //because Deceleration is enumerated as an int, this value is required //to provide fine tweaking of the deceleration.. double decelerationTweaker = 0.3; double speed = distance / ((double)deceleration * decelerationTweaker); speed = Math.Min(speed, Entity.MaxSpeed); Vector2 desiredVelocity = toTarget * speed / distance; return desiredVelocity - Entity.Velocity; } return new Vector2(); } private bool AccumulateForce(Vector2 forceToAdd) { double magnitudeRemaining = Entity.MaxForce - SteeringForce.Length(); if (magnitudeRemaining <= 0) return false; double magnitudeToAdd = forceToAdd.Length(); if (magnitudeToAdd > magnitudeRemaining) magnitudeToAdd = magnitudeRemaining; SteeringForce += Vector2.NormalizeRet(forceToAdd) * magnitudeToAdd; return true; } This is the update method of my objects: public void Update(double deltaTime) { Vector2 steeringForce = Steering.Calculate(); Vector2 acceleration = steeringForce / Mass; Velocity = Velocity + acceleration * deltaTime; Velocity.Truncate(MaxSpeed); Position = Position + Velocity * deltaTime; } If you want to see the problem with your own eyes you can download a minimal example here. Thanks in advance.

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• What can a Service do on Windows?

  - by Akemi Iwaya

  If you open up Task Manager or Process Explorer on your system, you will see many services running. But how much of an impact can a service have on your system, especially if it is ‘corrupted’ by malware? Today’s SuperUser Q&A post has the answers to a curious reader’s questions. Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites. The Question SuperUser reader Forivin wants to know how much impact a service can have on a Windows system, especially if it is ‘corrupted’ by malware: What kind malware/spyware could someone put into a service that does not have its own process on Windows? I mean services that use svchost.exe for example, like this: Could a service spy on my keyboard input? Take screenshots? Send and/or receive data over the internet? Infect other processes or files? Delete files? Kill processes? How much impact could a service have on a Windows installation? Are there any limits to what a malware ‘corrupted’ service could do? The Answer SuperUser contributor Keltari has the answer for us: What is a service? A service is an application, no more, no less. The advantage is that a service can run without a user session. This allows things like databases, backups, the ability to login, etc. to run when needed and without a user logged in. What is svchost? According to Microsoft: “svchost.exe is a generic host process name for services that run from dynamic-link libraries”. Could we have that in English please? Some time ago, Microsoft started moving all of the functionality from internal Windows services into .dll files instead of .exe files. From a programming perspective, this makes more sense for reusability…but the problem is that you can not launch a .dll file directly from Windows, it has to be loaded up from a running executable (exe). Thus the svchost.exe process was born. So, essentially a service which uses svchost is just calling a .dll and can do pretty much anything with the right credentials and/or permissions. If I remember correctly, there are viruses and other malware that do hide behind the svchost process, or name the executable svchost.exe to avoid detection. Have something to add to the explanation? Sound off in the comments. Want to read more answers from other tech-savvy Stack Exchange users? Check out the full discussion thread here.

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• Why I Love the Social Management Platform I Use

  - by Mike Stiles

  Not long ago, I asked the product heads for the various components of the Oracle Social Cloud’s SRM to say what they thought was coolest about their component. And while they did a fine job, it was recently pointed out to me that no one around here uses the platform in a real-world setting more than I do, as I not only blog and podcast my brains out, I also run Oracle Social’s own social properties. Of course I’m pro-Oracle Social’s product. Duh. But if you can get around immediately writing this off as a puff piece, there are real reasons beyond my employment that the Oracle SRM works for me as a community manager. If it didn’t, I could have simply written about something else, like how people love smartphones or something genius like that. Post Grid I like seeing what I want to see. I’m difficult that way. Post grid lets me see all posts for all channels, with custom columns showing me how posts are doing. I can filter the grid by social channel, published, scheduled, draft, suggested, etc. Then there’s a pullout side panel that shows me post details, including engagement analytics. From the pullout, I can preview the post, do a quick edit, a full edit, or (my favorite) copy a post so I can edit it and schedule it for other times so I don’t have to repeat from scratch. I’m not lazy, just time conscious. The Post Creation Environment Given our post volume, I need this to be as easy as it can be. I can highlight which streams I want the post to go out on, edit for the individual streams, maintain a media library that’s easy to upload to and attach from, tag posts, insert links that auto-shorten to an orac.le shortlink, schedule with a nice calendar visual, geo-target, drop photos inline into Twitter, and review each post. Watching My Channels The Engage component of the Oracle SRM brings in and drops into a grid the activity that’s happening on all my channels. I keep this open round-the-clock. Again, I get to see only what I want; social network, stream, unread messages, engagement by how I labeled them, and date range. I can bring up a post with a click, reply, label it, retweet it, assign it, delete it, archive it, etc. So don’t bother trying to be a troll on my channels. Analytics Social publishing and engaging 24/7 would be pretty unrewarding if I couldn’t see how our audience was responding. Frankly, I get more analytics than I know what to do with (I’m a content creator, not a data analyst). But I do know what numbers I care about, and they’re available by channel, date range, and campaigns. I’m seeing fan count, sources and demographics. I’m seeing engagement, what kinds of posts are getting engagement, and top engagers. I’m seeing my reach, both organic and paid. I’m seeing how individual posts performed in terms of engagement and virality, and posting time/date insight. Have I covered all the value propositions? I’ve covered pathetically few of them. It would be impossible in blog length to give shout-outs to the vast number of features and functionalities. From organizing teams and managing permissions with Workflow to the powerful ability to monitor topics (and your competition) across the web in Listen, it’s a major, and increasingly necessary, weapon in your social marketing arsenal. The life of a Community Manager is not for everybody. So if the Oracle SRM can actually make a Community Manager’s life easier, what’s not to love? I invite you to take a look at and participate in our Oracle Social Cloud social channels! Facebook Twitter YouTube Google Plus LinkedIn Daily Podcast on iHeartRadio @mikestiles @oraclesocial Photo: freeimages.com

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• Need help to install Ubuntu on Win7 Alienware M17xR3, installing not working

  - by Rodrigo

  Please I need help to install linux on my computer to start analyzing Next Generation Sequencing (molecular genetics) for my work. I've tried to install from all different ways and forms and it gave me different errors. First I will describe my system: Alienware M17x R3 Raid Drive 596GB (2x 298 GB) Windows7 primary partition C: The hardrive is divided in 3 primary partitions (can't do 4 don't know why) 1st: Fat16 no name capacity 40mbs almost not used (has files like command.com, dellbio.bin, dellrmk.bin and oobedone.flg) I dont know what this is for but is blocked and non system (Status:none). 2nd: Recovery NTFS 9GB (Status:system) and it seems to have boot files. 3rd: CD: Windos OS (status:boot). And I have 2 Logical drivers F: data for backup and games :D (300gb) G: For trying to install the Linux (Already tried with Fat32, Ext2, ext3 and ext4) Installing with Wubi on F: and G: Instalation looks good on windows ask to restart dos mode appears: try (HD0,0) non-ms:skip try (HD0,1) NTFS5: No Wibildr try (HD0,2) NTFS5: Error: "Prefix" is not set. Installing with Wubi on C: Installation looks good on windows ask to restart dos mode apears: Mount denied becouse NTFS volume is already exclusive opened, the volume may be already mounted or another software may use it which could be identified for example by the help of the 'FUSER' command Mount devdm-4 Could not find installation files /ubuntu/install custom-installation Run 'Chkdsk /r' on windows and restart...blablablalba... that should correct. done this didn't work. Tried installing with USB drive and after burning a CD with the Iso file download from the official website: I've tried the option to install along windows with a G: drive in FAT32, EXT2,3 and 4, I've tried to leave unallocated data, without the driver G at all... appears this everytime: http://i.stack.imgur.com/eo2Ie.png pres ok it ask me to: Not possible to install the boot loader at the location: specify new location: I've tried to select all the drivers non is accepted If I ask to continue without installing the boot loader he ask me to install later by myself which I'm trying to figure it out but I'm not really good to understand how ppl get to the programming part like a DOS to write down couse I'm a newb and I've dont work on dos or linux before... I've read that the boot loader has to be installed on the primary partition, but I'm not sure what I can delete from those 2 partitions that would let me get 1 extra... and it seems that the one that windows use is protected to write down so the software is not touching it... Please if someone have any idea to help me out... I've got a course tomorrow of how to use the software to analyze the data and I wanted to take my computer with me, so I've passed the last 3 days trying to search different ways to solve. My question is also post on the bugs.launchpad.net link here: lounchpad.net bug #882695

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• Cloud Apps News @#OOW12

  - by Natalia Rachelson

  All eyes were on Oracle this past week and the news cycle was in full swing. What better time to make some key announcements that were guaranteed to create buzz ... and so we did. The name of the game was Cloud! Here are the key Cloud announcements for Apps, which included Fusion Tap that enables mobility across all Cloud Apps, HCM customer momentum in the Cloud, and our very first ERP Cloud Services customer. Oracle Unveils Oracle Fusion Tap for the iPadOracle Fusion Tap - Productivity Amplified Anywhere, Anytime "Both the enterprise and technology providers must recognize the need to innovate and adapt for the increasing mobility of the workforce - not just for sales teams, but across the organization," said Carter Lusher, Research Fellow and Chief Analyst of Enterprise Applications Ecosystem, Ovum. "A mobile application that quickly and powerfully allows employees to make connections, analyze data, and complete activities at any time and wherever they may be located drives new levels of business value and enhances efficiency. Frankly, mobile access is no longer a 'nice to have' but a 'must have.'"  "The mobile workforce is a business reality, and Oracle Fusion Tap is an example of how Oracle delivers mobile and cloud innovations that fundamentally improve productivity and how we work," said Chris Leone, Senior Vice President of Application Development, Oracle. "With Oracle Fusion Tap users will have an all-in-one, easily extensible app that puts mission-critical data and colleague connection at their fingertips." The entire release is available here http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/1855392 Customers Live on Oracle Fusion Human Capital ManagementOracle HCM Cloud Service Helps Power HR's Contribution to the Business "More than 25 of the 100-plus customers who have selected Oracle Fusion Human Capital Management (HCM) are already live. Ardent Leisure, Peach Aviation, Toshiba Medical Systems and Zillow have deployed Oracle HCM Cloud Service and are using it to transform their HR operations. They join companies such as Principal Financial Group and Elizabeth Arden, who are already using Oracle HCM Cloud Service to help manage international growth and deliver pervasive, role-based, configurable solutions to their employees. With these recent go-lives, Oracle takes a leading position in successfully bringing live HCM customers in the cloud."  "As a technology company, Zillow looked to a partner who could scale with us. Zillow has gone live on Oracle HCM Cloud Service, which will give us the ability automate and streamline HR operations for our employees in the near future," said Sarah Bilton, Senior Director HR, Zillow. Read the entire release here http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/1859573 Lending Club Selects Oracle ERP Cloud Service to Help Increase Insight and EfficienciesOracle ERP Cloud Service Provides an Open Architecture, Best-of-Breed Decision-Making, and Scalability in the Cloud "Lending Club, the leading platform for investing in and obtaining personal loans, has selected Oracle ERP Cloud Service to help improve decision-making and workflow, implement robust reporting, and take advantage of the inherent scalability and cost savings provided by the cloud. With more than 76,000 borrowers and 90,000 investors Lending Club utilizes technology and innovation to reduce the cost of traditional banking and offer borrowers better rates and investors better returns.  After an extensive search, Lending Club selected Oracle ERP Cloud Service due to the breadth and depth of capabilities and ongoing innovation of Oracle ERP Cloud Service, as well as Oracle's open architecture, industry leadership and commitment to partners." "Lending Club is an innovative, data-intensive, high-growth company and we needed a solution and partner that could match us," said Carrie Dolan, CFO, Lending Club. "We conducted a thorough review of our options, and Oracle ERP Cloud Service was the clear winner in terms of capabilities and business value as well as commitment to us as a customer." Read the entire release here http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/1859020

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• How Do You Actually Model Data?

  Since the 1970’s Developers, Analysts and DBAs have been able to represent concepts and relations in the form of data through the use of generic symbols.  But what is data modeling?  The first time I actually heard this term I could not understand why anyone would want to display a computer on a fashion show runway. Hey, what do you expect? At that time I was a freshman in community college, and obviously this was a long time ago.  I have since had the chance to learn what data modeling truly is through using it. Data modeling is a process of breaking down information and/or requirements in to common categories called objects. Once objects start being defined then relationships start to form based on dependencies found amongst other existing objects.  Currently, there are several tools on the market that help data designer actually map out objects and their relationships through the use of symbols and lines.  These diagrams allow for designs to be review from several perspectives so that designers can ensure that they have the optimal data design for their project and that the design is flexible enough to allow for potential changes and/or extension in the future. Additionally these basic models can always be further refined to show different levels of details depending on the target audience through the use of three different types of models. Conceptual Data Model(CDM)Conceptual Data Models include all key entities and relationships giving a viewer a high level understanding of attributes. Conceptual data model are created by gathering and analyzing information from various sources pertaining to a project during the typical planning phase of a project. Logical Data Model (LDM)Logical Data Models are conceptual data models that have been expanded to include implementation details pertaining to the data that it will store. Additionally, this model typically represents an origination’s business requirements and business rules by defining various attribute data types and relationships regarding each entity. This additional information can be directly translated to the Physical Data Model which reduces the actual time need to implement it. Physical Data Model(PDMs)Physical Data Model are transformed Logical Data Models that include the necessary tables, columns, relationships, database properties for the creation of a database. This model also allows for considerations regarding performance, indexing and denormalization that are applied through database rules, data integrity. Further expanding on why we actually use models in modern application/database development can be seen in the benefits that data modeling provides for data modelers and projects themselves, Benefits of Data Modeling according to Applied Information Science Abstraction that allows data designers remove concepts and ideas form hard facts in the form of data. This gives the data designers the ability to express general concepts and/or ideas in a generic form through the use of symbols to represent data items and the relationships between the items. Transparency through the use of data models allows complex ideas to be translated in to simple symbols so that the concept can be understood by all viewpoints and limits the amount of confusion and misunderstanding. Effectiveness in regards to tuning a model for acceptable performance while maintaining affordable operational costs. In addition it allows systems to be built on a solid foundation in terms of data. I shudder at the thought of a world without data modeling, think about it? Data is everywhere in our lives. Data modeling allows for optimizing a design for performance and the reduction of duplication. If one was to design a database without data modeling then I would think that the first things to get impacted would be database performance due to poorly designed database and there would be greater chances of unnecessary data duplication that would also play in to the excessive query times because unneeded records would need to be processed. You could say that a data designer designing a database is like a box of chocolates. You will never know what kind of database you will get until after it is built.

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• AccelerometerInput XNA GameComponent

  - by Michael B. McLaughlin

  Bad accelerometer controls kill otherwise good games. I decided to try to do something about it. So I create an XNA GameComponent called AccelerometerInput. It’s still a beta project but you are welcome to try it, use it, modify it, etc. I’m releasing under the terms of the Microsoft Public License. Important info: First, it only supports tilt-style controls currently. I have not implemented motion-style controls yet (and make no promises as to when I might find time to do so). Second, I commented it heavily so that you can (hopefully) understand what it is doing. Please read the comments and examine the sample game for a usage overview. There are configurable parameters which I encourage you to make use of (both by modifying the default values where your testing shows it to be appropriate and also by implementing a calibration mechanism in your game that lets the user adjust those configurable values based on his or her own circumstances). Third, even with this code, accelerometer controls are still a fairly advanced topic area; you will likely find nothing but disappointment if you simply plunk this into some project without testing it on a device (or preferably on several devices). Fourth, if you do try this code and find that something doesn’t work as expected on your phone, please let me know as I want to improve it and can only do so with your help. Let me know what phone model it is, what you tried doing, what you expected, and what result you had instead. I may or may not be able to incorporate it into the code, but I can let others know at the very least so that they can make appropriate modifications to their games (I’m hopeful that all phones are reasonably similar in their workings and require, at most, a slight calibration change, but I simply don’t know). Fifth, although I’ll do my best to answer any questions you may have about it, I’m very busy with a number of things currently so it might take a little while. Please look through the code and examine the comments and sample game first before asking any questions. It’s likely that the answer is in there. If not, or if you just aren’t really sure, ask away. Sixth, there are differences between a portrait-mode game and a landscape mode game (specifically in the appropriate default tilt adjustment for toward the user/away from the user calculations). This is documented and the default is set for landscape. If you use this for a portrait game, make the appropriate change (look for the TODO: comment in AccelerometerInput.cs). Seventh, no provision whatsoever is made for disabling screen locking. It is up to you to implement that and to take appropriate measures to detect when the user has been idle for too long and timeout the game. That code is very game-specific. If you have questions about such matters, consult the relevant MSDN documentation and, if you still have questions, visit the App Hub forums and ask there. I answer questions there a lot and so I may even stumble across your question and answer it. But that’s a much better forum than the comments section here for questions of that sort so I would appreciate it if you asked idle detection-related questions there (or on some other suitable site that you may be more familiar and comfortable with). Eighth, this is an XNA GameComponent intended for XNA-based games on WP7. A sufficiently knowledgeable Silverlight developer should have no problem adapting it for use in a Silverlight game or app. I may create a Silverlight version at some point myself. Right now I do not have the time, unfortunately. Ok. Without further ado: http://www.bobtacoindustries.com/developers/utils/AccelerometerInput.zip Have a great St. Patrick’s Day!

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• Domain Models (PHP)

  - by Calum Bulmer

  I have been programming in PHP for several years and have, in the past, adopted methods of my own to handle data within my applications. I have built my own MVC, in the past, and have a reasonable understanding of OOP within php but I know my implementation needs some serious work. In the past I have used an is-a relationship between a model and a database table. I now know after doing some research that this is not really the best way forward. As far as I understand it I should create models that don't really care about the underlying database (or whatever storage mechanism is to be used) but only care about their actions and their data. From this I have established that I can create models of lets say for example a Person an this person object could have some Children (human children) that are also Person objects held in an array (with addPerson and removePerson methods, accepting a Person object). I could then create a PersonMapper that I could use to get a Person with a specific 'id', or to save a Person. This could then lookup the relationship data in a lookup table and create the associated child objects for the Person that has been requested (if there are any) and likewise save the data in the lookup table on the save command. This is now pushing the limits to my knowledge..... What if I wanted to model a building with different levels and different rooms within those levels? What if I wanted to place some items in those rooms? Would I create a class for building, level, room and item with the following structure. building can have 1 or many level objects held in an array level can have 1 or many room objects held in an array room can have 1 or many item objects held in an array and mappers for each class with higher level mappers using the child mappers to populate the arrays (either on request of the top level object or lazy load on request) This seems to tightly couple the different objects albeit in one direction (ie. a floor does not need to be in a building but a building can have levels) Is this the correct way to go about things? Within the view I am wanting to show a building with an option to select a level and then show the level with an option to select a room etc.. but I may also want to show a tree like structure of items in the building and what level and room they are in. I hope this makes sense. I am just struggling with the concept of nesting objects within each other when the general concept of oop seems to be to separate things. If someone can help it would be really useful. Many thanks

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• Clever memory usage through the years

  - by Ben Emmett

  A friend and I were recently talking about the really clever tricks people have used to get the most out of memory. I thought I’d share my favorites, and would love to hear yours too! Interleaving on drum memory Back in the ye olde days before I’d been born (we’re talking the 50s / 60s here), working memory commonly took the form of rotating magnetic drums. These would spin at a constant speed, and a fixed head would read from memory when the correct part of the drum passed it by, a bit like a primitive platter disk. Because each revolution took a few milliseconds, programmers took to manually arranging information non-sequentially on the drum, timing when an instruction or memory address would need to be accessed, then spacing information accordingly around the edge of the drum, thus reducing the access delay. Similar techniques were still used on hard disks and floppy disks into the 90s, but have become irrelevant with modern disk technologies. The Hashlife algorithm Conway’s Game of Life has attracted numerous implementations over the years, but Bill Gosper’s Hashlife algorithm is particularly impressive. Taking advantage of the repetitive nature of many cellular automata, it uses a quadtree structure to store the hashes of pieces of the overall grid. Over time there are fewer and fewer new structures which need to be evaluated, so it starts to run faster with larger grids, drastically outperforming other algorithms both in terms of speed and the size of grid which can be simulated. The actual amount of memory used is huge, but it’s used in a clever way, so makes the list . Elite’s procedural generation Ok, so this isn’t exactly a memory optimization – more a storage optimization – but it gets an honorable mention anyway. When writing Elite, David Braben and Ian Bell wanted to build a rich world which gamers could explore, but their 22K memory was something of a limitation (for comparison that’s about the size of my avatar picture at the top of this page). They procedurally generated all the characteristics of the 2048 planets in their virtual universe, including the names, which were stitched together using a lookup table of parts of names. In fact the original plans were for 2^52 planets, but it was decided that that was probably too many. Oh, and they did that all in assembly language. Other games of the time used similar techniques too – The Sentinel’s landscape generation algorithm being another example. Modern Garbage Collectors Garbage collection in managed languages like Java and .NET ensures that most of the time, developers stop needing to care about how they use and clean up memory as the garbage collector handles it automatically. Achieving this without killing performance is a near-miraculous feet of software engineering. Much like when learning chemistry, you find that every time you think you understand how the garbage collector works, it turns out to be a mere simplification; that there are yet more complexities and heuristics to help it run efficiently. Of course introducing memory problems is still possible (and there are tools like our memory profiler to help if that happens to you) but they’re much, much rarer. A cautionary note In the examples above, there were good and well understood reasons for the optimizations, but cunningly optimized code has usually had to trade away readability and maintainability to achieve its gains. Trying to optimize memory usage without being pretty confident that there’s actually a problem is doing it wrong. So what have I missed? Tell me about the ingenious (or stupid) tricks you’ve seen people use. Ben

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• Introducing Agile development after traditional project inception

  - by Riggy

  About a year and a half ago, I entered a workplace that claimed to do Agile development. What I learned was that this place has adopted several agile practices (such as daily standups, sprint plannings and sprint reviews) but none of the principles (just in time / just good enough mentality, exposing failure early, rich communication). I've now been tasked with making the team more agile and I've been assured that I have complete buy-in from the devs and the business team. As a pilot program, they've given me a project that just completed 15 months of requirements gathering, has a 110 page Analysis & Design document (to be considered as "written in stone"), and where I have no access to the end users (only to the committee made up of the users' managers who won't actually be using the product). I started small, giving them a list of expected deliverables for the first 5 sprints (leaving the future sprints undefined), a list of goals for the first sprint, and I dissected the A&D doc to get enough user stories to meet the first sprint's goals. Since then, they've asked why we don't have all the requirements for all the sprints, why I haven't started working on stuff for the third sprint (which they consider more important but is based off of the deliverables of the first 2 sprints) and are pressing for even more documentation that my entire IT team considers busy-work or un-related to us (such as writing the user manual up-front, documenting all the data fields from all the sprints up front, and more "up-front" work). This has been pretty rough for me as a new project manager, but there are improvements I have effectively implemented such as scrumban for story management, pair programming, and having the business give us customer acceptance tests up front (as part of the requirements documentation). So my questions are: What can I do to more effectively introduce change to a resistant business? Are there other practices that I can introduce on the IT side to help show the business the benefits of agile? The burden of documentation is strangling us - the business still sees it as a risk management strategy instead of as a risk. What can we do to alleviate their documentation concerns and demands (specifically the quantity of documentation and their need for all of it up front)? We are in a separate building from our business, about 3 blocks away and they refuse to have their people on the project co-habitate b/c that person "won't be able to work on their other projects while they're at our building." They expect us to always go over there and to bundle our questions so that we can ask them all at once and not waste that person's time with "constant interruptions." What can we do to get richer communication from them? Any additional advice would also be appreciated. Thanks!

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• Exploring TCP throughput with DTrace

  - by user12820842

  One key measure to use when assessing TCP throughput is assessing the amount of unacknowledged data in the pipe. This is sometimes termed the Bandwidth Delay Product (BDP) (note that BDP is often used more generally as the product of the link capacity and the end-to-end delay). In DTrace terms, the amount of unacknowledged data in bytes for the connection is the different between the next sequence number to send and the lowest unacknoweldged sequence number (tcps_snxt - tcps_suna). According to the theory, when the number of unacknowledged bytes for the connection is less than the receive window of the peer, the path bandwidth is the limiting factor for throughput. In other words, if we can fill the pipe without the peer TCP complaining (by virtue of its window size reaching 0), we are purely bandwidth-limited. If the peer's receive window is too small however, the sending TCP has to wait for acknowledgements before it can send more data. In this case the round-trip time (RTT) limits throughput. In such cases the effective throughput limit is the window size divided by the RTT, e.g. if the window size is 64K and the RTT is 0.5sec, the throughput is 128K/s. So a neat way to visually determine if the receive window of clients may be too small should be to compare the distribution of BDP values for the server versus the client's advertised receive window. If the BDP distribution overlaps the send window distribution such that it is to the right (or lower down in DTrace since quantizations are displayed vertically), it indicates that the amount of unacknowledged data regularly exceeds the client's receive window, so that it is possible that the sender may have more data to send but is blocked by a zero-window on the client side. In the following example, we compare the distribution of BDP values to the receive window advertised by the receiver (10.175.96.92) for a large file download via http. # dtrace -s tcp_tput.d ^C BDP(bytes) 10.175.96.92 80 value ------------- Distribution ------------- count -1 | 0 0 | 6 1 | 0 2 | 0 4 | 0 8 | 0 16 | 0 32 | 0 64 | 0 128 | 0 256 | 3 512 | 0 1024 | 0 2048 | 9 4096 | 14 8192 | 27 16384 | 67 32768 |@@ 1464 65536 |@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ 32396 131072 | 0 SWND(bytes) 10.175.96.92 80 value ------------- Distribution ------------- count 16384 | 0 32768 |@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ 17067 65536 | 0 Here we have a puzzle. We can see that the receiver's advertised window is in the 32768-65535 range, while the amount of unacknowledged data in the pipe is largely in the 65536-131071 range. What's going on here? Surely in a case like this we should see zero-window events, since the amount of data in the pipe regularly exceeds the window size of the receiver. We can see that we don't see any zero-window events since the SWND distribution displays no 0 values - it stays within the 32768-65535 range. The explanation is straightforward enough. TCP Window scaling is in operation for this connection - the Window Scale TCP option is used on connection setup to allow a connection to advertise (and have advertised to it) a window greater than 65536 bytes. In this case the scaling shift is 1, so this explains why the SWND values are clustered in the 32768-65535 range rather than the 65536-131071 range - the SWND value needs to be multiplied by two since the reciever is also scaling its window by a shift factor of 1. Here's the simple script that compares BDP and SWND distributions, fixed to take account of window scaling. #!/usr/sbin/dtrace -s #pragma D option quiet tcp:::send / (args[4]-tcp_flags & (TH_SYN|TH_RST|TH_FIN)) == 0 / { @bdp["BDP(bytes)", args[2]-ip_daddr, args[4]-tcp_sport] = quantize(args[3]-tcps_snxt - args[3]-tcps_suna); } tcp:::receive / (args[4]-tcp_flags & (TH_SYN|TH_RST|TH_FIN)) == 0 / { @swnd["SWND(bytes)", args[2]-ip_saddr, args[4]-tcp_dport] = quantize((args[4]-tcp_window)*(1 tcps_snd_ws)); } And here's the fixed output. # dtrace -s tcp_tput_scaled.d ^C BDP(bytes) 10.175.96.92 80 value ------------- Distribution ------------- count -1 | 0 0 | 39 1 | 0 2 | 0 4 | 0 8 | 0 16 | 0 32 | 0 64 | 0 128 | 0 256 | 3 512 | 0 1024 | 0 2048 | 4 4096 | 9 8192 | 22 16384 | 37 32768 |@ 99 65536 |@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ 3858 131072 | 0 SWND(bytes) 10.175.96.92 80 value ------------- Distribution ------------- count 512 | 0 1024 | 1 2048 | 0 4096 | 2 8192 | 4 16384 | 7 32768 | 14 65536 |@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ 1956 131072 | 0

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• Design pattern for logging changes in parent/child objects saved to database

  - by andrew

  I’ve got a 2 database tables in parent/child relationship as one-many. I’ve got three classes representing the data in these two tables: Parent Class { Public int ID {get; set;} .. other properties } Child Class { Public int ID {get;set;} Public int ParentID {get; set;} .. other properties } TogetherClass { Public Parent Parent; Public List<Child> ChildList; } Lastly I’ve got a client and server application – I’m in control of both ends so can make changes to both programs as I need to. Client makes a request for ParentID and receives a Together Class for the matching parent, and all of the child records. The client app may make changes to the children – add new children, remove or modify existing ones. Client app then sends the Together Class back to the server app. Server app needs to update the parent and child records in the database. In addition I would like to be able to log the changes – I’m doing this by having 2 separate tables one for Parent, one for child; each containing the same columns as the original plus date time modified, by whom and a list of the changes. I’m unsure as to the best approach to detect the changes in records – new records, records to be deleted, records with no fields changed, records with some fields changed. I figure I need to read the parent & children records and compare those to the ones in the Together Class. Strategy A: If Together class’s child record has an ID of say 0, that indicates a new record; insert. Any deleted child records are no longer in the Together Class; see if any of the comparison child records are not found in the Together class and delete if not found (Compare using ID). Check each child record for changes and if changed log. Strategy B: Make a new Updated TogetherClass UpdatedClass { Public Parent Parent {get; set} Public List<Child> ListNewChild {get;set;} Public List<Child> DeletedChild {get;set;} Public List<Child> ExistingChild {get;set;} // used for no changes and modified rows } And then process as per the list. The reason why I’m asking for ideas is that both of these solutions don’t seem optimal to me and I suspect this problem has been solved already – some kind of design pattern ? I am aware of one potential problem in this general approach – that where Client App A requests a record; App B requests same record; A then saves changes; B then saves changes which may overwrite changes A made. This is a separate locking issue which I’ll raise a separate question for if I’ve got trouble implementing. The actual implementation is c#, SQL Server and WCF between client and server - sharing a library containing the class implementations. Apologies if this is a duplicate post – I tried searching various terms without finding a match though.

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• Are You an IT Geek? Why Not Write for How-To Geek?

  - by The Geek

  Are you a geek in the IT field that wants to share your skills with the world? We’re looking for an experienced Sysadmin / IT Admin / Webmaster geek with writing skills that wants to join our team on a part-time basis. Please apply if you have the following qualities: You must be a geek at heart, willing to try and make the boring world of IT sound glamorous and sexy. If that’s not possible, at least be willing to share your wisdom and skills to help other IT geeks save time and become better at what they do. You must be able to write articles that are easy to understand. Either Windows or Linux writers are welcome to apply. You must be able to follow our style guide. You must be creative. You must generate ideas for articles on your own, and take suggestions like a pro. You’re ambitious, looking to build your skills and your name, and are prepared to work hard. If you aren’t willing to work hard, put some dedication and pride into your work, or aren’t really interested in the topic, this job might not be for you. We’re looking for serious individuals that want to grow with us, and as we grow, you’ll grow as well. How To Apply If you think this job is a good fit for you, send an email to [email protected] and include some background information about yourself, why you’d be a good fit, some topic areas you are familiar with, and hopefully some examples of your work. Bonus points if you have a ninja costume and a keyboard strapped to your back. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips What Topics Should The How-To Geek Write About?Got Awesome Skills? Why Not Write for How-To Geek?Got Awesome Geek Skills? The How-To Geek is Looking for WritersAbout the GeekThe How-To Geek Bounty Program TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 QuicklyCode Provides Cheatsheets & Other Programming Stuff Download Free MP3s from Amazon Awe inspiring, inter-galactic theme (Win 7) Case Study – How to Optimize Popular Wordpress Sites Restore Hidden Updates in Windows 7 & Vista Iceland an Insurance Job?

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