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• What are the pros (and cons) of using “Sign in with Twitter/Facebook” for a new website?

  - by Paul D. Waite

  Myself and a friend are looking to launch a little forum site. I’m considering using the “Sign in with Facebook/Twitter” APIs, possibly exclusively (a la e.g. Lanyrd), for user login. I haven’t used either of these before, nor run a site with user logins at all. What are the pros (and cons) of these APIs? Specifically: What benefits do I get as a developer from using them? What drawbacks are there? Do end users actually like/dislike them? Have you experienced any technical/logistical issues with these APIs specifically? Here are the pros and cons I’ve got so far: Pros More convenient for the user (“register” with two clicks, sign in with one) Possibly no need to maintain our own login system  Cons No control over our login process Exclude Facebook/Twitter users who are worried about us having some sort of access to their accounts Users’ accounts on our site are compromised if their Facebook/Twitter accounts are compromised. And if we don’t maintain our own alternative login system: Dependency on Facebook/Twitter for our login system Exclude non-Facebook/non-Twitter users from our site

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• DC Comics Identifies Krypton on the Star Map

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  This week Action Comics Superman #14 hits the stands and DC comics reveals the actual location of Kyrpton, delivered by none other than beloved astrophysicist Neil Tyson. Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy reports on the resolution of fans’ long standing curiosity about the location of Krypton: Well, that’s about to change. DC comics is releasing a new book this week – Action Comics Superman #14 – that finally reveals the answer to this stellar question. And they picked a special guest to reveal it: my old friend Neil Tyson. Actually, Neil did more than just appear in the comic: he was approached by DC to find a good star to fit the story. Red supergiants don’t work; they explode as supernovae when they are too young to have an advanced civilization rise on any orbiting planets. Red giants aren’t a great fit either; they can be old, but none is at the right distance to match the storyline. It would have to be a red dwarf: there are lots of them, they can be very old, and some are close enough to fit the plot. I won’t keep you in suspense: the star is LHS 2520, a red dwarf in the southern constellation of Corvus (at the center of the picture here). It’s an M3.5 dwarf, meaning it has about a quarter of the Sun’s mass, a third its diameter, roughly half the Sun’s temperature, and a luminosity of a mere 1% of our Sun’s. It’s only 27 light years away – very close on the scale of the galaxy – but such a dim bulb you need a telescope to see it at all (for any astronomers out there, the coordinates are RA: 12h 10m 5.77s, Dec: -15° 4m 17.9 s). 6 Ways Windows 8 Is More Secure Than Windows 7 HTG Explains: Why It’s Good That Your Computer’s RAM Is Full 10 Awesome Improvements For Desktop Users in Windows 8

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• What You Said: Your Favorite Co-Op Games

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  While competitive gaming is fun, reader response to this week’s Ask the Readers question shows that good old beat-the-bad-guys-together cooperative gaming is as popular as ever. Read on to see what your fellow readers are playing. By far the most popular nomination for favorite co-op game was an outright classic: 1987′s smash hit Contra. Originally released as an arcade game, it was ported to the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1988. Contra was groundbreaking for the time as it featured simultaneous play for the two players–you and a friend could play side by side without waiting to take your turn. Clearly that kind of side-by-side play resonated with readers. RJ writes: When my fiance and I played and beat Contra on the NES. I knew she was the one and we got married and its been great. That’s no small feat; Contra was voted “Toughest Game to Beat” by IGN.com readers. Even readers who had moved on to newer games still recall Contra fondly; Jami writes: The Gears of War trilogy on 360 is my favorite co-op currently, although I do have fond memories of bonding with my brother playing some co-op Contra on the NES. HTG Explains: What is the Windows Page File and Should You Disable It? How To Get a Better Wireless Signal and Reduce Wireless Network Interference How To Troubleshoot Internet Connection Problems

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• How to learn & introduce scrum in small startup?

  - by Jens Bannmann

  In a few months, a friend will establish his startup software company, and I will be the software architect with one additional developer. Though we have no real day-to-day experience with agile methods, I have read much "overview" type of material on them, and I firmly believe they are a good - if not the only - way to build software. So with this company, I want to go for iterative, agile development from day 1, preferably something light-weight. I was thinking of Scrum, but the question is: what is the best way for me and my colleagues to learn about it, to introduce it (which techniques when etc) and to evaluate whether we should keep it? Background which might be relevant: we're all experienced developers around the same age with similar professional mindset. We have worked together in the past and afterwards at several different companies, mostly with a Java/.NET focus. Some are a bit familiar with general ideas from the agile movement. In this startup, I have great power over tools, methods and process. The startup's product will be developed from scratch and could be classified as middleware. We have some "customer" contacts in the industry who could provide input as soon as we get to an alpha stage.

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• Someone using my website for Email and significant increase in spam

  - by Joy

  Let me give you the background in context so that you know the full story. Last summer my web guy (he put my website together) got in a fight with someone who attempted to register on my site using the name of my company as part of his user name. I was not aware of this at all until it had escalated dramatically. I don't know why my web guy was so unprofessional in his response to this person. I really don't know him - met him via SCORE and have never met in person. He is a vendor. Anyway, this guy who got into it with my web guy then threatened to do all he could to hurt my business and said he was internet savvy, etc. So, nothing seemed to happen for a while then not long ago this guy attempted to send me a friend request on Linkedin. After his behavior I declined it. Shortly afterwards I began seeing a dramatic increase in spammers posting comments on the blog part of my site. Just lately I have been receiving Emails from a variety of names but all with the "@___" that I own - for my business. I had additional security added so now they have to register in order to comment on my blog and I am seeing a lot of registration attempts from the same (and similar) IP addresses with bogus names and weird Email addresses being blocked. So, it is not creating more work as it is all automatic. The Email addresses are of more concern. Is there a way to identify a person through an IP address or a place to report the behavior or the Email usage? This guy lives in South Carolina so he is not overseas. Any help/advice you can provide will be greatly appreciated. Thanks Joy

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• One eye on my dinner and one eye on SQL server

  - by fatherjack

  LiveJournal Tags: RedGate,Work Life Balance,Tips and Tricks,SQL Server This is somewhere between a Tweet and a proper blog article - would that be a Bleet? Anyway, I was at a local restaurant yesterday and after placing my order I was thinking about having to get home and log in to check some SQL Servers and then the thought came to me that as we were near civilisation there was likely to be a 3G signal that might actually make using the web browser on my phone bearable. It was surprisingly fast on my HTC Desire, it was almost as good as Wi-Fi. RedGate SQL Monitor works fine on the default HTC browser and here is the proof, me checking the servers while I am waiting for the meal to arrive. Everything checked out OK so I had the evening free from SQL Server. You can get a free 14 day full trial of a SQL Monitor from RedGate here or find out more about it at The Future of Monitoring. Disclosure: I am a friend of RedGate and as such regularly make positive comments about their products. I don't get paid for it but I do get free licenses for testing and reviewing purposes.

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• XSLT is not the solution you're looking for

  - by Jeff

  I was very relieved to see that Umbraco is ditching XSLT as a rendering mechanism in the forthcoming v5. Thank God for that. After working in this business for a very long time, I can't think of any other technology that has been inappropriately used, time after time, and without any compelling reason.The place I remember seeing it the most was during my time at Insurance.com. We used it, mostly, for two reasons. The first and justifiable reason was that it tweaked data for messaging to the various insurance carriers. While they all shared a "standard" for insurance quoting, they all had their little nuances we had to accommodate, so XSLT made sense. The other thing we used it for was rendering in the interview app. In other words, when we showed you some fancy UI, we'd often ditch the control rendering and straight HTML and use XSLT. I hated it.There just hasn't been a technology hammer that made every problem look like a nail (or however that metaphor goes) the way XSLT has. Imagine my horror the first week at Microsoft, when my team assumed control of the MSDN/TechNet forums, and we saw a mess of XSLT for some parts of it. I don't have to tell you that we ripped that stuff out pretty quickly. I can't even tell you how many performance problems went away as we started to rip it out.XSLT is not your friend. It has a place in the world, but that place is tweaking XML, not rendering UI.

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• Project Corndog: Viva el caliente perro!

  - by Matt Christian

  During one of my last semesters in college we were required to take a class call Computer Graphics which tried (quite unsuccessfully) to teach us a combination of mathematics, OpenGL, and 3D rendering techniques.  The class itself was horrible, but one little gem of an idea came out of it.  See, the final project in the class was to team up and create some kind of demo or game using techniques we learned in class.  My friend Paul and I teamed up and developed a top down shooter that, given the stringent timeline, was much less of a game and much more of 3D objects floating around a screen. The idea itself however I found clever and unique and decided it was time to spend some time developing a proper version of our idea.  Project Corndog as it is tentatively named, pits you as a freshly fried corndog who broke free from the shackles of fair food slavery in a quest to escape the state fair you were born in.  Obviously it's quite a serious game with undertones of racial prejudice, immoral practices, and cheap food sold at high prices. The game itself is a top down shooter in the style of 1942 (NES).  As a delicious corndog you will have to fight through numerous enemies including hungry babies, carnies, and the corndog serial-killer himself the corndog eating champion!  Other more engaging and frighteningly realistic enemies await as the only thing between you and freedom. Project Corndog is being developed in Visual Studio 2008 with XNA Game Studio 3.1.  It is currently being hosted on Google code and will be made available as an open source engine in the coming months.

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• sudo dhclient eth0 | sudo: unable to resolve host ubuntu

  - by Merianos Nikos

  I have a computer of a friend of mine, that runs Ubuntu (I don't know what version, due to the current system status) and while he was updating the kernel, he reboot the computer (yes that could be happen !!, anyway) Currently I am trying to recover the system by using a live USB, with Ubuntu installed on it. What I am doing, is the following: Update Failure The problem is that when I try to execute the fifth step, I am getting error because I do not have Internet access. The computer is properly wired on my rooter, and I have Internet access in any place apart of the shell. This message for example is send it via the live USB. but I cannot access the Internet via the shell. In my shell I try to use this command: sudo dhclient eth0 but the result of this command is the following message sudo: unable to resolve host ubuntu My hosts file has the following content: 127.0.0.1 localhost 127.0.1.1 ubuntu # The following lines are desirable for IPv6 capable hosts ::1 ip6-localhost ip6-loopback fe00::0 ip6-localnet ff00::0 ip6-mcastprefix ff02::1 ip6-allnodes ff02::2 ip6-allrouters ff02::3 ip6-allhosts how can I get connected on the Internet, in order to download the appropriate updates ? UPDATE 1 I just notice, that when I execute the ifconfig I am getting the following warning: Warning: cannot open /proc/net/dev (No such file or directory). Limited output. UPDATE 2 I just found that, and looks like solving the problem with dhclient eth0 command, but still I cannot ping Google UPDATE 3 Now the sudo dhclient eth0 returns the following message: RTNETLINK answers: File exists UPDATE 4 I just ping my rooter and I getting response, so, it is looks like I cannot ping outside the rooter (ie. Google) Kind regards ...

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• Pub banter - content strategy at the ballot box?

  - by Roger Hart

  Last night, I was challenged to explain (and defend) content strategy. Three sheets to the wind after a pub quiz, this is no simple task, but I hope I acquitted myself passably. I say "hope" because there was a really interesting question I couldn't answer to my own satisfaction. I wonder if any of you folks out there in the ethereal internet hive-mind can help me out? A friend - a rather concrete thinker who mathematically models complex biological systems for a living - pointed out that my examples were largely routed in business-to-business web sales and support. He challenged me with: Say you've got a political website, so your goal is to have somebody read it and vote for you - how do you measure the effectiveness of that content? Well, you would. umm. Oh dear. I guess what we're talking about here, to yank it back to my present comfort zone, is a sales process where your point of conversion is off the site. The political example is perhaps a little below the belt, since what you can and can't do, and what data you can and can't collect is so restricted. You can't throw up a "How did you hear about this election?" questionnaire in the polling booth. Exit polls don't pull in your browsing history and site session information. Not everyone fatuously tweets and geo-tags each moment of their lives. Oh, and folks lie. The business example might be easier to attack. You could have, say, a site for a farm shop that only did over the counter sales. Either way, it's tricky. I fell back on some of the work I've done usability testing and benchmarking documentation, and suggested similar, quick and dirty, small sample qualitative UX trials. I'm not wholly sure that was right. Any thoughts? How might we measure and curate for this kind of discontinuous conversion?

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• w00t! First post!

  - by blaird

  So, I busted my old blog and hadn't been keeping up with it. Decided it would be easier on me to use software that I didn't maintain, so several months ago I signed up for a GWB account. You are a witness to procrastination at its finest!  I was remarking to my friend Abby that I hadn't written anything in ages, that I've typed a bunch in the last 5 years or so, but that the typing belonged to someone else as work product, was boring technical mumbo jumbo, or was only good before it spoiled, that project/job/technology/tweet based freshness window that us geeks have to deal with. In short, I just didn't feel like it. So forgive the rambling sentences and my grammatical failures, you have Abby to thank ;) On the technology front I've been working with WPF, WCF and a whole lot of other alphabet soup in terms of patterns. I'm starting to get spoiled on Visual Studio 2010, and may have made a mistake by evaluating the ultimate version. Because I'm a .NET geek and an outdoor geek, expect a hodgepodge. It's nearly Easter, which for the garden means a whole lot of things. I've already started getting seed out, and started working soil. It feels good to get real dirt on your hands.

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• Wired Network not working on Ubuntu 11.10 + Strange Behavior with Manual Conf

  - by Mauricio Cruz

  I'm new to Ubuntu - to be honest this is my very first day trying it... and I've already spent hours trying to make my wired connection work. I've been using this wired network with Windows and OSX, and in both systems I also had some trouble trying to connect in the past (and the troubleshooters did their magic and helped me get connected). Today, this is what I got: I'm running Ubuntu 11.10; ifconfig: eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 78:2b:cb:c3:bf:8f UP BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:1 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:343 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:70 (70.0 B) TX bytes:63273 (63.2 KB) Interrupt:20 Memory:e2e00000-e2e20000 lo Link encap:Local Loopback inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0 inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1 RX packets:1859 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:1859 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 RX bytes:149368 (149.3 KB) TX bytes:149368 (149.3 KB) wlan0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 10:0b:a9:82:55:c0 UP BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:15484 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:16871 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:12048377 (12.0 MB) TX bytes:2677679 (2.6 MB) I also have some information from Windows ipconfig /all that I ran at my friend's machine Ipv6 Address: <address> preferential Ipv4 Address: 172.26.65.23 <preferential> Netmask: 255.255.254.0 Default Gateway: 172.26.64.1 DHCP Server : <address> DNS Servers : <address> DNS Suffix : <suffix> The weird thing is that I've tried to configure everything manually, using "Network Connections". When I add everything inside IPv4 Settings, the connection is finally successful, but only for 4~5 seconds before getting disconnected again... Update:I just changed the Connection Method to "Local-Link Only", and the same described above happens: At first, it says "Connection Stablished", but after a few seconds, the wired network gets disconnected. I hope someone can help me get connected! Thanks!

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• SQLAuthority News – #SQLPASS 2012 Book Signing Photos

  - by pinaldave

  I am at SQLPASS 2012 and the event is going great. Here are few of the random photos and random news. We had participated in three different book signing event today. SQL Queries 2012 Joes 2 Pros Book 1 Launch and Book Signing SQL 2012 Functions Book Launch at Embarcadero SQL Backup and Recovery Book Launch at Idera Rick Morelan and I authored the first two books 1) SQL 2012 Functions and 2) SQL Queries 2012 Joes 2 Pros Volume 1. Our dear friend Tim Randney authored SQL Backup and Recovery Book. In the book signing event of Tim Radney I went ahead of the time and stood in the line. I was fortunate to receive the very first copy of the autographed book from Tim Radney. We have one more book signing event of the book SQL Backup and Recovery by Tim Randey on Friday 9, 2012 between 12 to 1 PM at Joes 2 Pros booth #117. This is your last chance to shake hands with us and meet us in person. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)   Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL PASS, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority Author Visit, SQLAuthority News, T SQL, Technology

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• Day 6 - Game Menuing Woes and Future Screen Sneak Peeks

  - by dapostolov

  So, after my last post on Day 5 I dabbled with my game class design. I took the approach where each game objects is tightly coupled with a graphic. The good news is I got the menu working but not without some hard knocks and game growing pains. I'll explain later, but for now...here is a class diagram of my first stab at my class structure and some code...   Ok, there are few mistakes, however, I'm going to leave it as is for now... As you can see I created an inital abstract base class called GameSprite. This class when inherited will provide a simple virtual default draw method:        public virtual void DrawSprite(SpriteBatch spriteBatch)         {             spriteBatch.Draw(Sprite, Position, Color.White);         } The benefits of coding it this way allows me to inherit the class and utilise the method in the screen draw method...So regardless of what the graphic object type is it will now have the ability to render a static image on the screen. Example: public class MyStaticTreasureChest : GameSprite {} If you remember the window draw method from Day 3's post, we could use the above code as follows...         protected override void Draw(GameTime gameTime)         {             GraphicsDevice.Clear(Color.CornflowerBlue);             spriteBatch.Begin(SpriteBlendMode.AlphaBlend);             foreach(var gameSprite in ListOfGameObjects)            {                 gameSprite.DrawSprite(spriteBatch);            }             spriteBatch.End();             base.Draw(gameTime);         } I have to admit the GameSprite object is pretty plain as with its DrawSprite method... But ... we now have the ability to render 3 static menu items on the screen ... BORING! I want those menu items to do something exciting, which of course involves animation... So, let's have a peek at AnimatedGameSprite in the above game diagram. The idea with the AnimatedGameSprite is that it has an image to animate...such as ... characters, fireballs, and... menus! So after inheriting from GameSprite class, I added a few more options such as UpdateSprite...         public virtual void UpdateSprite(float elapsed)         {             _totalElapsed += elapsed;             if (_totalElapsed > _timePerFrame)             {                 _frame++;                 _frame = _frame % _framecount;                 _totalElapsed -= _timePerFrame;             }         }  And an overidden DrawSprite...         public override void DrawSprite(SpriteBatch spriteBatch)         {             int FrameWidth = Sprite.Width / _framecount;             Rectangle sourcerect = new Rectangle(FrameWidth * _frame, 0, FrameWidth, Sprite.Height);             spriteBatch.Draw(Sprite, Position, sourcerect, Color.White, _rotation, _origin, _scale, SpriteEffects.None, _depth);         } With these two methods...I can animate and image, all I had to do was add a few more lines to the screens Update Method (From Day 3), like such:             float elapsed = (float) gameTime.ElapsedGameTime.TotalSeconds;             foreach (var item in ListOfAnimatedGameObjects)             {                 item.UpdateSprite(elapsed);             } And voila! My images begin to animate in one spot, on the screen... Hmm, but how do I interact with the menu items using a mouse...well the mouse cursor was easy enough... this.IsMouseVisible = true; But, to have it "interact" with an image was a bit more tricky...I had to perform collision detection!             mouseStateCurrent = Mouse.GetState();             var uiEnabledSprites = (from s in menuItems                                    where s.IsEnabled                                    select s).ToList();             foreach (var item in uiEnabledSprites)             {                 var r = new Rectangle((int)item.Position.X, (int)item.Position.Y, item.Sprite.Width, item.Sprite.Height);                 item.MenuState = MenuState.Normal;                 if (r.Intersects(new Rectangle(mouseStateCurrent.X, mouseStateCurrent.Y, 0, 0)))                 {                     item.MenuState = MenuState.Hover;                     if (mouseStatePrevious.LeftButton == ButtonState.Pressed                         && mouseStateCurrent.LeftButton == ButtonState.Released)                     {                         item.MenuState = MenuState.Pressed;                     }                 }             }             mouseStatePrevious = mouseStateCurrent; So, basically, what it is doing above is iterating through all my interactive objects and detecting a rectangle collision and the object , plays the state animation (or static image).  Lessons Learned, Time Burned... So, I think I did well to start, but after I hammered out my prototype...well...things got sloppy and I began to realise some design flaws... At the time: I couldn't seem to figure out how to open another window, such as the character creation screen Input was not event based and it was bugging me My menu design relied heavily on mouse input and I couldn't use keyboard. Mouse input, is tightly bound with graphic rendering / positioning, so its logic will have to be in each scene. Menu animations would stop mid frame, then continue when the action occured again. This is bad, because...what if I had a sword sliding onthe screen? Then it would slide a quarter of the way, then stop due to another action, then render again mid-slide... it just looked sloppy. Menu, Solved!? To solve the above problems I did a little research and I found some great code in the XNA forums. The one worth mentioning was the GameStateManagementSample. With this sample, you can create a basic "text based" menu system which allows you to swap screens, popup screens, play the game, and quit....basic game state management... In my next post I'm going to dwelve a bit more into this code and adapt it with my code from this prototype. Text based menus just won't cut it for me, for now...however, I'm still going to stick with my animated menu item idea. A sneak peek using the Game State Management Sample...with no changes made... Cool Things to Mention: At work ... I tend to break out in random conversations every-so-often and I get talking about some of my challenges with this game (or some stupid observation about something... stupid) During one conversation I was discussing how I should animate my images; I explained that I knew I had to use the Update method provided, but I didn't know how (at the time) to render an image at an appropriate "pace" and how many frames to use, etc.. I also got thinking that if a machine rendered my images faster / slower, that was surely going to f-up my animations. To which a friend, Sheldon,  answered, surely the Draw method is like a camera taking a snapshot of a scene in time. Then it clicked...I understood the big picture of the game engine... After some research I discovered that the Draw method attempts to keep a framerate of 60 fps. From what I understand, the game engine will even leave out a few calls to the draw method if it begins to slow down. This is why we want to put our sprite updates in the update method. Then using a game timer (provided by the engine), we want to render the scene based on real time passed, not framerate. So even the engine renders at 20 fps, the animations will still animate at the same real time speed! Which brings up another point. Why 60 fps? I'm speculating that Microsoft capped it because LCD's dont' refresh faster than 60 fps? On another note, If the game engine knows its falling behind in rendering...then surely we can harness this to speed up our games. Maybe I can find some flag which tell me if the game is lagging, and what the current framerate is, etc...(instead of coding it like I did last time) Sheldon, suggested maybe I can render like WoW does, in prioritised layers...I think he's onto something, however I don't think I'll have that many graphics to worry about such a problem of graphic latency. We'll see. People to Mention: Well,as you are aware I hadn't posted in a couple days and I was surprised to see a few emails and messenger queries about my game progress (and some concern as to why I stopped). I want to thank everyone for their kind words of support and put everyone at ease by stating that I do intend on completing this project. Granted I only have a few hours each night, but, I'll do it. Thank you to Garth for mailing in my next screen! That was a nice surprise! The Sneek Peek you've been waiting for... Garth has also volunteered to render me some wizard images. He was a bit shocked when I asked for them in 2D animated strips. He said I was going backward (and that I have really bad Game Development Lingo). But, I advised Garth that I will use 3D images later...for now...2D images. Garth also had some great game design ideas to add on. I advised him that I will save his ideas and include them in the future design document (for the 3d version?). Lastly, my best friend Alek, is going to join me in developing this game. This was a project we started eons ago but never completed because of our careers. Now, priorities change and we have some spare time on our hands. Let's see what trouble Alek and I can get into! Tonight I'll be uploading my prototypes and base game to a source control for both of us to work off of. D.

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• How&rsquo;s your Momma an&rsquo; them?

  - by Bill Jones Jr.

  When a Southern “boy” like me sees somebody that used to be, or should be, a close friend or relative that they haven’t seen in a long time, that’s a typical greeting.  Come to think of it, we were often related to close friends. So “back in the day”, we not only knew people but everybody close to them.  When I started driving, my Dad told me to always drive carefully in Polk county.  He said if I ran into anybody there, it was likely they would be related or close family friends. Not so much any more… the cities have gotten bigger and more people come south and stay.  One of the curses of air conditioning I guess. Anyway, it’s been a while.  So “How’s your Momma and them”?  Have you been waiting for me to blog again?  Too bad, I’m back anyway <smile>. Here in Charlotte we just had another great code camp.  The Enterprise Developers Guild is going strong, thanks to the help of a lot of dedicated people.  Mark Wilson, Brian Gough, Syl Walker, Ghayth Hilal, Alberto Botero, Dan Thyer, Jean Doiron, Matt Duffield all come to mind.  Plus all the regulars who volunteer for every special event we have. Brian Gough put on a successful SharePoint Saturday.  Rafael Salas and our friends at the local Pass SQL group had a great SQL Saturday.  Brian Hitney and Glen Gordon keep on doing their usual great job for developers in the southeast as our local Microsoft reps. Since my last post, I have the honor of being designated the INetA Membership Mentor for Georgia in addition to mentoring the groups in the Carolinas for the past several years.  Georgia could be a really good thing since my wife likes shopping in Atlanta, not to mention how much we both like Georgia in general.  As I recall, my Momma had people in Georgia.  Wonder how their “Mommas an’ them” are doing?   Bill J

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• Functional Methods on Collections

  - by GlenPeterson

  I'm learning Scala and am a little bewildered by all the methods (higher-order functions) available on the collections. Which ones produce more results than the original collection, which ones produce less, and which are most appropriate for a given problem? Though I'm studying Scala, I think this would pertain to most modern functional languages (Clojure, Haskell) and also to Java 8 which introduces these methods on Java collections. Specifically, right now I'm wondering about map with filter vs. fold/reduce. I was delighted that using foldRight() can yield the same result as a map(...).filter(...) with only one traversal of the underlying collection. But a friend pointed out that foldRight() may force sequential processing while map() is friendlier to being processed by multiple processors in parallel. Maybe this is why mapReduce() is so popular? More generally, I'm still sometimes surprised when I chain several of these methods together to get back a List(List()) or to pass a List(List()) and get back just a List(). For instance, when would I use: collection.map(a => a.map(b => ...)) vs. collection.map(a => ...).map(b => ...) The for/yield command does nothing to help this confusion. Am I asking about the difference between a "fold" and "unfold" operation? Am I trying to jam too many questions into one? I think there may be an underlying concept that, if I understood it, might answer all these questions, or at least tie the answers together.

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• SQL SERVER – Download PSSDIAG Data Collection Utility

  - by pinaldave

  During an early career of mine as a database consultant – when I was dealing with SQL Server 2000, I often needed to collect various data related to SQL Server. My favorite tool to collect the data is PSSDIAG tool. It is a general purpose diagnostic collection utility that Microsoft Product Support Services uses to collect various logs and data files. It collects Performance Monitor logs, SQL Profiler traces, SQL Server blocking script output, Windows Event Logs, and SQLDIAG output. The data collected can be used by SQL Nexus tool which help you troubleshoot SQL Server performance problems. PSSDIAG is a wrapper around other data collection APIs and utilities, the performance impact of running PSSDIAG is generally equal to the impact of the traces that PSSDIAG has been configured to capture. If you are using SQL Server 2000 – you need to seriously consider to upgrading it to SQL Server 2012. Here is a PSSDIAG Data Collection Utility updated in August 2012. My friend and SQL Server Expert Amit Benerjee have written an excellent article on this subject, I encourage all of you to read the same. Note: For SQL Server 2012 there is SQLDiag. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Download, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority News, T SQL, Technology

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• New Visual Studio 2010 Extension - Collapse Solution

  - by MikeParks

  If your team has recently upgraded to Visual Studio 2010, take a second to check out the new Extension Manager. You can use it to browse through or install tons of tools, controls, or templates from the Visual Studio Gallery. My friend, Cory Cissell, and I recently teamed up and created an extension of our own called "Collapse Solution". It adds an option called Collapse Solution to the context menu of the solution node in the solution explorer. It also adds an option called Collapse Project to the context menu of each project node in the solution explorer. When that option is clicked, it will walk through the solution explorer tree and collapse any expanded child nodes in that section (projects, folders, code behind files, designer files, etc.). I use to have an add-in that did this in Visual Studio 2008 but it wasn't compatible when we upgraded to 2010 so we decided to write our own. The old tool was also packaged with a bunch of other junk that we didn't need so we figured it would be a much cleaner tool if it was broken off into its own extension. There's no need to install extra tools if you don't really need them. So if you have upgraded to Visual Studio 2010, please feel free to try out our Collapse Solution extension and leave us a rating/review in the Visual Studio Gallery. Thanks! Here's the link: http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/2d81fec6-71f3-4fa5-87b4-c2aa18e42f92

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• Iva&rsquo;s internship story

  - by anca.rosu

  Hello, my name is Iva and I am a member of the Internship program at Oracle Czech. When I joined Oracle, I initially worked as an Alliances and Channel Marketing Assistant at Oracle Czech Republic, but most recently, I have been working in the Demand Generation Team. I am a student of the Economics and Management Faculty at Czech University of Life Sciences in Prague, specializing in Marketing, Business and Administration. I have recently passed my Bachelor exams. I received the information about Oracle’s Internship opportunity from a friend. I joined Oracle in September 2008 and worked as an Alliances and Channel Marketing Assistant until May 2009. Here I was responsible for the Open Market Model (OMM) and at the same time I was covering communication with Partners, Oracle Events and Team Buildings as well as creating Partner Databases and Reports. At the moment, I support our Demand Generation Team to execute Direct Marketing campaigns in Czech Republic, Slovak Republic and Hungary. In addition to this, I help with Reporting and Contact Data Management for the whole of the European Enlargement (EE) and Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) regions. I enjoy my job and I appreciate the experience. Every day is interesting, because every day I learn something new. I am very happy that I was presented with an opportunity to work at Oracle and cooperate with friendly people in a multicultural environment. Oracle gives me the chance to develop my skills and start building my career. I am able to attend interesting training classes, improve my language skills and enjoy sporting activities, such as squash, swimming and aerobics, at the same time. If you dream of working in an international company and you would like to join a very dynamic industry, I really can recommend Oracle without a doubt, even if you have no IT background! If you have any questions related to this article feel free to contact  [email protected].  You can find our job opportunities via http://campus.oracle.com   Technorati Tags: Internship program,Oracle Czech,Economics,Management Faculty,Czech University of Life Sciences in Prague,Demand Generation Team

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• How to explain pointers to a Java/VB programmer

  - by Skeith

  I am writing a game and my friend has offered to help me as it is a RPG and will take a long time to do the "scripting" bit of the game. The problem is IMO he's not that good a programmer :( (add flame war here). He has only programmed in Java and VB and keeps saying really stupid things to me like "Why don't you drag and drop an onClick event" to design my UI when I'm using DirectX. I tried explaining pointers to him but his response was, if it's just a variable that holds a memory address, why don't you just use an int? I create an instance of an attack class and give the creature a pointer to it so if several creatures use the same attack there is only one instance of it. He keeps saying why not put if statements in the creature class for every attack class and set true for the ones that are there. He has programmed mainly in VB and a little in Java just to learn OOP. How can I explain advanced C++ concepts like pointers and memory management to him? He just doesn't understand there are no super functions like form.show in C++.

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• Getting a double slash when redirecting for a canonical hostname on Firefox only

  - by Brian Neal

  I have a Django powered website, and I'm trying to solve the "canonical hostname" problem. I want www.example.com to redirect to example.com. I have tried both techniques found in the Apache documentation here (scroll down to Canonical hostnames). I'm currently trying the mod_rewrite method, and I have this in a virtual host container: RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.example\.com$ [NC] RewriteRule ^/?(.*)$ http://example.com/$1 [L,R=301,NE] This works for me, except for one case. In Firefox only, if I type www.example.com in a browser, it redirects and I see this in the URL bar: example.com// (note the 2 trailing slashes). However, something like this will work correctly: www.example.com/news/ gets redirected to example.com/news/. I only see this on the root URL in Firefox. It seems to work fine on Windows under Chrome, IE9, and Opera (maybe those browsers eat the double slash?). My Mac using friend says it is fine in Safari, but he also sees the problem in Firefox. As far as Django settings go, I am using the default value of APPEND_SLASH=True. I don't know if Django has anything to do with it, but I've tried mod_rewrite rules like the above on static HTML sites before and it always seems to work.

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• SQL SERVER – Technical Reference Guides for Designing Mission-Critical Solutions – A Must Read

  - by pinaldave

  Yesterday I was reading architecture reference material helping my friend who was looking for material in this respect. While working together we were searching twitter, facebook and search engines to find relevant material.While searching online we end up on very interactive reference point. Once I send the same to him, he replied he may not need anything more after referencing this material. The best part of this article was it gives access to various aspect of the technology of the image map. Here is the abstract of the original article from the site: The Technical Reference Guides for Designing Mission-Critical Solutions provide planning and architecture guidance for various mission-critical workloads deployed by users. These guides reflect the knowledge gained by Microsoft while working with customers on mission-critical deployments. Each guide provides not only the key technical concepts and information helpful for design, but also “lessons learned,” best practices, and references to customer case studies. Once you click on any of the desired topic, you will see further detailed image map of the selected topic. Personally once I ended up on this site, I was there for more than 2 hours clicking through various links. Click on image to see larger image Read more here: Technical Reference Guides for Designing Mission-Critical Solutions Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL White Papers, T SQL, Technology

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• Software for video subscription service

  - by Clinton Blackmore

  I'd like to sell instructional videos over the web. Primarily, I'd like uses to subscribe to the site and be allowed access to videos over the internet. Secondarily, I might sell DVDs for those who have poor internet connections or would like a physical copy, or possibly I'd sell eBooks and the like in the future. Regarding the subscriptions: I'd like a system that automatically sends out e-mails when it is time to renew I'd like to be able to offer free trials Users without a free trial or subscription should not be able to access the content Incidentally, I plan to host videos on my current web host and move them to a CDN when volume (and capital) make this a good idea. While I have no intention to go crazy with the DRM, it seems expedient not to directly link to the files -- how can I link to them indirectly? It would be nice to support multiple payment processors -- specifically, I'd like to avoid a PayPal only approach. Are there any web applications (or plugins) you'd recommend for something like this? While I've set up and administered several web technologies, I've never done anything with e-commerce. I see there are possibilities like osCommerce, one friend recommends using WordPress with plugins, and it really appears that for any given CMS, you can graft on components like this, although I imagine that not all are created equal. As I'm not tied to a particular web application (and, while open source software that can run on a LAMP [p=perl, python, php] stack is preferable), I'd like to make a good choice at the beginning.

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• Why I don't use SSIS checkpoint files

  - by jamiet

  In a recent discussion in regard to general ETL best practises the subject of checkpoint files as a means for package restartability came up and I stated that I was dead against using them. For anyone that may care, here is why: Configuring them is distinctly unintuitive (that's a matter of opinion but if you follow the link I'll wager that you will agree) they don't make any allowance for loop iterations they cannot store variables of type Object they are limited in ability. There are many scenarios where you may want to execute certain containers regardless of whether the package is started from a checkpoint file but the current usage model does not allow for this. they are ignored by eventhandlers, which wouldn't be so bad if there were a way to toggle this behaviour in certain scenarios they dont work properly I'll expand on the last bullet point. I have encountered situations where the behaviour for tasks executing concurrently is unpredictable. That is, sometimes the completion of a task that executes concurrently with a failed/failing task will make it into the checkpoint file and sometimes it won't. This is near-impossible to reproduce but it does happen as my good friend John Welch will hopefully concur (if he is reading). Is anyone out there making successful use of checkpoint files within SSIS? I would be interested in knowing about that if so. @Jamiet

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• Is it more valuable to double major in Computer Science/Software Engineering or get an undergraduate CS degree with a Masters in SE?

  - by Austin Hyde

  A friend and I (both in college) are currently in a debate over which is better, in terms of employment opportunities, experience, and education: a Bachelors degree in both Computer Science and Software Engineering, or a Bachelors in Computer Science with a Masters in Software Engineering. My point of view is that I would rather go to school for 4-4.5 years to learn both sides of the field, and be out working on real projects gaining real experience, by going the double major route. His point of view is that it would look better to potential employers if he had a Bachelors in CS and Masters in SE. That way, when he's finally done after 4 years of CS and 2-4 of SE (depending on where he goes), he can pretty much have his choosing of what he wants to do. We are both in agreement on the distinction between the two degrees: CS is "traditional" and about the theory of algorithms, data structures, and programming, where SE is the study of the design of software and the implementation of CS theory. So, what's your stance on this debate? Have you gone one route or another? And most importantly, why?

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