Search Results

Search found 2219 results on 89 pages for 'odd parity'.

Page 64/89 | < Previous Page | 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71  | Next Page >

• Why would Copying a Large Image to the Clipboard Freeze a Computer?

  - by Akemi Iwaya

  Sometimes, something really odd happens when using our computers that makes no sense at all…such as copying a simple image to the clipboard and the computer freezing up because of it. An image is an image, right? Today’s SuperUser post has the answer to a puzzled reader’s dilemna. 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. Original image courtesy of Wikimedia. The Question SuperUser reader Joban Dhillon wants to know why copying an image to the clipboard on his computer freezes it up: I was messing around with some height map images and found this one: (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/15/Srtm_ramp2.world.21600×10800.jpg) The image is 21,600*10,800 pixels in size. When I right click and select “Copy Image” in my browser (I am using Google Chrome), it slows down my computer until it freezes. After that I must restart. I am curious about why this happens. I presume it is the size of the image, although it is only about 6 MB when saved to my computer. I am also using Windows 8.1 Why would a simple image freeze Joban’s computer up after copying it to the clipboard? The Answer SuperUser contributor Mokubai has the answer for us: “Copy Image” is copying the raw image data, rather than the image file itself, to your clipboard. The raw image data will be 21,600 x 10,800 x 3 (24 bit image) = 699,840,000 bytes of data. That is approximately 700 MB of data your browser is trying to copy to the clipboard. JPEG compresses the raw data using a lossy algorithm and can get pretty good compression. Hence the compressed file is only 6 MB. The reason it makes your computer slow is that it is probably filling your memory up with at least the 700 MB of image data that your browser is using to show you the image, another 700 MB (along with whatever overhead the clipboard incurs) to store it on the clipboard, and a not insignificant amount of processing power to convert the image into a format that can be stored on the clipboard. Chances are that if you have less than 4 GB of physical RAM, then those copies of the image data are forcing your computer to page memory out to the swap file in an attempt to fulfil both memory demands at the same time. This will cause programs and disk access to be sluggish as they use the disk and try to use the data that may have just been paged out. In short: Do not use the clipboard for huge images unless you have a lot of memory and a bit of time to spare. Like pretty graphs? This is what happens when I load that image in Google Chrome, then copy it to the clipboard on my machine with 12 GB of RAM: It starts off at the lower point using 2.8 GB of RAM, loading the image punches it up to 3.6 GB (approximately the 700 MB), then copying it to the clipboard spikes way up there at 6.3 GB of RAM before settling back down at the 4.5-ish you would expect to see for a program and two copies of a rather large image. That is a whopping 3.7 GB of image data being worked on at the peak, which is probably the initial image, a reserved quantity for the clipboard, and perhaps a couple of conversion buffers. That is enough to bring any machine with less than 8 GB of RAM to its knees. Strangely, doing the same thing in Firefox just copies the image file rather than the image data (without the scary memory surge). 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.

  Read the article

• My Dog, Cross-Channel Shopping, and Fusion SCM

  - by Kathryn Perry

  A guest post by Mark Carson, Director, Oracle Fusion Supply Chain Management I was walking my dog Max in an open space behind my house. As we tromped through the tall weeds I remembered it is tick season and that I should get Max some protection. While he sniffed merrily in the tick infested brush, I started shopping in the middle of an open field on my phone. I thought it would be convenient to pick up the tick medicine from a pet store on the way home. Searching the pet store website I saw that they had the medicine, but there was no information on whether the store had any in stock and there were no options for shipping it to the store for pickup. I could return it, but not pick it up which seamed kind of odd. I really didn't feel like making calls to the local stores to find out if they had it. Since the product is popular, I tried one of the large 'everything' stores. Browsing its website I could see that it could be shipped to me, shipped to the store for free, and that the store nearest to me had it in stock. Needless to say, this store became a better option. This experience is a small example of why retailers, distributors, and manufactures have placed a high priority on enabling 'cross-channel commerce.' Shoppers like you and me expect to be able to search, compare, buy and return products on-line and over the phone using a variety of devices including PDAs, tablets and in-store kiosks. The pet store lost my business because its web channel had limited information about its stores. I have spoken with many customers and prospects about cross-channel commerce. They all realize the business implications and urgency behind cross-channel commerce but recognize there are challenges to enable it. New and existing applications must be integrated together globally through a consistent cross-channel business process. Integration is required between applications that provide the initial shopping experience and delivery applications associated with warehouses, stores, and partners. The enablement must be accomplished in a flexible way to react to fast-changing product portfolios and new acquisitions, while at the same time minimizing costs through reuse of existing systems. Meanwhile, the business must continue to grow and decision makers need to balance new capability with peak seasons. The challenges above are not unique to retail. Any customer in any industry who has multiple points for capturing orders and multiple points for fulfilling orders will face these challenges. With this in mind, we had a unique opportunity in Fusion SCM to re-think how to build a set of modular and flexible applications in the order management space that would make these challenges easier to conquer. The results are Fusion Distributed Order Orchestration and Global Order Promising. These applications can help companies, such as the pet store, enable true cross-channel commerce. The apps provide highly adaptable and flexible business processes to automate order orchestration across multiple cross-channel systems. They also show a global view of supply across warehouses, stores, and partners for real-time availability and more accurate order promising. Additional capability includes a standards-based integration framework for seamless execution and the ability to reuse existing systems for faster and lower cost implementations. OK, that was a mouthful of features and benefits. As Max waited to cross the street (he can do basic math too), I wondered if he could relate. He does not care about leash laws, pick-up courtesy, where he can/can't walk, what time of day it is, or even ticks. He does not care about how all these things could make walking complicated. He just wants to walk. Similarly, customers just want to shop and companies just want to make it easier to sell and deliver. You can learn more about Distributed Order Orchestration and Global Order Promising in cross-channel here.

  Read the article

• Script to UPDATE STATISTICS with time window

  - by Bill Graziano

  I recently spent some time troubleshooting odd query plans and came to the conclusion that we needed better statistics.  We’ve been running sp_updatestats but apparently it wasn’t sampling enough of the table to get us what we needed.  I have a pretty limited window at night where I can hammer the disks while this runs.  The script below just calls UPDATE STATITICS on all tables that “need” updating.  It defines need as any table whose statistics are older than the number of days you specify (30 by default).  It also has a throttle so it breaks out of the loop after a set amount of time (60 minutes).  That means it won’t start processing a new table after this time but it might take longer than this to finish what it’s doing.  It always processes the oldest statistics first so it will eventually get to all of them.  It defaults to sample 25% of the table.  I’m not sure that’s a good default but it works for now.  I’ve tested this in SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008.  I liked the way Michelle parameterized her re-index script and I took the same approach. CREATE PROCEDURE dbo.UpdateStatistics ( @timeLimit smallint = 60 ,@debug bit = 0 ,@executeSQL bit = 1 ,@samplePercent tinyint = 25 ,@printSQL bit = 1 ,@minDays tinyint = 30 )AS/******************************************************************* Copyright Bill Graziano 2010*******************************************************************/SET NOCOUNT ON;PRINT '[ ' + CAST(GETDATE() AS VARCHAR(100)) + ' ] ' + 'Launching...'IF OBJECT_ID('tempdb..#status') IS NOT NULL DROP TABLE #status;CREATE TABLE #status( databaseID INT , databaseName NVARCHAR(128) , objectID INT , page_count INT , schemaName NVARCHAR(128) Null , objectName NVARCHAR(128) Null , lastUpdateDate DATETIME , scanDate DATETIME CONSTRAINT PK_status_tmp PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED(databaseID, objectID));DECLARE @SQL NVARCHAR(MAX);DECLARE @dbName nvarchar(128);DECLARE @databaseID INT;DECLARE @objectID INT;DECLARE @schemaName NVARCHAR(128);DECLARE @objectName NVARCHAR(128);DECLARE @lastUpdateDate DATETIME;DECLARE @startTime DATETIME;SELECT @startTime = GETDATE();DECLARE cDB CURSORREAD_ONLYFOR select [name] from master.sys.databases where database_id > 4OPEN cDBFETCH NEXT FROM cDB INTO @dbNameWHILE (@@fetch_status <> -1)BEGIN IF (@@fetch_status <> -2) BEGIN SELECT @SQL = ' use ' + QUOTENAME(@dbName) + ' select DB_ID() as databaseID , DB_NAME() as databaseName ,t.object_id ,sum(used_page_count) as page_count ,s.[name] as schemaName ,t.[name] AS objectName , COALESCE(d.stats_date, ''1900-01-01'') , GETDATE() as scanDate from sys.dm_db_partition_stats ps join sys.tables t on t.object_id = ps.object_id join sys.schemas s on s.schema_id = t.schema_id join ( SELECT object_id, MIN(stats_date) as stats_date FROM ( select object_id, stats_date(object_id, stats_id) as stats_date from sys.stats) as d GROUP BY object_id ) as d ON d.object_id = t.object_id where ps.row_count > 0 group by s.[name], t.[name], t.object_id, COALESCE(d.stats_date, ''1900-01-01'') ' SET ANSI_WARNINGS OFF; Insert #status EXEC ( @SQL); SET ANSI_WARNINGS ON; END FETCH NEXT FROM cDB INTO @dbNameENDCLOSE cDBDEALLOCATE cDBDECLARE cStats CURSORREAD_ONLYFOR SELECT databaseID , databaseName , objectID , schemaName , objectName , lastUpdateDate FROM #status WHERE DATEDIFF(dd, lastUpdateDate, GETDATE()) >= @minDays ORDER BY lastUpdateDate ASC, page_count desc, [objectName] ASC OPEN cStatsFETCH NEXT FROM cStats INTO @databaseID, @dbName, @objectID, @schemaName, @objectName, @lastUpdateDateWHILE (@@fetch_status <> -1)BEGIN IF (@@fetch_status <> -2) BEGIN IF DATEDIFF(mi, @startTime, GETDATE()) > @timeLimit BEGIN PRINT '[ ' + CAST(GETDATE() AS VARCHAR(100)) + ' ] ' + '*** Time Limit Reached ***'; GOTO __DONE; END SELECT @SQL = 'UPDATE STATISTICS ' + QUOTENAME(@dBName) + '.' + QUOTENAME(@schemaName) + '.' + QUOTENAME(@ObjectName) + ' WITH SAMPLE ' + CAST(@samplePercent AS NVARCHAR(100)) + ' PERCENT;'; IF @printSQL = 1 PRINT '[ ' + CAST(GETDATE() AS VARCHAR(100)) + ' ] ' + @SQL + ' (Last Updated: ' + CAST(@lastUpdateDate AS VARCHAR(100)) + ')' IF @executeSQL = 1 BEGIN EXEC (@SQL); END END FETCH NEXT FROM cStats INTO @databaseID, @dbName, @objectID, @schemaName, @objectName, @lastUpdateDateEND__DONE:CLOSE cStatsDEALLOCATE cStatsPRINT '[ ' + CAST(GETDATE() AS VARCHAR(100)) + ' ] ' + 'Completed.'GO

  Read the article

• DataContractSerializer: type is not serializable because it is not public?

  - by Michael B. McLaughlin

  I recently ran into an odd and annoying error when working with the DataContractSerializer class for a WP7 project. I thought I’d share it to save others who might encounter it the same annoyance I had. So I had an instance of  ObservableCollection<T> that I was trying to serialize (with T being a class I wrote for the project) and whenever it would hit the code to save it, it would give me: The data contract type 'ProjectName.MyMagicItemsClass' is not serializable because it is not public. Making the type public will fix this error. Alternatively, you can make it internal, and use the InternalsVisibleToAttribute attribute on your assembly in order to enable serialization of internal members - see documentation for more details. Be aware that doing so has certain security implications. This, of course, was malarkey. I was trying to write an instance of MyAwesomeClass that looked like this: [DataContract] public class MyAwesomeClass { [DataMember] public ObservableCollection<MyMagicItemsClass> GreatItems { get; set; }   [DataMember] public ObservableCollection<MyMagicItemsClass> SuperbItems { get; set; }     public MyAwesomeClass { GreatItems = new ObservableCollection<MyMagicItemsClass>(); SuperbItems = new ObservableCollection<MyMagicItemsClass>(); } }   That’s all well and fine. And MyMagicItemsClass was also public with a parameterless public constructor. It too had DataContractAttribute applied to it and it had DataMemberAttribute applied to all the properties and fields I wanted to serialize. Everything should be cool, but it’s not because I keep getting that “not public” exception. I could tell you about all the things I tried (generating a List<T> on the fly to make sure it wasn’t ObservableCollection<T>, trying to serialize the the Collections directly, moving it all to a separate library project, etc.), but I want to keep this short. In the end, I remembered my the “Debug->Exceptions…” VS menu option that brings up the list of exception-related circumstances under which the Visual Studio debugger will break. I checked the “Thrown” checkbox for “Common Language Runtime Exceptions”, started the project under the debugger, and voilà: the true problem revealed itself. Some of my properties had fairly elaborate setters whose logic I wanted to ignore. So for some of them, I applied an IgnoreDataMember attribute to them and applied the DataMember attribute to the underlying fields instead. All of which, in line with good programming practices, were private. Well, it just so happens that WP7 apps run in a “partial trust” environment and outside of “full trust”-land, DataContractSerializer refuses to serialize or deserialize non-public members. Of course that exception was swallowed up internally by .NET so all I ever saw was that bizarre message about things that I knew for certain were public being “not public”. I changed all the private fields I was serializing to public and everything worked just fine. In hindsight it all makes perfect sense. The serializer uses reflection to build up its graph of the object in order to write it out. In partial trust, you don’t want people using reflection to get at non-public members of an object since there are potential security problems with allowing that (you could break out of the sandbox pretty quickly by reflecting and calling the appropriate methods and cause some havoc by reflecting and setting the appropriate fields in certain circumstances. The fact that you cannot reflect your own assembly seems a bit heavy-handed, but then again I’m not a compiler writer or a framework designer and I have no idea what sorts of difficulties would go into allowing that from a compilation standpoint or what sorts of security problems allowing that could present (if any). So, lesson learned. If you get an incomprehensible exception message, turn on break on all thrown exceptions and try running it again (it might take a couple of tries, depending) and see what pops out. Chances are you’ll find the buried exception that actually explains what was going on. And if you’re getting a weird exception when trying to use DataContractSerializer complaining about public types not being public, chances are you’re trying to serialize a private or protected field/property.

  Read the article

• What's wrong with this turn to face algorithm?

  - by Chan

  I implement a torpedo object that chases a rotating planet. Specifically, it will turn toward the planet each update. Initially my implement was: void move() { vector3<float> to_target = target - get_position(); to_target.normalize(); position += (to_target * speed); } which works perfectly for torpedo that is a solid sphere. Now my torpedo is actually a model, which has a forward vector, so using this method looks odd because it doesn't actually turn toward but jump toward. So I revised it a bit to get, double get_rotation_angle(vector3<float> u, vector3<float> v) const { u.normalize(); v.normalize(); double cosine_theta = u.dot(v); // domain of arccosine is [-1, 1] if (cosine_theta > 1) { cosine_theta = 1; } if (cosine_theta < -1) { cosine_theta = -1; } return math3d::to_degree(acos(cosine_theta)); } vector3<float> get_rotation_axis(vector3<float> u, vector3<float> v) const { u.normalize(); v.normalize(); // fix linear case if (u == v || u == -v) { v[0] += 0.05; v[1] += 0.0; v[2] += 0.05; v.normalize(); } vector3<float> axis = u.cross(v); return axis.normal(); } void turn_to_face() { vector3<float> to_target = (target - position); vector3<float> axis = get_rotation_axis(get_forward(), to_target); double angle = get_rotation_angle(get_forward(), to_target); double distance = math3d::distance(position, target); gl_matrix_mode(GL_MODELVIEW); gl_push_matrix(); { gl_load_identity(); gl_translate_f(position.get_x(), position.get_y(), position.get_z()); gl_rotate_f(angle, axis.get_x(), axis.get_y(), axis.get_z()); gl_get_float_v(GL_MODELVIEW_MATRIX, OM); } gl_pop_matrix(); move(); } void move() { vector3<float> to_target = target - get_position(); to_target.normalize(); position += (get_forward() * speed); } The logic is simple, I find the rotation axis by cross product, the angle to rotate by dot product, then turn toward the target position each update. Unfortunately, it looks extremely odds since the rotation happens too fast that it always turns back and forth. The forward vector for torpedo is from the ModelView matrix, the third column A: MODELVIEW MATRIX -------------------------------------------------- R U A T -------------------------------------------------- 1 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 -------------------------------------------------- Any suggestion or idea would be greatly appreciated.

  Read the article

• XNA RenderTarget2D Sample

  - by Michael B. McLaughlin

  I remember being scared of render targets when I first started with XNA. They seemed like weird magic and I didn’t understand them at all. There’s nothing to be frightened of, though, and they are pretty easy to learn how to use. The first thing you need to know is that when you’re drawing in XNA, you aren’t actually drawing to the screen. Instead you’re drawing to this thing called the “back buffer”. Internally, XNA maintains two sections of graphics memory. Each one is exactly the same size as the other and has all the same properties (such as surface format, whether there’s a depth buffer and/or a stencil buffer, and so on). XNA flips between these two sections of memory every update-draw cycle. So while you are drawing to one, it’s busy drawing the other one on the screen. Then the current update-draw cycle ends, it flips, and the section you were just drawing to gets drawn to the screen while the one that was being drawn to the screen before is now the one you’ll be drawing on. This is what’s meant by “double buffering”. If you drew directly to the screen, the player would see all of those draws taking place as they happened and that would look odd and not very good at all. Those two sections of graphics memory are render targets. All a render target is, is a section of graphics memory to which things can be drawn. In addition to the two that XNA maintains automatically, you can also create and set your own using RenderTarget2D and GraphicsDevice.SetRenderTarget. Using render targets lets you do all sorts of neat post-processing effects (like bloom) to make your game look cooler. It also just lets you do things like motion blur and lets you create mirrors in 3D games. There are quite a lot of things that render targets let you do. To go along with this post, I wrote up a simple sample for how to create and use a RenderTarget2D. It’s available under the terms of the Microsoft Public License and is available for download on my website here: http://www.bobtacoindustries.com/developers/utils/RenderTarget2DSample.zip . Other than the ‘using’ statements, every line is commented in detail so that it should (hopefully) be easy to follow along with and understand. If you have any questions, leave a comment here or drop me a line on Twitter. One last note. While creating the sample I came across an interesting quirk. If you start by creating a Windows Game, and then make a copy for Windows Phone 7, the drop-down that lets you choose between drawing to a WP7 device and the WP7 emulator stays grayed-out. To resolve this, you need to right click on the Windows Phone 7 version in the Solution Explorer, and choose “Set as StartUp Project”. The bar will then become active, letting you change the target you which to deploy to. If you want another version to be the one that starts up when you press F5 to start debugging, just go and right-click on that version and choose “Set as StartUp Project” for it once you’ve set the WP7 target (device or emulator) that you want.

  Read the article

• Sparse virtual machine disk image resizing weirdness?

  - by Matt H

  I have a partitioned virtual machine disk image created by vmware. What I want to do is resize that by 10GB. The file size is showing as 64424509440. Or 60GB. So I ran this: dd if=/dev/zero of=./win7.img seek=146800640 count=0 It ran without errors and I can verify the new size is in fact 75161927680 bytes or 70GB. This is where it gets a little odd. I started the guest domain in xen which is a Windows 7 enterprise machine. What I was expecting to see in diskmgmt.msc is 2 partitions. 1 system partition at the start of around 100MB and near 60GB partition (which is C drive) followed by around 10GB of free space. Actually what I saw was a 70GB partition!?! That confused me... so I decided to run the Check Disk which when you set it on the C drive it asks you to reboot so it'll run on boot. So I did that and during the boot it ran the checks. It got all the way through stage 3 and didn't show any errors at all. Looked at the partitions in disk manager and now C drive has shrunk back to 60GB and there is no free space. What gives? Ok, I thought I'd try mounting it under Dom0 and examining it with fdisk. This is what I get when mounted sudo xl block-attach 0 tap:aio:/home/xen/vms/otoy_v1202-xen.img xvda w sudo fdisk -l /dev/xvda Disk /dev/xvda: 64.4 GB, 64424509440 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 7832 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x582dfc96 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/xvda1 * 1 13 102400 7 HPFS/NTFS Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary. /dev/xvda2 13 7833 62810112 7 HPFS/NTFS Note the cylinder boundary comment. When I run sudo cfdisk /dev/xvda I get: FATAL ERROR: Bad primary partition 1: Partition ends in the final partial cylinder Press any key to exit cfdisk So I guess this is a bigger problem than first thought. How can I fix this? EDIT: Oops, the cylinder boundary thing is not a problem at all since disks have used LBA etc. So that threw me for a moment... still the problem exists... Now this output looks a little different. sudo sfdisk -uS -l /dev/xvda Disk /dev/xvda: 7832 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors/track Units = sectors of 512 bytes, counting from 0 Device Boot Start End #sectors Id System /dev/xvda1 * 2048 206847 204800 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/xvda2 206848 125827071 125620224 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/xvda3 0 - 0 0 Empty /dev/xvda4 0 - 0 0 Empty BTW: I do have a backup of the image so if you help me mess it up that's ok. EDIT: sudo parted /dev/xvda print free Model: Xen Virtual Block Device (xvd) Disk /dev/xvda: 64.4GB Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B Partition Table: msdos Number Start End Size Type File system Flags 32.3kB 1049kB 1016kB Free Space 1 1049kB 106MB 105MB primary ntfs boot 2 106MB 64.4GB 64.3GB primary ntfs 64.4GB 64.4GB 1049kB Free Space Cool. Linux is showing free space is 10GB which is what I expect. The problem is windows isn't seeing this?

  Read the article

• Feynman's inbox

  - by user12607414

  Here is Richard Feynman writing on the ease of criticizing theories, and the difficulty of forming them: The problem is not just to say something might be wrong, but to replace it by something — and that is not so easy. As soon as any really definite idea is substituted it becomes almost immediately apparent that it does not work. The second difficulty is that there is an infinite number of possibilities of these simple types. It is something like this. You are sitting working very hard, you have worked for a long time trying to open a safe. Then some Joe comes along who knows nothing about what you are doing, except that you are trying to open the safe. He says ‘Why don’t you try the combination 10:20:30?’ Because you are busy, you have tried a lot of things, maybe you have already tried 10:20:30. Maybe you know already that the middle number is 32 not 20. Maybe you know as a matter of fact that it is a five digit combination… So please do not send me any letters trying to tell me how the thing is going to work. I read them — I always read them to make sure that I have not already thought of what is suggested — but it takes too long to answer them, because they are usually in the class ‘try 10:20:30’. (“Seeking New Laws”, page 161 in The Character of Physical Law.) As a sometime designer (and longtime critic) of widely used computer systems, I have seen similar difficulties appear when anyone undertakes to publicly design a piece of software that may be used by many thousands of customers. (I have been on both sides of the fence, of course.) The design possibilities are endless, but the deep design problems are usually hidden beneath a mass of superfluous detail. The sheer numbers can be daunting. Even if only one customer out of a thousand feels a need to express a passionately held idea, it can take a long time to read all the mail. And it is a fact of life that many of those strong suggestions are only weakly supported by reason or evidence. Opinions are plentiful, but substantive research is time-consuming, and hence rare. A related phenomenon commonly seen with software is bike-shedding, where interlocutors focus on surface details like naming and syntax… or (come to think of it) like lock combinations. On the other hand, software is easier than quantum physics, and the population of people able to make substantial suggestions about software systems is several orders of magnitude bigger than Feynman’s circle of colleagues. My own work would be poorer without contributions — sometimes unsolicited, sometimes passionately urged on me — from the open source community. If a Nobel prize winner thought it was worthwhile to read his mail on the faint chance of learning a good idea, I am certainly not going to throw mine away. (In case anyone is still reading this, and is wondering what provoked a meditation on the quality of one’s inbox contents, I’ll simply point out that the volume has been very high, for many months, on the Lambda-Dev mailing list, where the next version of the Java language is being discussed. Bravo to those of my colleagues who are surfing that wave.) I started this note thinking there was an odd parallel between the life of the physicist and that of a software designer. On second thought, I’ll bet that is the story for anybody who works in public on something requiring special training. (And that would be pretty much anything worth doing.) In any case, Feynman saw it clearly and said it well.

  Read the article

• Experimenting with other search engines

  - by Bill Graziano

  I’ve been a Google user so long I can hardly remember what I used before it.  Alta Vista maybe?  Or Yahoo.  I’ve tried Bing off and on but it never really stuck.  I probably care more about search engines than your average user because of their impact on SQLTeam.com.  Lately I’ve been trying two other search engines and actually switched to one of them. I’ve played with Blekko a little in the past.  They have some interesting ways to “slice up” your results.  For example, searching on “SQL Server /blogs /date” should just search all the recently updated blogs.  Those two extra words on the search are slashtags.  The full list of slashtags runs from /forums to just see forums to /twitter to /nikon to /reviews and on and on and on.  I laughed when I saw they had slashtags for both liberal and conservative.  I’d hate to find any search results that don’t match my existing worldview :)  You can also create your own slashtags.  I created a mini-search engine for the SQL Server blogs that I read.  You can search it for “backup” at http://blekko.com/ws/backup+/billgraziano/sql-sites.  I uploaded my OPML and it limited the search to just those sites.  It seems like the site is focusing more on curating results and less on algorithms.  This is an interesting site for those power searchers.  There are some great ways to curate results using slashtags.  For 99% of my searches (type words, click on one of the first few links) slashtags are overkill.  They do have some good information on page and site ranking though so I’ll probably send some time looking through that. Blekko recently got my attention again when they said they were banning “content farms” - and that includes eHow and experts-exchange.  I always feel used when I click on a link to EE and find myself scrolling all the way to the bottom to see if I can find the answer.  Sometimes it’s there but sometimes it tells me I need to pay first.  I’ve longed for a way to always exclude certain sites.  Blekko might be taking a hammer to a problem that needs a scalpel but it’s an interesting choice.  (And some of the comments in the TechCrunch link are interesting if you’re a search nerd.) DuckDuckGo is an odd name for a search engine.  Their big hook is that they don’t have search history.  If you wade through your Google account you can probably find the page where it stores your search history.  It was pretty enlightening to find mine.  It was easy to disable but that got me started looking at other search engines.  DDG (or DukGo) just feels like Google used to in the old days.  The results are good enough and the site is fast. Searches will return a snippet from WikiPedia or other site (like StackOverflow) at the top.  I think the idea is to answer the question without needing to visit the site.  I’m not sure that’s a good thing for SQLTeam.com. The only thing I really miss is image search.  You can add a “!i” at the end of any search and it will search the images on Bing.  Bing doesn’t have a great image search but it works for most of what I need.  They call these exclamation marks “!bangs” and they are kinda, sorta like slashtags.  I’ve been using DuckDuckGo now for a few weeks and I’m pretty happy with it.  I use Chrome for my browser and it was an easy switch to make.  It’s still a little surprising seeing my search results come up in a different format.  I’m starting to get used to it though.

  Read the article

• Drive

  - by erikanollwebb

  Picking up where we left off, let's summarize.  People have both intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation, and whether reward works depends a bit on what you are rewarding.  Rewards don't decreased intrinsic motivation provided you know what you are getting and why, and when you reward high performance.  But as anyone who has watched the great animation of Dan Pink's TED talk knows, even that doesn't tell the whole story.  Although people may not be less intrinsically motivated by rewards, the impact of rewards on actual performance is a really odd questions.  Larger rewards don't necessarily lead to better performance and in fact, some times lead to worse performance.  Pink argues that people are driven and engaged when they have autonomy, mastery and purpose.  If they can self-direct and can be good at what they do and have a sense of purpose for what they are doing, they show the highest engagement.   (Personally, I would add progress to the list.  My experience is that if you have autonomy, mastery and a sense of purpose but don't get a feeling that you are making any progress day to day, your level of engagement will drop rapidly.) So Pink is arguing if we could set up work so that people have a sense of purpose in what they do, have some autonomy and the ability to build mastery, you'll have better companies.  And that's probably true in a lot of ways, but there's a problem.  Sometimes, you have things you need to do but maybe you don't really want to do.  Or that you don't really see the point of.  Or that doesn't have a lot of value to you at the end of the day.  Then what does a company do?  Let me give you an example.  I've worked on some customer relationship management (CRM) tools over the years and done user research with sales people to try and understand their world.  And there's a funny thing about sales tools in CRM.  Sometimes what the company wants a sales person to do is at odds with what a sales person thinks is useful to them.  For example, companies would like to know who a sales person talked to at the company and the person level.  They'd like to know what they talked about, when, and whether the deals closed.  Those metrics would help you build a better sales force and understand what works and what does not.  But sales people see that as busy work that doesn't add any value to their ability to sell.  So you have a sales person who has a lot of autonomy, they like to do things that improve their ability to sell and they usually feel a sense of purpose--the group is trying to make a quota!  That quota will help the company succeed!  But then you have tasks that they don't think fit into that equation.  The company would like to know more about what makes them successful and get metrics on what they do and frankly, have a record of what they do in case they leave, but the sales person thinks it's a waste of time to put all that information into a sales application. They have drive, just not for all the things the company would like.   You could punish them for not entering the information, or you could try to reward them for doing it, but you still have an imperfect model of engagement.  Ideally, you'd like them to want to do it.  If they want to do it, if they are motivated to do it, then the company wins.  If *something* about it is rewarding to them, then they are more engaged and more likely to do it.  So the question becomes, how do you create that interest to do something?

  Read the article

• Styling specific columns and rows

  - by hattenn

  I'm trying to style some specific parts of a 5x4 table that I create. It should be like this: Every even numbered row and every odd numbered row should get a different color. Text in the second, third, and fourth columns should be centered. I have this table: <table> <caption>Some caption</caption> <colgroup> <col> <col class="value"> <col class="value"> <col class="value"> </colgroup> <thead> <tr> <th id="year">Year</th> <th>1999</th> <th>2000</th> <th>2001</th> </tr> </thead> <tbody> <tr class="oddLine"> <td>Berlin</td> <td>3,3</td> <td>1,9</td> <td>2,3</td> </tr> <tr class="evenLine"> <td>Hamburg</td> <td>1,5</td> <td>1,3</td> <td>2,0</td> </tr> <tr class="oddLine"> <td>München</td> <td>0,6</td> <td>1,1</td> <td>1,0</td> </tr> <tr class="evenLine"> <td>Frankfurt</td> <td>1,3</td> <td>1,6</td> <td>1,9</td> </tr> </tbody> <tfoot> <tr class="oddLine"> <td>Total</td> <td>6,7</td> <td>5,9</td> <td>7,2</td> </tr> </tfoot> </table> And I have this CSS file: table, th, td { border: 1px solid black; border-collapse: collapse; padding: 0px 5px; } #year { text-align: left; } .oddLine { background-color: #DDDDDD; } .evenLine { background-color: #BBBBBB; } .value { text-align: center; } And this doesn't work. The text in the columns are not centered. What is the problem here? And is there a way to solve it (other than changing the class of all the cells that I want centered)? P.S.: I think there's some interference with .evenLine and .oddLine classes. Because when I put "background: black" in the class "value", it changes the background color of the columns in the first row. The thing is, if I delete those two classes, text-align still doesn't work, but background attribute works perfectly. Argh...

  Read the article

• Identity in .NET 4.5&ndash;Part 3: (Breaking) changes

  - by Your DisplayName here!

  I recently started porting a private build of Thinktecture.IdentityModel to .NET 4.5 and noticed a number of changes. The good news is that I can delete large parts of my library because many features are now in the box. Along the way I found some other nice additions. ClaimsIdentity now has methods to query the claims collection, e.g. HasClaim(), FindFirst(), FindAll(). ClaimsPrincipal has those methods as well. But they work across all contained identities. Nice! ClaimsPrincipal.Current retrieves the ClaimsPrincipal from Thread.CurrentPrincipal. Combined with the above changes, no casting necessary anymore. SecurityTokenHandler now has read and write methods that work directly with strings. This makes it much easier to deal with non-XML tokens like SWT or JWT. A new session security token handler that uses the ASP.NET machine key to protect the cookie. This makes it easier to get started in web farm scenarios. No need for a custom service host factory or the federation behavior anymore. WCF can be switched into “WIF mode” with the useIdentityConfiguration switch (odd name though). Tooling has become better and the new test STS makes it very easy to get started. On the other hand – and that was kind of expected – to bring claims into the core framework, there are also some breaking changes for WIF code. If you want to migrate (and I would recommend that), most changes to your code are mechanical. The following is a brain dump of the changes I encountered. Assembly Microsoft.IdentityModel is gone. The new functionality is now in mscorlib, System.IdentityModel(.Services) and System.ServiceModel. All the namespaces have changed as well. No IClaimsPrincipal and IClaimsIdentity anymore. Configuration section has been split into <system.identityModel /> and <system.identityModel.services />. WCF configuration story has changed as well. Claim.ClaimType is now Claim.Type. ClaimCollection is now IEnumerable<Claim>. IsSessionMode is now IsReferenceMode. Bootstrap token handling is different now. ClaimsPrincipalHttpModule is gone. This is not really needed anymore, apart from maybe claims transformation (see here). Various factory methods on ClaimsPrincipal are gone (e.g. ClaimsPrincipal.CreateFromIdentity()). SecurityTokenHandler.ValidateToken now returns a ReadOnlyCollection<ClaimsIdentity>. Some lower level helper classes are gone or internal now (e.g. KeyGenerator). The WCF WS-Trust bindings are gone. I think this is a pity. They were *really* useful when doing work with WSTrustChannelFactory. Since WIF is part of the Windows operating system and also supported in future versions of .NET, there is no urgent need to migrate to the 4.5 claims model. But obviously, going forward, at some point you want to make the move.

  Read the article

• Is the Leptonica implementation of 'Modified Median Cut' not using the median at all?

  - by TheCodeJunkie

  I'm playing around a bit with image processing and decided to read up on how color quantization worked and after a bit of reading I found the Modified Median Cut Quantization algorithm. I've been reading the code of the C implementation in Leptonica library and came across something I thought was a bit odd. Now I want to stress that I am far from an expert in this area, not am I a math-head, so I am predicting that this all comes down to me not understanding all of it and not that the implementation of the algorithm is wrong at all. The algorithm states that the vbox should be split along the lagest axis and that it should be split using the following logic The largest axis is divided by locating the bin with the median pixel (by population), selecting the longer side, and dividing in the center of that side. We could have simply put the bin with the median pixel in the shorter side, but in the early stages of subdivision, this tends to put low density clusters (that are not considered in the subdivision) in the same vbox as part of a high density cluster that will outvote it in median vbox color, even with future median-based subdivisions. The algorithm used here is particularly important in early subdivisions, and 3is useful for giving visible but low population color clusters their own vbox. This has little effect on the subdivision of high density clusters, which ultimately will have roughly equal population in their vboxes. For the sake of the argument, let's assume that we have a vbox that we are in the process of splitting and that the red axis is the largest. In the Leptonica algorithm, on line 01297, the code appears to do the following Iterate over all the possible green and blue variations of the red color For each iteration it adds to the total number of pixels (population) it's found along the red axis For each red color it sum up the population of the current red and the previous ones, thus storing an accumulated value, for each red note: when I say 'red' I mean each point along the axis that is covered by the iteration, the actual color may not be red but contains a certain amount of red So for the sake of illustration, assume we have 9 "bins" along the red axis and that they have the following populations 4 8 20 16 1 9 12 8 8 After the iteration of all red bins, the partialsum array will contain the following count for the bins mentioned above 4 12 32 48 49 58 70 78 86 And total would have a value of 86 Once that's done it's time to perform the actual median cut and for the red axis this is performed on line 01346 It iterates over bins and check they accumulated sum. And here's the part that throws me of from the description of the algorithm. It looks for the first bin that has a value that is greater than total/2 Wouldn't total/2 mean that it is looking for a bin that has a value that is greater than the average value and not the median ? The median for the above bins would be 49 The use of 43 or 49 could potentially have a huge impact on how the boxes are split, even though the algorithm then proceeds by moving to the center of the larger side of where the matched value was.. Another thing that puzzles me a bit is that the paper specified that the bin with the median value should be located, but does not mention how to proceed if there are an even number of bins.. the median would be the result of (a+b)/2 and it's not guaranteed that any of the bins contains that population count. So this is what makes me thing that there are some approximations going on that are negligible because of how the split actually takes part at the center of the larger side of the selected bin. Sorry if it got a bit long winded, but I wanted to be as thoroughas I could because it's been driving me nuts for a couple of days now ;)

  Read the article

• getJSON not working if the mvc model view controller has a parameter

  - by Paul

  I'm having an issue with a callback. I'm not even getting an error in Firebug. If I alert before and after the getjson call both alerts show but the getjson call doesn't fire. public ActionResult TestPage() { return View(); } public ActionResult LoadMapLonLats(int mapId) { //some code return Json(_myMaps); } $("#Search").click(function() { $.getJSON("LoadMapLonLats", { mapId: 73 }, loadDbMap); }); function loadDbMap(maps) { alert('m'); $.each(maps, function(i) { alert(maps[i]); }); } As long as I leave TestPage without a parameter is works. If I add a parameter to TestPage(int id) then the call back to LoadMapLonLats doesn't work. Seems odd. Of course TestPage is the page I'm loading so I need to do some work here before rendering the page. Not sure why adding a parameter to the view would break the callback to another function. //this breaks he callback to LoadMapLonLats public ActionResult TestPage(int id) { return View(); } Any ideas? Seems like this may be related, if not sorry I can post a new thread.

  Read the article

• Correctly calling setGridWidth on a jqGrid inside a jQueryUI Dialog

  - by Dan

  I have a jQueryUI dialog (#locDialog) which has a jqGrid ($grid) inside it. When the Dialog opens (initially, but it gets called whenever it opens), I want the $grid to resize to the size of the $locDialog. When I do this initially, I get scrollbars inside the grid (not inside the dialog). If I debug the code, I see the width of the $grid is 677. So, I call setGridWidth() again and check the width and now I have 659, which is 18px less, which is the size of the scroll area for the jqGrid (Dun-dun-dun..) When I rezie the dialog, I resize the grid as well, and everything is happy - no scrollbars, except where necessary. My dialog init code: $locDialog = $('#location-dialog').dialog({ autoOpen: false, modal: true, position: ['center', 100], width: 700, height:500, resizable: true, buttons: { "Show Selected": function() {alert($('#grid').jqGrid('getGridParam','selarrrow'));}, "OK": function() {$(this).dialog('close');}, "Cancel": function() {$(this).dialog('close');} }, open: function(event, ui) { $grid.setGridHeight($(this).height()-54); // No idea why 54 is the magic number here $grid.setGridWidth($(this).width(), true); }, close: function(event, ui) { }, resizeStop: function(event, ui) { $grid.setGridWidth($locDialog.width(), true); $grid.setGridHeight($locDialog.height()-54); } }); I am curious if anyone has seen this before. Really, it isn't the end of the world if I initially have unnecessary scrollbars at first, but it is just odd that when I call setGridWidth initially, it doesn't take into account the scroll area of 18px. As far as the magical number 54, that is the number I had to subtract from the height of the dialog value to get the grid to render without unnecessary scrollbars.

  Read the article

• Philosophy of [WebInvoke(ResponseFormat = WebMessageFormat.Json)]

  - by Mikey Cee

  Hi everyone, I'm writing what I'm referring to as a POJ (Plain Old JSON) WCF web service - one that takes and emits standard JSON with none of the crap that ASP.NET Ajax likes to add to it. It seems that there are three steps to accomplish this: Change to in the endpoint's tag Decorate the method with [WebInvoke(ResponseFormat = WebMessageFormat.Json)] Add an incantation of [AspNetCompatibilityRequirements(RequirementsMode = AspNetCompatibilityRequirementsMode.Allowed)] to the service contract This is all working OK for me - I can pass in and am being returned nice plain JSON. If I remove the WebInvoke attribute, then I get XML returned instead, so it is certainly doing what it is supposed to do. But it strikes me as odd that the option to specify JSON output appears here and not in the configuration file. Say I wanted to expose my method as an XML endpoint too - how would I do this? Currently the only way I can see would be to have a second method that does exactly the same thing but does not have WebMethodFormat.Json specified. Then rinse and repeat for every method in my service? Yuck. Specifying that the output should be serialized to JSON in the attribute seems to be completely contrary to the philosophy of WCF, where the service is implemented is a transport and encoding agnostic manner, leaving the nasty details of how the data will be moved around to the configuration file. Is there a better way of doing what I want to do? Or are we stuck with this awkward attribute? Or do I not understanding WCF deeply enough?

  Read the article

• jQuery UI dialog on ASP.NET page (inside user control)

  - by marc_s

  I have a really odd behavior here: I created a little popup dialog in jQuery UI, and in my test HTML page, it works flawlessly. When I click on the button, the popup comes up, covers the background, and remains on screen until I click on one of the two buttons (OK or Cancel) provided. So now I wanted to add this into my ASP.NET 3.5 app. I wanted to add it to a GridView inside a user controls (ASCX), which is on a page (ASPX) contained inside a master page. The jQuery 1.4.2 and jQuery UI 1.8.1 scripts are referenced on the master page: <body> <form id="XXXXXX" runat="server"> <Ajax:ScriptManager ID="masterScriptManager" runat="server" ScriptMode="Auto"> <Scripts> <asp:ScriptReference Path="~/Scripts/jquery-1.4.2.min.js" /> <asp:ScriptReference Path="~/Scripts/jquery-ui-1.8.1.custom.min.js" /> </Scripts> </Ajax:ScriptManager> I had to change this to use the Ajax script manager, since adding them to the as never worked. So in my gridview, I have a column with image buttons, and when the user clicks on those, I am calling a little javascript function to show the jQuery UI dialog: function showDialog() { $("#dlg-discount").dialog('open'); $("#txtAmount").focus(); } When I run this page in MS IE 8, I get a separate page, and at the top of the page, I get the contents of my , with proper background color and all. In Firefox 3.5.6, I do get the dialog as a popup. In both cases, the dialog page/popup disappears again after a second or less - without me clicking anything! It seems similar to this question but the solution provided there doesn't work in my case. This one here also seems similar but again: the solution presented doesn't seem to work in my case... Any ideas / hints / tips on what the h** is going on here?? Thanks!

  Read the article

• Delphi Exception Handling - How to clean up properly?

  - by Tom

  I'm looking at some code in an application of ours and came across something a little odd from what I normally do. With exception handling and cleanup, we (as well as many other programmers out there, I'm sure) use a Try/Finally block embedded with a Try/Except block. Now I'm used to the Try/Except inside the Try/Finally like so: Try Try CouldCauseError(X); Except HandleError; end; Finally FreeAndNil(x); end; but this other block of code is reversed as so: Try Try CouldCauseError(X); Finally FreeAndNil(x); end; Except HandleError; end; Looking around the web, I'm seeing folks doing this both ways, with no explanation as to why. My question is, does it matter which gets the outside block and which gets the inside block? Or will the except and finally sections get handled no matter which way it is structured? Thanks.

  Read the article

• X509 Certificates, DigitalSignature vs NonRepudiation (C#)

  - by Eyvind

  We have been handed a set of test sertificates on smart cards for developing a solution that requires XML messages to be signed using PKI. Each (physical) smart card seems to have two certificates stored on it. I import them into the Windows certificate store using software supplied by the smart card provider, and then use code resembling the following to iterate over the installed certificates: foreach (X509Certificate2 x509 in CertStore.Certificates) { foreach (X509Extension extension in x509.Extensions) { if (extension.Oid.Value == "one we are interested in") { X509KeyUsageExtension ext = (X509KeyUsageExtension)extension; if ((ext.KeyUsages & X509KeyUsageFlags.DigitalSignature) != X509KeyUsageFlags.None) { // process certs here We have been told to use the certificates that have the NonRepudiation key usage flag set to sign the XMLs. However, the certificate that has the NonRepudiation flag has this flag only, and not for instance the DigitalSignature flag which I check for above. Does this strike anyone but me as slightly odd? I am in other words told to sign with a certificate that does not (appear to) have the DigitalSignature usage flag set. Is this normal procedure? Any comments? Thanks.

  Read the article

• ReSharper - Possible Null Assignment when using Microsoft.Contracts

  - by HVS

  Is there any way to indicate to ReSharper that a null reference won't occur because of Design-by-Contract Requires checking? For example, the following code will raise the warning (Possible 'null' assignment to entity marked with 'NotNull' attribute) in ReSharper on lines 7 and 8: private Dictionary<string, string> _Lookup = new Dictionary<string, string>(); public void Foo(string s) { Contract.Requires(!String.IsNullOrEmpty(s)); if (_Lookup.ContainsKey(s)) _Lookup.Remove(s); } What is really odd is that if you remove the Contract.Requires(...) line, the ReSharper message goes away. Update I found the solution through ExternalAnnotations which was also mentioned by Mike below. Here's an example of how to do it for a function in Microsoft.Contracts: Create a directory called Microsoft.Contracts under the ExternalAnnotations ReSharper directory. Next, Create a file called Microsoft.Contracts.xml and populate like so: <assembly name="Microsoft.Contracts"> <member name="M:System.Diagnostics.Contracts.Contract.Requires(System.Boolean)"> <attribute ctor="M:JetBrains.Annotations.AssertionMethodAttribute.#ctor"/> <parameter name="condition"> <attribute ctor="M:JetBrains.Annotations.AssertionConditionAttribute.#ctor(JetBrains.Annotations.AssertionConditionType)"> <argument>0</argument> </attribute> </parameter> </member> </assembly> Restart Visual Studio, and the message goes away!

  Read the article

• How would you solve this graph theory handshake problem in python?

  - by Zachary Burt

  I graduated college last year with a degree in Psychology, but I also took a lot of math for fun. I recently got the book "Introductory Graph Theory" by Gary Chartrand to brush up on my math and have some fun. Here is an exercise from the book that I'm finding particularly befuddling: Suppose you and your husband attended a party with three other married couples. Several handshakes took place. No one shook hands with himself (or herself) or with his (or her) spouse, and no one shook hands with the same person more than once. After all the handshaking was completed, suppose you asked each person, including your husband, how many hands he or she had shaken. Each person gave a different answer. a) How many hands did you shake? b) How many hands did your husband shake? Now, I've been reasoning about this for a while, and trying to draw sample graphs that could illustrate a solution, but I'm coming up empty-handed. My logic is this: there are 8 different vertices in the graph, and 7 of them have different degrees. The values for the degrees must therefore be 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and x. The # of degrees for one married couple is (0, 6). Since all graphs have an even number of odd vertices, x must be either 5, 3, or 1. What's your solution to this problem? And, if you could solve it in python, how would you do it? (python is fun.) Cheers.

  Read the article

• How would you solve this graph theory handshake problem in python?

  - by Zachary Burt

  I graduated college last year with a degree in Psychology, but I also took a lot of math for fun. I recently got the book "Introductory Graph Theory" by Gary Chartrand to brush up on my math and have some fun. Here is an exercise from the book that I'm finding particularly befuddling: Suppose you and your husband attended a party with three other married couples. Several handshakes took place. No one shook hands with himself (or herself) or with his (or her) spouse, and no one shook hands with the same person more than once. After all the handshaking was completed, suppose you asked each person, including your husband, how many hands he or she had shaken. Each person gave a different answer. a) How many hands did you shake? b) How many hands did your husband shake? Now, I've been reasoning about this for a while, and trying to draw sample graphs that could illustrate a solution, but I'm coming up empty-handed. My logic is this: there are 8 different vertices in the graph, and 7 of them have different degrees. The values for the degrees must therefore be 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and x. The # of degrees for one married couple is (0, 6). Since all graphs have an even number of odd vertices, x must be either 5, 3, or 1. What's your solution to this problem? And, if you could solve it in python, how would you do it? (python is fun.) Cheers.

  Read the article

• Ruby - Feedzirra and updates

  - by mplacona

  Hi, trying to get my head around Feedzirra here. I have it all setup and everything, and can even get results and updates, but something odd is going on. I came up with the following code: def initialize(feed_url) @feed_url = feed_url @rssObject = Feedzirra::Feed.fetch_and_parse(@feed_url) end def update_from_feed_continuously() @rssObject = Feedzirra::Feed.update(@rssObject) if @rssObject.updated? puts @rssObject.new_entries.count else puts "nil" end end Right, what I'm doing above, is starting with the big feed, and then only getting updates. I'm sure I must be doing something stupid, as even though I'm able to get the updates, and store them on the same instance variable, after the first time, I'm never able to get those again. Obviously this happens because I'm overwriting my instance variable with only updates, and lose the full feed object. I then thought about changing my code to this: def update_from_feed_continuously() feed = Feedzirra::Feed.update(@rssObject) if feed.updated? puts feed.new_entries.count else puts "nil" end end Well, I'm not overwriting anything and that should be the way to go right? WRONG, this means I'm doomed to always try to get updates to the same static feed object, as although I get the updates on a variable, I'm never actually updating my "static feed object", and newly added items will be appended to my "feed.new_entries" as they in theory are new. I'm sure I;m missing a step here, but I'd really appreciate if someone could shed me a light on it. I've been going through this code for hours, and can't get to grips with it. Obviously it should work fine, if I did something like: if feed.updated? puts feed.new_entries.count @rssObject = initialize(@feed_url) else Because that would reinitialize my instance variable with a brand new feed object, and the updates would come again. But that also means that any new update added on that exact moment would be lost, as well as massive overkill, as I'd have to load the thing again. Thanks in advance!

  Read the article

• Quantis Quantum Random Number Generator (QRNG) - any reviews?

  - by Tim Post

  I am thinking about getting one of these (PCI) to set up an internal entropy pool similar to this service who incidentally brought us fun captcha challenges. Prior to lightening my wallet, I'm hoping to gather feedback from people who may be using this device. As there is no possible 'correct' answer, I am making this CW and tagging it as subjective. I'm undertaking a project to help write Monte Carlo simulations for a non profit that distributes mosquito nets in Malaria stricken areas. The idea is to model areas to determine the best place to distribute mosquito nets. During development, I expect to consume gigs if not more of the RNG output. We really need our own source. Is this device reliable? Does it have to be re-started often? Is its bandwidth really as advertised? It passes all tests, as far as randomness goes (i.e. NIST/DIEHARD). What I don't want is something in deadlock due to some ioctl in disk sleep that does nothing but radiate heat. This is not a spamvertisement, I'm helping out of pocket and I really, really want to know if such a large purchase will bear fruit. I can't afford to build a HRNG based on radioactive decay, this looks like the next best thing. Any comments are appreciated. I will earn zero rep for this, please do not vote to close. This is no different than questions regarding the utilization of some branded GPU for some odd purpose. Answers pointing to other solutions will be gladly accepted, I'm not married to this idea.

  Read the article

• CSS sliding door background image problem.

  - by ethyreal

  I noticed I am not the first to ask about CSS sliding doors. However this seems (at least to me) to be a rather odd problem which I have not seen an answer for. Trying to create a simple rounded corner link button: html: <a href="#" class="link_button"><span>Add A New Somthing</span></a> css: .link_button { background: transparent url('img/backgrounds/bg-buttonRight.png') no-repeat scroll top right; color: #444; display: block; float: left; font: normal 12px arial; height: 41px; margin-right: 6px; padding-right: 14px; text-decoration: none; } .link_button span { background: transparent url('img/backgrounds/bg-buttonLeft.png') no-repeat top left; display: block; line-height: 31px; padding: 5px 0 5px 14px; } .link_button:active { background-position: bottom right; color: #000; outline: none; } .link_button:active span { background-position: bottom left; padding: 6px 0 4px 18px; } results: The two images are overlapping, which is what I want, but why the discoloration? Why would one be darker? I tried using png jpg, gif, with and without transparency. I posted the code here, along with another attempt using only one jpg instead of two, but still the same results. Did I miss something? Thanks in advance.

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71  | Next Page >