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• Working with lots of cubes. Improving performance?

  - by Randomman159

  Edit: To sum the question up, I have a voxel based world (Minecraft style (Thanks Communist Duck)) which is suffering from poor performance. I am not positive on the source but would like any possible advice on how to get rid of it. I am working on a project where a world consists of a large quantity of cubes (I would give you a number, but it is user defined worlds). My test one is around (48 x 32 x 48) blocks. Basically these blocks don't do anything in themselves. They just sit there. They start being used when it comes to player interaction. I need to check what cubes the users mouse interacts with (mouse over, clicking, etc.), and for collision detecting as the player moves. Now I had a massive amount of lag at first, looping through every block. I have managed to decrease that lag, by looping through all the blocks, and finding which blocks are within a particular range of the character, and then only looping through those blocks for the collision detection, etc. However, I am still going at a depressing 2fps. Does anyone have any other ideas on how I could decrease this lag? Btw, I am using XNA (C#) and yes, it is 3d.

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• State Changes in a Component Based Architecture [closed]

  - by Maxem

  I'm currently working on a game and using the naive component based architecture thingie (Entities are a bag of components, entity.Update() calls Update on each updateable component), while the addition of new features is really simple, it makes a few things really difficult: a) multithreading / currency b) networking c) unit testing. Multithreading / Concurrency is difficult because I basically have to do poor mans concurrency (running the entity updates in separate threads while locking only stuff that crashes (like lists) and ignoring the staleness of read state (some states are already updated, others aren't)) Networking: There are no explicit state changes that I could efficiently push over the net. Unit testing: All updates may or may not conflict, so automated testing is at least awkward. I was thinking about these issues a bit and would like your input on these changes / idea: Switch from the naive cba to a cba with sub systems that work on lists of components Make all state changes explicit Combine 1 and 2 :p Example world update: statePostProcessing.Wait() // ensure that post processing has finished Apply(postProcessedState) state = new StateBag() Concurrently( () => LifeCycleSubSystem.Update(state), // populates the state bag () => MovementSubSystem.Update(state), // populates the state bag .... }) statePostProcessing = Future(() => PostProcess(state)) statePostProcessing.Start() // Tick is finished, the post processing happens in the background So basically the changes are (consistently) based on the data for the last tick; the post processing can a) generate network packages and b) fix conflicts / remove useless changes (example: entity has been destroyed - ignore movement etc.). EDIT: To clarify the granularity of the state changes: If I save these post processed state bags and apply them to an empty world, I see exactly what has happened in the game these state bags originated from - "Free" replay capability. EDIT2: I guess I should have used the term Event instead of State Change and point out that I kind of want to use the Event Sourcing pattern

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• Should I use a seperate class per test?

  - by user460667

  Taking the following simple method, how would you suggest I write a unit test for it (I am using MSTest however concepts are similar in other tools). public void MyMethod(MyObject myObj, bool validInput) { if(!validInput) { // Do nothing } else { // Update the object myObj.CurrentDateTime = DateTime.Now; myObj.Name = "Hello World"; } } If I try and follow the rule of one assert per test, my logic would be that I should have a Class Initialise method which executes the method and then individual tests which check each property on myobj. public class void MyTest { MyObj myObj; [TestInitialize] public void MyTestInitialize() { this.myObj = new MyObj(); MyMethod(myObj, true); } [TestMethod] public void IsValidName() { Assert.AreEqual("Hello World", this.myObj.Name); } [TestMethod] public void IsDateNotNull() { Assert.IsNotNull(this.myObj.CurrentDateTime); } } Where I am confused is around the TestInitialize. If I execute the method under TestInitialize, I would need seperate classes per variation of parameter inputs. Is this correct? This would leave me with a huge number of files in my project (unless I have multiple classes per file). Thanks

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• Quaternions, Axis Angles and Rotation Matrices. Which of these should I use for FP Camera?

  - by Afonso Lage

  After 2 weeks of reading many math formulas and such I know what is a Quaternion, an Axis Angles and Matrices. I have made my own math libary (Java) to use on my game (LWJGL). But I'm really confused about all this. I want to have a 3D first person camera. The move (translation) is working fine but the rotation isnt working like I need. I need a camera to rotate arround world Axis and not about its own axis. But even using Quaternions, this doesnt work and no matter how much I read about Euler Angles, everybody says to me dont touch on it! This is a little piece of code that i'm using to make the rotation: Quaternion qPitch = Quaternion.createFromAxis(cameraRotate.x, 1.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f); Quaternion qYaw = Quaternion.createFromAxis(cameraRotate.y, 0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f); this.multiplicate(qPitch.toMatrix4f().toArray()); this.multiplicate(qYaw.toMatrix4f().toArray()); Where this is a Matrix4f view matrix and cameraRotate is a Vector3f that just handle the angles to rotate obtained from mouse move. So I think I'm doing everything right: Translate the view Matrix Rotate the Move Matrix So, after reading all this, I just want to know: To obtain a correct first person camera rotate, I must need to use Quaternios to make the rotations, but how to rotate around world axis? Thanks for reading it. Best regards, Afonso Lage

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• Issues implementing arcball viewer

  - by Pris

  My scene has a simple cube, and a camera built with the lookAt function (I'm using OpenGL). The scene renders fine, and I'm sure I have my model/view/projection matrices set up correctly. Now I'm trying to implement arcball rotation for my camera, but I'm having some trouble. I've got it down to calculating the angle/axis rotation for a virtual sphere in normalized screen coordinates. That means when I move my mouse left to right, I get an angle around the Y axis... and moving my mouse up/down will get me an angle about X. I'm not sure where to go from here -- what do I need to do with my axis so I can apply the angle to simulate camera rotation about its viewpoint? If I try directly applying the axis/angle rotation the camera/view transform I get what you'd expect. The view is rotated about the world axes which the mouse moving over the virtual sphere on the screen corresponds to. So if I move the mouse up/down the view rotates about the world's X axis (what I get reminds me of a first-person view)... but this isn't what I want. I think I need the axis I get to be transformed so it passes through the camera viewpoint and is oriented correct in reference to the camera... but I don't know if that's right or how to do that.

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• How often do you review fundamentals?

  - by mlnyc

  So I've been out of school for a year and a half now. In school, of course we covered all the fundamentals: OS, databases, programming languages (i.e. syntax, binding rules, exception handling, recursion, etc), and fundamental algorithms. the rest were more in-depth topics on things like NLP, data mining, etc. Now, a year ago if you would have told me to write a quicksort, or reverse a singly-linked list, analyze the time complexity of this 'naive' algorithm vs it's dynamic programming counterpart, etc I would have been able to give you a decent and hopefully satisfying answer. But if you would have asked me more real world questions I might have been stumped (things like how would handle logging for an application, or security difference between GET and POST, differences between SQL Server and Oracle SQL, anything I list on my resume as currently working with [jQuery questions, ColdFusion questions, ...] etc) Now, I feel things are the opposite. I haven't wrote my own sort since graduating, and I don't really have to worry much about theoretical things that do not naturally fall into problems I am trying to solve. For example, I might give you some great SQL solutions using an analytical function that I would have otherwise been stumped on or write a cool web application using angular or something but ask me to write an algo for insertAfter(Element* elem) and I might not be able to do it in a reasonable time frame. I guess my question here to the experienced programmers is how do you balance the need to both learn and experiment with new technologies (fun!), working on personal projects (also fun!) working and solving real world problems in a timeboxed environment (so I might reach out to a library that does what I want rather than re-invent the wheel so that I can focus on the problem I am trying to solve) (work, basically), and refreshing on old theoretical material which is still valid for interviews and such (can be a drag)? Do you review older material (such as famous algorithms, dynamic programming, Big-O analysis, locking implementations) regularly or just when you need it? How much time do you dedicate to both in your 'deliberate practice' and do you have a certain to-do list of topics that you want to work on?

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• How to create a script for moving a 3rd person controller in an iOS device by using Javascript in Unity3D?

  - by user36563

  I've a code but I'm not sure about the steps, so what I should do after the script? pragma strict public var horizontalSpeed : float = 1.0; public var verticalSpeed : float = 1.0; private var h : float = 0.0; private var v : float = 0.0; private var lastPos : Vector3 = Vector3.zero; function Update() { if UNITY_EDITOR if ( Input.GetMouseButtonDown(0) ) { lastPos = Input.mousePosition; } else if ( Input.GetMouseButton(0) ) { var delta = Input.mousePosition - lastPos; h = horizontalSpeed * delta.x ; transform.Rotate( 0, -h, 0, Space.World ); v = verticalSpeed * delta.y ; transform.position += transform.forward * v * Time.deltaTime; lastPos = Input.mousePosition; } else if (Input.touchCount == 1) { var touch : Touch = Input.GetTouch(0); if (touch.phase == TouchPhase.Moved) { h = horizontalSpeed * touch.deltaPosition.x ; transform.Rotate( 0, -h, 0, Space.World ); v = verticalSpeed * touch.deltaPosition.y ; transform.position += transform.forward * v * Time.deltaTime; } } endif }

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• What's the benefit to learn Java programming?

  - by user30139

  I'm from the PHP world. Recently I'm trying to learn about Java. Because simply I'm a bit interested in Android development. Learning about Java gives more control about my cellphone. Say I could fine tune some applications to fit my personal requirements or even make my own ones. Still Java is a new world to me. I guess I'm already too comfortable with weak typed languages such as PHP. Honestly I think application development of no matter which kind wouldn't make too much difference. Because just as web development mostly framework based, what the developer do is to fill the blanks meaning to follow the protocols the given by the framework. Most of the code is still about business logic, that's what application development all about, right? The big difference seems to lie on the programming languages. Comparing to PHP, Java holds a whole package of constraints and practices. At this point, what are the benefits to learn programming in it?

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• What makes one language any better than another when both are designed for the same goals? [closed]

  - by Justin808

  I'm in the process of creating a grammar for a scripting language but as I'm working on it I started to wonder what makes a language good in the first place. I know the goals for my script but there are always 1000 different ways to go about doing things. Goals: Easy to use and understand (not my grandma could do it easy, but the secretary at the front desk could do it or the VP of marketing could do it type of easy) No user defined functions or subroutines. Its use would be in events of objects in a system similar to HyperCard. Conceptually I was thinking of a language like this: set myVariable to 'Hello World' set counter to 0 repeat 5 times with x begin set counter to counter add x end set myVariable to myVariable plus ' ' plus counter popup myVariable set text of label named 'label' to 'new text' set color of label named 'label' to blue The end result would popup a dialog with the contents Hello World 15 it would also change the text of a label and make it blue. But I could do the same thing 1000 different ways. So what makes one language any better than another when both are designed for the same goals?

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• Problems with 3D transformation - (SharpDX)

  - by Morphex

  First of all , I have been trying to get this right for a couple of day already, I have read so much info and still fail miserably to understand this. So I am going to tell you that even though I have done fairly amount of research myself, I failed to implement it. I must say miserably I am trying to create a generic camera class for a game engine of sorts - for research purposes only - the thing is I have no idea how to go about it. I have read about quaternions and matrices, but when it comes to the actual implementation I suck at it. Sharpdx has already Matrices and QUaternions implemented. SO no big deal on the map behind it. How in the world would I go about creating a camera? I have seen so many camera examples and still can't make one that works as expected. I would like to implement diferent types too (Orbital, 6DoF, FPS). So what is need for a camera? UP, Forward and Right vectors I read they are needed, also a quaternion for rotations, and View and Projection matrices. I understand that a FPS camera for instance only rotates around the World Y and the Right Axis of the camera. the 6DoF rotates always around their own axis, and the orbital is just translating for set distance and making it look always at a fixed target point. The concepts are there, now implementing this is not trivial for me. Can anyone point me on what am I missing, what I got wrong? I would really enjoy if you could give a tutorial, some piece of code, or just plain explanation of the concepts. Thank you for readin, a frustrated coder.

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• 3D Box Collision Data Import

  - by cboe

  I'm trying to implement a collision system using oriented bounding boxes, using a center for the box, it's extents as a 3D Vector and a rotation matrix, which is all stuff I picked up online and seem to be somewhat the standard. Detecting the center is no problem so I'm gonna leave these out here. My problem however is importing the data from a 3D file. Say I've placed a box with 2 units length on each side aligned to the world axis. The logic results here are extents of 1,1,1 and I use an identity matrix for rotation - easy. However I'm stuck when I rotate the box in the 3D program, say 30 degrees each axis. How would I parse the box? I only have these 8 vertices as information, and I guess what I would need to do is to find out the rotation of said box, apply it to the vertices so they are aligned to world axes and then calculate the extents out of that. How do I get the rotation of the box when I only have the vertex information of the box available?

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• OpenGL: Move camera regardless of rotation

  - by Markus

  For a 2D board game I'd like to move and rotate an orthogonal camera in coordinates given in a reference system (window space), but simply can't get it to work. The idea is that the user can drag the camera over a surface, rotate and scale it. Rotation and scaling should always be around the center of the current viewport. The camera is set up as: gl.glMatrixMode(GL2.GL_PROJECTION); gl.glLoadIdentity(); gl.glOrtho(-width/2, width/2, -height/2, height/2, nearPlane, farPlane); where width and height are equal to the viewport's width and height, so that 1 unit is one pixel when no zoom is applied. Since these transformations usually mean (scaling and) translating the world, then rotating it, the implementation is: gl.glMatrixMode(GL2.GL_MODELVIEW); gl.glLoadIdentity(); gl.glRotatef(rotation, 0, 0, 1); // e.g. 45° gl.glTranslatef(x, y, 0); // e.g. +10 for 10px right, -2 for 2px down gl.glScalef(zoomFactor, zoomFactor, zoomFactor); // e.g. scale by 1.5 That however has the nasty side effect that translations are transformed as well, that is applied in world coordinates. If I rotate around 90° and translate again, X and Y axis are swapped. If I reorder the transformations so they read gl.glTranslatef(x, y, 0); gl.glScalef(zoomFactor, zoomFactor, zoomFactor); gl.glRotatef(rotation, 0, 0, 1); the translation will be applied correctly (in reference space, so translation along x always visually moves the camera sideways) but rotation and scaling are now performed around origin. It shouldn't be too hard, so what is it I'm missing?

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• Windows W8, L8 and now H8

  - by raccoon_tim

  Windows 8 is having to endure with a lot of headwind at the moment. The weather forecast doesn’t appear to improve in the near future either with prominent game developers and publishers taking to the barricades accusing Microsoft of building a closed ecosystem. I am forced to side with this opinion as I too see services the likes of Steam as playing an important role in the gaming world, which just happens to be an industry that cannot be sidelined. What Microsoft is attempting to do is merge the PC and mobile markets. The Windows Marketplace is to be the only place where you can purchase Windows applications in the future starting now with Metro apps. This is what Apple, Google and Microsoft have been doing with mobile devices for some time now and it’s what we have all come to expect. The PC market is different, however. It has always been open, which has resulted in a diverse market allowing for third parties to build successful distribution and marketing networks. You could argue that Microsoft is just doing something that Steam has been doing for a long time now but the difference is that Microsoft would own both the marketplace AND that operating system, which would eventually give it dominance over the whole Windows application distribution network. Currently there is no real alternative to Windows in the PC gaming world but I would expect to see Mac OS and Linux getting more popular if Microsoft does not notice the signals coming from the gaming industry and choose to once again open up the markets on the PC.

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• Enjoy Cloud Odyssey The Oracle Movie

  - by Naresh Persaud

  If you attended Open World you may have seen the promotions for a new movie produced by Oracle. The movie is called Cloud Odyssey and it chronicles the journey of a hero to the cloud. The movie is an animated sci-fi adventure. This movie will be played at Oracle events around the world so you may soon get an invite to attend. Interesting approach to telling the cloud story. For many IT organizations, the journey to the cloud is a major initiative for end users. I am sure Homer would be proud. In fact perhaps if it is successful, I am hopeful we may see a cloud Iliad.  Below, I have embedded a trailer to the movie for your viewing pleasure. While it clearly is not the next Iron Man, it is intriguing. Hope you enjoy.  &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;span id=&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;XinhaEditingPostion&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/span&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;

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• TileEntitySpecialRenderer only renders from certain angle

  - by Hullu2000

  I'm developing a Minecraft mod with Forge. I've added a tileentity and a custom renderer for it. The problem is: The block is only visible from sertain angles. I've compaed my code to other peoples code and it looks pretty much like them. The block is opaque and not to be rendered and the renderer is registered normally so the fault must be in the renderer. Here's the renderer code: public class TERender extends TileEntitySpecialRenderer { public void renderTileEntityAt(TileEntity tileEntity, double d, double d1, double d2, float f) { GL11.glPushMatrix(); GL11.glTranslatef((float)d, (float)d1, (float)d2); HeatConductTileEntity TE = (HeatConductTileEntity)tileEntity; renderBlock(TE, tileEntity.getWorldObj(), tileEntity.xCoord, tileEntity.yCoord, tileEntity.zCoord, mod.EMHeatConductor); GL11.glPopMatrix(); } public void renderBlock(HeatConductTileEntity tl, World world, int i, int j, int k, Block block) { Tessellator tessellator = Tessellator.instance; GL11.glColor3f(1, 1, 1); tessellator.startDrawingQuads(); tessellator.addVertex(0, 0, 0); tessellator.addVertex(1, 0, 0); tessellator.addVertex(1, 1, 0); tessellator.addVertex(0, 1, 0); tessellator.draw(); } }

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• What would cause ANY .NET application to crash immediately... except a project I create and Debug in

  - by blak3r

  My software recently got deployed to a customer who said that the application was crashing immediately after it started. After some initial debugging, the customer provided me remote access to one of the computers which was unable to run the application. I found that the crash wasn't specific to my application. Any application which depended on the .NET framework crashed immediately. Conveniently, Visual Studio 2008 was installed so I created a quick hello world application on it and clicked Debug. The application worked fine. But, then when I tried to execute the generated binaries in the /bin/Debug/HelloWorld.exe directory outside of visual studio it crashed. List of things i've tried (UPDATED): I checked that "Everyone" has Read&Execute permissions for c:\Windows. To test that the problem was with the .NET Framework (and not my application), I attempted to download Paint .NET on to the computers. The setup frontend crashed in the same manner. Performed a repair of the .NET framework as outlined in http://support.microsoft.com/kb/908077 (Boy was this fun and time consuming). No luck. Installed .NET 3.5 SP1 (before it just had .NET 3.5) Note: my application targets 2.0 so I did this more as a long shot... but i learned in the process that .NET 3.5 SP1 also updates the underlying frameworks. Ran Aaron Stebner's .NET Setup Verification Tool. This tool indicated that .NET was successfully installed. (I forget if i checked all the versions but at least 2.0 worked). Tested some mini hello world applications which were targeted for .NET 2.0 and .NET 3.5 and both crashed in the same way. Tried launching .NET apps via windbg cmd line. Doing this did allow me invoke my simple hello world applications. So, simple .NET hello world works when invoked by windbg or by launching via debug in visual studio... but doesn't if i try to execute it standalone. I created a dump file using WinDbg. It wasn't all that revealing to me. FAULTING_IP: mscorwks!PEImage::GetEntryPointToken+21 79f4ff9d f6401010 test byte ptr [eax+10h],10h EXCEPTION_RECORD: 0012f710 -- (.exr 0x12f710) ExceptionAddress: 79f4ff9d (mscorwks!PEImage::GetEntryPointToken+0x00000021) ExceptionCode: c0000005 (Access violation) ExceptionFlags: 00000000 NumberParameters: 2 Parameter[0]: 00000000 Parameter[1]: 00000010 Attempt to read from address 00000010 FAULTING_THREAD: 00000b44 PROCESS_NAME: MyProcess.exe ERROR_CODE: (NTSTATUS) 0x80000003 - {EXCEPTION} Breakpoint A breakpoint has been reached. EXCEPTION_CODE: (HRESULT) 0x80000003 (2147483651) - One or more arguments are invalid DETOURED_IMAGE: 1 NTGLOBALFLAG: 0 APPLICATION_VERIFIER_FLAGS: 0 MANAGED_STACK: !dumpstack -EE OS Thread Id: 0xb44 (0) Current frame: ChildEBP RetAddr Caller,Callee EXCEPTION_OBJECT: !pe cb10b4 Exception object: 00cb10b4 Exception type: System.ExecutionEngineException Message: <none> InnerException: <none> StackTrace (generated): <none> StackTraceString: <none> HResult: 80131506 MANAGED_OBJECT_NAME: System.ExecutionEngineException CONTEXT: 0012f72c -- (.cxr 0x12f72c) eax=00000000 ebx=00000000 ecx=00000000 edx=0000000e esi=001a1490 edi=00000001 eip=79f4ff9d esp=0012f9f8 ebp=0012fa1c iopl=0 nv up ei pl zr na pe nc cs=001b ss=0023 ds=0023 es=0023 fs=003b gs=0000 efl=00010246 mscorwks!PEImage::GetEntryPointToken+0x21: 79f4ff9d f6401010 test byte ptr [eax+10h],10h ds:0023:00000010=?? Resetting default scope READ_ADDRESS: 00000010 FOLLOWUP_IP: mscorwks!PEImage::GetEntryPointToken+21 79f4ff9d f6401010 test byte ptr [eax+10h],10h BUGCHECK_STR: APPLICATION_FAULT_NULL_CLASS_PTR_DEREFERENCE_SHUTDOWN PRIMARY_PROBLEM_CLASS: NULL_CLASS_PTR_DEREFERENCE_SHUTDOWN DEFAULT_BUCKET_ID: NULL_CLASS_PTR_DEREFERENCE_SHUTDOWN LAST_CONTROL_TRANSFER: from 79ef02b5 to 79f4ff9d STACK_TEXT: 79f4ff9d mscorwks!PEImage::GetEntryPointToken+0x21 79ef02b5 mscorwks!PEFile::GetEntryPointToken+0xa0 79eefeaf mscorwks!SystemDomain::ExecuteMainMethod+0xd4 79fb9793 mscorwks!ExecuteEXE+0x59 79fb96df mscorwks!_CorExeMain+0x15c 7900b1b3 mscoree!_CorExeMain+0x2c 7c817077 kernel32!BaseProcessStart+0x23 SYMBOL_STACK_INDEX: 0 SYMBOL_NAME: mscorwks!PEImage::GetEntryPointToken+21 FOLLOWUP_NAME: MachineOwner MODULE_NAME: mscorwks IMAGE_NAME: mscorwks.dll DEBUG_FLR_IMAGE_TIMESTAMP: 471ef729 STACK_COMMAND: .cxr 0012F72C ; kb ; dds 12f9f8 ; kb FAILURE_BUCKET_ID: NULL_CLASS_PTR_DEREFERENCE_SHUTDOWN_80000003_mscorwks.dll!PEImage::GetEntryPointToken BUCKET_ID: APPLICATION_FAULT_NULL_CLASS_PTR_DEREFERENCE_SHUTDOWN_DETOURED_mscorwks!PEImage::GetEntryPointToken+21 WATSON_STAGEONE_URL: http://watson.microsoft.com/StageOne/MyProcess_exe/2_4_4_39/4a8a192c/unknown/0_0_0_0/bbbbbbb4/80000003/00000000.htm?Retriage=1 Followup: MachineOwner Edit 1:The event log details for this error say it's a .NET Runtime version 2.0.50727.3053 - Fatal Execution Engine Error (7A097706)(80131506). Edit 2 (10-7-09): This issue is still active. Edit 3 (3-29-10): This update is to let everyone know that I never did successfully solve the problem. The customer who's machine this was on lost interest in solving it and just reimaged the machine :(. Thanks for all the contributions though.

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• XSLT: look for a word and it's context

  - by farhad

  Hello! I need to search a word and it's context into an xml. For example <line>hello world, my name is farhad and i'm having trouble with xslt</line> looking for 'and', context of 3 words: <line>hello world, my <span class="context">name is farhad <span class="word">and</span> i'm having</span> trouble with xslt</line> How can i do? I wrote some xslt to find the word, but i can't go back 3 words to set span. This is my xslt: <xsl:variable name="delimiters">[,.;!?\s"()]+</xsl:variable> <xsl:template match="/"> <xsl:apply-templates select="//line"/> </xsl:template> <xsl:template match="line"> <line> <xsl:for-each select="tokenize(.,'\s')"> <xsl:choose> <!-- se l'ultimo carattere è di punteggiatura, prendo la sottostringa senza la punteggiatura --> <xsl:when test="compare(replace(.,$delimiters,'$1'),'red') = 0"> <span class="word"> <xsl:value-of select="."/> </span> </xsl:when> <xsl:otherwise> <xsl:value-of select="."/> <xsl:choose> <xsl:when test="position()=last()"> <xsl:text></xsl:text> </xsl:when> <xsl:otherwise> <xsl:text> </xsl:text> </xsl:otherwise> </xsl:choose> </xsl:otherwise> </xsl:choose> </xsl:for-each> </line><xsl:text> </xsl:text> </xsl:template> This is an example xml: http://pastebin.com/eAVM9CDQ . I have to search for context also on preceding tags, for example: <line>hello world,</line> <line>my name</line> <line>is farhad </line> <line>and i'm having</line> <line>trouble with xslt</line> so, looking for 'and', context of 3 words: <line>hello world,</line> <line>my <span class="context">name</line> <line>is farhad </line> <line><span class="word">and</span> i'm having</span></line> <line>trouble with xslt</line> with problems of overlapping, but now it's not a problem (i think i know how manage it). How can i search a word and its context? Thank you very much.

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• Looking For iPhone 4S Alternatives? Here Are 3 Smartphones You Should Consider

  - by Gopinath

  If you going to buy iPhone 4S on a two year contract in USA, Europe or Australia you may not find it expensive. But if you are planning to buy it in any other parts of the world, you will definitely feel the heat of ridiculous iPhone 4S price. In India iPhone 4S costs approximately costs $1000 which is 30% more than the price tag of an unlocked iPhone sold in USA. Personally I love iPhones as there is no match for the user experience provided by Apple as well as the wide range of really meaning applications available for iPhone. But it breaks heart to spend $1000 for a phone and I’m forced to look at alternates available in the market. Here are the four iPhone 4S alternates available in almost all the countries where we can buy iPhone 4S Google Galaxy Nexus The Galaxy Nexus is Google’s own Android smartphone manufactured by Samsung and sold under the brand name of Google Nexus. Galaxy Nexus is the pure Android phone available in the market without any bloat software or custom user interfaces like other Androids available in the market. Galaxy Nexus is also the first Android phone to be shipped with the latest version of Android OS, Ice Cream Sandwich. This phone is the benchmark for the rest of Android phones that are going to enter the market soon. In the words of Google this smartphone is called as “Galaxy Nexus: Simple. Beautiful. Beyond Smart.”.  BGR review summarizes the phone as This is almost comical at this point, but the Samsung Galaxy Nexus is my favourite Android device in the world. Easily replacing the HTC Rezound, the Motorola DROID RAZR, and Samsung Galaxy S II, the Galaxy Nexus champions in a brand new version of Android that pushes itself further than almost any other mobile OS in the industry. Samsung Galaxy S II The one single company that is able to sell more smartphones than Apple is Samsung. Samsung recently displaced Apple from the top smartphone seller spot and occupied it with loads of pride. Samsung’s Galaxy S II fits as one the best alternatives to Apple’s iPhone 4S with it’s beautiful design and remarkable performance. Engadget summarizes Samsung Galaxy S2 review as It’s the best Android smartphone yet, but more importantly, it might well be the best smartphone, period. Of course, a 4.3-inch screen size won’t suit everyone, no matter how stupendously thin the device that carries it may be, and we also can’t say for sure that the Galaxy S II would justify a long-term iOS user foresaking his investment into one ecosystem and making the leap to another. Nonetheless, if you’re asking us what smartphone to buy today, unconstrained by such externalities, the Galaxy S II would be the clear choice. Sometimes it’s just as simple as that. Nokia Lumia 800 Here comes unexpected Windows Phone in to the boxing ring. May be they are not as great as Androids available in the market today, but they are picking up very quickly. Especially the Nokia Lumia 800 seems to be first ever Windows Phone 7 aimed at competing serious with Androids and iPhones available in the market. There are reports that Nokia Lumia 800 is outselling all Androids in UK and few high profile tech blogs are calling it as the king of Windows Phone. Considering this phone while evaluating the alternative of iPhone 4S will not disappoint you. We assure. Droid RAZR Remember the Motorola Driod that swept entire Android market share couple of years ago? The first two version of Motorola Droids were the best in the market and they out performed almost every other Android phone those days. The invasion of Samsung Androids, Motorola lost it charm. With the recent release of Droid RAZR, Motorola seems to be in the right direction to reclaiming the prestige. Droid RAZR is the thinnest smartphone available in the market and it’s beauty is not just skin deep. Here is a review of the phone from Engadget blog the RAZR’s beauty is not only skin deep. The LTE radio, 1.2GHz dual-core processor and 1GB of RAM make sure this sleek number is ready to run with the big boys. It kept pace with, and in some cases clearly outclassed its high-end competition. Despite its deficiencies in the display department and underwhelming battery life, the RAZR looks to be a perfectly viable alternative when considering the similarly-pricey Rezound and Galaxy Nexus Further Reading So we have seen the four alternates of iPhone 4S available in the market and I personally love to buy a Samsung smartphone if I’m don’t have money to afford an iPhone 4S. If you are interested in deep diving into the alternates, here few links that help you do more research Apple iPhone 4S vs. Samsung Galaxy Nexus vs. Motorola Droid RAZR: How Their Specs Compare by Huffington Post Nokia Lumia 800 vs. iPhone 4S vs. Nexus Galaxy: Spec Smackdown by PC World Browser Speed Test: Nokia Lumia 800 vs. iPhone 4S vs. Samsung Galaxy S II – by Gizmodo iPhone 4S vs Samsung Galaxy S II by pocket lint Apple iPhone 4S vs. Samsung Galaxy S II by techie buzz This article titled,Looking For iPhone 4S Alternatives? Here Are 3 Smartphones You Should Consider, was originally published at Tech Dreams. Grab our rss feed or fan us on Facebook to get updates from us.

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• The Top Ten Security Top Ten Lists

  - by Troy Kitch

  As a marketer, we're always putting together the top 3, or 5 best, or an assortment of top ten lists. So instead of going that route, I've put together my top ten security top ten lists. These are not only for security practitioners, but also for the average Joe/Jane; because who isn't concerned about security these days? Now, there might not be ten for each one of these lists, but the title works best that way. Starting with my number ten (in no particular order): 10. Top 10 Most Influential Security-Related Movies Amrit Williams pulls together a great collection of security-related movies. He asks for comments on which one made you want to get into the business. I would have to say that my most influential movie(s), that made me want to get into the business of "stopping the bad guys" would have to be the James Bond series. I grew up on James Bond movies: thwarting the bad guy and saving the world. I recall being both ecstatic and worried when Silicon Valley-themed "A View to A Kill" hit theaters: "An investigation of a horse-racing scam leads 007 to a mad industrialist who plans to create a worldwide microchip monopoly by destroying California's Silicon Valley." Yikes! 9. Top Ten Security Careers From movies that got you into the career, here’s a top 10 list of security-related careers. It starts with number then, Information Security Analyst and ends with number one, Malware Analyst. They point out the significant growth in security careers and indicate that "according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the field is expected to experience growth rates of 22% between 2010-2020. If you are interested in getting into the field, Oracle has many great opportunities all around the world.  8. Top 125 Network Security Tools A bit outside of the range of 10, the top 125 Network Security Tools is an important list because it includes a prioritized list of key security tools practitioners are using in the hacking community, regardless of whether they are vendor supplied or open source. The exhaustive list provides ratings, reviews, searching, and sorting. 7. Top 10 Security Practices I have to give a shout out to my alma mater, Cal Poly, SLO: Go Mustangs! They have compiled their list of top 10 practices for students and faculty to follow. Educational institutions are a common target of web based attacks and miscellaneous errors according to the 2014 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report.    6. (ISC)2 Top 10 Safe and Secure Online Tips for Parents This list is arguably the most important list on my list. The tips were "gathered from (ISC)2 member volunteers who participate in the organization’s Safe and Secure Online program, a worldwide initiative that brings top cyber security experts into schools to teach children ages 11-14 how to protect themselves in a cyber-connected world…If you are a parent, educator or organization that would like the Safe and Secure Online presentation delivered at your local school, or would like more information about the program, please visit here.” 5. Top Ten Data Breaches of the Past 12 Months This type of list is always changing, so it's nice to have a current one here from Techrader.com. They've compiled and commented on the top breaches. It is likely that most readers here were effected in some way or another. 4. Top Ten Security Comic Books Although mostly physical security controls, I threw this one in for fun. My vote for #1 (not on the list) would be Professor X. The guy can breach confidentiality, integrity, and availability just by messing with your thoughts. 3. The IOUG Data Security Survey's Top 10+ Threats to Organizations The Independent Oracle Users Group annual survey on enterprise data security, Leaders Vs. Laggards, highlights what Oracle Database users deem as the top 12 threats to their organization. You can find a nice graph on page 9; Figure 7: Greatest Threats to Data Security. 2. The Ten Most Common Database Security Vulnerabilities Though I don't necessarily agree with all of the vulnerabilities in this order...I like a list that focuses on where two-thirds of your sensitive and regulated data resides (Source: IDC).  1. OWASP Top Ten Project The Online Web Application Security Project puts together their annual list of the 10 most critical web application security risks that organizations should be including in their overall security, business risk and compliance plans. In particular, SQL injection risks continues to rear its ugly head each year. Oracle Audit Vault and Database Firewall can help prevent SQL injection attacks and monitor database and system activity as a detective security control. Did I miss any?

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• NoSQL Memcached API for MySQL: Latest Updates

  - by Mat Keep

  With data volumes exploding, it is vital to be able to ingest and query data at high speed. For this reason, MySQL has implemented NoSQL interfaces directly to the InnoDB and MySQL Cluster (NDB) storage engines, which bypass the SQL layer completely. Without SQL parsing and optimization, Key-Value data can be written directly to MySQL tables up to 9x faster, while maintaining ACID guarantees. In addition, users can continue to run complex queries with SQL across the same data set, providing real-time analytics to the business or anonymizing sensitive data before loading to big data platforms such as Hadoop, while still maintaining all of the advantages of their existing relational database infrastructure. This and more is discussed in the latest Guide to MySQL and NoSQL where you can learn more about using the APIs to scale new generations of web, cloud, mobile and social applications on the world's most widely deployed open source database The native Memcached API is part of the MySQL 5.6 Release Candidate, and is already available in the GA release of MySQL Cluster. By using the ubiquitous Memcached API for writing and reading data, developers can preserve their investments in Memcached infrastructure by re-using existing Memcached clients, while also eliminating the need for application changes. Speed, when combined with flexibility, is essential in the world of growing data volumes and variability. Complementing NoSQL access, support for on-line DDL (Data Definition Language) operations in MySQL 5.6 and MySQL Cluster enables DevOps teams to dynamically update their database schema to accommodate rapidly changing requirements, such as the need to capture additional data generated by their applications. These changes can be made without database downtime. Using the Memcached interface, developers do not need to define a schema at all when using MySQL Cluster. Lets look a little more closely at the Memcached implementations for both InnoDB and MySQL Cluster. Memcached Implementation for InnoDB The Memcached API for InnoDB is previewed as part of the MySQL 5.6 Release Candidate. As illustrated in the following figure, Memcached for InnoDB is implemented via a Memcached daemon plug-in to the mysqld process, with the Memcached protocol mapped to the native InnoDB API. Figure 1: Memcached API Implementation for InnoDB With the Memcached daemon running in the same process space, users get very low latency access to their data while also leveraging the scalability enhancements delivered with InnoDB and a simple deployment and management model. Multiple web / application servers can remotely access the Memcached / InnoDB server to get direct access to a shared data set. With simultaneous SQL access, users can maintain all the advanced functionality offered by InnoDB including support for Foreign Keys, XA transactions and complex JOIN operations. Benchmarks demonstrate that the NoSQL Memcached API for InnoDB delivers up to 9x higher performance than the SQL interface when inserting new key/value pairs, with a single low-end commodity server supporting nearly 70,000 Transactions per Second. Figure 2: Over 9x Faster INSERT Operations The delivered performance demonstrates MySQL with the native Memcached NoSQL interface is well suited for high-speed inserts with the added assurance of transactional guarantees. You can check out the latest Memcached / InnoDB developments and benchmarks here You can learn how to configure the Memcached API for InnoDB here Memcached Implementation for MySQL Cluster Memcached API support for MySQL Cluster was introduced with General Availability (GA) of the 7.2 release, and joins an extensive range of NoSQL interfaces that are already available for MySQL Cluster Like Memcached, MySQL Cluster provides a distributed hash table with in-memory performance. MySQL Cluster extends Memcached functionality by adding support for write-intensive workloads, a full relational model with ACID compliance (including persistence), rich query support, auto-sharding and 99.999% availability, with extensive management and monitoring capabilities. All writes are committed directly to MySQL Cluster, eliminating cache invalidation and the overhead of data consistency checking to ensure complete synchronization between the database and cache. Figure 3: Memcached API Implementation with MySQL Cluster Implementation is simple: 1. The application sends reads and writes to the Memcached process (using the standard Memcached API). 2. This invokes the Memcached Driver for NDB (which is part of the same process) 3. The NDB API is called, providing for very quick access to the data held in MySQL Cluster’s data nodes. The solution has been designed to be very flexible, allowing the application architect to find a configuration that best fits their needs. It is possible to co-locate the Memcached API in either the data nodes or application nodes, or alternatively within a dedicated Memcached layer. The benefit of this flexible approach to deployment is that users can configure behavior on a per-key-prefix basis (through tables in MySQL Cluster) and the application doesn’t have to care – it just uses the Memcached API and relies on the software to store data in the right place(s) and to keep everything synchronized. Using Memcached for Schema-less Data By default, every Key / Value is written to the same table with each Key / Value pair stored in a single row – thus allowing schema-less data storage. Alternatively, the developer can define a key-prefix so that each value is linked to a pre-defined column in a specific table. Of course if the application needs to access the same data through SQL then developers can map key prefixes to existing table columns, enabling Memcached access to schema-structured data already stored in MySQL Cluster. Conclusion Download the Guide to MySQL and NoSQL to learn more about NoSQL APIs and how you can use them to scale new generations of web, cloud, mobile and social applications on the world's most widely deployed open source database See how to build a social app with MySQL Cluster and the Memcached API from our on-demand webinar or take a look at the docs Don't hesitate to use the comments section below for any questions you may have 

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• SQLAuthority News – Technical Review of Learning at Koenig Solutions

  - by pinaldave

  Yesterday I finished my 3 days fast track in person learning of course End to End SQL Server Business Intelligence at Koenig Solutions. You can read my previous article over here regarding why am I learning SQL Server. Yesterday I blogged about my experience of arriving to Training Center and my induction with the center. The Training Days I had enrolled for three days training so my routine each of the three days was very much same. However, the content every day was different as I was learning something new every day. Let me describe a few of the interesting details of my daily routine. A Single Student Batch The best part of my training was that in my training batch, I am single student. Koenig is known to smaller batches and often they have single student batches as well. I was very much delighted to know that I will have dedicated access and attention from my trainer in my batch as I will be single student in my batch. In most of the labs I have observed there are no more than 4 students at any time. Prakash and Pinal 7:30 AM Breakfast Talk We all students gather at 7:30 in breakfast area. The best time of the day. I was the only Indian student in the group. The other students were from USA, Canada, Nigeria, Bhutan, Tanzania, and a few others from other countries. I immediately become the source of information and reference manual. Though the distance between Delhi and Bangalore is 2000+ KM I was considered as a local guy. 8:30 AMHeading to Training Center Every day without fail at 8:30 the van started from our accommodation to the training center. As mentioned in an earlier blog post the distance is about 5 minutes and we were able to reach at the location before 8:45. This gave us some time settle in before our class starts at 9:00 AM. 9:00 AM Order Lunch Food Well it may sound funny that we just had breakfast 30 minutes but the first thing everybody has to do is to order lunch as soon as the class starts. There is an online training portal to order food for the day. Everybody has to place their order early during the day so the food arrives on time during lunch time. Everybody can order whatever they want to order using an online ordering system. The options are plenty and everybody can order what they like. 9:05 AM Learning Starts After deciding the lunch we started the learning. I was very fortunate to have a very experienced trainer - Prakash Chheatry. Though I have never met him before I have heard a lot about Prakash. He is known as the top most SQL Server Trainer in India. His student list contains some of the very well known SQL Server Experts of the world and few of SQL Server “best seller” book authors. Learning continues till 1:00 PM with one tea-coffee break in between. 1:00 PM Lunch The lunch time is again the fun time. We all students get together in the afternoon and tell the stories of the world. Indeed the best part of the day beside learning new stuff. 4:55 PM Ready to Return We stop at 4:55 as at precisely 5:00 PM the van stops by the institute which takes us back to our accommodation. Trust me seriously long long day always but the amount of the learning is the win of the day. 7:30 PM Dinner Time After coming back to the accommodation I study till 7:30 and then rush for dinner. Dinner is world cuisine and deserts are really delicious. After dinner every day I have written a blog and retired early as the next day is always going to be busier than the present day. What did I learn As I mentioned earlier I know SQL Server fairly well. I had expressed the same in my conversation as well. This is the reason I was assigned a fairly senior trainer and we learned everything quite quickly. As I know quite a few things we went pretty fast in many topics. There were a few things, I wanted to learn in detail as well practice on the labs. We slowed down where we wanted and rush through the concepts where I was very comfortable. Here is the list of the things which we covered in action pack three days. Introduction to Business Intelligence (Intro) SQL Server Analysis Service (Theory and Lab) SQL Server Integration Service  (Theory and Lab) SQL Server Reporting Service  (Theory and Lab) SQL Server PowerPivot (Lab) UDM (Theory) SharePoint Concepts (Theory) Power View (Demo) Business Intelligence and Security (Discussion) Well, I was delighted that I was able to refresh lots of concepts during these three days. Thanks to my trainer and my friend who helped me to have a good learning experience. I believe all the learning  will help me in my growth and future career. With this I end my this experience. I am planning to have another online learning experience later this month. I will blog about my experience as I begin it. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Training, T SQL, Technology

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• Do Not Optimize Without Measuring

  - by Alois Kraus

  Recently I had to do some performance work which included reading a lot of code. It is fascinating with what ideas people come up to solve a problem. Especially when there is no problem. When you look at other peoples code you will not be able to tell if it is well performing or not by reading it. You need to execute it with some sort of tracing or even better under a profiler. The first rule of the performance club is not to think and then to optimize but to measure, think and then optimize. The second rule is to do this do this in a loop to prevent slipping in bad things for too long into your code base. If you skip for some reason the measure step and optimize directly it is like changing the wave function in quantum mechanics. This has no observable effect in our world since it does represent only a probability distribution of all possible values. In quantum mechanics you need to let the wave function collapse to a single value. A collapsed wave function has therefore not many but one distinct value. This is what we physicists call a measurement. If you optimize your application without measuring it you are just changing the probability distribution of your potential performance values. Which performance your application actually has is still unknown. You only know that it will be within a specific range with a certain probability. As usual there are unlikely values within your distribution like a startup time of 20 minutes which should only happen once in 100 000 years. 100 000 years are a very short time when the first customer tries your heavily distributed networking application to run over a slow WIFI network… What is the point of this? Every programmer/architect has a mental performance model in his head. A model has always a set of explicit preconditions and a lot more implicit assumptions baked into it. When the model is good it will help you to think of good designs but it can also be the source of problems. In real world systems not all assumptions of your performance model (implicit or explicit) hold true any longer. The only way to connect your performance model and the real world is to measure it. In the WIFI example the model did assume a low latency high bandwidth LAN connection. If this assumption becomes wrong the system did have a drastic change in startup time. Lets look at a example. Lets assume we want to cache some expensive UI resource like fonts objects. For this undertaking we do create a Cache class with the UI themes we want to support. Since Fonts are expensive objects we do create it on demand the first time the theme is requested. A simple example of a Theme cache might look like this: using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Drawing; struct Theme { public Color Color; public Font Font; } static class ThemeCache { static Dictionary<string, Theme> _Cache = new Dictionary<string, Theme> { {"Default", new Theme { Color = Color.AliceBlue }}, {"Theme12", new Theme { Color = Color.Aqua }}, }; public static Theme Get(string theme) { Theme cached = _Cache[theme]; if (cached.Font == null) { Console.WriteLine("Creating new font"); cached.Font = new Font("Arial", 8); } return cached; } } class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { Theme item = ThemeCache.Get("Theme12"); item = ThemeCache.Get("Theme12"); } } This cache does create font objects only once since on first retrieve of the Theme object the font is added to the Theme object. When we let the application run it should print “Creating new font” only once. Right? Wrong! The vigilant readers have spotted the issue already. The creator of this cache class wanted to get maximum performance. So he decided that the Theme object should be a value type (struct) to not put too much pressure on the garbage collector. The code Theme cached = _Cache[theme]; if (cached.Font == null) { Console.WriteLine("Creating new font"); cached.Font = new Font("Arial", 8); } does work with a copy of the value stored in the dictionary. This means we do mutate a copy of the Theme object and return it to our caller. But the original Theme object in the dictionary will have always null for the Font field! The solution is to change the declaration of struct Theme to class Theme or to update the theme object in the dictionary. Our cache as it is currently is actually a non caching cache. The funny thing was that I found out with a profiler by looking at which objects where finalized. I found way too many font objects to be finalized. After a bit debugging I found the allocation source for Font objects was this cache. Since this cache was there for years it means that the cache was never needed since I found no perf issue due to the creation of font objects. the cache was never profiled if it did bring any performance gain. to make the cache beneficial it needs to be accessed much more often. That was the story of the non caching cache. Next time I will write something something about measuring.

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• XNA Notes 002

  - by George Clingerman

  This past week (much like every week in the XNA community) was filled with things happening and people doing cool things (and getting noticed for doing cool things!). You can definitely tell there are some Xbox LIVE Indie game developers starting to make some names for themselves. Can’t wait to name drop them at bars. Me- “Oh you played Game X? Yeah, I know the guy that made that. Pretty cool guy.” Yeah, I’ll be THAT guy.   Time Critical XNA News 30 days left to submit XBLIGs made in XNA Game Studio 3.1 http://blogs.msdn.com/b/xna/archive/2011/01/08/30-days-left-to-submit-xna-gs-3-1-games-to-app-hub.aspx Jeromy Walsh wants you to know his XNA 4.0 Winter Workshop starting soon, go get signed up! And the forum is now LIVE on GameDev.net http://gamedevelopedia.com/ http://tinyurl.com/4gg2cfv The XNA Team Per Nick Gravelyn, Aaron Stebner’s blog post is a must read for icons on Windows Phone http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/72022/439597.aspx#439597 http://blogs.msdn.com/b/astebner/archive/2010/10/01/10070507.aspx Shawn Hargreaves writes about Sprite Billboards in a 3D world http://blogs.msdn.com/b/shawnhar/archive/2011/01/12/spritebatch-billboards-in-a-3d-world.aspx XNA MVPs Andy “The ZMan” Dunn wants YOU to come to the MVP Summit and run a 5K http://www.indiegameguy.com/blogs/zman/archive/2010/12/26/come-to-the-mvp-summit-and-run-a-5k-yes-you.aspx Jim Perry updates his forum signature just to make it clear that he’s not speaking for Microsoft or giving official information (LOL, thanks Jim, now if only people will take the time to read that...) XNA MVP | Please use the Forum Search and read the Forum FAQs | My posts are not official info http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/70849/439613.aspx#439613 XNA Developers Robert Boyd (@werezombie) working hard at converting his RPG engine used to make Breath of Death VII and Chtulu Saves the World to XNA 4.0. If you haven’t done the upgrade yet yourself, might be useful to read back through his tweets and recent forum posts to see the problems/solutions he’s encountered. http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/71834/438099.aspx#438099 http://www.twitter.com/werezompire SpynDoctorGames is in the final phase before the release of Your Doodles are Bugged for the PC! Going to be interesting to watch as more XNA game developers explore the PC game market for their games. http://twitter.com/SpynDoctorGames/statuses/24503173217521664 http://www.spyn-doctor.de @DrMistry shares some details of his next title YoYoYo http://www.mstargames.co.uk/mistryblogmain/35-genblog/177-a-new-year-a-new-game-and-maybe-a-new-approach.html Travis Woodward (@RabidLionGames) has a blog post coming this weekend on Farseer and Mario-like platformer movement. http://twitter.com/RabidLionGames/statuses/24992762021548032 http://www.rabidlion.com/ S4G Interview with Radiangames http://n4g.com/news/679492/s4g-interview-with-radiangames XBLAratings.com interviews Steve Flores (@DragonDivide) developer of Alpha Squad http://www.xblaratings.com/developer-qaa/3621-alpha-squad-developer-interview XBox LIVE Indie Games If you haven’t been reading the roundups on IndieGames by NaviFairy on GayGamer, you’ve been missing out! http://gaygamer.net/2011/01/xbox_indie_review_roundup_1112.html Armless Octopus posts the Top 20 Games of 2010 Part 1 http://www.armlessoctopus.com/2011/01/10/top-20-xbox-live-indie-games-of-2010-part-1/ Armless Octopus posts the Top 20 Games of 2010 Part 2 http://www.armlessoctopus.com/2011/01/12/top-20-xbox-live-indie-games-of-2010-%E2%80%93-part-2/ Xbox LIVE Indie Game Reviews http://www.gamemarx.com/ Don’t forget to be following @XboxHornet . That’s a great way to snag free copies of Xbox LIVE Indie Games http://twitter.com/XboxHornet/statuses/24471103808208896 http://www.xboxhornet.com/wordpress/ Xbox LIVE Indie Game Review posts the top 20 Xbox 360 LIVE Indie Games of 2010 http://www.xbox-360-community-games-reviews.com/top-20-best-xbox-360-live-indie-games-of-2010/ VVGtv to Stream #XBLIG Again! Help out if you can. http://vvgtv.com/2011/01/07/vvgtv-to-stream-xblig-again/ Indie Gamer Magazine Issue 14 has a look at the Xbox LIVE Winter Indie Game Uprisiing http://www.indiegamemag.com/issue14/ XNA Game Development Andrew Russell announced and asked for help in his development of ExEn: XNA for iPhone, Android and Silverlight http://rockethub.com/projects/752-exen-xna-for-iphone-android-and-silverlight App Hub forums letting you down? Don’t forget about StackOverflow and the game development specific version gamedev.stackexchange http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/xna http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/xna Transmute gets an update from Aaron Foley (@slyprid) and you can now add and visually edit parallax layers to your 2D tile game. http://twitpic.com/3nudj0 http://twitter.com/slyprid/statuses/23418379574448128 http://forgottenstarstudios.com/Transmute/default.html Webcomics Weekly #75 touches on some feelings I’ve seen people try to express (myself included) when talking about game development and what types of games should be released for XBLIG http://www.pvponline.com/2011/01/05/webcomics-weekly-75-sour-oats/ Setting up a new PC for XNA development? Here’s a site that helps you quickly build a installer for all the most common applications developers use. http://ninite.com/ Fun wew thread on the XNA forums asking XBLIG/XNA developers just what their Top 10 favorite video games of all time are. http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/107.aspx Christopher Hill (@Xalterax) stumbled across an entire community that does nothing but create box art. This is a great potential resource for Xbox LIVE Indie Game developers to get some awesome box art for their games. http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/46582/441451.aspx#441451 http://www.vgboxart.com/browse/plat/360/ Don’t forget about the XNA Wiki, fantastic community resource (and roll up those sleeves and contribute already!) http://xnawiki.com/index.php?title=Main_Page

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• Demystified - BI in SharePoint 2010

  - by Sahil Malik

  Ad:: SharePoint 2007 Training in .NET 3.5 technologies (more information). Frequently, my clients ask me if there is a good guide on deciphering the seemingly daunting choice of products from Microsoft when it comes to business intelligence offerings in a SharePoint 2010 world. These are all described in detail in my book, but here is a one (well maybe two) page executive overview. Microsoft Excel: Yes, Microsoft Excel! Your favorite and most commonly used in the world database. No it isn’t a database in technical pure definitions, but this is the most commonly used ‘database’ in the world. You will find many business users craft up very compelling excel sheets with tonnes of logic inside them. Good for: Quick Ad-Hoc reports. Excel 64 bit allows the possibility of very large datasheets (Also see 32 bit vs 64 bit Office, and PowerPivot Add-In below). Audience: End business user can build such solutions. Related technologies: PowerPivot, Excel Services Microsoft Excel with PowerPivot Add-In: The powerpivot add-in is an extension to Excel that adds support for large-scale data. Think of this as Excel with the ability to deal with very large amounts of data. It has an in-memory data store as an option for Analysis services. Good for: Ad-hoc reporting and logic with very large amounts of data. Audience: End business user can build such solutions. Related technologies: Excel, and Excel Services Excel Services: Excel Services is a Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 shared service that brings the power of Excel to SharePoint Server by providing server-side calculation and browser-based rendering of Excel workbooks. Thus, excel sheets can be created by end users, and published to SharePoint server – which are then rendered right through the browser in read-only or parameterized-read-only modes. They can also be accessed by other software via SOAP or REST based APIs. Good for: Sharing excel sheets with a larger number of people, while maintaining control/version control etc. Sharing logic embedded in excel sheets with other software across the organization via REST/SOAP interfaces Audience: End business users can build such solutions once your tech staff has setup excel services on a SharePoint server instance. Programmers can write software consuming functionality/complex formulae contained in your sheets. Related technologies: PerformancePoint Services, Excel, and PowerPivot. Visio Services: Visio Services is a shared service on the Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 platform that allows users to share and view Visio diagrams that may or may not have data connected to them. Connected data can update these diagrams allowing a visual/graphical view into the data. The diagrams are viewable through the browser. They are rendered in silverlight, but will automatically down-convert to .png formats. Good for: Showing data as diagrams, live updating. Comes with a developer story. Audience: End business users can build such solutions once your tech staff has setup visio services on a SharePoint server instance. Developers can enhance the visualizations Related Technologies: Visio Services can be used to render workflow visualizations in SP2010 Reporting Services: SQL Server reporting services can integrate with SharePoint, allowing you to store reports and data sources in SharePoint document libraries, and render these reports and associated functionality such as subscriptions through a SharePoint site. In SharePoint 2010, you can also write reports against SharePoint lists (access services uses this technique). Good for: Showing complex reports running in a industry standard data store, such as SQL server. Audience: This is definitely developer land. Don’t expect end users to craft up reports, unless a report model has previously been published. Related Technologies: PerformancePoint Services PerformancePoint Services: PerformancePoint Services in SharePoint 2010 is now fully integrated with SharePoint, and comes with features that can either be used in the BI center site definition, or on their own as activated features in existing site collections. PerformancePoint services allows you to build reports and dashboards that target a variety of back-end datasources including: SQL Server reporting services, SQL Server analysis services, SharePoint lists, excel services, simple tables, etc. Using these you have the ability to create dashboards, scorecards/kpis, and simple reports. You can also create reports targeting hierarchical multidimensional data sources. The visual decomposition tree is a new report type that lets you quickly breakdown multi-dimensional data. Good for: Mostly everything :), except your wallet – it’s not free! But this is the most comprehensive offering. If you have SharePoint server, forget everything and go with performance point. Audience: Developers need to setup the back-end sources, manageability story. DBAs need to setup datawarehouses with cubes. Moderately sophisticated business users, or developers can craft up reports using dashboard designer which is a click-once App that deploys with PerformancePoint Related Technologies: Excel services, reporting services, etc.   Other relevant technologies to know about: Business Connectivity Services: Allows for consumption of external data in SharePoint as columns or external lists. This can be paired with one or more of the above BI offerings allowing insight into such data. Access Services: Allows the representation/publishing of an access database as a SharePoint 2010 site, leveraging many SharePoint features. Reporting services is used by Access services. Secure Store Service: The SP2010 Secure store service is a replacement for the SP2007 single sign on feature. This acts as a credential policeman providing credentials to various applications running with SharePoint. BCS, PerformancePoint Services, Excel Services, and many other apps use the SSS (Secure Store Service) for credential control. Comment on the article ....

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• Global Perspective: Oracle AppAdvantage Does its Stage Debut in the UK

  - by Tanu Sood

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Global Perspective is a monthly series that brings experiences, business needs and real-world use cases from regions across the globe. This month’s feature is a follow-up from last month’s Global Perspective note from a well known ACE Director based in EMEA. My first contribution to this blog was before Oracle Open World and I was quite excited about where this initiative would take me in my understanding of the value of Oracle Fusion Middleware. Rimi Bewtra from the Oracle AppAdvantage team came as promised to the Oracle ACE Director briefings and explained what this initiative was all about and I then asked the directors to take part in the new survey. The story was really well received and then at the SOA advisory board that many of these ACE Directors already take part in there was a further discussion on how this initiative will help customers understand the benefits of adoption. A few days later Rick Beers launched the program at a lunch of invited customer executives which included one from Pella who talked about their projects (a quick recap on that here). I wasn’t able to stay for the whole event but what really interested me was that these executives who understood the technology but where looking for how they could use them to drive their businesses. Lots of ideas were bubbling up in my head about how we can use this in user groups to help our members, and the timing was fantastic as just three weeks later we had UKOUG_Apps13, our flagship Applications conference in the UK. We had independently working with Oracle marketing in the UK on an initiative called Apps Transformation to help our members look beyond just the application they use today. We have had a Fusion community page but felt the options open are now much wider than Fusion Applications, there are acquired applications, social, mobility and of course the underlying technology, Oracle Fusion Middleware. I was really pleased to be allowed to give the Oracle AppAdvantage story as a session in our conference and we are planning a special Apps Transformation event in March where I hope the Oracle AppAdvantage team will take part and we will have the results of the survey to discuss. But, life also came full circle for me. In my first post, I talked about Andrew Sutherland and his original theory that Oracle Fusion Middleware adoption had technical drivers. Well, Andrew was a speaker at our event and he gave a potted, tech-talk free update on Oracle Open World. Andrew talked about the Prevailing Technology Winds, and what is driving this today and he talked about that in the past it was the move from simply automating processes (ERP etc), through the altering of those processes (SOA) and onto consolidation. The next drivers are around the need to predict, both faster and more accurately; how to better exploit the information that we have available. He went on to talk about The Nexus of Forces: Social, Mobile, Cloud and Information – harnessing these forces of change with Oracle technology. Gartner really likes this concept and if you want to know more you can get their paper here. All this has made me think, and I hope it will make you too. Technology can help us drive our businesses better and understanding your needs can be the first step on your journey, which was the theme of our event in the UK. I spoke to a number of the delegates and I hope to share some of their stories in later posts. If you have a story to share, the survey is at: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/P335DD3 About the Author: Debra Lilley, Fujitsu Fusion Champion, UKOUG Board Member, Fusion User Experience Advocate and ACE Director. Debra has 18 years experience with Oracle Applications, with E Business Suite since 9.4.1, moving to Business Intelligence Team Leader and then Oracle Alliance Director. She has spoken at over 100 conferences worldwide and posts at debrasoraclethoughts Editor’s Note: Debra has kindly agreed to share her musings and experience in a monthly column on the Fusion Middleware blog so do stay tuned…

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