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• Announcing the new Oracle Retail Workspace, A Configuration of Oracle WebCenter Spaces 11.1.1.5 for Oracle Retail

  - by Oracle Retail Documentation Team

  For the Oracle Retail 13.2.x enterprise, Oracle Retail Workspace 13.2.4 replaces previous versions of Oracle Retail Workspace. Oracle Retail Workspace 13.2.4 is a supported configuration of Oracle WebCenter Spaces 11.1.1.5 for Oracle Retail. Supported Product Overview In order to provide a next-generation Oracle user engagement platform for the retail industry, Oracle Retail Workspace leverages WebCenter Spaces. Oracle Retail Workspace is not a licensed retail application with any code. Instead, retailers purchase the underlying technology and then leverage the Oracle Retail Workspace Implementation Guide to configure a portal utilizing Oracle WebCenter Spaces. Oracle Retail Workspace has been repositioned as a configuration of Oracle WebCenter Spaces for the following reasons: The Oracle Retail Workspace configuration utilizes the external application functionality and the application navigator taskflow of the Oracle WebCenter Framework to configure Oracle Retail applications in Oracle WebCenter Spaces. The Oracle WebCenter Framework improves IT development cycle times by blending Web 2.0 services, processes, business intelligence, and transactions in an integrated JSF framework. The Oracle WebCenter Spaces 11g offers features provided by the previous versions of Oracle Retail Workspace that enable retailers to leverage a productive portal-based environment. List of Documents The following are included in Workspace 13.2.4, A Configuration of WebCenter Spaces 11.1.1.5 for Oracle Retail Oracle Retail Workspace Release Notes Oracle Retail Workspace Implementation Guide Workspace Retail Library—Unsupported The Oracle Retail Workspace Retail Library is comprised of previously-published accelerator documents and sample code downloads hosted on My Oracle Support. They are not supported, nor are they associated with the support lifecycle of the Workspace application. Doc ID: 1461281.1: Oracle Retail Workspace Retail Library Oracle Retail Workspace Retail Library Reference GuideA set of Micro-Applications that can be used to perform some of the operations of Oracle Retail Merchandising System (RMS) from outside the application. This document describes the functional and technical design details of the Micro-Applications available in this release, including the following and more: Create Regular Item Create Purchase Order Item Transfer Update Vendor Oracle Retail Fashion Planning Bundle Reports documentationThe Oracle Retail Fashion Planning Bundle Reports package includes role-based Oracle Business Intelligence (BI) Enterprise Edition (EE) reports and dashboards that provide an illustrative overview highlighting the Fashion Planning Bundle solutions. These dashboards can be leveraged out-of-the-box or can be used along with the other dashboards and reports that may have already been created to support a specific solution or organizational needs. This package includes dashboards for the Assortment Planning, Item Planning, Item Planning Configured for COE, Merchandise Financial Planning Retail Accounting, and Merchandise Financial Planning Cost Accounting applications. Oracle Retail Accelerators for WebLogic Server 11g Micro-Applications Development TutorialThis tutorial describes how you can create a Micro-Application for the Create a Regular Item task in the Retail Merchandising System (RMS) application using Oracle JDeveloper and ADF. Retail Accelerators: Developing ADF Reports for RPASThis document illustrates how you can use the Oracle Application Development Framework 11g (ADF) to generate reports that provide insights from the Oracle Retail Predictive Application Server (RPAS) based applications. Oracle Retail Accelerators Guide for WebCenter 11gOracle Retail Accelerators Guide for WebCenter 11g describes how you can integrate Oracle Retail applications with Oracle WebCenter Spaces and customize WebCenter Spaces to include custom-developed content. Oracle Retail Accelerators, Developing Oracle BI EE reports on RPAS Domain DataThis document illustrates how you can set up the integration between BI EE and RPAS domains to generate BI EE reports and dashboards for RPAS. Oracle Retail Accelerators, Developing Oracle BI EE Reports on RPAS WorkbooksThis document outlines a process to create real-time Oracle Business Intelligence (BI) Enterprise Edition reports against RPAS workbooks dynamically, as opposed to directly going against the RPAS domain for the data. 

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• The Future of Air Travel: Intelligence and Automation

  - by BobEvans

  Remember those white-knuckle flights through stormy weather where unexpected plunges in altitude result in near-permanent relocations of major internal organs? Perhaps there’s a better way, according to a recent Wall Street Journal article: “Pilots of a Honeywell International Inc. test plane stayed on their initial flight path, relying on the company's latest onboard radar technology to steer through the worst of the weather. The specially outfitted Boeing 757 barely shuddered as it gingerly skirted some of the most ferocious storm cells over Fort Walton Beach and then climbed above the rest in zero visibility.” Or how about the multifaceted check-in process, which might not wreak havoc on liver location but nevertheless makes you wonder if you’ve been trapped in some sort of covert psychological-stress test? Another WSJ article, called “The Self-Service Airport,” says there’s reason for hope there as well: “Airlines are laying the groundwork for the next big step in the airport experience: a trip from the curb to the plane without interacting with a single airline employee. At the airport of the near future, ‘your first interaction could be with a flight attendant,’ said Ben Minicucci, chief operating officer of Alaska Airlines, a unit of Alaska Air Group Inc.” And in the topsy-turvy world of air travel, it’s not just the passengers who’ve been experiencing bumpy rides: the airlines themselves are grappling with a range of challenges—some beyond their control, some not—that make profitability increasingly elusive in spite of heavy demand for their services. A recent piece in The Economist illustrates one of the mega-challenges confronting the airline industry via a striking set of contrasting and very large numbers: while the airlines pay $7 billion per year to third-party computerized reservation services, the airlines themselves earn a collective profit of only $3 billion per year. In that context, the anecdotes above point unmistakably to the future that airlines must pursue if they hope to be able to manage some of the factors outside of their control (e.g., weather) as well as all of those within their control (operating expenses, end-to-end visibility, safety, load optimization, etc.): more intelligence, more automation, more interconnectedness, and more real-time awareness of every facet of their operations. Those moves will benefit both passengers and the air carriers, says the WSJ piece on The Self-Service Airport: “Airlines say the advanced technology will quicken the airport experience for seasoned travelers—shaving a minute or two from the checked-baggage process alone—while freeing airline employees to focus on fliers with questions. ‘It's more about throughput with the resources you have than getting rid of humans,’ said Andrew O'Connor, director of airport solutions at Geneva-based airline IT provider SITA.” Oracle’s attempting to help airlines gain control over these challenges by blending together a range of its technologies into a solution called the Oracle Airline Data Model, which suggests the following steps: • To retain and grow their customer base, airlines need to focus on the customer experience. • To personalize and differentiate the customer experience, airlines need to effectively manage their passenger data. • The Oracle Airline Data Model can help airlines jump-start their customer-experience initiatives by consolidating passenger data into a customer data hub that drives realtime business intelligence and strategic customer insight. • Oracle’s Airline Data Model brings together multiple types of data that can jumpstart your data-warehousing project with rich out-of-the-box functionality. • Oracle’s Intelligent Warehouse for Airlines brings together the powerful capabilities of Oracle Exadata and the Oracle Airline Data Model to give you real-time strategic insights into passenger demand, revenues, sales channels and your flight network. The airline industry aside, the bullet points above offer a broad strategic outline for just about any industry because the customer experience is becoming pre-eminent in each and there is simply no way to deliver world-class customer experiences unless a company can capture, manage, and analyze all of the relevant data in real-time. I’ll leave you with two thoughts from the WSJ article about the new in-flight radar system from Honeywell: first, studies show that a single episode of serious turbulence can wrack up $150,000 in additional costs for an airline—so, it certainly behooves the carriers to gain the intelligence to avoid turbulence as much as possible. And second, it’s back to that top-priority customer-experience thing and the value that ever-increasing levels of intelligence can deliver. As the article says: “In the cabin, reporters watched screens showing the most intense parts of the nearly 10-mile wide storm, which churned some 7,000 feet below, in vibrant red and other colors. The screens also were filled with tiny symbols depicting likely locations of lightning and hail, which can damage planes and wreak havoc on the nerves of white-knuckle flyers.”  (Bob Evans is senior vice-president, communications, for Oracle.)  

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• Using kAudioSessionProperty_OtherMixableAudioShouldDuck on iPhone

  - by Cliff

  Hello, I'm trying to get consistant behavior out of the kAudioSessionProperty_OtherMixableAudioShouldDuck property on the iPhone to allow iPod music blending and I'm having trouble. At the start of my app I set an Ambient category like so: -(void) initialize { [[AVAudioSession sharedInstance] setCategory: AVAudioSessionCategoryAmbient error: nil]; } Later on when I attempt to play audio I set the duck property using the following method: //this will crossfade the audio with the ipod music - (void) toggleCrossfadeOn:(UInt32)onOff { //crossfade the ipod music AudioSessionSetProperty(kAudioSessionProperty_OtherMixableAudioShouldDuck,sizeof(onOff),&onOff); AudioSessionSetActive(onOff); } I call this passing a numeric "1" just before playing audio like so: [self toggleCrossfadeOn:1]; [player play]; I then call the crossfade method again passing a zero when my app's audio completes using a playback is stopping callback like so: -(void) playbackIsStoppingForPlayer:(MQAudioPlayer*)audioPlayer { NSLog(@"Releasing player"); [audioPlayer release]; [self toggleCrossfadeOn:0]; } In my production app this exact code works as expected, causing the ipod to fade out just before playing my app's audio then fade back in when the audio finishes playing. In a new project I recently started, I get different behavior. The iPod audio fades down and never fades back in. In my production app I use the AVAudioPlayer where in my new app I've written a custom audio player that uses audio queues. Could somebody help me understand the differences and how to properly use this API?

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• CCSprite with actions crossing the screen boundaries (copy sprite problem)

  - by iostriz

  Let's say we have a CCSprite object that has an actions tied to it: -(void) moveJack { CCSpriteSheet *sheet = (CCSpriteSheet*)[self getChildByTag:kSheet]; CCSprite *jack = (CCSprite*)[sheet getChildByTag:kJack]; ... CCSequence *seq = [CCSequence actions: jump1, [jump1 reverse], jump2, nil]; [jack runAction:seq]; } If the sprite crosses over the screen boundary, I would like to display it at opposite side. So, original sprite is half displayed on the right side (for example), and half on the left side, because it has not fully crossed yet. Obviously (or is it), I need 2 sprites to achieve this. One on the right side (original), and one on the left side (a copy). The problem is - I don't know how to create exact copy of the original sprite, because tied actions have scaling and blending transformations (sprite is a bit distorted). I would like to have something like: CCSprite *copy = [[jack copy] autorelease]; so that I can add a copy to display it on the correct side (and kill it after transition is over). It should have all the actions tied to it... Any ideas?

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• Copy Small Bitmaps on to Large Bitmap with Transparency Blend: What is faster than graphics.DrawImag

  - by Glenn

  I have identified this call as a bottleneck in a high pressure function. graphics.DrawImage(smallBitmap, x , y); Is there a faster way to blend small semi transparent bitmaps into a larger semi transparent one? Example Usage: XY[] locations = GetLocs(); Bitmap[] bitmaps = GetBmps(); //small images sizes vary approx 30px x 30px using (Bitmap large = new Bitmap(500, 500, PixelFormat.Format32bppPArgb)) using (Graphics largeGraphics = Graphics.FromImage(large)) { for(var i=0; i < largeNumber; i++) { //this is the bottleneck largeGraphics.DrawImage(bitmaps[i], locations[i].x , locations[i].y); } } var done = new MemoryStream(); large.Save(done, ImageFormat.Png); done.Position = 0; return (done); The DrawImage calls take a small 32bppPArgb bitmaps and copies them into a larger bitmap at locations that vary and the small bitmaps might only partially overlap the larger bitmaps visible area. Both images have semi transparent contents that get blended by DrawImage in a way that is important to the output. I've done some testing with BitBlt but not seen significant speed improvement and the alpha blending didn't come out the same in my tests. I'm open to just about any method including a better call to bitblt or unsafe c# code.

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• howto distinguish composition and self-typing use-cases

  - by ayvango

  Scala has two instruments for expressing object composition: original self-type concept and well known trivial composition. I'm curios what situations I should use which in. There are obvious differences in their applicability. Self-type requires you to use traits. Object composition allows you to change extensions on run-time with var declaration. Leaving technical details behind I can figure two indicators to help with classification of use cases. If some object used as combinator for a complex structure such as tree or just have several similar typed parts (1 car to 4 wheels relation) than it should use composition. There is extreme opposite use case. Lets assume one trait become too big to clearly observe it and it got split. It is quite natural that you should use self-types for this case. That rules are not absolute. You may do extra work to convert code between this techniques. e.g. you may replace 4 wheels composition with self-typing over Product4. You may use Cake[T <: MyType] {part : MyType} instead of Cake { this : MyType => } for cake pattern dependencies. But both cases seem counterintuitive and give you extra work. There are plenty of boundary use cases although. One-to-one relations is very hard to decide with. Is there any simple rule to decide what kind of technique is preferable? self-type makes you classes abstract, composition makes your code verbose. self-type gives your problems with blending namespaces and also gives you extra typing for free (you got not just a cocktail of two elements but gasoline-motor oil cocktail known as a petrol bomb). How can I choose between them? What hints are there? Update: Let us discuss the following example: Adapter pattern. What benefits it has with both selt-typing and composition approaches?

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• OpenGL Colour Interpolation

  - by Will-of-fortune

  I'm currently working on an little project in C++ and OpenGL and am trying to implement a colour selection tool similar to that in photoshop, as below. However I am having trouble with interpolation of the large square. Working on my desktop computer with a 8800 GTS the result was similar but the blending wasn't as smooth. This is the code I am using: GLfloat swatch[] = { 0,0,0, 1,1,1, mR,mG,mB, 0,0,0 }; GLint swatchVert[] = { 400,700, 400,500, 600,500, 600,700 }; glVertexPointer(2, GL_INT, 0, swatchVert); glColorPointer(3, GL_FLOAT, 0, swatch); glDrawArrays(GL_QUADS, 0, 4); Moving onto my laptop with Intel Graphics HD 3000, this result was even worse with no change in code. I thought it was OpenGL splitting the quad into two triangles, so I tried rendering using triangles and interpolating the colour in the middle of the square myself but it still doesnt quite match the result I was hoping for. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

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• iPhone OpenGL ES Texture2D Masking

  - by Robert Neagu

  What's the best choice when trying to mask a texture like ColorSplash or other apps like iSteam, etc? I started learning OPENGL ES like... 4 days ago (I'm a total rookie) and tried the following approach: 1) I created a colored texture2D, a grayscale version of the first texture and a third texture2D called mask 2) I also created a texture2D for the brush... which is grayscale and it's opaque (brush = black = 0,0,0,1 and surroundings = white = 1,1,1,1). My intention was to create an antialiased brush with smooth edges but i'm fine with a normal one right now 3) I searched for masking techniques on the internet and found this tutorial ZeusCMD - Design and Development Tutorials : OpenGL ES Programming Tutorials - Masking about masking. The tutorial tells me to use blending to achieve masking... first draw colored, then mask with glBlendFunc(GL_DST_COLOR, GL_ZERO) and then grayscale with glBlendFunc(GL_ONE, GL_ONE) ... and this gives me something close to what i want... but not exactly what i want. The result is masked but it's somehow overbright-ed 4) For drawing to the mask texture i used an extra frame buffer object (FBO) I'm not really happy with the resulting image (overbright-ed picture) nor with the speed achieved with this method. I think the normal way was to draw directly to the grayscale (overlay) texture2D affecting only it's alpha channel in the places where the brush hits. Is there a fast way to achieve this? I have searched a lot and never got an answer that's clear and understandable. Then, in the main draw loop I could only draw the colored texture and then blend the grayscale ontop with glBlendFunc(GL_SRC_ALPHA, GL_ONE_MINUS_SRC_ALPHA). I just want to learn to use OPENGL ES and it's driving me nuts because i can't get it to work properly. An advice, a link to a tutorial would be much appreciated.

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• How to draw shadows that don't suck?

  - by mystify

  A CAShapeLayer uses a CGPathRef to draw it's stuff. So I have a star path, and I want a smooth drop shadow with a radius of about 15 units. Probably there is some nice functionality in some new iPhone OS versions, but I need to do it myself for a old aged version of 3.0 (which most people still use). I tried to do some REALLY nasty stuff: I created a for-loop and sequentially created like 15 of those paths, transform-scaling them step by step to become bigger. Then assigning them to a new created CAShapeLayer and decreasing it's alpha a little bit on every iteration. Not only that this scaling is mathematically incorrect and sucks (it should happen relative to the outline!), the shadow is not rounded and looks really ugly. That's why nice soft shadows have a radius. The tips of a star shouldn't appear totally sharp after a shadow size of 15 units. They should be soft like cream. But in my ugly solution they're just as s harp as the star itself, since all I do is scale the star 15 times and decrease it's alpha 15 times. Ugly. I wonder how the big guys do it? If you had an arbitrary path, and that path must throw a shadow, how does the algorithm to do that work? Probably the path would have to be expanded like 30 times, point-by-point relative to the tangent of the outline away from the filled part, and just by 0.5 units to have a nice blending. Before I re-invent the wheel, maybe someone has a handy example or link?

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• R plotting multiple histograms on single plot to .pdf as a part of R batch script

  - by Bryce Thomas

  I am writing R scripts which play just a small role in a chain of commands I am executing from a terminal. Basically, I do much of my data manipulation in a Python script and then pipe the output to my R script for plotting. So, from the terminal I execute commands which look something like $python whatever.py | R CMD BATCH do_some_plotting.R. This workflow has been working well for me so far, though I have now reached a point where I want to overlay multiple histograms on the same plot, inspired by this answer to another user's question on Stackoverflow. Inside my R script, my plotting code looks like this: pdf("my_output.pdf") plot(hist(d$original,breaks="FD",prob=TRUE), col=rgb(0,0,1,1/4),xlim=c(0,4000),main="original - This plot is in beta") plot(hist(d$minus_thirty_minutes,breaks="FD",prob=TRUE), col=rgb(1,0,0,1/4),add=T,xlim=c(0,4000),main="minus_thirty_minutes - This plot is in beta") Notably, I am using add=T, which is presumably meant to specify that the second plot should be overlaid on top of the first. When my script has finished, the result I am getting is not two histograms overlaid on top of each other, but rather a 3-page PDF whose 3 individual plots contain the titles: i) Histogram of d$original ii) original - This plot is in beta iii) Histogram of d$minus_thirty_minutes So there's two points here I'm looking to clarify. Firstly, even if the plots weren't overlaid, I would expect just a 2-page PDF, not a 3-page PDF. Can someone explain why I am getting a 3-page PDF? Secondly, is there a correction I can make here somewhere to get just the two histograms plotted, and both of them on the same plot (i.e. 1-page PDF)? The other Stackoverflow question/answer I linked to in the first paragraph did mention that alpha-blending isn't supported on all devices, and so I'm curious whether this has anything to do with it. Either way, it would be good to know if there is a R-based solution to my problem or whether I'm going to have to pipe my data into a different language/plotting engine.

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• Creating transparent gridlines

  - by Rob Penridge

  I'm trying to get the chart's gridlines to be transparent but it doesn't seem to be supported: http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/grstatug/63302/HTML/default/viewer.htm#n1f71f6e9v037an1jy274v66z4r1.htm I'm doing to try and blend the gridlines with the chart background color (which in my code can change between colors) which would make the gridlines subtle rather than jarring when background colors change. Here is my code: ** ** TAKE THE DEFAULT STYLE BEING USED. MODIFY IT SO THAT ** GRAPH GRIDLINES WILL BE GREEN AND MOSTLY TRANSPARENT *; proc template; define style my_style; parent = styles.default; style GraphGridLines from GraphGridLines / contrastcolor=green transparency=.05; end; run; ** ** LAYOUT TEMPLATE FOR A SIMPLE SERIES CHART *; proc template; define statgraph mychart; begingraph; layout overlay / wallcolor=black xaxisopts=(display=(line) griddisplay=on) yaxisopts=(display=(line)) ; seriesplot x=name y=height / lineattrs=(color=white); endlayout; endgraph; end; run; ** ** PLOT SAMPLE DATA USING CUSTOM STYLE AND CHART LAYOUT WE JUST DEFINED *; ods graphics / width=640 height=640 ; ods html style=my_style; proc sgrender data=sashelp.class template=mychart; run; ods html close; Is there another way to achieve this effect by blending the green color with the background color?

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• How to merge two icons together? (overlay one icon on top of another)

  - by demoncodemonkey

  I've got two 16x16 RGB/A .ICO icon files, each loaded into a separate System.Drawing.Icon object. How would you create a new Icon object containing the merge of the two icons (one overlaid on top of the other)? Edit: I probably wasn't too clear, I don't want to blend two images into each other, I want to overlay one icon on top of another. I should add that the icons already contain transparent parts and I do not need any transparent "blending" to make both icons visible. What I need is to overlay the non-transparent pixels of one icon over the top of another icon. The transparent pixels should let the background icon show through. For example, look at the stackoverflow icon. It has some areas that are grey and orange, and some areas that are totally transparent. Imagine you want to overlay the SO icon on top of the Firefox icon. You would see the greys and oranges of the SO icon in full colour, and where the SO icon is transparent, you would see those parts of the Firefox icon.

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• (HTML) PNG on top of another PNG - possible to eliminate full transparency?

  - by MHTri

  I'd like to put a logo png onto of another coloured png. They both have transparent backgrounds. When I try this the images blend together. Curiously, in Photoshop the logo retains its opaque-ness - I put colours on the layers underneath it, another image, etc etc, the logo is still opaque. I'd like to do it this way so I can rotate the background images. How do I fix this? [edit]I've cooked up an example image: http://i.imgur.com/XtoGn.png The left is what I want to happen, the right is what happens on all browsers (I know the background isn't transparent but bear with me - they're both transparent pngs, with the background having a gradient layer mask). I've put the images like this <div> <img id="backgroundImg" style="position: absolute; top: 0;" src="/Images/background.png" /> <img id="logoImg" src="/Images/logo.png" /> </div> I'm not entirely sure what blending mode I'm using in PS.

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• own drawImage / drawLine in OpenGL

  - by Chrise

  I'm implementing some native 2D-draw functions in my graphics engine for android, but now there's another question coming up, when I observe the performance of my program. At the moment I'm implementing a drawLine/drawImage function. In summary, there are following different values for drawing each different line / image: the color the alpha value the width of the line rotation (only for images) size/scale (also for images) blending method (subrtract, add, normal-alpha) Now, when an imageLine is drawn, I put the CPU-calculated vertex-positions and uv-values for 6 vertices (2 triangles), into a Floatbuffer and draw it immediately with drawArrays, after passing information for drawing (color,alpha, etc.) via uniforms to the shader. When I draw an image, the pre-set VBO is directly drawn after passing information. The first fact I recognized, is: of course drawing Images is much faster, than imagelines (beacuse of VBOs), but also: I cannot pre-put vertex-data into a VBO for imageLines, because imageLines have no static shape like normal images (varying linelength, varying linewidth and the vertex positions of x1,y1 and x2,y2 change too often) That's why I use a normal Floatbuffer, instead of a VBO. So my question is: What's the best way for managing images, and other 2D-graphics functions. For me it's some kind of important, that the user of the engine is able to draw as many images/2D graphics as possible, without loosing to much performance. You can find the functions for drawing images, imagelines, rects, quads, etc. here: https://github.com/Chrise55/LLama3D/blob/master/Llama3DLibrary/src/com/llama3d/object/graphics/image/ImageBase.java Here an example how it looks with many images (testing artificial neural networks), it works fine, but already little bit slow with that many images... :(

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• C# return and display syntax issue

  - by thatdude

  I am having trouble passing the return value from TheMethod() to Main and displaying the word if the if statement is passed as true. I have thought of two ways of doing this, neither has worked but I think I am missing synatx. Using a return ?; non void method and then displaying the returned value. Using a void method and actually writing out(example below) So yes I am new at this, however I have made so many iterations everything is blending together and I have forgot what I have tried. Any help on the syntax be great for either of these ways. Basically I need it to iterate numbers 1,2,3,4 and depending on if the current iteration matches an expression in the if statements it will display a word. Example: if (3 = i) { Console.WriteLine("Word"); } Code: using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using System.Threading.Tasks; namespace Proj5 { class Program { int i = 0; static void Main(int i) { for (i = 0; i < 101; i++) { Console.WriteLine("test"); } } string TheMethod(int i) { string f = "Word1"; string b = "Word2"; if (i == 3) { return f; } if (i == 5) { return b; } if (0 == (i % 3)) { return f; } if (0 == i % 5) { return b; } else { return b; } } } }

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• Employee Engagement Q&A with John Brunswick

  - by Kellsey Ruppel

  As we are focusing this week on Employee Engagement, I recently sat down with industry expert and thought leader John Brunswick on the topic. Here is the Q&A dialogue we shared.  Q: How do you effectively engage employees to drive business value?A: Motivation, both extrinsic and intrinsic, combined with the relevancy of various channels to support it.  Beyond chaining business strategies like compensation models within an organization, engagement ultimately is most successful when driven by employee's motivations.  Business value derived from engagement through technical capabilities can be objectively measured through metrics like the rate and accuracy of problem solving for a given business function or frequency of innovation created.  Providing employees performing "knowledge work" with capabilities that allow them to perform work with a higher degree of accuracy in the same or ideally less time, adds value for that individual and in turn, drives their level of engagement to drive business value. Q: Organizations with high levels of employee engagement outperform the total stock market index by 22%. Can you comment on why you think this might be? A: Alignment through shared purpose.  Zappos is an excellent example of a culture that arguably has higher than average levels of employee engagement and it permeates every aspect of their organization – embodied externally through their customer experience.  I recently made my first purchase with them and it was obvious through their web experience, visual design, communication style, customer service and attention to detail down to green packaging, that they have an amazingly strong shared purpose.  The Zappos.com ‘About page’ outlines their "Family Core Values", the first three being "Deliver WOW Through Service, Embrace and Drive Change & Create Fun and A Little Weirdness" – all reflected externally in my interaction with them.  Strong shared purpose enables higher product and service experience, equating to a dedicated customer base, repeat purchases and expanded marketshare. Q: Have you seen any trends in the market regarding employee engagement? A: Some companies now see offering a form of social engagement similar to Facebook and LinkedIn as standard communication infrastructure like email or instant messaging.  Originally offered as standalone tools, the value is now seen when these capabilities are offered in an integrated fashion in the context of business entities.  An emerging area of focus is around employee activities related to their organization on external social platforms, implicitly creating external communities with employees acting on behalf of the brand and interacting with each other (e.g. Twitter).  Companies have reached a formal understand that this now established communication medium requires strategies allowing employees to engage.  I have personally met colleagues from Oracle, like Oracle User Experience Director Ultan O'Broin (@ultan), via Twitter before meeting first through internal channels. Q: Employee engagement is important, but what about engaging customers and partners? A: The last few years we have witnessed an interesting evolution from the novelty of self-service to expectations of "intelligent" self-service.  From a consumer standpoint, engagement can end up being a key differentiator, especially in mature markets.  Customers that perform some level of interaction with a brand develop greater affinity for the brand and have a greater probability of acting as an advocate.  As organizations move toward a model of deeper engagement, they must ensure that their business is positioned to support deeper relationships, offering potentially greater transparency. From a partner standpoint greater engagement can lead to new types of business opportunities, much in the way that Amazon.com offers a unified shopping experience that can potentially span various vendors.  This same model can be extended to blending services and product delivery models, based on a closeness not easily possible before increased capability of engagement mechanisms. Q: What types of solutions are available to successfully deliver employee engagement? A: Solutions enabling higher levels of engagement do so on the basis of relevancy.  This relevancy is generally supported by aspects of content management, social collaboration, business intelligence, portal and process management technologies.  These technologies can help deliver an experience tailored to a given role or process within an organization that applies equally to work that is structured or unstructured, appearing in the form of functionality as simple as an online employee directory search, knowledge communities supported by social collaboration, as well as more feature rich business intelligence dashboards and portals. Looking to learn more about how to effectively engage your employees? Check out this webcast, or read more from John Brunswick. 

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• Why do my 512x512 bitmaps look jaggy on Android OpenGL?

  - by Milo Mordaunt

  This is sort of driving me nuts, I've googled and googled and tried everything I can think of, but my sprites still look super blurry and super jaggy. Example: Here: https://docs.google.com/open?id=0Bx9Gbwnv9Hd2TmpiZkFycUNmRTA If you click through to the actual full size image you should see what I mean, it's like it's taking and average of every 5*5 pixels or something, the background looks really blurry and blocky, but the ball is the worst. The clouds look all right for some reason, probably because they're mostly transparent. I know the pngs aren't top notch themselves but hey, I'm no artist! I would imagine it's a problem with either: a. How the pngs are made example sprite (512x512): https://docs.google.com/open?id=0Bx9Gbwnv9Hd2a2RRQlJiQTFJUEE b. How my Matrices work This is the relevant parts of the renderer: public void onDrawFrame(GL10 unused) { if(world != null) { dt = System.currentTimeMillis() - endTime; world.update( (float) dt); // Redraw background color GLES20.glClear(GLES20.GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT); Matrix.setIdentityM(mvMatrix, 0); Matrix.translateM(mvMatrix, 0, 0f, 0f, 0f); world.draw(mvMatrix, mProjMatrix); endTime = System.currentTimeMillis(); } else { Log.d(TAG, "There is no world...."); } } public void onSurfaceChanged(GL10 unused, int width, int height) { GLES20.glViewport(0, 0, width, height); Matrix.orthoM(mProjMatrix, 0, 0, width /2, 0, height /2, -1.f, 1.f); } And this is what each Quad does when draw is called: public void draw(float[] mvMatrix, float[] pMatrix) { Matrix.setIdentityM(mMatrix, 0); Matrix.setIdentityM(mvMatrix, 0); Matrix.translateM(mMatrix, 0, xPos, yPos, 0.f); Matrix.multiplyMM(mvMatrix, 0, mvMatrix, 0, mMatrix, 0); Matrix.scaleM(mvMatrix, 0, scale, scale, 0f); Matrix.rotateM(mvMatrix, 0, angle, 0f, 0f, -1f); GLES20.glUseProgram(mProgram); posAttr = GLES20.glGetAttribLocation(mProgram, "vPosition"); texAttr = GLES20.glGetAttribLocation(mProgram, "aTexCo"); uSampler = GLES20.glGetUniformLocation(mProgram, "uSampler"); int alphaHandle = GLES20.glGetUniformLocation(mProgram, "alpha"); GLES20.glVertexAttribPointer(posAttr, COORDS_PER_VERTEX, GLES20.GL_FLOAT, false, 0, vertexBuffer); GLES20.glVertexAttribPointer(texAttr, 2, GLES20.GL_FLOAT, false, 0, texCoBuffer); GLES20.glEnableVertexAttribArray(posAttr); GLES20.glEnableVertexAttribArray(texAttr); GLES20.glActiveTexture(GLES20.GL_TEXTURE0); GLES20.glBindTexture(GLES20.GL_TEXTURE_2D, texture); GLES20.glUniform1i(uSampler, 0); GLES20.glUniform1f(alphaHandle, alpha); mMVMatrixHandle = GLES20.glGetUniformLocation(mProgram, "uMVMatrix"); mPMatrixHandle = GLES20.glGetUniformLocation(mProgram, "uPMatrix"); GLES20.glUniformMatrix4fv(mMVMatrixHandle, 1, false, mvMatrix, 0); GLES20.glUniformMatrix4fv(mPMatrixHandle, 1, false, pMatrix, 0); GLES20.glDrawElements(GLES20.GL_TRIANGLE_STRIP, 4, GLES20.GL_UNSIGNED_SHORT, indicesBuffer); GLES20.glDisableVertexAttribArray(posAttr); GLES20.glDisableVertexAttribArray(texAttr); GLES20.glBindTexture(GLES20.GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0); } c. How my texture loading/blending/shaders setup works Here is the renderer setup: public void onSurfaceCreated(GL10 unused, EGLConfig config) { // Set the background frame color GLES20.glClearColor(0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f); GLES20.glDisable(GLES20.GL_DEPTH_TEST); GLES20.glDepthMask(false); GLES20.glBlendFunc(GLES20.GL_ONE, GLES20.GL_ONE_MINUS_SRC_ALPHA); GLES20.glEnable(GLES20.GL_BLEND); GLES20.glEnable(GLES20.GL_DITHER); } Here is the vertex shader: attribute vec4 vPosition; attribute vec2 aTexCo; varying vec2 vTexCo; uniform mat4 uMVMatrix; uniform mat4 uPMatrix; void main() { gl_Position = uPMatrix * uMVMatrix * vPosition; vTexCo = aTexCo; } And here's the fragment shader: precision mediump float; uniform sampler2D uSampler; uniform vec4 vColor; varying vec2 vTexCo; varying float alpha; void main() { vec4 color = texture2D(uSampler, vec2(vTexCo)); gl_FragColor = color; if(gl_FragColor.a == 0.0) { "discard; } } This is how textures are loaded: private int loadTexture(int rescource) { int[] texture = new int[1]; BitmapFactory.Options opts = new BitmapFactory.Options(); opts.inScaled = false; Bitmap temp = BitmapFactory.decodeResource(context.getResources(), rescource, opts); GLES20.glGenTextures(1, texture, 0); GLES20.glActiveTexture(GLES20.GL_TEXTURE0); GLES20.glBindTexture(GLES20.GL_TEXTURE_2D, texture[0]); GLES20.glTexParameterf(GLES20.GL_TEXTURE_2D, GLES20.GL_TEXTURE_MAG_FILTER, GLES20.GL_LINEAR); GLES20.glTexParameterf(GLES20.GL_TEXTURE_2D, GLES20.GL_TEXTURE_MIN_FILTER, GLES20.GL_LINEAR); GLUtils.texImage2D(GLES20.GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0, temp, 0); GLES20.glGenerateMipmap(GLES20.GL_TEXTURE_2D); GLES20.glBindTexture(GLES20.GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0); temp.recycle(); return texture[0]; } I'm sure I'm doing about 20,000 things wrong, so I'm really sorry if the problem is blindingly obvious... The test device is a Galaxy Note, running a JellyBean custom ROM, if that matters at all. So the screen resolution is 1280x800, which means... The background is 1024x1024, so yeah it might be a little blurry, but shouldn't be made of lego. Thank you so much, any answer at all would be appreciated.

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• 7-Eleven Improves the Digital Guest Experience With 10-Minute Application Provisioning

  - by MichaelM-Oracle

  By Vishal Mehra - Director, Cloud Computing, Oracle Consulting Making the Cloud Journey Matter There’s much more to cloud computing than cutting costs and closing data centers. In fact, cloud computing is fast becoming the engine for innovation and productivity in the digital age. Oracle Consulting Services contributes to our customers’ cloud journey by accelerating application provisioning and rapidly deploying enterprise solutions. By blending flexibility with standardization, our Middleware as a Service (MWaaS) offering is ensuring the success of many cloud initiatives. 10-Minute Application Provisioning Times at 7-Eleven As a case in point, 7-Eleven recently highlighted the scope, scale, and results of a cloud-powered environment. The world’s largest convenience store chain is rolling out a Digital Guest Experience (DGE) program across 8,500 stores in the U.S. and Canada. Everyday, 7-Eleven connects with tens of millions of customers through point-of-sale terminals, web sites, and mobile apps. Promoting customer loyalty, targeting promotions, downloading digital coupons, and accepting digital payments are all part of the roadmap for a comprehensive and rewarding customer experience. And what about the time required for deploying successive versions of this mission-critical solution? Ron Clanton, 7-Eleven's DGE Program Manager, Information Technology reported at Oracle Open World, " We are now able to provision new environments in less than 10 minutes. This includes the complete SOA Suite on Exalogic, and Enterprise Manager managing both the SOA Suite, Exalogic, and our Exadata databases ." OCS understands the complex nature of innovative solutions and has processes and expertise to help clients like 7-Eleven rapidly develop technology that enhances the customer experience with little more than the click of a button. OCS understood that the 7-Eleven roadmap required careful planning, agile development, and a cloud-capable environment to move fast and perform at enterprise scale. Business Agility Today’s business-savvy technology leaders face competing priorities as they confront the digital disruptions of the mobile revolution and next-generation enterprise applications. To support an innovation agenda, IT is required to balance competing priorities between development and operations groups. Standardization and consolidation of computing resources are the keys to success. With our operational and technical expertise promoting business agility, Oracle Consulting's deep Middleware as a Service experience can make a significant difference to our clients by empowering enterprise IT organizations with the computing environment they seek to keep up with the pace of change that digitally driven business units expect. Depending on the needs of the organization, this environment runs within a private, public, or hybrid cloud infrastructure. Through on-demand access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources, IT delivers the standard tools and methods for developing, integrating, deploying, and scaling next-generation applications. Gold profiles of predefined configurations eliminate the version mismatches among databases, application servers, and SOA suite components, delivered both by Oracle and other enterprise ISVs. These computing resources are well defined in business terms, enabling users to select what they need from a service catalog. Striking the Balance between Development and Operations As a result, development groups have the flexibility to choose among a menu of available services with descriptions of standard business functions, service level guarantees, and costs. Faced with the consumerization of enterprise IT, they can deliver the innovative customer experiences that seamlessly integrate with underlying enterprise applications and services. This cloud-powered development and testing environment accelerates release cycles to ensure agile development and rapid deployments. At the same time, the operations group is relying on certified stacks and frameworks, tuned to predefined environments and patterns. Operators can maintain a high level of security, and continue best practices for applications/systems monitoring and management. Moreover, faced with the challenges of delivering on service level agreements (SLAs) with the business units, operators can ensure performance, scalability, and reliability of the infrastructure. The elasticity of a cloud-computing environment – the ability to rapidly add virtual machines and storage in response to computing demands -- makes a difference for hardware utilization and efficiency. Contending with Continuous Change What does it take to succeed on the promise of the cloud? As the engine for innovation and productivity in the digital age, IT must face not only the technical transformations but also the organizational challenges of the cloud. Standardizing key technologies, resources, and services through cloud computing is only one part of the cloud journey. Managing relationships among multiple department and projects over time – developing the management, governance, and monitoring capabilities within IT – is an often unmentioned but all too important second part. In fact, IT must have the organizational agility to contend with continuous change. This is where a skilled consulting services partner can play a pivotal role as a trusted advisor in the successful adoption of cloud solutions. With a lifecycle services approach to delivering innovative business solutions, Oracle Consulting Services has expertise and a portfolio of services to help enterprise customers succeed on their cloud journeys as well as other converging mega trends .

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• OpenGL Polygon Stipple Not Working On Different Machine

  - by FranticPedantic

  I have a situation where I am trying to draw a semi-transparent rectangle over a background that is not using openGL and so I can not use blending. I decided to use polygon stippling for a 'screen door transparency' effect as recommended by some. It works fine on my machine and some others, but on some machines with slightly old Intel graphics cards it's failing to render the rectangle at all. If I turn off polygon stipple, it renders fine (but without the stipple). I have compared many of the state variables that I thought might affect it (see code) between machines and they are all the same, and I get no errors. static const GLubyte stipplePatternChkr[128]; //definition omitted for clarity //but works on my machine // stipple the box glPolygonMode(GL_FRONT_AND_BACK, GL_FILL); glColor4ubv(Color(COLORREF_PADGRAY)); glEnable(GL_POLYGON_STIPPLE); glPolygonStipple(stipplePatternChkr); CRect rcStipple(dim); rcStipple.DeflateRect(padding - 1, padding - 1); glBegin(GL_QUADS); glVertex2i(rcStipple.left, rcStipple.bottom); glVertex2i(rcStipple.right, rcStipple.bottom); glVertex2i(rcStipple.right, rcStipple.top); glVertex2i(rcStipple.left, rcStipple.top); glEnd(); glDisable(GL_POLYGON_STIPPLE); int err = glGetError(); if (err != GL_NO_ERROR) { TRACE("glError(%s: %s)\n", s, gluErrorString(err)); } float x; glGetFloatv(GL_UNPACK_ALIGNMENT, &x); TRACE("unpack alignment %f\n", x); glGetFloatv(GL_UNPACK_IMAGE_HEIGHT, &x); TRACE("unpack height %f\n", x); glGetFloatv(GL_UNPACK_LSB_FIRST, &x); TRACE("unpack lsb %f\n", x); glGetFloatv(GL_UNPACK_ROW_LENGTH, &x); TRACE("unpack length %f\n", x); glGetFloatv(GL_UNPACK_SKIP_PIXELS, &x); TRACE("upnack skip %f\n", x); glGetFloatv(GL_UNPACK_SWAP_BYTES, &x); TRACE("upnack swap %f\n", x);

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• On Mac, two jpg's whose color should match do not

  - by Tim

  So I'm designing a myspace page and I have two images, one is a repeating bg image, and another is an image which loads on a layer above it, which acts as a header/masthead. For some reason, on Macs only, and only in the browser (tested in safari and ff), the masthead renders slightly darker than the repeating bg image, creating this color inconsistency. The block that extends up behind the album artwork is a solid box made with css which blocks some of myspace's standard content. It actually renders as the proper color, blending in well with the bottom portion of this image, which is the repeating part of the background, but becomes noticeable as it extends up, over the masthead, which is darker than it should be. Both images where created in GIMP and saved as jpg's using, as far as i can tell, the same settings. Here's the pic of what is going on: Screenshot - Click Me!!! Here is the code which controls this part of the design. <div class="masthead"><span></span></div> .masthead {width: 1600px; height: 1940px; background-image:url(http://www.sourtricks.com/myspace/bdww/myspace_bg09.jpg); position: absolute; margin-left: -800px; left: 50%; top: 0px; z-index: -1; overflow-x: hidden;} body.bodyContent{ margin: 0 !important; padding: 0 !important; background-color: 000000 !important; font-size: 1px; background-image: url(http://www.sourtricks.com/myspace/bdww/bg_repeat05.jpg); background-position: center bottom; _background-position: right bottom; background-attachment: scroll; background-repeat: repeat-y; z-index: -2; overflow-x: hidden; font-family: arial, sans-serif !important; } Any help would be much, much, much appreciated. Thanks for your time, Tim

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• Any thoughts on how to create a true 'punch-out' area in a Sprite?

  - by rhtx

  I've been working on this for awhile, now. You might also call it a 'reverse mask', or an 'inverse mask'. Basically, I'm creating a view window within a display object. I need to allow objects on the stage that are under the window to be able to interact with the mouse. This is similar to a WPF question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/740994/use-wpf-object-to-punch-hole-in-another, which has a much shorter write-up. I've got a Class called PunchOutShield, which creates a Sprite that covers the stage (or over some desired area). The Sprite's Graphics object is filled using the color and transparency of Flex's modal screen. The result is a screen that looks like the screen which appears behind a modal PopUp. PunchOutShield has a method called punch, which takes two arguments - the first is a Shape object, which defines the shape of the punch-through area; the second is a Point object, which indicates where to position the punch-through area. It took some experimenting, but I found that I can successfully create a punch-out area (i.e. - the modal screen does not display within the bounds of the given Shape). To do this, I set cacheAsBitmap to true on the Sprite that is used to create the modal screen, and also on the Shape object, which is added to the modal screen Sprite's displayList. If I set the blend mode of the Shape to ERASE, a completely transparent area is created in the modal screen. So far, great. The problem is that Shape does not subclass InteractiveObject, so there is no way to set mouseEnabled = false on it. And so, it prevents interaction between the mouse and any objects that are visible through the punch-out area. On top of that, InteractiveObject isn't available to look at, so I can't see if there is a way to borrow what it's doing to provide the mouseEnabled functionality and apply it to a subclass of Shape. I've tried using another Sprite object, rather than a Shape object, but the blending doesn't work out correctly. I'm not sure why there is a difference, but the Shape object seems to somehow combine with the parenting Sprite, allowing the ERASE blendMode to effect the desired punch-out visual appearance. It wouldn't be the end of the world if I had to draw up the screen with a series of rectangles so that the punch-out area was just simply not drawn, but that approach won't work if the punch-out area is complex. Or round. Any thoughts on this approach, or on an alternative approach?

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• Updating Textures on Runtime in OpenSceneGraph

  - by Abhishek Bansal

  I am working on a project in which i am required to capture frames from external device video and render them on openSceneGraph Node. I am also using GLSL shaders. But i dont know how to update textures on runtime. For other uniforms we need to make callbacks but do we also need to make callbacks for samplers in glsl and openSceneGraph ? My code looks like this. All i am getting right now is a black window. osg::ref_ptr<osg::Geometry> pictureQuad = osg::createTexturedQuadGeometry(osg::Vec3(0.0f,0.0f,0.0f), osg::Vec3(_deviceNameToImageFrameMap[deviceName].frame->s(),0.0f,0.0f), osg::Vec3(0.0f,0.0f,_deviceNameToImageFrameMap[deviceName].frame->t()), 0.0f, 1.0f,_deviceNameToImageFrameMap[deviceName].frame->s(), _deviceNameToImageFrameMap[deviceName].frame->t()); //creating texture and setting up parameters for video frame osg::ref_ptr<osg::TextureRectangle> myTex= new osg::TextureRectangle(_deviceNameToImageFrameMap[deviceName].frame.get()); myTex->setFilter(osg::Texture::MIN_FILTER,osg::Texture::LINEAR); myTex->setFilter(osg::Texture::MAG_FILTER,osg::Texture::LINEAR); myTex->setWrap(osg::Texture::WRAP_S, osg::Texture::CLAMP_TO_EDGE); myTex->setWrap(osg::Texture::WRAP_T, osg::Texture::CLAMP_TO_EDGE); _videoSourceNameToNodeMap[sourceName].geode = new osg::Geode(); _videoSourceNameToNodeMap[sourceName].geode->setDataVariance(osg::Object::DYNAMIC); _videoSourceNameToNodeMap[sourceName].geode->addDrawable(pictureQuad.get()); //apply texture to node _videoSourceNameToNodeMap[sourceName].geode->getOrCreateStateSet()->setTextureAttributeAndModes(0, myTex.get(), osg::StateAttribute::ON); _videoSourceNameToNodeMap[sourceName].geode->getOrCreateStateSet()->setMode(GL_DEPTH_TEST, osg::StateAttribute::OFF); _videoSourceNameToNodeMap[sourceName].geode->setDataVariance(osg::Object::DYNAMIC); //Set uniform sampler osg::Uniform* srcFrame = new osg::Uniform( osg::Uniform::SAMPLER_2D, "srcFrame" ); srcFrame->set(0); //Set Uniform Alpha osg::Uniform* alpha = new osg::Uniform( osg::Uniform::FLOAT, "alpha" ); alpha->set(.5f); alpha->setUpdateCallback(new ExampleCallback()); //Enable blending _videoSourceNameToNodeMap[sourceName].geode->getOrCreateStateSet()->setMode( GL_BLEND, osg::StateAttribute::ON); //Adding blend function to node osg::BlendFunc *bf = new osg::BlendFunc(); bf->setFunction(GL_SRC_ALPHA, GL_ONE_MINUS_SRC_ALPHA); _videoSourceNameToNodeMap[sourceName].geode->getOrCreateStateSet()->setAttributeAndModes(bf); //apply shader to quad _videoSourceNameToNodeMap[sourceName].geode->getOrCreateStateSet()->setAttributeAndModes(program, osg::StateAttribute::ON); //add Uniform to shader _videoSourceNameToNodeMap[sourceName].geode->getOrCreateStateSet()->addUniform( srcFrame ); _videoSourceNameToNodeMap[sourceName].geode->getOrCreateStateSet()->addUniform( alpha );

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• Why Swift is 100 times slower than C in this image processing test?

  - by xiaobai

  Like many other developers I have been very excited at the new Swift language from Apple. Apple has boasted its speed is faster than Objective C and can be used to write operating system. And from what I learned so far, it's a very type-safe language and able to have precisely control over the exact data type (like integer length). So it does look like having good potential handling performance critical tasks, like image processing, right? That's what I thought before I carried out a quick test. The result really surprised me. Here is a much simplified image alpha blending code snippet in C: test.c: #include <stdio.h> #include <stdint.h> #include <string.h> uint8_t pixels[640*480]; uint8_t alpha[640*480]; uint8_t blended[640*480]; void blend(uint8_t* px, uint8_t* al, uint8_t* result, int size) { for(int i=0; i<size; i++) { result[i] = (uint8_t)(((uint16_t)px[i]) *al[i] /255); } } int main(void) { memset(pixels, 128, 640*480); memset(alpha, 128, 640*480); memset(blended, 255, 640*480); // Test 10 frames for(int i=0; i<10; i++) { blend(pixels, alpha, blended, 640*480); } return 0; } I compiled it on my Macbook Air 2011 with the following command: gcc -O3 test.c -o test The 10 frame processing time is about 0.01s. In other words, it takes the C code 1ms to process one frame: $ time ./test real 0m0.010s user 0m0.006s sys 0m0.003s Then I have a Swift version of the same code: test.swift: let pixels = UInt8[](count: 640*480, repeatedValue: 128) let alpha = UInt8[](count: 640*480, repeatedValue: 128) let blended = UInt8[](count: 640*480, repeatedValue: 255) func blend(px: UInt8[], al: UInt8[], result: UInt8[], size: Int) { for(var i=0; i<size; i++) { var b = (UInt16)(px[i]) * (UInt16)(al[i]) result[i] = (UInt8)(b/255) } } for i in 0..10 { blend(pixels, alpha, blended, 640*480) } The build command line is: xcrun swift -O3 test.swift -o test Here I use the same O3 level optimization flag to make the comparison hopefully fair. However, the resulting speed is 100 time slower: $ time ./test real 0m1.172s user 0m1.146s sys 0m0.006s In other words, it takes Swift ~120ms to processing one frame which takes C just 1 ms. I also verified the memory initialization time in both test code are very small compared to the blend processing function time. What happened?

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• Guide to MySQL & NoSQL, Webinar Q&A

  - by Mat Keep

  0 0 1 959 5469 Homework 45 12 6416 14.0 Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA 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-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-ansi-language:EN-US;} Yesterday we ran a webinar discussing the demands of next generation web services and how blending the best of relational and NoSQL technologies enables developers and architects to deliver the agility, performance and availability needed to be successful. Attendees posted a number of great questions to the MySQL developers, serving to provide additional insights into areas like auto-sharding and cross-shard JOINs, replication, performance, client libraries, etc. So I thought it would be useful to post those below, for the benefit of those unable to attend the webinar. Before getting to the Q&A, there are a couple of other resources that maybe useful to those looking at NoSQL capabilities within MySQL: - On-Demand webinar (coming soon!) - Slides used during the webinar - Guide to MySQL and NoSQL whitepaper  - MySQL Cluster demo, including NoSQL interfaces, auto-sharing, high availability, etc.  So here is the Q&A from the event  Q. Where does MySQL Cluster fit in to the CAP theorem? A. MySQL Cluster is flexible. A single Cluster will prefer consistency over availability in the presence of network partitions. A pair of Clusters can be configured to prefer availability over consistency. A full explanation can be found on the MySQL Cluster & CAP Theorem blog post.  Q. Can you configure the number of replicas? (the slide used a replication factor of 1) Yes. A cluster is configured by an .ini file. The option NoOfReplicas sets the number of originals and replicas: 1 = no data redundancy, 2 = one copy etc. Usually there's no benefit in setting it >2. Q. Interestingly most (if not all) of the NoSQL databases recommend having 3 copies of data (the replication factor).    Yes, with configurable quorum based Reads and writes. MySQL Cluster does not need a quorum of replicas online to provide service. Systems that require a quorum need > 2 replicas to be able to tolerate a single failure. Additionally, many NoSQL systems take liberal inspiration from the original GFS paper which described a 3 replica configuration. MySQL Cluster avoids the need for a quorum by using a lightweight arbitrator. You can configure more than 2 replicas, but this is a tradeoff between incrementally improved availability, and linearly increased cost. Q. Can you have cross node group JOINS? Wouldn't that run into the risk of flooding the network? MySQL Cluster 7.2 supports cross nodegroup joins. A full cross-join can require a large amount of data transfer, which may bottleneck on network bandwidth. However, for more selective joins, typically seen with OLTP and light analytic applications, cross node-group joins give a great performance boost and network bandwidth saving over having the MySQL Server perform the join. Q. Are the details of the benchmark available anywhere? According to my calculations it results in approx. 350k ops/sec per processor which is the largest number I've seen lately The details are linked from Mikael Ronstrom's blog The benchmark uses a benchmarking tool we call flexAsynch which runs parallel asynchronous transactions. It involved 100 byte reads, of 25 columns each. Regarding the per-processor ops/s, MySQL Cluster is particularly efficient in terms of throughput/node. It uses lock-free minimal copy message passing internally, and maximizes ID cache reuse. Note also that these are in-memory tables, there is no need to read anything from disk. Q. Is access control (like table) planned to be supported for NoSQL access mode? Currently we have not seen much need for full SQL-like access control (which has always been overkill for web apps and telco apps). So we have no plans, though especially with memcached it is certainly possible to turn-on connection-level access control. But specifically table level controls are not planned. Q. How is the performance of memcached APi with MySQL against memcached+MySQL or any other Object Cache like Ecache with MySQL DB? With the memcache API we generally see a memcached response in less than 1 ms. and a small cluster with one memcached server can handle tens of thousands of operations per second. Q. Can .NET can access MemcachedAPI? Yes, just use a .Net memcache client such as the enyim or BeIT memcache libraries. Q. Is the row level locking applicable when you update a column through memcached API? An update that comes through memcached uses a row lock and then releases it immediately. Memcached operations like "INCREMENT" are actually pushed down to the data nodes. In most cases the locks are not even held long enough for a network round trip. Q. Has anyone published an example using something like PHP? I am assuming that you just use the PHP memcached extension to hook into the memcached API. Is that correct? Not that I'm aware of but absolutely you can use it with php or any of the other drivers Q. For beginner we need more examples. Take a look here for a fully worked example Q. Can I access MySQL using Cobol (Open Cobol) or C and if so where can I find the coding libraries etc? A. There is a cobol implementation that works well with MySQL, but I do not think it is Open Cobol. Also there is a MySQL C client library that is a standard part of every mysql distribution Q. Is there a place to go to find help when testing and/implementing the NoSQL access? If using Cluster then you can use the [email protected] alias or post on the MySQL Cluster forum Q. Are there any white papers on this?  Yes - there is more detail in the MySQL Guide to NoSQL whitepaper If you have further questions, please don’t hesitate to use the comments below!

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• Looking Back at MIX10

  - by WeigeltRo

  It’s the sad truth of my life that even though I’m fascinated by airplanes and flight in general since my childhood days, my body doesn’t like flying. Even the ridiculously short flights inside Germany are taking their toll on me each time. Now combine this with sitting in the cramped space of economy class for many hours on a transatlantic flight from Germany to Las Vegas and back, and factor in some heavy dose of jet lag (especially on my way eastwards), and you get an idea why after coming back home I had this question on my mind: Was it really worth it to attend MIX10? This of course is a question that will also be asked by my boss at Comma Soft (for other reasons, obviously), who decided to send me and my colleague Jens Schaller, to the MIX10 conference. (A note to my German readers: An dieser Stelle der Hinweis, dass Comma Soft noch Silverlight-Entwickler und/oder UI-Designer für den Standort Bonn sucht – aussagekräftige Bewerbungen bitte an [email protected]) Too keep things short: My answer is yes. Before I’ll go into detail, let me ask the heretical questions whether tech conferences in general still make sense. There was a time, where actually being at a tech conference gave you a head-start in regard to learning about new technologies. Nowadays this is no longer true, where every bit of information and every detail is immediately twittered, blogged and whatevered to death. In the case of MIX10 you even can download the video-taped sessions shortly after. So: Does visiting a conference still make sense? It depends on what you expect from a conference. It should be clear to everybody that you’ll neither get exclusive information, nor receive training in a small group. What a conference does offer that sitting in front of your computer does not can be summarized as follows: Focus Being away from work and home will help you to focus on the presented information. Of course there are always the poor guys who are haunted by their work (with mails and short text messages reporting the latest showstopper problem), but in general being out of your office makes a huge difference. Inspiration With the focus comes the emotional involvement. I find it much easier to absorb information if I feel that certain vibe when sitting in a session. This still means that I have put work into reviewing the information later, but it’s a better starting point. And all the impressions collected at a (good) conference combined lead to a higher motivation – be it by the buzz (“this is gonna be sooo cool!”) or by the fear to fall behind (“man, we’ll have work on this, or else…”). People At a conference it’s pretty easy to get into contact with other people during breakfast, lunch and other breaks. This is a good opportunity to get a feel for what other development teams are doing (on a very general level of course, nobody will tell you about their secret formula) and what they are thinking about specific technologies. So MIX10 did offer focus, inspiration and people, but that would have meant nothing without valuable content. When I (being a frontend developer with a strong interest in UI/UX) planned my visit to MIX10, I made the decision to focus on the "soft" topics of design, interaction and user experience. I figured that I would be bombarded with all the technical details about Silverlight 4 anyway in the weeks and months to come. Actually, I would have liked to catch a few technical sessions, but the agenda wasn’t exactly in favor of people interested in any kind of Silverlight and UI/UX/Design topics. That’s one of my few complaints about the conference – I would have liked one more day and/or more sessions per day. Overall, the quality of the workshops and sessions was pretty high. In fact, looking back at my collection of conferences I’ve visited in the past I’d say that MIX10 ranks somewhere near the top spot. Here’s an overview of the workshops/sessions I attended (I’ll leave out the keynotes): Day 0 (Workshops on Sunday) Design Fundamentals for Developers Robby Ingebretsen is the man! Great workshop in three parts with the perfect mix of examples, well-structured definition of terminology and the right dose of humor. Robby was part of the WPF team before founding his own company so he not only has a strong interest in design (and the skillz!) but also the technical background.   Design Tools and Techniques Originally announced to be held by Arturo Toledo, the Rosso brothers from ArcheType filled in for the first two parts, and Corrina Black had a pretty general part about the Windows Phone UI. The first two thirds were a mixed bag; the two guys definitely knew what they were talking about, and the demos were great, but the talk lacked the preparation and polish of a truly great presentation. Corrina was not allowed to go into too much detail before the keynote on Monday, but the session was still very interesting as it showed how much thought went into the Windows Phone UI (and there’s always a lot to learn when people talk about their thought process). Day 1 (Monday) Designing Rich Experiences for Data-Centric Applications I wonder whether there was ever a test-run for this session, but what Ken Azuma and Yoshihiro Saito delivered in the first 15 minutes of a 30-minutes-session made me walk out. A commercial for a product (just great: a video showing a SharePoint plug-in in an all-Japanese UI) combined with the most generic blah blah one could imagine. EPIC FAIL.   Great User Experiences: Seamlessly Blending Technology & Design I switched to this session from the one above but I guess I missed the interesting part – what I did catch was what looked like a “look at the cool stuff we did” without being helpful. Or maybe I was just in a bad mood after the other session.   The Art, Technology and Science of Reading This talk by Kevin Larson was very interesting, but was more a presentation of what Microsoft is doing in research (pretty impressive) and in the end lacked a bit the helpful advice one could have hoped for.   10 Ways to Attack a Design Problem and Come Out Winning Robby Ingebretsen again, and again a great mix of theory and practice. The clean and simple, yet effective, UI of the reader app resulted in a simultaneous “wow” of Jens and me. If you’d watch only one session video, this should be it. Microsoft has to bring Robby back next year! Day 2 (Tuesday) Touch in Public: Multi-touch Interaction Design for Kiosks & Architectural Experiences Very interesting session by Jason Brush, a great inspiration with many details to look out for in the examples. Exactly what I was hoping for – and then some!   Designing Bing: Heart and Science How hard can it be to design the UI for a search engine? An input field and a list of results, that should be it, right? Well, not so fast! The talk by Paul Ray showed the many iterations to finally get it right (up to the choice of a specific blue for the links). And yes, I want an eye-tracking device to play around with!   The Elephant in the Room When Nishant Kothary presented a long list of what his session was not about, I told to myself (not having the description text present) “Am I in the wrong talk? Should I leave?”. Boy, was I wrong. A great talk about human factors in the process of designing stuff.   An Hour with Bill Buxton Having seen Bill Buxton’s presentation in the keynote, I just had to see this man again – even though I didn’t know what to expect. Being more or less unplanned and intended to be more of a conversation, the session didn’t provide a wealth of immediately useful information. Nevertheless Bill Buxton was impressive with his huge knowledge of seemingly everything. But this could/should have been a session some when in the evening and not in parallel to at least two other interesting talks. Day 3 (Wednesday) Design the Ordinary, Like the Fixie This session by DL Byron and Kevin Tamura started really well and brought across the message to keep things simple. But towards the end the talk lost some of its steam. And, as a member of the audience pointed out, they kind of ignored their own advice when they used a fancy presentation software other then PowerPoint that sometimes got in the way of showing things.   Developing Natural User Interfaces Speaking of alternative presentation software, Joshua Blake definitely had the most remarkable alternative to PowerPoint, a self-written program called NaturalShow that was controlled using multi-touch on a touch screen. Not a PowerPoint-killer, but impressive nevertheless. The (excellent) talk itself was kind of eye-opening in regard to what “multi-touch support” on various platforms (WPF, Silverlight, Windows Phone) actually means.   Treat your Content Right The talk by Tiffani Jones Brown wasn’t even on my planned schedule, but somehow I ended up in that session – and it was great. And even for people who don’t necessarily have to write content for websites, some points made by Tiffani are valid in many places, notably wherever you put texts with more than a single word into your UI. Creating Effective Info Viz in Microsoft Silverlight The last session of MIX10 I attended was kind of disappointing. At first things were very promising, with Matthias Shapiro giving a brief but well-structured introduction to info graphics and interactive visualizations. Then the live-coding began and while the result was interesting, too much time was spend on wrestling to get the code working. Ending earlier than planned, the talk was a bit light on actual content, but at least it included a nice list of resources. Conclusion It could be felt all across MIX10, UIs will take a huge leap forward; in fact, there are enough examples that have already. People who both have the technical know-how and at least a basic understanding of design (“literacy” as Bill Buxton called it) are in high demand. The concept of the MIX conference and initiatives like design.toolbox shows that Microsoft understands very well that frontend developers have to acquire new knowledge besides knowing how to hack code and putting buttons on a form. There are extremely exciting times before us, with lots of opportunity for those who are eager to develop their skills, that is for sure.

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