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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, November 12, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, November 12, 2012Popular ReleasesAX 2012 Custom Operating Units: AXPOM (beta): This is beta version of the tool. There are some known issues that will be fixed in the next upcoming release.????: ???? 1.0: ????Unicode IVS Add-in for Microsoft Office: Unicode IVS Add-in for Microsoft Office: Unicode IVS Add-in for Microsoft Office ??? ?????、Unicode IVS?????????????????Unicode IVS???????????????。??、??????????????、?????????????????????????????。EXCEL??、??、????????：DataPie（??MSSQL 2008、ORACLE、ACCESS 2007）: DatePie3.4.2: DatePie3.4.2Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.74: fix for issue #18836 - sometimes throws null-reference errors in ActivationObject.AnalyzeScope method. add back the Context object's 8-parameter constructor, since someone has code that's using it. throw a low-pri warning if an expression statement is == or ===; warn that the developer may have meant an assignment (=). if window.XXXX or window"XXXX" is encountered, add XXXX (as long as it's a valid JavaScript identifier) to the known globals so subsequent references to XXXX won't throw ...Home Access Plus+: v8.3: Changes: Fixed: A odd scroll bar showing up for no reason Changed: Added some code to hopefully sort out the details view when there is a small number of files Fixed: Where the details toolbar shows in the wrong place until you scroll Fixed: Where the Help Desk live tile shows all open tiles, instead of user specific tiles (admins still see all) Added: Powerpoint Files Filter Added: Print style for Booking System Added: Silent check for the logon tracker Updated: Logon Tracker I...Silverlight 4 & 5 Persian DatePicker: Silverlight 4 and 5 Persian DatePicker 1.5: - Improved DateTime Parser.???????: Monitor 2012-11-11: This is the first releaseVidCoder: 1.4.5 Beta: Removed the old Advanced user interface and moved x264 preset/profile/tune there instead. The functionality is still available through editing the options string. Added ability to specify the H.264 level. Added ability to choose VidCoder's interface language. If you are interested in translating, we can get VidCoder in your language! Updated WPF text rendering to use the better Display mode. Updated HandBrake core to SVN 5045. Removed logic that forced the .m4v extension in certain ...ImageGlass: Version 1.5: http://i1214.photobucket.com/albums/cc483/phapsuxeko/ImageGlass/1.png v1.5.4401.3015 Thumbnail bar: Increase loading speed Thumbnail image with ratio Support personal customization: mouse up, mouse down, mouse hover, selected item... Scroll to show all items Image viewer Zoom by scroll, or selected rectangle Speed up loading Zoom to cursor point New background design and customization and others... v1.5.4430.483 Thumbnail bar: Auto move scroll bar to selected image Show / Hi...Building Windows 8 Apps with C# and XAML: Full Source Chapters 1 - 10 for Windows 8 Fix 002: This is the full source from all chapters of the book, compiled and tested on Windows 8 RTM. Includes: A fix for the Netflix example from Chapter 6 that was missing a service reference A fix for the ImageHelper issue (images were not being saved) - this was due to the buffer being inadequate and required streaming the writeable bitmap to a buffer first before encoding and savingmyCollections: Version 2.3.2.0: New in this version : Added TheGamesDB.net API for Games and NDS Added Support for Windows Media Center Added Support for myMovies Added Support for XBMC Added Support for Dune HD Added Support for Mede8er Added Support for WD HDTV Added Fast search options Added order by Artist/Album for music You can now create covers and background for games You can now update your ID3 tag with the info of myCollections Fixed several provider Performance improvement New Splash ...Draw: Draw 1.0: Drawing PadPlayer Framework by Microsoft: Player Framework for Windows 8 (v1.0): IMPORTANT: List of breaking changes from preview 7 Ability to move control panel or individual elements outside media player. more info... New Entertainment app theme for out of the box support for Windows 8 Entertainment app guidelines. more info... VSIX reference names shortened. Allows seeing plugin name from "Add Reference" dialog without resizing. FreeWheel SmartXML now supports new "Standard" event callback type. Other minor misc fixes and improvements ADDITIONAL DOWNLOADSSmo...WebSearch.Net: WebSearch.Net 3.1: WebSearch.Net is an open-source research platform that provides uniform data source access, data modeling, feature calculation, data mining, etc. It facilitates the experiments of web search researchers due to its high flexibility and extensibility. The platform can be used or extended by any language compatible for .Net 2 framework, from C# (recommended), VB.Net to C++ and Java. Thanks to the large coverage of knowledge in web search research, it is necessary to model the techniques and main...Umbraco CMS: Umbraco 4.10.0: NugetNuGet BlogRead the release blog post for 4.10.0. Whats newMVC support New request pipeline Many, many bugfixes (see the issue tracker for a complete list) Read the documentation for the MVC bits. Breaking changesWe have done all we can not to break backwards compatibility, but we had to do some minor breaking changes: Removed graphicHeadlineFormat config setting from umbracoSettings.config (an old relic from the 3.x days) U4-690 DynamicNode ChildrenAsList was fixed, altering it'...SQL Server Partitioned Table Framework: Partitioned Table Framework Release 1.0: SQL Server 2012 ReleaseSharePoint Manager 2013: SharePoint Manager 2013 Release ver 1.0.12.1106: SharePoint Manager 2013 Release (ver: 1.0.12.1106) is now ready for SharePoint 2013. The new version has an expanded view of the SharePoint object model and has been tested on SharePoint 2013 RTM. As a bonus, the new version is also available for SharePoint 2010 as a separate download.Fiskalizacija za developere: FiskalizacijaDev 1.2: Verzija 1.2. je, prije svega, odgovor na novu verziju Tehnicke specifikacije (v1.1.) koja je objavljena prije nekoliko dana. Pored novosti vezanih uz (sitne) izmjene u spomenutoj novoj verziji Tehnicke dokumentacije, projekt smo prošili sa nekim dodatnim feature-ima od kojih je vecina proizašla iz vaših prijedloga - hvala :) Novosti u v1.2. su: - Neusuglašenost zahtjeva (http://fiskalizacija.codeplex.com/workitem/645) - Sample projekt - iznosi se množe sa 100 (http://fiskalizacija.codeplex.c...MFCMAPI: October 2012 Release: Build: 15.0.0.1036 Full release notes at SGriffin's blog. If you just want to run the MFCMAPI or MrMAPI, get the executables. If you want to debug them, get the symbol files and the source. The 64 bit builds will only work on a machine with Outlook 2010 64 bit installed. All other machines should use the 32 bit builds, regardless of the operating system. Facebook BadgeNew Projects.NET C# Wrapper for IQFeed API by Sentinel: An API for DTN IQFeed writtein in C#. Supports: - Historical Data Requests, - Lookup Tables - Level 1 - Level 2 - NewsBaiduMap: ????????API?????Bananagrams: An experimental Java project to find the most efficient strategy of playing Bannagrams, the popular game that I take absolutely no credit for inventing.Cloud Wallet: Don't try to remember every credit card, email, forum and account password of yours. Store them with Cloud Wallet in the skydrive and get them needed.Customer Contact System: System for Local Authorities/Government Bodies to manage enquiries from members of the public in their administrative area.daniel's little electronical bear: Hey, this is Daniel's idea that write her girlfriend a vivid little e-pet. So Daniel is just about to carry on this plan and hopefully fulfill it sooner or later. If you wanna give any advice, please don't hesitate to call me at any time,even ideas is OK!danielzhang0212@gmail.comfacebook page vote and like sample: facebook page vote and like sampleFriendly URL: This application is designed to help large organizations assign simple and memorable URL's to otherwise complicated or non-memorable URL's. GameSDK - Simple Game SDK with events: This game SDK use events for letting know each player through a game board when an events occurs. This is a simple SDK, easily adaptable to your project.GIF o Magic Prototype: GIF o Magic PrototypeHFS+ Driver Installer for Windows: Simple utility to install Read-Only HFS+ Driver to read Mac partitions from Windows.invrt: Simplest-that-could-possibly work inversion of control framework. Written in C#Kwd.Summary: Orchard module to provide alternate summary text for content itemsLogJam: LogJam will provide a modern, efficient, and productive framework for trace logging and metrics logging for all projects. LogJam is currently pre-alpha.Mi-DevEnv: Mi-DevEnv is an integrated set of PowerShell scripts to create virtual machines and populate them with software & tools e.g.: SharePoint,CRM,SQL,Office,K2 & VS.Mltools: mini tools for browser game.More Space Invaders: more then another space invadersMP3 Art Embedder: Embed cover art into MP3 filesMultiple GeoCoder: Serverside geocoding wrapper for various geocoding services. Supports a failover in the event you get throttled.My list: mvc3 project to test some frameworksMyFinalProject_WeamBinjumah: It is a website based on web 2.0 which about sea cruises' experiences with people who love amazing sea cruises. The website will offer most of web 2.0 features.netcached - memcached client for .NET: netcached is a lightweight, high performance .NET client for memcached protocol.paipai: paipaiProjeto Zeus: PROJETO REALIZADO COMO TRABALHO ACADÊMICO.Roy's Tools: Roy's ToolsSuperCotka: SuperCotkaSzoftvertechnológia beadandó: Árva Balázs beadandójának projektvezeto oldalat az ELTE szoftvertechnológia tantárgyára.Twi.Fly: Twi.Fly is designed to change the way that you write most of your code.Coding likes flying, more than twice speed.Unicode IVS Add-in for Microsoft Office: "Unicode IVS Add-in for Microsoft Office" makes Microsoft Office 2007 and 2010 capable to load, save and edit documents contains Unicode IVS.Uyghur Named Date: Generate Uyghur named date string. ???????? ??? ?????? ????? ????? ?????Windows 8 Camp BH: Projeto contendo conteudo de ajuda para o Windows 8 Camp oferecido pelo Microsoft Inovation Center de Belo Horizonte.???????: ??wpf??????? ?? ??

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• 50 Years of LEDs: An Interview with Inventor Nick Holonyak [Video]

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  The man who powered on the first LED half a century ago is still around to talk about it; read on to watch an interview with LED inventor Nick Holonyak. The most fascinating thing about Holonyak’s journey to the invention of the LED was that he started off trying to build a laser and ended up inventing a super efficient light source: Holonyak got his PhD in 1954. In 1957, after a year at Bell Labs and a two year stint in the Army, he joined GE’s research lab in Syracuse, New York. GE was already exploring semiconductor applications and building the forerunners of modern diodes called thyristors and rectifiers. At a GE lab in Schenectady, the scientist Robert Hall was trying to build the first diode laser. Hall, Holonyak and others noticed that semiconductors emit radiation, including visible light, when electricity flows through them. Holonyak and Hall were trying to “turn them on,” and channel, focus and multiply the light. Hall was the first to succeed. He built the world’s first semiconductor laser. Without it, there would be no CD and DVD players today. “Nobody knew how to turn the semiconductor into the laser,” Holonyak says. “We arrived at the answer before anyone else.” But Hall’s laser emitted only invisible, infrared light. Holonyak spent more time in his lab, testing, cutting and polishing his hand-made semiconducting alloys. In the fall of 1962, he got first light. “People thought that alloys were rough and turgid and lumpy,” he says. “We knew damn well what happened and that we had a very powerful way of converting electrical current directly into light. We had the ultimate lamp.” How To Get a Better Wireless Signal and Reduce Wireless Network Interference How To Troubleshoot Internet Connection Problems 7 Ways To Free Up Hard Disk Space On Windows

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• How do you deal with translating theory into practice?

  - by Mr. Shickadance

  Hello all! Being a computer scientist in a research field I am often tasked with working alongside professionals outside of the software domain (think math people, electrical engineer etc), and then translating their theories and ideas into real-world implementations. I often find it difficult when they present a theoretical problem which appears to be somewhat disconnected from reality. I am not saying that the theory is bogus, only that it is difficult to translate into real-world situations. For example, recently I have been working with software defined radios. We are exploring many different areas, but often the math specialists in my group would present a problem which is heavily grounded in theory (signal processing, physics, whatever). I often struggle at times where it is hard to draw direct parallels between the theory and the real-world implementation that I need to develop. Say we are working on an energy detector, the theory person in my group would say "you need to measure the noise variance with no signal present." This leads me to think "how the hell do I isolate noise from a signal in reality?" There are many examples, but I hope you see where I am going. So, my question is how does one deal with implementation of theoretical concepts when the theory seems detached from reality? Or at least when the connections are not so clear. Or perhaps, the person with the 'theory' may be ignorant of real restrictions? Note: I found this to be a hard question to ask - hopefully you are following me. If you have suggestions on how I could improve it, by all means let me know! Thanks for looking! EDIT: To be a bit more clear, I understand in situations like this that I must learn that specific domain myself to an extent (i.e. signal processing), but I am more concerned with when those theoretical concepts do not appear to be as grounded in practice as one would like.

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• Unknown CSS font-family oddity with IE7-10 on Win Vista-8

  - by Jeff

  I am seeing the following "oddity" with IE7-10 on Win Vista-8: When declaring font-family: serif; I am seeing an old bitmapped serif font that I can't identify (see screenshot below) instead of the expected font Times New Roman. I know it's an old bitmapped font because it displays aliased, without any font smoothing, with IE7-10 on Win Vista-8 (just like Courier on every version of Win). Screenshot: I would like to know (1) can anyone else confirm my research and (2) BONUS: which font is IE displaying? Notes: IE6 and IE7 on Win XP displays Times New Roman, as they should. It doesn't matter if font-family: serif; is declared in an external stylesheet or inline on the element. Quoting the CSS attribute makes no difference. Adding "Unkown Font" to the stack also makes no difference. New Screenshot: The answer from Jukka below is correct. Here is a new screenshot with Batang (not BatangChe) to illustrate. Hope this helps someone.

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• Is Openness at the heart of the EU Digital Agenda?

  - by trond-arne.undheim

  At OpenForum Europe Summit 2010, to be held in Brussels, Autoworld, 11 Parc du Cinquantenaire on Thursday 10 June 2010, a number of global speakers will discuss whether it indeed provides an open digital market as a catalyst for economic growth and if it will deliver a truly open e-government and digital citizenship (see Summit 2010). In 2008, OpenForum Europe, a not-for-profit champion of openness through open standards, hosted one of the most cited speeches by Neelie Kroes, then Commissioner of Competition. Her forward-looking speech on openness and interoperability as a way to improve the competitiveness of ICT markets set the EU on a path to eradicate lock-in forever. On the two-year anniversary of that event, Vice President Kroes, now the first-ever Commissioner of the Digital Agenda, is set to outline her plans for delivering on that vision. Much excitement surrounds open standards, given that Kroes is a staunch believer. The EU's Digital Agenda promises IT standardization reform in Europe and vows to recognize global standards development organizations (fora/consortia) by 2010. However, she avoided the term "open standards" in her new strategy. Markets are, of course, asking why she is keeping her cards tight on this crucial issue. Following her speech, Professor Yochai Benkler, award-winning author of "The Wealth of Networks", and Professor Nigel Shadbolt, appointed by the UK Government to work alongside Sir Tim Berners-Lee to help transform public access to UK Government information join dozens of speakers in the quest to analyse, entertain and challenge European IT policy, people, and documents. Speakers at OFE Summit 2010 include David Drummond, Senior VP Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer, Google; Michael Karasick, VP Technology and Strategy, IBM; Don Deutsch, Vice President, Standards Strategy and Architecture for Oracle Corp; Thomas Vinje, Partner Clifford Chance; Jerry Fishenden, Director, Centre for Policy Research, and Rishab Ghosh, head, collaborative creativity group, UNU-MERIT, Maastricht (see speakers). Will openness stay at the heart of EU Digital Agenda? Only time will show.

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• What is a good way to store tilemap data?

  - by Stephen Tierney

  I'm developing a 2D platformer with some uni friends. We've based it upon the XNA Platformer Starter Kit which uses .txt files to store the tile map. While this is simple it does not give us enough control and flexibility with level design. Some examples: for multiple layers of content multiple files are required, each object is fixed onto the grid, doesn't allow for rotation of objects, limited number of characters etc. So I'm doing some research into how to store the level data and map file. This concerns only the file system storage of the tile maps, not the data structure to be used by the game while it is running. The tile map is loaded into a 2D array, so this question is about which source to fill the array from. Reasoning for DB: From my perspective I see less redundancy of data using a database to store the tile data. Tiles in the same x,y position with the same characteristics can be reused from level to level. It seems like it would simple enough to write a method to retrieve all the tiles that are used in a particular level from the database. Reasoning for JSON/XML: Visually editable files, changes can be tracked via SVN a lot easier. But there is repeated content. Do either have any drawbacks (load times, access times, memory etc) compared to the other? And what is commonly used in the industry? Currently the file looks like this: .................... .................... .................... .................... .................... .................... .................... .........GGG........ .........###........ .................... ....GGG.......GGG... ....###.......###... .................... .1................X. #################### 1 - Player start point, X - Level Exit, . - Empty space, # - Platform, G - Gem

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• The emergence of Atlassian's Bamboo (and a free SQL Source Control license offer!)

  - by David Atkinson

  The rise in demand for database continuous integration has forced me to skill-up in various new tools and technologies, particularly build servers. We have been using JetBrain's TeamCity here at Red Gate for a couple of years now, having replaced the ageing CruiseControl.NET, so it was a natural choice for us to use this for our database CI demos. Most of our early adopter customers have also transitioned away from CruiseControl, the majority to TeamCity and Microsoft's TeamBuild. However, more recently, for reasons we've yet to fully comprehend, we've observed a significant surge in the number of evaluators for Atlassian's Bamboo. I installed this a couple of weeks back to satisfy myself that it works seamlessly with Red Gate tools. As you would expect Bamboo's UI has the same clean feel found in any Atlassian tool (we use JIRA extensively here at Red Gate). In the coming weeks I will post a short step-by-step guide to setting up SQL Server continuous integration using the Red Gate command lines. To help us further optimize the integration between these tools I'd be very keen to hear from any Bamboo users who also use Red Gate tools who might be willing to participate in usability tests and other similar research in exchange for Amazon vouchers. If you are interested in helping out please contact me at David dot Atkinson at red-gate.com I recently spoke with Sarah, the product marketing manager for Bamboo, and we ended up having a detailed conversation about database CI, which has been meticulously documented in the form of a blog post on Atlassian's website: http://blogs.atlassian.com/2012/05/database-continuous-integration-redgate/ We've also managed to persuade Red Gate marketing to provide a great free-tool offer, provide a free SQL Source Control or SQL Connect license to Atlassian users provided it is claimed before the end of June! Full details are at the bottom of the post. Technorati Tags: sql server

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• Other games that employ mechanics like the game "Diplomacy"

  - by Kevin Peno

  I'm doing a little bit of research and I'm hoping you can help me track down any games, other than Diplomacy (online version here), that employ all or some of the mechanics in Diplomacy (rules, short form). Examples I'm looking for: Simultaneous orders given prior to execution of orders In Diplomacy, players "write down" their moves and execute them "at the same time" Support, in terms of supporting an attacker or defender "take" a territory. In Diplomacy, no one unit is stronger than another you need to combine the strength of multiple units to attack other territories. Rules for how move conflicts are resolved Example, 2 units move into a space, but only one is allowed, what happens. I may add to this list later, but these are the primary things I'm looking for. If you need clarification on anything just let me know. Note: I tried asking this on GamingSE, but it was shot down. So, I am unsure where else I could post this. Since I am researching this for game development purposes, I assume this post is on topic. Please let me know if this is not the case. Please also feel free to re-categorize this. Thanks!

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• Red Sand – An Awesome Fan Made Mass Effect Prequel [Short Movie]

  - by Asian Angel

  Welcome to Mars where humanity has just discovered the Prothean Ruins and Element Zero, but danger abounds as the Red Sand terrorist group seeks to claim Mars for themselves! If you love the Mass Effect game series, then you will definitely want to watch this awesome fan made prequel set 35 years before the events of the first game. Synopsis From YouTube: Serving as a prequel to the MASS EFFECT game series,”Red Sand” is set 35 years before the time of Commander Shepard and tells the story of the discovery of ancient ruins on Mars. Left behind by the mysterious alien race known as the Protheans, the ruins are a treasure trove of advanced technology and the powerful Element Zero, an energy source beyond humanity’s wildest dreams. As the Alliance research team led by Dr. Averroes (Ayman Samman) seeks to unlock the secrets of the ruins, a band of marauders living in the deserts of Mars wants the ruins for themselves. Addicted to refined Element Zero in the form of a narcotic nicknamed “Red Sand” which gives them telekinetic “biotic” powers, these desert-dwelling terrorists will stop at nothing to control the ruins and the rich vein of Element Zero at its core. Standing between them and their goal are Colonel Jon Grissom (Mark Meer), Colonel Lily Sandhurst (Amy Searcy), and a team of Alliance soldiers tasked with defending the ruins at all costs. At stake – the future of humanity’s exploration of the galaxy, and the set up for the MASS EFFECT storyline loved by millions of gamers worldwide. RED SAND: a Mass Effect fan film – starring MARK MEER [via Geeks are Sexy] 7 Ways To Free Up Hard Disk Space On Windows HTG Explains: How System Restore Works in Windows HTG Explains: How Antivirus Software Works

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• Writing a "Hello World" Device Driver for kernel 2.6 using Eclipse

  - by Isaac

  Goal I am trying to write a simple device driver on Ubuntu. I want to do this using Eclipse (or a better IDE that is suitable for driver programming). Here is the code: #include <linux/module.h> static int __init hello_world( void ) { printk( "hello world!\n" ); return 0; } static void __exit goodbye_world( void ) { printk( "goodbye world!\n" ); } module_init( hello_world ); module_exit( goodbye_world ); My effort After some research, I decided to use Eclipse CTD for developing the driver (while I am still not sure if it supports multi-threading debugging tools). So I: Installed Ubuntu 11.04 desktop x86 on a VMWare virtual machine, Installed eclipse-cdt and linux-headers-2.6.38-8 using Synaptic Package Manager, Created a C Project named TestDriver1 and copy-pasted above code to it, Changed the default build command, make, to the following customized build command: make -C /lib/modules/2.6.38-8-generic/build M=/home/isaac/workspace/TestDriver1 The problem I get an error when I try to build this project using eclipse. Here is the log for the build: **** Build of configuration Debug for project TestDriver1 **** make -C /lib/modules/2.6.38-8-generic/build M=/home/isaac/workspace/TestDriver1 all make: Entering directory '/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.38-8-generic' make: *** No rule to make target vmlinux', needed byall'. Stop. make: Leaving directory '/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.38-8-generic' Interestingly, I get no error when I use shell instead of eclipse to build this project. To use shell, I just create a Makefile containing obj-m += TestDriver1.o and use the above make command to build. So, something must be wrong with the eclipse Makefile. Maybe it is looking for the vmlinux architecture (?) or something while current architecture is x86. Maybe it's because of VMWare? As I understood, eclipse creates the makefiles automatically and modifying it manually would cause errors in the future OR make managing makefile difficult. So, how can I compile this project on eclipse?

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• CERN Announces the Discovery of a Higgs-Boson-like Particle

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  CERN scientists dropped a press release today indicating they’ve found a particle consistent with the long sought after Higgs Boson particle–the “God” particle, that could help radically refine our understanding of Standard Model of Particle Physics. For years scientists at CERN have been harnessing the power of the Large Hadron Collider to answer fundamental questions about the nature of particles and the universe around us. In the above video John Ellis, a theoretical physicist, answers the question “What is the Higgs Boson?” The video pairs nicely with the CERN press release: “We observe in our data clear signs of a new particle, at the level of 5 sigma, in the mass region around 126 GeV. The outstanding performance of the LHC and ATLAS and the huge efforts of many people have brought us to this exciting stage,” said ATLAS experiment spokesperson Fabiola Gianotti, “but a little more time is needed to prepare these results for publication.” “The results are preliminary but the 5 sigma signal at around 125 GeV we’re seeing is dramatic. This is indeed a new particle. We know it must be a boson and it’s the heaviest boson ever found,” said CMS experiment spokesperson Joe Incandela. “The implications are very significant and it is precisely for this reason that we must be extremely diligent in all of our studies and cross-checks.” “It’s hard not to get excited by these results,” said CERN Research Director Sergio Bertolucci. “ We stated last year that in 2012 we would either find a new Higgs-like particle or exclude the existence of the Standard Model Higgs. With all the necessary caution, it looks to me that we are at a branching point: the observation of this new particle indicates the path for the future towards a more detailed understanding of what we’re seeing in the data.” How to Use an Xbox 360 Controller On Your Windows PC Download the Official How-To Geek Trivia App for Windows 8 How to Banish Duplicate Photos with VisiPic

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• FIX: Visual Studio Post Build Event Returns &ndash;1 when it should not.

  - by ChrisD

  I had written a Console Application that I run as part of my post build for other projects..  The Console application logs a series of messages to the console as it executes.  I use the Environment.ExitCode value to specify an error or success condition.  When the application executes without issue, the ExitCode is 0, when there is a problem its –1. As part of my logging, I log the value of the exit code right before the application terminates.  When I run this executable from the command line, it behaves as it should; error scenarios return –1 and success scenarios return 0.   When I run the same command line as part of the post-build event, Visual Studio reports the exit code as –1, even when the application reports the exit code as 0.   A snippet of the build output follows: Verbose: Exiting with ExitCode=0 C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.5\Microsoft.Common.targets(3397,13): error MSB3073: The command ""MGC.exe" "-TargetPath=C:\TFS\Solutions\Research\Source\Framework\Services\Identity\STS\_STSBuilder\bin\Debug\_STSBuilder.dll" C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.5\Microsoft.Common.targets(3397,13): error MSB3073:  C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.5\Microsoft.Common.targets(3397,13): error MSB3073: " exited with code -1. The Application returns a 0 exit code.  But visual studio is reporting an error.  Why? The answer is in the way I format my log messages.  Apparently Visual Studio watches the messages that get streamed to the the output console.  If those messages match a pattern used by visual studio to communicate errors, Visual Studio assumes an error has occurred in the executable and returns a –1.  This post details the formats used by Visual Studio to determine error conditions. In my case, the presence of the colon was tripping up Visual studio.  I Replaced all occurrences of colon with an equal sign and Visual Studio once again respected the exit code of the application. Verbose= Exiting with ExitCode=0 ========== Build: 3 succeeded or up-to-date, 0 failed, 0 skipped ==========

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• Open Source Security packages for Rails

  - by Edwin

  I'm currently creating a complete web application using Rails 3 to familiarize myself with its inner workings and to gain a better appreciation of a working web application's moving parts. (Plus, since I'm still working on my degree, I hope that it will give me a better idea of what's BS in my education requirements and which weaknesses/skills I should focus on.) The example application I'm working on is an ecommerce site, and I've already configured the backend, routes, controllers, and so on. As part of the application, I'd like to integrate a second layer of security on top of the one Rails already provides for user authentication. However, I've been unable to find any on Google, with the exception of OAuth - which, from my understanding, is meant to secure API calls. While I could roll my own secure authentication system, I'm only in my second year of college and recognize that A) I know little about security, and B) there are developers that know much more about security that are working on open-source projects. What are some actively developed open-source security packages or frameworks that can be easily added to Rails? Pros and cons are not necessary, as I can do the research myself. P.S. I'm not sure whether I posted this in the right SE site; please migrate to SO or Security if it is more appropriate there.

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• US GAAP and IFRS Convergence May Be Delayed Even More

  - by Theresa Hickman

  Yesterday, on March 10, the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) met to discuss the changes in financial statement presentation. Over the last six months, the FASB and IASB have been working feverishly to converge US GAAP and IFRS standards to meet the 2011 deadline. In March alone, the standards-setters met eight times. Many people fear that this accelerated pace is compromising the quality of the end product and that maybe they should slow down and do their due diligence. According to WG&L Accounting & Compliance Alert Checkpoint 3/10/2010, (which requires a subscription to view the full article) "Some statement preparers and investors who advise the FASB believe that the process would be better served if it was slowed down so that more attention could be paid to quality." "Should 2011 be looked at as a line in the sand?" asked Joan Amble, executive vice president and corporate comptroller for American Express Co. "We don't think that due process should be compromised for the due date," concurred Lewis Dulitz, vice president of accounting policies and research for medical products supplier Covidien plc. I personally have mixed emotions about this. On one hand, I have been growing impatient with how slow the US has jumped on the IFRS band wagon. On the other hand, being the conservative that I am and knowing this convergence will be costly and disruptive to businesses, I would prefer to be safe than sorry and get it right the first time.

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• "Are You There?".. India Tops Logistics List of Emerging Nations

  - by [email protected]

  It's just amazing how far, wide and deep modern supply chains are extending. AMR reported on 15 Apr (M.Burkett, A.Reese) in a SCM webcast that 'Penetrating Emerging Markets" was the top priotiy for organizations based on a recent survey. I took this as both adding new consumers to their prospect-list as well as leveraging 'lower cost labor arbitrage". (Read '3 Billion Capitalists") Supply Chain Quarterly reports that India and Brazil received the highest ranking of the logistics markets in developing nations India tops the list of emerging nations that scores the attractiveness of logistics markets to foreign investors. Developed by the UK-based research firm Transport Intelligence, the new  Emerging Market Logistics Index rated 38 developing countries on 3 factors. 1. "Market size and growth attractiveness," considered a country's economic output, projected growth rate, and population size.  2. "Market compatibility," which examined how well-matched a nation was with the services offered by global logistics providers. This includes a country's security levels, market accessibility, foreign direct investment, distribution of wealth and population, and development of its service sector. 3. "Connectedness," which rated the efficiency of customs and border controls, liner shipping connections, and transportation infrastructure. India claimed the top spot due to its market size and growth prospects. Brazil is second because of its economic performance, good levels of market accessibility, and improving domestic and international transport connections. Are you there? For more information see www.transportintelligence.com/articles_papers. The top 10 emerging countries India Brazil Indonesia Mexico Russia Turkey United Arab Emirates Egypt Saudi Arabia Malaysia Source: Transport Intelligence, The Emerging Markets Logistics Index, March 2010

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• The emergence of Atlassian's Bamboo (and a free SQL Source Control license offer!)

  - by David Atkinson

  The rise in demand for database continuous integration has forced me to skill-up in various new tools and technologies, particularly build servers. We have been using JetBrain's TeamCity here at Red Gate for a couple of years now, having replaced the ageing CruiseControl.NET, so it was a natural choice for us to use this for our database CI demos. Most of our early adopter customers have also transitioned away from CruiseControl, the majority to TeamCity and Microsoft's TeamBuild. However, more recently, for reasons we've yet to fully comprehend, we've observed a significant surge in the number of evaluators for Atlassian's Bamboo. I installed this a couple of weeks back to satisfy myself that it works seamlessly with Red Gate tools. As you would expect Bamboo's UI has the same clean feel found in any Atlassian tool (we use JIRA extensively here at Red Gate). In the coming weeks I will post a short step-by-step guide to setting up SQL Server continuous integration using the Red Gate command lines. To help us further optimize the integration between these tools I'd be very keen to hear from any Bamboo users who also use Red Gate tools who might be willing to participate in usability tests and other similar research in exchange for Amazon vouchers. If you are interested in helping out please contact me at David dot Atkinson at red-gate.com I recently spoke with Sarah, the product marketing manager for Bamboo, and we ended up having a detailed conversation about database CI, which has been meticulously documented in the form of a blog post on Atlassian's website: http://blogs.atlassian.com/2012/05/database-continuous-integration-redgate/ We've also managed to persuade Red Gate marketing to provide a great free-tool offer, provide a free SQL Source Control or SQL Connect license to Atlassian users provided it is claimed before the end of June! Full details are at the bottom of the post. Technorati Tags: sql server

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• Stable ubuntu distribution for a broadcom bcm4313 wireless driver and an nvidia 630 graphics adapter

  - by Vivek Pradhan

  I have been trying to completely shift to ubuntu or a linux distro for almost 2 years now. I have tried all the ubuntu distros starting from 10.04 through 11.10, but there has always been some bugs with the display drivers or the wireless cards not being recognised and the additional drivers suggested from the ubuntu community not doing the trick always. I tried a lot to fix bugs, checked a lot of forums, launch pad, got some of them fixed, but could not really get a neat and complete ubuntu machine set up till now. Now I really like the whole open source community and the linux platform, my pc at home runs ubuntu 11.04 perfectly but there have been some glitches always with ubuntu on my laptop that has forced me to stick with windows only. Now I am currently on an hp dv6 laptop that has the broadcom bcm4313 wireless driver and the nvidia 630gtm graphics(optimus) driver. Now I tried to do some research on the support of these drivers in linux machines but could not get anywhere. So I would really appreciate if you guys could suggest some linux distro that I could use that has full support of these drivers or has stable bug fixes for these kind of issues. I tried precise pangolin (LTS) through a live CD but i still see a problem with wifi networks which is a little frustrating. Please help me find the perfect match for my laptop :P I would gladly provide any other information necessary.

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• The Importance of Collaboration, Analytics, and Mobile Technologies for Modern HR

  - by HCM-Oracle

  It was 17 years ago, when a McKinsey study uncovered the “war for talent”. Today, it is no point of contention that a strong talent-centric strategy maybe the most important focus for organizations. A talent-centric organization aims at recruiting, retaining and developing the best talent.  The best employees will be able to adapt responsibilities and be able to come up with solutions to solve problems, which are important skills in today’s dynamic work environment, and arguably more important in this recessionary climate.   The notion of hiring and retaining talented employees for organizational sustainability and competitive advantage is not a new concept. But can organizations consider themselves as having a “talent-centric” strategy without up-to-date collaboration tools, HR analytics and mobile technologies in pursuit of attracting, hiring and retaining the best talent? Attend the Upcoming Webcast A webcast on June 19th at 3pm EST will reveal more results of the study. Based on original research done in collaboration between Oracle HCM and HCI, we unveil new findings that explore how critical collaboration, analytic insights and mobile technology are for supporting a talent-centric work environment. You will learn: What are the benefits to being talent-centric? How does collaboration via social networks, analytics with predictive insights and mobile technologies support the talent-centric strategy of an organization? What is the state of play for these technologies? Register Here 

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• ArchBeat Link-o-Rama for 11/14/2011

  - by Bob Rhubart

  InfoQ: Developer-Driven Threat Modeling Threat modeling is critical for assessing and mitigating the security risks in software systems. In this IEEE article, author Danny Dhillon discusses a developer-driven threat modeling approach to identify threats using the dataflow diagrams. Managing the Virtual World | Philip J. Gill "The killer app for virtualization has been server consolidation," says Al Gillen, program vice president for systems software at market research firm International Data Corporation (IDC). Solaris X86 AESNI OpenSSL Engine | Dan Anderson "Having X86 AESNI hardware crypto instructions is all well and good, but how do we access it? The software is available with Solaris 11 and is used automatically if you are running Solaris x86 on a AESNI-capable processor," says Anderson. WebLogic Access Management | René van Wijk "This post is a continuation of the post WebLogic Identity Management. In this post we will present the steps involved to integrate WebLogic and Oracle Access Manager," says Oracle ACE René van Wijk. OTN Developer Days in the Nordics - Helsinki, Oslo, Stockholm, and Copenhagen OTN Developer days head for the land of the midnight sun. Podcast: Information Integration Part 2/3 In part two of a three-part program, Oracle Information Integration, Migration, and Consolidation authors Jason Williamson, Tom Laszewsk, and Marc Hebert offer examples of some of the most daunting information integration challenges. Measuring the Human Task activity in Oracle BPM | Leon Smiers Leon Smiers discusses using Oracle BPM to get answer to important questions about what's happening with business process. Architecture all day. Oracle Technology Network Architect Day - Phoenix, AZ- Dec 14 Spend the day with your peers learning from experts in Cloud computing, engineered systems, and Oracle Fusion Middleware. The Heroes of Java: Michael Hüttermann | Markus Eisele Oracle ACE Director Markus Eisele interviews Java Champion Michael Hüttermann on his role, his process, and on why he uses Java.

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• Email Alias [email protected] Replaced with New Oracle Certification Support Tool

  - by Paul Sorensen

  All Oracle Certification customer service issues previously sent to [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], or [email protected], should now be submitted as service requests via the new request tool. Support via these email aliases ends today. Managing candidate communications via this tool will enable better issue tracking capabilities and ensure that all issues are handled quickly and efficiently. The integrated tool will also help us to more easily research historical and related issues to enable improved certification communications and business processes. For now, questions related to Java, Oracle Solaris (Cluster), MySQL, NetBeans or OpenOffice.org exam or certification, will still be sent to [email protected] and resolved via email. Questions related to the status of an Oracle Certification Success Kit, will still be sent to [email protected] and resolved via email. ?We are excited about this new offering and ?c?o?n?t?i?n?u?e? ??t?o??????? ?w?o?r?k? ?t?o?w?a?r?d ?improve?d customer ?s?e?r?v?i?c?e?? for our OCP community. Thank you for your cooperation! Quick View of Oracle Certification Customer Support Oracle Certification Support: All issues that previously would have been sent to [email protected] [email protected]: All questions on Java, Oracle Solaris (Cluster), MySQL, NetBeans, OpenOffice.org exams and certifications [email protected]: All questions on the status of your Oracle Certification Success Kit

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• Solaris: What comes next?

  - by alanc

  As you probably know by now, a few months ago, we released Solaris 11 after years of development. That of course means we now need to figure out what comes next - if Solaris 11 is “The First Cloud OS”, then what do we need to make future releases of Solaris be, to be modern and competitive when they're released? So we've been having planning and brainstorming meetings, and I've captured some notes here from just one of those we held a couple weeks ago with a number of the Silicon Valley based engineers. Now before someone sees an idea here and calls their product rep wanting to know what's up, please be warned what follows are rough ideas, and as I'll discuss later, none of them have any committment, schedule, working code, or even plan for integration in any possible future product at this time. (Please don't make me force you to read the full Oracle future product disclaimer here, you should know it by heart already from the front of every Oracle product slide deck.) To start with, we did some background research, looking at ideas from other Oracle groups, and competitive OS'es. We examined what was hot in the technology arena and where the interesting startups were heading. We then looked at Solaris to see where we could apply those ideas. Making Network Admins into Socially Networking Admins We all know an admin who has grumbled about being the only one stuck late at work to fix a problem on the server, or having to work the weekend alone to do scheduled maintenance. But admins are humans (at least most are), and crave companionship and community with their fellow humans. And even when they're alone in the server room, they're never far from a network connection, allowing access to the wide world of wonders on the Internet. Our solution here is not building a new social network - there's enough of those already, and Oracle even has its own Oracle Mix social network already. What we proposed is integrating Solaris features to help engage our system admins with these social networks, building community and bringing them recognition in the workplace, using achievement recognition systems as found in many popular gaming platforms. For instance, if you had a Facebook account, and a group of admin friends there, you could register it with our Social Network Utility For Facebook, and then your friends might see: Alan earned the achievement Critically Patched (April 2012) for patching all his servers. Matt is only at 50% - encourage him to complete this achievement today! To avoid any undue risk of advertising who has unpatched servers that are easier targets for hackers to break into, this information would be tightly protected via Facebook's world-renowned privacy settings to avoid it falling into the wrong hands. A related form of gamification we considered was replacing simple certfications with role-playing-game-style Experience Levels. Instead of just knowing an admin passed a test establishing a given level of competency, these would provide recruiters with a more detailed level of how much real-world experience an admin has. Achievements such as the one above would feed into it, but larger numbers of experience points would be gained by tougher or more critical tasks - such as recovering a down system, or migrating a service to a new platform. (As long as it was an Oracle platform of course - migrating to an HP or IBM platform would cause the admin to lose points with us.) Unfortunately, we couldn't figure out a good way to prevent (if you will) “gaming” the system. For instance, a disgruntled admin might decide to start ignoring warnings from FMA that a part is beginning to fail or skip preventative maintenance, in the hopes that they'd cause a catastrophic failure to earn more points for bolstering their resume as they look for a job elsewhere, and not worrying about the effect on your business of a mission critical server going down. More Z's for ZFS Our suggested new feature for ZFS was inspired by the worlds most successful Z-startup of all time: Zynga. Using the Social Network Utility For Facebook described above, we'd tie it in with ZFS monitoring to help you out when you find yourself in a jam needing more disk space than you have, and can't wait a month to get a purchase order through channels to buy more. Instead with the click of a button you could post to your group: Alan can't find any space in his server farm! Can you help? Friends could loan you some space on their connected servers for a few weeks, knowing that you'd return the favor when needed. ZFS would create a new filesystem for your use on their system, and securely share it with your system using Kerberized NFS. If none of your friends have space, then you could buy temporary use space in small increments at affordable rates right there in Facebook, using your Facebook credits, and then file an expense report later, after the urgent need has passed. Universal Single Sign On One thing all the engineers agreed on was that we still had far too many "Single" sign ons to deal with in our daily work. On the web, every web site used to have its own password database, forcing us to hope we could remember what login name was still available on each site when we signed up, and which unique password we came up with to avoid having to disclose our other passwords to a new site. In recent years, the web services world has finally been reducing the number of logins we have to manage, with many services allowing you to login using your identity from Google, Twitter or Facebook. So we proposed following their lead, introducing PAM modules for web services - no more would you have to type in whatever login name IT assigned and try to remember the password you chose the last time password aging forced you to change it - you'd simply choose which web service you wanted to authenticate against, and would login to your Solaris account upon reciept of a cookie from their identity service. Pinning notes to the cloud We also all noted that we all have our own pile of notes we keep in our daily work - in text files in our home directory, in notebooks we carry around, on white boards in offices and common areas, on sticky notes on our monitors, or on scraps of paper pinned to our bulletin boards. The contents of the notes vary, some are things just for us, some are useful for our groups, some we would share with the world. For instance, when our group moved to a new building a couple years ago, we had a white board in the hallway listing all the NIS & DNS servers, subnets, and other network configuration information we needed to set up our Solaris machines after the move. Similarly, as Solaris 11 was finishing and we were all learning the new network configuration commands, we shared notes in wikis and e-mails with our fellow engineers. Users may also remember one of the popular features of Sun's old BigAdmin site was a section for sharing scripts and tips such as these. Meanwhile, the online "pin board" at Pinterest is taking the web by storm. So we thought, why not mash those up to solve this problem? We proposed a new BigAddPin site where users could “pin” notes, command snippets, configuration information, and so on. For instance, once they had worked out the ideal Automated Installation manifest for their app server, they could pin it up to share with the rest of their group, or choose to make it public as an example for the world. Localized data, such as our group's notes on the servers for our subnet, could be shared only to users connecting from that subnet. And notes that they didn't want others to see at all could be marked private, such as the list of phone numbers to call for late night pizza delivery to the machine room, the birthdays and anniversaries they can never remember but would be sleeping on the couch if they forgot, or the list of automatically generated completely random, impossible to remember root passwords to all their servers. For greater integration with Solaris, we'd put support right into the command shells — redirect output to a pinned note, set your path to include pinned notes as scripts you can run, or bring up your recent shell history and pin a set of commands to save for the next time you need to remember how to do that operation. Location service for Solaris servers A longer term plan would involve convincing the hardware design groups to put GPS locators with wireless transmitters in future server designs. This would help both admins and service personnel trying to find servers in todays massive data centers, and could feed into location presence apps to help show potential customers that while they may not see many Solaris machines on the desktop any more, they are all around. For instance, while walking down Wall Street it might show “There are over 2000 Solaris computers in this block.” [Note: this proposal was made before the recent media coverage of a location service aggregrator app with less noble intentions, and in hindsight, we failed to consider what happens when such data similarly falls into the wrong hands. We certainly wouldn't want our app to be misinterpreted as “There are over $20 million dollars of SPARC servers in this building, waiting for you to steal them.” so it's probably best it was rejected.] Harnessing the power of the GPU for Security Most modern OS'es make use of the widespread availability of high powered GPU hardware in today's computers, with desktop environments requiring 3-D graphics acceleration, whether in Ubuntu Unity, GNOME Shell on Fedora, or Aero Glass on Windows, but we haven't yet made Solaris fully take advantage of this, beyond our basic offering of Compiz on the desktop. Meanwhile, more businesses are interested in increasing security by using biometric authentication, but must also comply with laws in many countries preventing discrimination against employees with physical limations such as missing eyes or fingers, not to mention the lost productivity when employees can't login due to tinted contacts throwing off a retina scan or a paper cut changing their fingerprint appearance until it heals. Fortunately, the two groups considering these problems put their heads together and found a common solution, using 3D technology to enable authentication using the one body part all users are guaranteed to have - pam_phrenology.so, a new PAM module that uses an array USB attached web cams (or just one if the user is willing to spin their chair during login) to take pictures of the users head from all angles, create a 3D model and compare it to the one in the authentication database. While Mythbusters has shown how easy it can be to fool common fingerprint scanners, we have not yet seen any evidence that people can impersonate the shape of another user's cranium, no matter how long they spend beating their head against the wall to reshape it. This could possibly be extended to group users, using modern versions of some of the older phrenological studies, such as giving all users with long grey beards access to the System Architect role, or automatically placing users with pointy spikes in their hair into an easy use mode. Unfortunately, there are still some unsolved technical challenges we haven't figured out how to overcome. Currently, a visit to the hair salon causes your existing authentication to expire, and some users have found that shaving their heads is the only way to avoid bad hair days becoming bad login days. Reaction to these ideas After gathering all our notes on these ideas from the engineering brainstorming meeting, we took them in to present to our management. Unfortunately, most of their reaction cannot be printed here, and they chose not to accept any of these ideas as they were, but they did have some feedback for us to consider as they sent us back to the drawing board. They strongly suggested our ideas would be better presented if we weren't trying to decipher ink blotches that had been smeared by the condensation when we put our pint glasses on the napkins we were taking notes on, and to that end let us know they would not be approving any more engineering offsites in Irish themed pubs on the Friday of a Saint Patrick's Day weekend. (Hopefully they mean that situation specifically and aren't going to deny the funding for travel to this year's X.Org Developer's Conference just because it happens to be in Bavaria and ending on the Friday of the weekend Oktoberfest starts.) They recommended our research techniques could be improved over just sitting around reading blogs and checking our Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest accounts, such as considering input from alternate viewpoints on topics such as gamification. They also mentioned that Oracle hadn't fully adopted some of Sun's common practices and we might have to try harder to get those to be accepted now that we are one unified company. So as I said at the beginning, don't pester your sales rep just yet for any of these, since they didn't get approved, but if you have better ideas, pass them on and maybe they'll get into our next batch of planning.

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• Huge google impression drop after cleaning html

  - by olgatorresfoundation

  Good morning, I am the webmaster of a non-profit organization that donates grants to colorectal cancer research projects and funds various colorectal cancer information campaigns. We have three domains: www.fundacioolgatorres dot org (Catalan) www.fundacionolgatorres dot org (Spanish) www.olgatorresfoundation dot org (English) So what happened? I redesigned olgatorresfoundation on the 20th and the fundacionolgatorres on the 30th of May. In both cases, exactly two days later, the number of impressions on both dropped to a halt. Granted, we did not have the traffic of Microsoft, but a 90% decrease a disaster of incredible proportions for us. My only real changes were cleaning up the old ineffective HTML to a cleaner form (mostly moving away from redundant table construction to a table-less view). Here is a before and after snapshot of what the change looks like: Before: http://www.fundacioolgatorres.org/aparell_digestiu/introduccio/ (unchanged page in Catalan) After: http://www.olgatorresfoundation.org/digestive_system/introduction/ (changed page in English) Anybody has a clue to what just happened? Why should a normal, sane html improvement be punished and so dramatically? No URLs have been changed, neither have page names or descriptions. Possible secondary question: If it is so that Google sees it as a major overhaul and decides to drop the pagerank sharply, does it come back to pre-change levels if the content "checks out" or will the page start over from scratch earning those pagerank points (which would mean that we would have to wait 6 months for the pages to recover to the level they had two weeks ago)? (duplicated from productforums.google dot com/forum/#!category-topic/webmasters/crawling-indexing--ranking/YsnyX0JzOpY, hoping to reach a wider audience)

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• 2D Tile Map files for Platformer, JSON or DB?

  - by Stephen Tierney

  I'm developing a 2D platformer with some uni friends. We've based it upon the XNA Platformer Starter Kit which uses .txt files to store the tile map. While this is simple it does not give us enough control and flexibility with level design. Some examples: for multiple layers of content multiple files are required, each object is fixed onto the grid, doesn't allow for rotation of objects, limited number of characters etc. So I'm doing some research into how to store the level data and map file. Reasoning for DB: From my perspective I see less redundancy of data using a database to store the tile data. Tiles in the same x,y position with the same characteristics can be reused from level to level. It seems like it would simple enough to write a method to retrieve all the tiles that are used in a particular level from the database. Reasoning for JSON: Visually editable files, changes can be tracked via SVN a lot easier. But there is repeated content. Do either have any drawbacks (load times, access times, memory etc) compared to the other? And what is commonly used in the industry? Currently the file looks like this: .................... .................... .................... .................... .................... .................... .................... .........GGG........ .........###........ .................... ....GGG.......GGG... ....###.......###... .................... .1................X. #################### 1 - Player start point, X - Level Exit, . - Empty space, # - Platform, G - Gem

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• Have programmers at your work not taken up or been averse to an offer of a second monitor?

  - by Chris Knight

  I'm putting together a business case for the developers in my company to get a second monitor. After my own experiences and research, this seems a no-brainer to me in terms of increasing productivity and morale/happiness. One question which has niggled me is if I should be pushing to get all developers onto a second monitor or let folk opt-in (i.e. they get one if they want one). Thoughts on this are welcome, but my specific question relates to a snippet on this site: But when the IT manager at Thibeault's company asked other employees if they wanted dual monitors last year, few jumped at the offer. Blinded by my own pre-judgement, this surprised me. Has anyone else experienced this? I fully appreciate that some people prefer a single larger monitor, but my general experience of researching the web suggests that most programmers prefer a dual (or more) setup. I'm guessing this should be tempered with the thought that those developers who contribute to such discussions might not be considered your average developer who might not care one way or the other. Anyway, if you have experienced the above have you tried to sell the concept of dual monitors to the masses? If everyone just got 2 monitors regardless if they wanted it or not, were there adverse reactions or negative effects? UPDATE: The developers are on a mixture of 17", 22", or 24" single monitors. The desks should be able to accommodate dual 22" monitors as I am proposing, though this will take some getting used to I imagine.

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• Using a portable USB monitor in Ubuntu 13.04 (AOC e1649Fwu - DisplayLink)

  Having access to a little bit of IT hardware extravaganza isn't that easy here in Mauritius for exactly two reasons - either it is simply not available or it is expensive like nowhere. Well, by chance I came across an advert by a local hardware supplier and their offer of the week caught my attention - a portable USB monitor. Sounds cool, and the specs are okay as well. It's completely driven via USB 2.0, has a light weight, the dimensions would fit into my laptop bag and the resolution of 1366 x 768 pixels is okay for a second screen. Long story, short ending: I called them and only got to understand that they are out of stock - how convenient! Well, as usual I left some contact details and got the regular 'We call you back' answer. Surprisingly, I didn't receive a phone call as promised and after starting to complain via social media networks they finally came back to me with new units available - and *drum-roll* still the same price tag as promoted (and free delivery on top as one of their employees lives in Flic en Flac). Guess, it was a no-brainer to get at least one unit to fool around with. In worst case it might end up as image frame on the shelf or so... The usual suspects... Ubuntu first! Of course, the packing mentions only Windows or Mac OS as supported operating systems and without hesitation at all, I hooked up the device on my main machine running on Ubuntu 13.04. Result: Blackout... Hm, actually not the situation I was looking for but okay can't be too difficult to get this piece of hardware up and running. Following the output of syslogd (or dmesg if you prefer) the device has been recognised successfully but we got stuck in the initialisation phase. Oct 12 08:17:23 iospc2 kernel: [69818.689137] usb 2-4: new high-speed USB device number 5 using ehci-pciOct 12 08:17:23 iospc2 kernel: [69818.800306] usb 2-4: device descriptor read/64, error -32Oct 12 08:17:24 iospc2 kernel: [69819.043620] usb 2-4: New USB device found, idVendor=17e9, idProduct=4107Oct 12 08:17:24 iospc2 kernel: [69819.043630] usb 2-4: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3Oct 12 08:17:24 iospc2 kernel: [69819.043636] usb 2-4: Product: e1649FwuOct 12 08:17:24 iospc2 kernel: [69819.043642] usb 2-4: Manufacturer: DisplayLinkOct 12 08:17:24 iospc2 kernel: [69819.043647] usb 2-4: SerialNumber: FJBD7HA000778Oct 12 08:17:24 iospc2 kernel: [69819.046073] hid-generic 0003:17E9:4107.0008: hiddev0,hidraw5: USB HID v1.10 Device [DisplayLink e1649Fwu] on usb-0000:00:1d.7-4/input1Oct 12 08:17:24 iospc2 mtp-probe: checking bus 2, device 5: "/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.7/usb2/2-4"Oct 12 08:17:24 iospc2 mtp-probe: bus: 2, device: 5 was not an MTP deviceOct 12 08:17:30 iospc2 kernel: [69825.411220] [drm] vendor descriptor length:17 data:17 5f 01 00 15 05 00 01 03 00 04Oct 12 08:17:30 iospc2 kernel: [69825.498778] udl 2-4:1.0: fb1: udldrmfb frame buffer deviceOct 12 08:17:30 iospc2 kernel: [69825.498786] [drm] Initialized udl 0.0.1 20120220 on minor 1Oct 12 08:17:30 iospc2 kernel: [69825.498909] usbcore: registered new interface driver udl The device has been recognised as USB device without any question and it is listed properly: # lsusb...Bus 002 Device 005: ID 17e9:4107 DisplayLink ... A quick and dirty research on the net gave me some hints towards the udlfb framebuffer device for USB DisplayLink devices. By default this kernel module is blacklisted $ less /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-framebuffer.conf | grep udl#blacklist udlblacklist udlfb and it is recommended to load it manually. So, unloading the whole udl stack and giving udlfb a shot: Oct 12 08:22:31 iospc2 kernel: [70126.642809] usbcore: registered new interface driver udlfb But still no reaction on the external display which supposedly should have been on and green. Display okay? Test run on Windows Just to be on the safe side and to exclude any hardware related defects or whatsoever - you never know what happened during delivery. I moved the display to a new position on the opposite side of my laptop, installed the display drivers first in Windows Vista (I know, I know...) as recommended in the manual, and then finally hooked it up on that machine. Tada! Display has been recognised correctly and I have a proper choice between cloning and extending my desktop. Testing whether the display is working properly - using Windows Vista Okay, good to know that there is nothing wrong on the hardware side just software... Back to Ubuntu - Kernel too old Some more research on Google and various hits recommend that the original displaylink driver has been merged into the recent kernel development and one should manually upgrade the kernel image (and both header) packages for Ubuntu. At least kernel 3.9 or higher would be necessary, and so I went out to this URL: http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/ and I downloaded all the good stuff from the v3.9-raring directory. The installation itself is easy going via dpkg: $ sudo dpkg -i linux-image-3.9.0-030900-generic_3.9.0-030900.201304291257_amd64.deb$ sudo dpkg -i linux-headers-3.9.0-030900_3.9.0-030900.201304291257_all.deb$ sudo dpkg -i linux-headers-3.9.0-030900-generic_3.9.0-030900.201304291257_amd64.deb As with any kernel upgrades it is necessary to restart the system in order to use the new one. Said and done: $ uname -r3.9.0-030900-generic And now connecting the external display gives me the following output in /var/log/syslog: Oct 12 17:51:36 iospc2 kernel: [ 2314.984293] usb 2-4: new high-speed USB device number 6 using ehci-pciOct 12 17:51:36 iospc2 kernel: [ 2315.096257] usb 2-4: device descriptor read/64, error -32Oct 12 17:51:36 iospc2 kernel: [ 2315.337105] usb 2-4: New USB device found, idVendor=17e9, idProduct=4107Oct 12 17:51:36 iospc2 kernel: [ 2315.337115] usb 2-4: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3Oct 12 17:51:36 iospc2 kernel: [ 2315.337122] usb 2-4: Product: e1649FwuOct 12 17:51:36 iospc2 kernel: [ 2315.337127] usb 2-4: Manufacturer: DisplayLinkOct 12 17:51:36 iospc2 kernel: [ 2315.337132] usb 2-4: SerialNumber: FJBD7HA000778Oct 12 17:51:36 iospc2 kernel: [ 2315.338292] udlfb: DisplayLink e1649Fwu - serial #FJBD7HA000778Oct 12 17:51:36 iospc2 kernel: [ 2315.338299] udlfb: vid_17e9&pid_4107&rev_0129 driver's dlfb_data struct at ffff880117e59000Oct 12 17:51:36 iospc2 kernel: [ 2315.338303] udlfb: console enable=1Oct 12 17:51:36 iospc2 kernel: [ 2315.338306] udlfb: fb_defio enable=1Oct 12 17:51:36 iospc2 kernel: [ 2315.338309] udlfb: shadow enable=1Oct 12 17:51:36 iospc2 kernel: [ 2315.338468] udlfb: vendor descriptor length:17 data:17 5f 01 0015 05 00 01 03 00 04Oct 12 17:51:36 iospc2 kernel: [ 2315.338473] udlfb: DL chip limited to 1500000 pixel modesOct 12 17:51:36 iospc2 kernel: [ 2315.338565] udlfb: allocated 4 65024 byte urbsOct 12 17:51:36 iospc2 kernel: [ 2315.343592] hid-generic 0003:17E9:4107.0009: hiddev0,hidraw5: USB HID v1.10 Device [DisplayLink e1649Fwu] on usb-0000:00:1d.7-4/input1Oct 12 17:51:36 iospc2 mtp-probe: checking bus 2, device 6: "/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.7/usb2/2-4"Oct 12 17:51:36 iospc2 mtp-probe: bus: 2, device: 6 was not an MTP deviceOct 12 17:51:36 iospc2 kernel: [ 2315.426583] udlfb: 1366x768 @ 59 Hz valid modeOct 12 17:51:36 iospc2 kernel: [ 2315.426589] udlfb: Reallocating framebuffer. Addresses will change!Oct 12 17:51:36 iospc2 kernel: [ 2315.428338] udlfb: 1366x768 @ 59 Hz valid modeOct 12 17:51:36 iospc2 kernel: [ 2315.428343] udlfb: set_par mode 1366x768Oct 12 17:51:36 iospc2 kernel: [ 2315.430620] udlfb: DisplayLink USB device /dev/fb1 attached. 1366x768 resolution. Using 4104K framebuffer memory Okay, that's looks more promising but still only blackout on the external screen... And yes, due to my previous modifications I swapped the blacklisted kernel modules: $ less /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-framebuffer.conf | grep udlblacklist udl#blacklist udlfb Silly me! Okay, back to the original situation in which udl is allowed and udlfb blacklisted. Now, the logging looks similar to this and the screen shows those maroon-brown and azure-blue horizontal bars as described on other online resources. Oct 15 21:27:23 iospc2 kernel: [80934.308238] usb 2-4: new high-speed USB device number 5 using ehci-pciOct 15 21:27:23 iospc2 kernel: [80934.420244] usb 2-4: device descriptor read/64, error -32Oct 15 21:27:24 iospc2 kernel: [80934.660822] usb 2-4: New USB device found, idVendor=17e9, idProduct=4107Oct 15 21:27:24 iospc2 kernel: [80934.660832] usb 2-4: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3Oct 15 21:27:24 iospc2 kernel: [80934.660838] usb 2-4: Product: e1649FwuOct 15 21:27:24 iospc2 kernel: [80934.660844] usb 2-4: Manufacturer: DisplayLinkOct 15 21:27:24 iospc2 kernel: [80934.660850] usb 2-4: SerialNumber: FJBD7HA000778Oct 15 21:27:24 iospc2 kernel: [80934.663391] hid-generic 0003:17E9:4107.0008: hiddev0,hidraw5: USB HID v1.10 Device [DisplayLink e1649Fwu] on usb-0000:00:1d.7-4/input1Oct 15 21:27:24 iospc2 mtp-probe: checking bus 2, device 5: "/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.7/usb2/2-4"Oct 15 21:27:24 iospc2 mtp-probe: bus: 2, device: 5 was not an MTP deviceOct 15 21:27:25 iospc2 kernel: [80935.742407] [drm] vendor descriptor length:17 data:17 5f 01 00 15 05 00 01 03 00 04Oct 15 21:27:25 iospc2 kernel: [80935.834403] udl 2-4:1.0: fb1: udldrmfb frame buffer deviceOct 15 21:27:25 iospc2 kernel: [80935.834416] [drm] Initialized udl 0.0.1 20120220 on minor 1Oct 15 21:27:25 iospc2 kernel: [80935.836389] usbcore: registered new interface driver udlOct 15 21:27:25 iospc2 kernel: [80936.021458] [drm] write mode info 153 Next, it's time to enable the display for our needs... This can be done either via UI or console, just as you'd prefer it. Adding the external USB display under Linux isn't an issue after all... Settings Manager => Display Personally, I like the console. With the help of xrandr we get the screen identifier first $ xrandrScreen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 3200 x 1080, maximum 32767 x 32767LVDS1 connected 1280x800+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 331mm x 207mm...DVI-0 connected 1366x768+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 344mm x 193mm   1366x768       60.0*+ and then give it the usual shot with auto-configuration. Let the system decide what's best for your hardware... $ xrandr --output DVI-0 --off$ xrandr --output DVI-0 --auto And there we go... Cloned output of main display: New kernel, new display... The external USB display works out-of-the-box with a Linux kernel > 3.9.0. Despite of a good number of resources it is absolutely not necessary to create a Device or Screen section in one of Xorg.conf files. This information belongs to the past and is not valid on kernel 3.9 or higher. Same hardware but Windows 8 Of course, I wanted to know how the latest incarnation from Redmond would handle the new hardware... Flawless! Most interesting aspect here: I did not use the driver installation medium on purpose. And I was right... not too long afterwards a dialog with the EULA of DisplayLink appeared on the main screen. And after confirmation of same it took some more seconds and the external USB monitor was ready to rumble. Well, and not only that one... but see for yourself. This time Windows 8 was the easiest solution after all. Resume I can highly recommend this type of hardware to anyone asking me. Although, it's dimensions are 15.6" it is actually lighter than my Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 and it still fits into my laptop bag without any issues. From now on... no more single screen while developing software on the road!

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