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  • Good SLA

    - by PointsToShare
    © 2011 Dov Trietsch What is a good SLA? I have frequently pondered about Service Level Agreements (SLA). Yesterday after ordering and while waiting, and waiting, and waiting for the food to arrive, I passed the time reading and re-reading the restaurant menu (again and again..) until I noticed their very interesting SLA.   Because (as promised) we had to wait even longer and the conversation around me was mostly in Russian, I ended doodling some of my thoughts of the menu, on the menu. People are both providers and consumers of services. As a service consumer – maybe the SLA above sucks – though to be honest, had the service been better, I would not have noticed this and you, the reader, would have been spared this rambling monograph. As a provider, I think it’s great! Because I provide services in the form of business software, I extend the idea to the following principles of design: 1: Wygiwyg. You guessed it. What You Get Is What You Get. 2: Ugiwugi.  U Get It When U Get It. How’s this for a developer friendly SLA? I’ll never be off the spec, or late. And BTW, the food was good, so when I finally got what I got, I liked it. That's All Folks!!

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  • In Google Webmaster Tools we have 3 sitemaps attributed to 1 domain

    - by Frank
    Thanks for you advice and help ahead of time I have a website that has been on the internet for almost 10 years created in "Microsoft Frontpage" with over 900 pages. Currently in Google Webmaster tools it shows up as 2 domains and 3 sitemaps: http://www.example.com example.com hostedsitmaps.com Furthermore, since we were having hard to placing the xml sitemap on our site(Frontpage Issues) we decided to hire pro-sitemaps.com to create, host and upload the xml file which they did. Thus, I have another site hostedsitemaps.com on our webmaster tools for the site. Hosted sitemaps shows: 900 urls submitted 800 Indexed. Crawl errors and Search queries: No data available http://www.example.com shows: 889 URLs submitted 1 URLs indexed. Crawl Errors: 14 Soft 404 796 Not found Search Queries: 8104 example.com shows: 889 URLs submitted 1 URLs indexed Crawl errors: 48 Soft 404 91 Not found Search Queries: 8104 My questions and need for help are as followed: 1. Why are our domain based sites in webmaster tools ( example.com and http:www.example.com) showing only 1 URL indexed while the hostedsitemap has 800 indexed? 2. Should we have 3 domains configured for this "one" domain in Google Webmaster tools? 3. Should we eliminate/delete the hostedsitemap from webmaster tools completely and take off that XML sitemap? 4 Does having example.com and http://www.example.com impact web ranking? 5. Any other thoughts or help in this very complicated matter for us. Thanks.

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  • New Content: Customer Engagement & Oracle OpenWorld Preview

    - by user462779
    Two new bits of content available on Profit Online: In A Cross-Channel Approach to Consumer Engagement, Cassandra Moren, senior director of consumer goods industry marketing at Oracle, shares her thoughts on how consumer goods manufacturers are reaping benefits from developing a direct relationship with customers: "Consumer goods manufacturers are starting to adapt in ways that mirror retailers. They are making investments in innovative technologies and processes to build the infrastructure to support the market demand. With advances in aspects like social networking, digital marketing and mobility fundamentally changing the way consumers behave, the door has opened to building a more direct relationship with their customers." We've also published a Special Report on Oracle OpenWorld that gives a great overview of recommendations for must-see sessions and insider advice from experienced attendees. For example, this top from John Matelski, newly elected president of the Independent Oracle Users Group: “Based on developments of the last 12 months, I think big data is definitely going to be hot. The challenges and opportunities of data governance will be another biggie. And there will obviously be a big emphasis on Oracle Exadata and the other Oracle Engineered Systems, with more than 100 sessions.” More updates to come as we continue to add content to Profit Online on a regular basis. Thanks for reading!

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  • Ubuntu 12.04 LTS 32bit does not detect 4Gb ram

    - by David
    I have recently installed 4Gb of ram for an existing 12.04 32bit Ubuntu. It's not being recognised, only 3.2Gb is showing, See: administrator@Root2:~$ free total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 3355256 1251112 2104144 0 48664 391972 -/+ buffers/cache: 810476 2544780 System is PAE capable, See: administrator@Root2:~$ grep --color=always -i PAE /proc/cpuinfo flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe nx lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts aperfmperf pni dtes64 monitor ds_cpl est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm lahf_lm dts flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe nx lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts aperfmperf pni dtes64 monitor ds_cpl est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm lahf_lm dts The system us fully patched and tried to run manual PAE upgrade, See: administrator@Root2:~$ sudo apt-get install linux-generic-pae linux-headers-generic-pae [sudo] password for administrator: Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done linux-generic-pae is already the newest version. linux-headers-generic-pae is already the newest version. The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required: language-pack-zh-hans language-pack-kde-en language-pack-kde-zh-hans language-pack-kde-en-base kde-l10n-engb kde-l10n-zhcn language-pack-zh-hans-base firefox-locale-zh-hans language-pack-kde-zh-hans-base Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them. 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. I am not sure what else to try to recognise the full physical memory installed other than loading 64bit. Any thoughts? Thanks! output of uname -r administrator@Root2:~$ uname -r 3.2.0-24-generic-pae

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  • How do I access shared folders on Ubuntu server from Mac OS?

    - by Stephen
    I have an old dell desktop running ubuntu 11.04, I also have samba installed on it. I'm trying to access the shared folders on the Ubuntu machine from my Mac, so I go into 'Finder', click on 'Go' and 'Connect to Server'. I type in the ip address of the ubuntu machine smb://xxx.xxx.x.xx and click connect, I can then see the list of shared folders from the ubuntu machine so I know its making a connection. But when I access the 'Music' folder I get an error message stating: There was an error connecting to the server "xxx.xxx.x.xx". Check the server name or IP address, and try again. Any thoughts anyone ? EDIT I have a external hard drive attached to the server, and the folders I'm trying to access are located on that external hard drive. The location of the folder is /media/HD-CELU2/test, so I think the path from Finder should be smb://xxx.xxx.x.xx/media/HD-CELU2/test, but having tested this, I'm still not getting in. P.S. I'm using Samba as I have a Windows machine on my home network as well.

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  • Blur gets displaced compared to original image

    - by user1294203
    I have implemented a SSAO and I'm using a blur step to smooth it out. The problem is that the blurred texture is slightly displaced compared to the original. I'm blurring using a 4x4 kernel since that was my noise kernel in SSAO. The following is the blurring shader: float result = 0.0; for(int i = 0; i < 4; i++){ for(int j = 0; j < 4; j++){ vec2 offset = vec2(TEXEL_SIZE.x * i, TEXEL_SIZE.y * j); result += texture(aoSampler, TexCoord + offset).r; } } out_AO = vec4(vec3(0.0), result * 0.0625); Where TEXEL_SIZE is one over my window resolution. I was thinking that this is was an error based on how OpenGL counts the Texel center, so I tried displacing the texture coordinate I was using by 0.5 * TEXEL_SIZE, but there was still a slight displacement. The texture input to my blur shader, has wrap parameters: glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_WRAP_S, GL_CLAMP); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_WRAP_T, GL_CLAMP); When I tell the blur shader to just output the the value of the pixel, the result is not displaced, so it must have something to do with how neighboring pixels are sampled. Any thoughts?

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  • What are the best strategies for selling Android apps?

    - by Rob S.
    I'm a young developer hoping to sell my apps I made for Android soon. My applications are basically 99% finished so I'm investigating what would be the best marketing strategy to use to sell my apps. I'm sure the brilliant minds here can give me some great advice. I'm particularly interested in your thoughts on the following points (especially from experienced Android developers): Is it more profitable to sell an app for free with ads or to sell an app without ads for a price? Perhaps a combination of a free ad version and a paid ad-free version? If you give away an app for free with ads on it is it ethical to decline bending over backwards to support it? How much does piracy actually affect potential sales? Should any effort be put towards preventing it? Can you still make a profit off your application if you make it open source? Could you perhaps make more of a profit from the attention you would get by doing so? Is Google's Android Marketplace really the best place to release Android apps? It is worthwhile enough to maintain a developer blog or website to keep users updated on your development progress and software releases? Any other suggestions you could give me to maximize profit meanwhile keeping users happy and coming back for more would also be greatly appreciated. While I appreciate general tips and tricks, I'd like to ask that if possible you please go the extra step and show how they specifically apply to selling Android apps. Marketing statistics, developer retrospect, and any additional experience you can share from your time selling Android apps is what I would love to see most. Thank you very much in advance for your time. I truly appreciate all the responses I receive.

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  • Understanding Visitor Pattern

    - by Nezreli
    I have a hierarchy of classes that represents GUI controls. Something like this: Control-ContainerControl-Form I have to implement a series of algoritms that work with objects doing various stuff and I'm thinking that Visitor pattern would be the cleanest solution. Let take for example an algorithm which creates a Xml representaion of a hierarchy of objects. Using 'classic' approach I would do this: public abstract class Control { public virtual XmlElement ToXML(XmlDocument document) { XmlElement xml = document.CreateElement(this.GetType().Name); // Create element, fill it with attributes declared with control return xml; } } public abstract class ContainerControl : Control { public override XmlElement ToXML(XmlDocument document) { XmlElement xml = base.ToXML(document); // Use forech to fill XmlElement with child XmlElements return xml; } } public class Form : ContainerControl { public override XmlElement ToXML(XmlDocument document) { XmlElement xml = base.ToXML(document); // Fill remaining elements declared in Form class return xml; } } But I'm not sure how to do this with visitor pattern. This is the basic implementation: public class ToXmlVisitor : IVisitor { public void Visit(Form form) { } } Since even the abstract classes help with implementation I'm not sure how to do that properly in ToXmlVisitor. Perhaps there is a better solution to this problem. The reason that I'm considering Visitor pattern is that some algorithms will need references not available in project where the classes are implemented and there is a number of different algorithms so I'm avoiding large classes. Any thoughts are welcome.

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  • Where is a good place to start to learn about custom caching in .Net

    - by John
    I'm looking to make some performance enhancements to our site, but I'm not sure exactly where to begin. We have some custom object caching, but I think that we can do better. Our Business We aggregate news stories on a news type of web site. We get approximately 500-1000 new stories per week. We have index pages that show various lists of the items and details pages that show the individual stories. Our Current Use case: Getting an Individual Story User makes a request The Data Access Layer(DAL) checks to see if the item is in cache and if item is fresh (15 minutes). If the item is not in cache or is not fresh, retrieve the item from SQL Server, save to cache and return to user. Problems with this approach The pull nature of caching means that users have to pay the waiting cost every time that the cache is refreshed. Once a story is published, it changes infrequently and I think that we should replace the pull model with something better. My initial thoughts My initial thought is that stories should ALL be stored locally in some type of dictionary. (Cache or is there another, better way?). If the story is not found, then make a trip to the database, update the local dictionary and send the item back. Since there may be occasional updates to stories, this should be an entirely process from the user. I watched a video by Brent Ozar, How StackOverflow Scales SQL Server, in which Brent states "the fastest database query is the one that you don't make". Where do I start? At this point, I don't know exactly what the solution is. Is it caching? Is there a better way of using local storage? Do I use a Dictionary, OrderedDictionary, List ? It seems daunting and I'm just looking for some good starting points to learn more about how to do this type of optimization.

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  • MVP Pattern Philsophical Question - Security Checking in UI

    - by Brian
    Hello, I have a philosophical question about the MVP pattern: I have a component that checks whether a user has access to a certain privilege. This privilege turns on or off certain UI features. For instance, suppose you have a UI grid, and for each row that gets bound, I do a security check to see if certain features in the grid should be enabled or disabled. There are two ways to do this: have the UI/view call the component's method, determine if it has access, and enable/disable or show/hide. The other is have the view fire an event to the presenter, have the presenter do the check and return the access back down to the view through the model or through the event arg. As per the MVP pattern, which component should security checks fit into, the presenter or the view? Since the view is using it to determine its accessibility, it seems more fitting in the view, but it is doing database checks and all inside this business component, and there is business logic there, so I can see the reverse argument too. Thoughts? Thanks.

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  • Hardware compatibility on H97 chipset/hardware support

    - by user3238850
    I am aware that there is documentation about compatibility but it is way out dated. I am also aware that there is a hardware compatibility page on Ubuntu website, but that one is focused on the whole box rather than a single piece of hardware. I have some experience with Linux OS, and some experience playing Ubuntu Server in a virtual machine, but never worked on a machine that lives in the real internet. I am building a home server with an Intel H97 chipset motherboard. I have looked at several models and none of them has Linux in the supported OS category. I have the experience of installing Ubuntu Desktop 14.04 on my 4-years-old lap top, and except for some system errors on start up, there is not too much I can complain about, so I guess I should be fine. However, this time I am going to install Ubuntu Server 14.04 on a relatively new piece of hardware(I went to http://linux-drivers.org/ but found nothing really helpful). For example the ASUS motherboard has M.2 socket and Intel LAN I218V chip, the Gigabyte motherboard has two LAN chips(Intel LAN WGI217V and ATHEROS AR8161-BL3A-R). So I really want to make sure everything will work. Usually I would just trust Ubuntu and buy all hardware I need, but basing on my past experience with the Ubuntu Desktop version on my lap top, I am not so convinced. There is an easily noticeable difference: when the system is idle, the fan runs much more frequently and longer under Ubuntu. This leads to my suspicion that generally hardware will have worse support for Ubuntu, which is no surprising at all but enough for me to put this post here. And as far as I know, some Intel CPU features come with software that usually will not run under Linux. Any help, idea or thoughts would be greatly appreciated!

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  • Should I pick up a functional programming language?

    - by Statement
    I have recently been more concerned about the way I write my code. After reading a few books on design patterns (and overzealous implementation of them, I'm sure) I have shifted my thinking greatly toward encapsulating that which change. I tend to notice that I write less interfaces and more method-oriented code, where I love to spruce life into old classes with predicates, actions and other delegate tasks. I tend to think that it's often the actions that change, so I encapsulate those. I even often, although not always, break down interfaces to a single method, and then I prefer to use a delegate for the task instead of forcing client code to create a new class. So I guess it then hit me. Should I be doing functional programming instead? Edit: I may have a misconception about functional programming. Currently my language of choice is C#, and I come from a C++ background. I work as a game developer but I am currently unemployed. I have a great passion for architecture. My virtues are clean, flexible, reusable and maintainable code. I don't know if I have been poisoned by these ways or if it is for the better. Am I having a refactoring fever or should I move on? I understand this might be a question about "use the right tool for the job", but I'd like to hear your thoughts. Should I pick up a functional language? One of my fear factors is to leave the comfort of Visual Studio.

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  • Should Professional Development occur on company time?

    - by jshu
    As a first-time part-time software developer at a small consulting company, I'm struggling to organise time to further my own software development knowledge - whether that's reading a book, keeping up with the popular questions on StackOverflow, researching a technology we're using in-depth, or following the front page of Hacker News. I can see results borne from my self-allocated study time, but listing and demonstrating the skills and knowledge gained through Professional Development is difficult. The company does not have any defined PD policy, and there's a lot of pressure to get something deliverable done now! when working for consultants. I've checked what my coworkers do, and they don't appear to allocate any time to self-improvement; they just work at the problems they're given, looking up specific MSDN references, code samples, and the like as they need them. I realise that PD policy is going to vary across companies of different size and culture, and a company like my own is probably a bit of an edge case. I'd love to hear views and experiences from more seasoned developers; especially those who have to make the PD policy choices in their team or company. I'd also like to learn about the more radical approaches to PD, even if they're completely out there; it's always interesting to see what other people are trying. Not quite a summary, but what I'm trying to ask: Is it common or recommended for companies to allocate PD time? Whose responsibility is it to ensure a developer's knowledge and skills are up to date? Should a part-time work schedule inspire a lower ratio of PD time : work? How can a developer show non-developer coworkers that reading blogs and books is net productive? Is reading blogs and books actually net productive? (references welcomed) Is writing blogs effective as a way of PD? (a recent theme on Hacker News) This is sort of a broad question because I don't know exactly which questions I need to ask here, so any thoughts on relevant issues I haven't addressed are very welcome.

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  • Python or Ruby in 2011.

    - by Sleeper Smith
    What I'm really asking is, in the current services and technologies provided, which is a more "useful" language? Which one has more opportunity? Some background info first. I'm a .net C# dev for 5 years. Having done a few projects on Amazon AWS, I'm looking to start a few projects of my own. But Azure's too expensive, and AWS has too much management overhead. My current choice is Google App Engine and Python. Logical enough. But what I want to ask here is this: In Linux world, which is more useful? Recently heard about Heroku for Ruby. How viable is this? Looking at the pricing model indicates that it's more expensive. Which one has more up-to-date and exciting open source projects? For instance Trac is just plain out dated compared to Redmine. One of the big reason pulling me for Ruby is Redmine. Implementations? IronPython/IronRuby/JRuby etc etc. Which one is more standardised and more implementation agnostic? Which one is easier to port between Windows/Linux? Anyway, your input and thoughts are greatly appreciated. thanks.

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  • Microsoft IntelliMouse episodic pauses

    - by Rob Hills
    I have a Microsoft IntelliMouse connected via USB to a computer (directly, NOT via hub) currently running Ubuntu 11.10, but this problem also existed before we upgraded from 10.10. Every now and then (apparently randomly) the computer "pauses" for anything up to a few seconds. This usually occurs after a mouse movement and during the pause, the computer is completely unresponsive to mouse or keyboard. lsusb shows: Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 001 Device 002: ID 0409:0058 NEC Corp. HighSpeed Hub Bus 001 Device 004: ID 05e3:0605 Genesys Logic, Inc. USB 2.0 Hub [ednet] Bus 003 Device 013: ID 045e:001e Microsoft Corp. IntelliMouse Explorer Bus 001 Device 005: ID 04a9:1097 Canon, Inc. PIXMA iP5000 Bus 001 Device 006: ID 0a5c:200a Broadcom Corp. Bluetooth dongle Bus 001 Device 007: ID 0911:1c57 Philips Speech Processing Bus 001 Device 008: ID 04a9:2219 Canon, Inc. CanoScan 9950F so the mouse appears to be correctly identified. Syslog episodically shows the following sequence: Jan 15 11:48:32 kayes-computer kernel: [10588.512036] usb 3-1: USB disconnect, device number 10 Jan 15 11:48:33 kayes-computer kernel: [10589.248026] usb 3-1: new low speed USB device number 11 using uhci_hcd Jan 15 11:48:33 kayes-computer mtp-probe: checking bus 3, device 11: "/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.1/usb3/3-1" Jan 15 11:48:33 kayes-computer kernel: [10589.448596] input: Microsoft Microsoft IntelliMouse® Explorer as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.1/usb3/3-1/3-1:1.0/input/input11 Jan 15 11:48:33 kayes-computer kernel: [10589.448706] generic-usb 0003:045E:001E.000B: input,hidraw0: USB HID v1.00 Mouse [Microsoft Microsoft IntelliMouse® Explorer] on usb-0000:00:1d.1-1/input0 Jan 15 11:48:33 kayes-computer mtp-probe: bus: 3, device: 11 was not an MTP device though I can't confirm if these are directly associated with the "pauses". Any thoughts on what might be causing this or what else I can do to diagnose the problem?

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  • Efficient mapping layout in 2D side-scroller, and collisions between character and the world

    - by Jack
    I haven't touched Visual Studio for a couple months now, but I was playing a game from the '90s toady and had an epiphany: I was looking for something what i didn't need, and I wasn't using what I knew correctly. One of those realizations was collision, so let me tell you a bit about my project that I was working on. The project's graphics looks like Mario or Dangerous Dave, etc., you get the idea - old-school pixels. So anyway I remember trying to think of something else than AABB for character form, but I couldn't think of anything. Perhaps I could get a suggestion for this? Another thing is the world - I don't want it to be just linear world, I want mountains, etc.. My idea is to use triangles, and no idea yet what to do if I want just part of the cube, say 3/4 or 2/4 or whatever. Hard-coding such things seems inefficient. P.S. I am not looking at the precision level offered by Box2D. Actually I remember trying to implement it at first, but I failed as my understanding of C++ wasn't advanced enough, as it'll be mentioned below. P.P.S. I am programming in C++, and I haven't done it for a couple months now. I have no means of testing it either, as my PC is broken down, and this one can barely run games from late '90s, not to speak about a compiler or a program with inefficient resource management... I am also not an expert (obviously), I don't even know if I can consider myself an average programmer. In short, I am simply curious about my thoughts and my past experience when programming the game. I may come back to it when my PC is fixed, I'm already filling a note about these things.

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  • How to correctly export UV coordinates from Blender

    - by KlashnikovKid
    Alright, so I'm just now getting around to texturing some assets. After much trial and error I feel I'm pretty good at UV unwrapping now and my work looks good in Blender. However, either I'm using the UV data incorrectly (I really doubt it) or Blender doesn't seem to export the correct UV coordinates into the obj file because the texture is mapped differently in my game engine. And in Blender I've played with the texture panel and it's mapping options and have noticed it doesn't appear to affect the exported obj file's uv coordinates. So I guess my question is, is there something I need to do prior to exporting in order to bake the correct UV coordinates into the obj file? Or something else that needs to be done to massage the texture coordinates for sampling. Or any thoughts at all of what could be going wrong? (Also here is a screen shot of my diffused texture in blender and the game engine. As you can see in the image, I have the same problem with a simple test cube not getting correct uv's either) http://www.digitalinception.net/blenderSS.png http://www.digitalinception.net/gameSS.png

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  • Animating DOM elements vs refreshing a single Canvas

    - by mgibsonbr
    A few years ago, when the HTML Canvas element was still kinda fresh, I wrote a small game in a rather "unusual" way: each game element had its own canvas, and frequently animated elements even had multiple canvases, one for each animation sprite. This way, the translation would be done by manipulating the DOM position of the canvases, while the sprite animation would consist of altering the visibility of the already drawn canvases. (z-indexes, of course, were the tricky part) It worked like a charm: even in IE6 with excanvas it showed a decent performance, and everything was rather consistent between browsers, including some smartphones. Now I'm thinking in writing a larger game engine in the same fashion, so I'm wondering whether it would be a good idea to do so in the current context (with all the advances in browsers and so on). I know I'm trading memory for time, so this needs to be customizable (even at runtime) for each machine the game will be running. But I believe using separate canvases would also help to avoid the game "freezing" on CPU spikes, since the translation would still happen even if the redraws lag for a while. Besides, the browsers' rendering engines are already optimized in may ways, so I'm guessing this scheme would also reduce the load on the CPU (in contrast to doing everything in JavaScript - specially the less optimized ones). It looks good in my head, but I'd like to hear the opinion of more experienced people before proceeding further. Is there any known drawback of doing this? I'm particulartly unexperienced in dealing with the GPU, so I wonder whether this "trick" would nullify any benefit of using a single, big canvas. Or maybe on modern devices it's overkill (though I'm skeptic about the claims that canvas+js - especially WebGL - will ever be a good alternative to native code). Any thoughts?

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  • What's a good Game development platform for a platformer game with these characteristics?

    - by Joe
    Yes, I know, the best way to make an indie game is to learn to code. I've got some scripting experience, but I want to do worldbuilding with already-existing tools (and communities surrounding those tools), and I've been really impressed with games like An Untitled Story that were made with pre-packaged toolsets at their core, like Game Maker. :) So I'm planning to make my game using either Game Maker or something like it. The basic parameters of my planned game: -2D platformer. -Physics/speed akin to Sonic the Hedgehog. -Large, non-linear world, flowing as seamlessly as possible -- think Super Metroid, but without the forced screen transitions. The first two points have me leaning toward Game Maker -- Plenty of 2D platformers have been made with it, and there are serviceable, openly available Sonic-the-Hedgehog-style physics engines for it that could be adapted to my needs with minimal muss and fuss. But the third makes me antsy -- from what limited information I hear, Game Maker has problems with large levels/boards/screens/whateveryoucallthem, thus necessitating transitions between screens. I want to avoid that if at all possible -- it would, I believe, fundamentally alter the flow of the game. I understand that generally speaking, the more you have loaded into memory the more things are going to chug (especially for a one-size-fits-all game development platform that isn't a model of efficient coding), but I'm hoping there are systems that can un-load objects that are sufficiently far offscreen and thus better produce seamlessness. Any thoughts, people? :) The sooner I can get a basic pre-fab physics engine and world-building program up and running, the sooner I can start prototyping areas and generally tooling around. Should I be looking at Game Maker, or elsewhere? (My current plan is to more-or-less build the game prototype-style, then worry about art and sound at the very end once the damn thing is playable.)

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  • Requiring multithreading/concurrency for implementation of scripting language

    - by Ricky Stewart
    Here's the deal: I'm looking at designing my own scripting/interpreted language for fun. I'm only in the planning stages right now; I want to make sure I have a very strong hold on exactly how I will implement everything before I start coding. What I'm currently struggling with is concurrency. It seems to me like an easy way to avoid the unpredictable performance that comes with garbage collection would be to put the garbage collector in its own thread, and have it run concurrently with the interpreter itself. (To be clear, I don't plan to allow the scripts to be multithreaded themselves; I would simply put a garbage collector to work in a different thread than the interpreter.) This doesn't seem to be a common strategy for many popular scripting languages, probably for portability reasons; I would probably write the interpreter in the UNIX/POSIX threading framework initially and then port it to other platforms (Windows, etc.) if need be. Does anyone have any thoughts in this issue? Would whatever gains I receive by exploiting concurrency be nullified by the portability issues that will inevitably arise? (On that note, am I really correct in my assumption that I would experience great performance gains with a concurrent garbage collector?) Should I move forward with this strategy or step away from it?

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  • Which software to keep track of my project?

    - by Exa
    I'm about to start the first real phase of my game development which will consist of the acquisition of information, resources and the definition of where I want to go and what I will need for that. I just want to make sure that I'm prepared as best as possible before I actually start development. I don't like the thought of using Microsoft Word or Excel for my project management... I already worked with MS Project but I don't think it fits my needs. I need a software where I can easily maintain project steps, milestones, important issues, information about technologies and engines I use, as well as simple notes and thoughts I just want to write down. I usually prefer a whiteboard for stuff like that but unfortunately it's not a persistent way of storing. ;) Also writing it down the old-school way is something I can think of, but only for quick notes... Which software do you use for that? Are there commonly used programs? Is there any free software at all?

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  • When creating an library published on CodePlex, how "bad" would it be for the unit-test projects to rely on commercial products?

    - by Lasse V. Karlsen
    I have started a project on CodePlex for a WebDAV server implementation for .NET, so that I can host a WebDAV server in my own programs. This is both a learning/research project (WebDAV + server portion) as well as a project I think I can have much fun with, both in terms of making it and using it. However, I see a need to do mocking of types here in order to unit-testing properly. For instance, I will be relying on HttpListener for the web server portion of the WebDAV server, and since this type has no interface, and is sealed, I cannot easily make mocks or stubs out of it. Unless I use something like TypeMock. So if I used TypeMock in the unit-test projects on this library, how bad would this be for potential users? The projects are made in C# 3.5 for .NET 3.5 and 4.0, and the project files was created with Visual Studio 2010 Professional. The actual class libraries you would end up referencing in your software would of course not be encumbered with anything remotely like this, only the unit-test libraries. What's your thoughts on this? As an example, I have in my old code-base, which is private, the ability to just initiate a WebDAV server with just this: var server = new WebDAVServer(); This constructs, and owns, a HttpListener instance internally, and I would like to verify through unit-tests that if I dispose of this server object, the internal listener is disposed of. If, on the other hand, I use the overload where I hand it a listener object, this object should not be disposed of. Short of exposing the internal listener object to the outside world, something I'm a bit loath to do, how can I in a good way ensure that the object was disposed of? With TypeMock I can mock away parts of this object even though it isn't accessed through interfaces. The alternative would be for me to wrap everything in wrapper classes, where I have complete control.

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  • Why does everybody hate SharePoint?

    - by Ryan Michela
    Reading this topic about the most over hyped technologies I noticed that SharePoint is almost universally reviled. My experience with SharePoint (especially the most recent versions) is that it accomplishes it's core competencies smartly. Namely: Centralized document repository - get all those office documents out of email (with versioning) User-editible content creation for internal information disemination - look, an HR site with current phone numbers and the vacation policy Project collaboration - a couple clicks creates a site with a project's documents, task list, simple schedule, threaded discussion, and possibly a list of all project related emails. Very basic business automation - when you fill out the vacation form, an email is sent to HR. My experience is that SharePoint only gets really ugly when an organization tries to push it in a direction it isn't designed for. SharePoint is not a CRM, ERP, bug database or external website. SharePoint is flexible enough to serve in a pinch, but it is no replacement for a dedicated tool. (Microsoft is just as guilty of pushing SharePoint into domains it doesn't belong.) If you use SharePoint for what it's designed for, it really does work. Thoughts?

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  • Dependency Analyser

    - by tsutha
    I have been watching 3 videos put together by SSIS team on Dependency Analyser. I am happy Microsoft have made an effort to do something about it. I have been asking for this feature since SQL 2005 TAP. Still a long way to go before they catch up with competetion. It looks like it currently supports SSIS and SQL dependencies. Release note states its still in development and support only limited sets of tasks. You still would not know the impact of dropping a column on cubes, reports etc. I hope that changes by the time RTM comes out. I am struggling to understand why it is impossible to do it across the solution. Ideally if you have a BI solution which holds DB, SSIS, SSAS, SSRS & PPS projects I would like to right click and execute a dependency analyser, stating what impact would have if I drop / rename a specific column. Has anyone else looked at it and what are your thoughts? ThanksSutha  

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  • Desktop switcher appears to be broken for quick double-switches

    - by Jon Blackburn
    I'm wondering if anyone else has seen this. I have three virtual desktops aligned in a horizontal row. In the middle desktop I have only a single application window. I have keyboard shortcuts mapping to navigate between the desktops. Obviously, I never use the up/down arrows because I only have one row of workspaces. Here's the problem, which only started to happen after I installed 12.04.1: When I rapidly hit to go from workspace 1 to workspace 3, the window on workspace 2 gets moved to workspace 1. I have checked using both Unity and Gnome3, and the behavior is the same under both. If I change back to the default workspace setup (a 2x2 grid of desktops) things seem to settle down (i.e., no wandering windows). Not every type of application window behaves the same way. I couldn't get a Chrome browser to jump from 2 to 1, but both Terminal and Terminator exhibit the behavior. Any thoughts? Better workarounds? Thanks in advance.

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