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• XNA Moddable Game - Architecture Design and Reflection

  - by David K

  I've decided to embark on an XNA moddable game project of a simple rogue style. For all purposes of this question, I'm going to not be using a scripting engine, but rather allow modders to directly compile assemblies that are loaded by the game at run time. I know about the security problems this may raise. So in order to expose the moddable content, I have gone about creating a generic project in XNA called MyModel. This contains a number of interfaces that all inherit from IPlugin, such as IGameSystem, IRenderingSystem, IHud, IInputSystem etc. Then I've created another project called MyRogueModel. This references MyModel project, and holds interfaces such as IMonster, IPlayer, IDungeonGenerator, IInventorySystem. More rogue specific interfaces, but again, all interfaces in this project inherit from IPlugin. Then finally, I've created another project called MyRogueGame, that references both MyModel and MyRogueModel projects. This project will be the game that you run and play. Here I have put the actual implementation of the Monster, DungeonGenerator, InputSystem and RenderingSystem classes. This project will also scan the mods directory during run time and load any IPlugins it finds using reflection and override anything it finds from the default. For example if it finds a new implementation of the DungeonGenerator it will use that one instead. Now my question is, in order to get this far, I have effectively 2 projects that contain nothing but interfaces... which seems a little... strange ? For people to create mods for the game, I would give them both the MyModel and MyRogueModel assemblies in which they would reference. I'm not sure whether this is the right way to do it, but my reasoning goes as follows : If I write 1 input system, I can use it in any game I write. If I create 3 rogue like games, and a modder writes 1 rendering system, that modder could use the rendering system for all 3 games, because it all comes from the MyModel project. I come from a more web based C# role, so having empty interface projects doesn't seem wrong, its just something I haven't done before. Before I embark on something that might be crazy, I'd just like to know whether this is a foolish idea and whether there's a better (or established) design principle I should be following ?

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• How can I solve the same problems a CB-architecture is trying to solve without using hacks? [on hold]

  - by Jefffrey

  A component based system's goal is to solve the problems that derives from inheritance: for example the fact that some parts of the code (that are called components) are reused by very different classes that, hypothetically, would lie in a very different branch of the inheritance tree. That's a very nice concept, but I've found out that CBS is often hard to accomplish without using ugly hacks. Implementations of this system are often far from clean. But I don't want to discuss this any further. My question is: how can I solve the same problems a CBS try to solve with a very clean interface? (possibly with examples, there are a lot of abstract talks about the "perfect" design already). Here's an example I was going for before realizing I was just reinventing inheritance again: class Human { public: Position position; Movement movement; Sprite sprite; // other human specific components }; class Zombie { Position position; Movement movement; Sprite sprite; // other zombie specific components }; After writing that I realized I needed an interface, otherwise I would have needed N containers for N different types of objects (or to use boost::variant to gather them all together). So I've thought of polymorphism (move what systems do in a CBS design into class specific functions): class Entity { public: virtual void on_event(Event) {} // not pure virtual on purpose virtual void on_update(World) {} virtual void on_draw(Window) {} }; class Human { private: Position position; Movement movement; Sprite sprite; public: virtual void on_event(Event) { ... } virtual void on_update(World) { ... } virtual void on_draw(Window) { ... } }; class Zombie { private: Position position; Movement movement; Sprite sprite; public: virtual void on_event(Event) { ... } virtual void on_update(World) { ... } virtual void on_draw(Window) { ... } }; Which was nice, except for the fact that now the outside world would not even be able to know where a Human is positioned (it does not have access to its position member). That would be useful to track the player position for collision detection or if on_update the Zombie would want to track down its nearest human to move towards him. So I added const Position& get_position() const; to both the Zombie and Human classes. And then I realized that both functionality were shared, so it should have gone to the common base class: Entity. Do you notice anything? Yes, with that methodology I would have a god Entity class full of common functionality (which is the thing I was trying to avoid in the first place).

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• Efficient inline templates and C++

  - by Darryl Gove

  I've talked before about calling inline templates from C++, I've also talked about calling inline templates efficiently. This time I want to talk about efficiently calling inline templates from C++. The obvious starting point is that I need to declare the inline templates as being extern "C": extern "C" { int mytemplate(int); } This enables us to call it, but the call may not be very efficient because the compiler will treat it as a function call, and may produce suboptimal code based on that premise. So we need to add the no_side_effect pragma: extern "C" { int mytemplate(int); #pragma no_side_effect(mytemplate) } However, this may still not produce optimal code. We've discussed how the no_side_effect pragma cannot be combined with exceptions, well we know that the code cannot produce exceptions, but the compiler doesn't know that. If we tell the compiler that information it may be able to produce even better code. We can do this by adding the "throw()" keyword to the template declaration: extern "C" { int mytemplate(int) throw(); #pragma no_side_effect(mytemplate) } The following is an example of how these changes might improve performance. We can take our previous example code and migrate it to C++, adding the use of a try...catch construct: #include <iostream extern "C" { int lzd(int); #pragma no_side_effect(lzd) } int a; int c=0; class myclass { int routine(); }; int myclass::routine() { try { for(a=0; a<1000; a++) { c=lzd(c); } } catch(...) { std::cout << "Something happened" << std::endl; } return 0; } Compiling this produces a slightly suboptimal code sequence in the hot loop: $ CC -O -xtarget=T4 -S t.cpp t.il ... /* 0x0014 23 */ lzd %o0,%o0 /* 0x0018 21 */ add %l6,1,%l6 /* 0x001c */ cmp %l6,1000 /* 0x0020 */ bl,pt %icc,.L77000033 /* 0x0024 23 */ st %o0,[%l7] There's a store in the delay slot of the branch, so we're repeatedly storing data back to memory. If we change the function declaration to include "throw()", we get better code: $ CC -O -xtarget=T4 -S t.cpp t.il ... /* 0x0014 21 */ add %i1,1,%i1 /* 0x0018 23 */ lzd %o0,%o0 /* 0x001c 21 */ cmp %i1,999 /* 0x0020 */ ble,pt %icc,.L77000019 /* 0x0024 */ nop The store has gone, but the code is still suboptimal - there's a nop in the delay slot rather than useful work. However, it's good enough for this example. The point I'm making is that the compiler produces the better code with both the "throw()" and the no side effect pragma.

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• ArchBeat Link-o-Rama for 2012-08-29

  - by Bob Rhubart

  ORCLville: OOW 2012 - Crystal BallOracle ACE Director Floyd Teter cooks up some tongue-in-cheek predictions for news and announcements that might come out of Oracle OpenWorld 2012. What's your prediction? Oracle Optimized Solutions at Oracle OpenWorld 2012 | Oracle Hardware Hardware matters, too! The people behind the Oracle Hardware blog have put together a list of Oracle Openworld 2012 sessions focused Oracle Optimized Solutions, "designed, pre-tested, tuned and fully documented architectures for optimal performance and availability." Just plug the session ID numbers into Schedule Builder and you're good to go. AIX Checklist for stable OBIEE deployment | Dick Dunbar "OBIEE is a complicated system with many moving parts and connection points," according to Oracle Business Inteligence escalation engineer Dick Dunbar. "The purpose of this article is to provide a checklist to discuss OBIEE deployment with your systems administrators." Demo for OPN: Coherence Management with EM Cloud Control 12c Oracle Partner Network members can check out a new Coherence Management demo that showcases some of the key capabilities of Management Pack for Oracle Coherence and JVM Diagnostics. "The demo flow showcases the key enhancements made in Enterprise Manager 12c release which includes new customizable performance summary, cache data management and configuration management," according to the WebLogic Partner Community EMEA blog. The Pragmatic Architect: To Boldly Go Where No One Has Gone Before | Frank Buschmann "Many architects have technical knowledge that's both impressive and sound, which is indeed an inevitable basis for design success," says Frank Buschmann. "Yet, a lot of software projects fail or suffer due to severe challenges in their architecture. The key to mastery is how architects approach design, what they value, and where they focus their attention and work." As retail dies, whom will be the winners? | Peter Evans-Greenwood "The problem for many retailers is that how consumers shop has changed but the the retailers haven't adapted, " says Peter Evans-Greenwood. "Their sole virtue was to be the last step in a supply chain delivering somebody else's products to the consumer. However, being the last step in the supply chain is no longer a virtue when consumers skip across channels and can reach around the globe, no longer dependant on or limited to what they can find locally." Thought for the Day "Brains require stimulation. If you're locked into a pattern of work, work, and more work, your brain soon habituates - the same way that it lets you stop hearing a clock ticking. So, if you want to be more effective at work, you must, paradoxically, be less single-minded in your devotion to work. Anything you do—anything—that stimulates new segments of your brain will make you a more effective programmer or analyst. I promise, with a money-back guarantee." — Gerald M. Weinberg Source: SoftwareQuotes.com

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• Simple collision detection in Unity 2D

  - by N1ghtshade3

  I realise other posts exist with this topic yet none have gone into enough detail for me. I am attempting to create a 2D game in Unity using C# as my scripting language. Basically I have two objects, player and bomb. Both were created simply by dragging the respective PNG to the stage. I have set up touch controls to move player left and right; gravity of any kind is not needed as I only require it to move x units when I tap either the left or right side of the screen. This movement is stored in a script called playerController.cs and works just fine. I also have a variable health = 3 for player, which is stored in healthScript.cs. I am now at a point where I am stuck. I would like it so that when player collides with bomb, health decreases by one and the bomb object is destroyed. So what I tried doing is using a new script called playerPhysics.cs, I added the following: void OnCollisionEnter2D(Collision2D coll){ if(coll.gameObject.name=="bomb") GameObject.Destroy("bomb"); healthScript.health -= 1; } While I'm fairly sure I don't know the proper way to reference a variable in another script and that's why the health didn't decrease when I collided, bomb never disappeared from the stage so I'm thinking there's also a problem with my collision. Initially, I had simply attached playerPhysics.cs to player. After searching around though, it appeared as though player also needed a rigidBody attached to it, so I did that. Still no luck. I tried using a circleCollider (player is a circle), using a rigidBody2D, and using all manner of colliders on one and/or both of the objects. If you could please explain what colliders (if any) should be attached to which objects and whether I need to change my script(s), that would be much more helpful than pointing me to one of the generic documentation examples I've already read. Also, if it would be simple to fix the health thing not working that would be an added bonus but not exactly the focus of this question. Bear in mind that this game is 2D; I'm not sure if that changes anything. Thanks!

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• No network connectivity (not wired or wireless) - RT5390

  - by Ben Udy

  I am starting to think I simply need to accept a small loss and sell my new ASUS K73E. Because I really don't enjoy computing when I have to deal with Windough$ and this windows 7 64 bit on my new ASUS is even worse than the old machines with XP. I have written to ASUS and they simply say "We don't support Linux" and while Ralink's website says they do support Linux I can't get anyone to tell me what model Ralink card might be in my machine. Is anyone out there who might be able to give me some useful advice???? Here is the answer to command lspci nn && lsusb && lsmod && rfkill list all: di,snd_seq snd 54244 16 snd_hda_codec_realtek,snd_hda_intel,snd_hda_codec,snd_hwdep,snd_pcm_oss,snd_mixer_oss,snd_pcm,snd_seq_oss,snd_rawmidi,snd_seq,snd_timer,snd_seq_device uvcvideo 57374 0 videodev 34361 1 uvcvideo v4l1_compat 13251 2 uvcvideo,videodev soundcore 6620 1 snd snd_page_alloc 7076 2 snd_hda_intel,snd_pcm psmouse 63677 0 serio_raw 3978 0 lp 7028 0 parport 32635 2 ppdev,lp fbcon 35102 71 tileblit 1999 1 fbcon font 7557 1 fbcon bitblit 4707 1 fbcon softcursor 1189 1 bitblit video 17375 0 output 1871 1 video vga16fb 11385 1 vgastate 8961 1 vga16fb ahci 32360 2 di,snd_seq snd 54244 16 snd_hda_codec_realtek,snd_hda_intel,snd_hda_codec,snd_hwdep,snd_pcm_oss,snd_mixer_oss,snd_pcm,snd_seq_oss,snd_rawmidi,snd_seq,snd_timer,snd_seq_device uvcvideo 57374 0 videodev 34361 1 uvcvideo v4l1_compat 13251 2 uvcvideo,videodev soundcore 6620 1 snd snd_page_alloc 7076 2 snd_hda_intel,snd_pcm psmouse 63677 0 serio_raw 3978 0 lp 7028 0 parport 32635 2 ppdev,lp fbcon 35102 71 tileblit 1999 1 fbcon font 7557 1 fbcon bitblit 4707 1 fbcon softcursor 1189 1 bitblit video 17375 0 output 1871 1 video vga16fb 11385 1 vgastate 8961 1 vga16fb ahci 32360 2 Edit #2 lspci 00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Device 0104 (rev 09) 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Device 0116 (rev 09) 00:16.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation Cougar Point HECI Controller #1 (rev 04) 00:1a.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation Cougar Point USB Enhanced Host Controller #2 (rev 05) 00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation Cougar Point High Definition Audio Controller (rev 05) 00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Cougar Point PCI Express Root Port 1 (rev b5) 00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Cougar Point PCI Express Root Port 2 (rev b5) 00:1c.5 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Cougar Point PCI Express Root Port 6 (rev b5) 00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation Cougar Point USB Enhanced Host Controller #1 (rev 05) 00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation Device 1c49 (rev 05) 00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation Cougar Point 6 port SATA AHCI Controller (rev 05) 00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation Cougar Point SMBus Controller (rev 05) 02:00.0 Network controller: RaLink Device 5390 03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Device 1083 (rev c0) lsusb Bus 002 Device 002: ID 8087:0024 Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 001 Device 003: ID 13d3:5710 IMC Networks Bus 001 Device 002: ID 8087:0024 Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Thanks for the suggestion because this gave me a model for Ralink RT5390. I have now gone to Ralink.com and downloaded (via Windows 7) the driver package (it is a bz2 file). I hope I can figure out how to install it. And FYI - I was not able to run su (not authorized?) and dmidecode didn't exist (probably needs to be downloaded BUT no internet yet in Ubuntu)

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• Reduce weight in healthy way - Day 2

  - by krnites

  My second day of reducing weight and it seems most of the blog are correct in saying that you can reduce weight if your calorie consumption is less than what you burn. In one day I have lost 1 lbs without doing anything. My current weight is 177.4 lbs. Yesterday I ate small portion of dinner that I used to eat that also around 7 PM. Normally I eat my dinner around 10 PM and withing 2 hour of eating I go for sleep, but yesterday I ate around 7 PM and went for sleep only after 12.On my second day I have eaten noodles and 3 eggs in breakfast and sesame chicken ( I love it) and fried rice in lunch, I still have not gone for running but had plan to go for running and then swimming. I hope it will at least burn the calories that I had taken. On some site it was written that a normal men body needs around 2000 Calorie a day. So if I am eating less than 2000 calorie ( noodles + 3 eggs = 400+200, rice + sesame chicken = 1300, total = 1900) and burning around 300 calorie, my total calorie intake will be 1600 which is less than what my body needs. So most probably by tomorrow I should come under 176 lb bracket.Apart from counting the calorie that I am taking in everyday and approx number of calorie that I am burning everyday, I had also starting tracking my physical activities on my mobile. I have got a beautiful Samsung Focus S Windows 7.5 mobile. And after browsing through the market I have downloaded couple of health Apps.1. 6 Week training - this has set of exercise and lets you choose the number of sets you want to do for all exercise. Its focus on your core muscles.2. Fast food Calories - This apps has all the fast food chain listed and give the calorie count of each of the food item available on there menu. Like for Burger King's French Fries Large (Salted) contains 500 Calorie.3. Gym Pocket Guide - Contains instructions for different kind of exercise and tells a right way of doing them.4.  RunSat - kind of GPS based application. Its mark the distance you have run, shows the path you have taken on a map, total calorie burnt, laps completed. I love this apps.5. Stop Watch I also have noticed that If I am running in GYM and have television in front of me where a movie or serial is going on which I like,  I normally didn't notice the time. Most of the time running on treadmill is very boring, but if some music video is playing or some kind of sitcom is going, I can run for  a hour or half.So on day 2 I have lost 1 lbs and had learnt that calorie intake should be less then calorie burnt for a given day.

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• It's Here! Visual Studio 2010 and ASP.NET 4.0 Ship

  Today Microsoft released Visual Studio 2010 and ASP.NET 4.0. I've been using the RC version of Visual Studio 2010 quite a bit for the past couple of months and have really grown to like it. It has a host of features and enhancements that improve developer productivity, from improved IntelliSense to better multiple monitor support. Plus there's something about the user experience that, to me, makes it feel better than Visual Studio 2008. I don't know if it's the new blue color motif or what, but the IDE seems more modern looking and more responsive to my mouse movements and other input. Anyway, if you've not yet downloaded Visual Studio 2010 and ASP.NET 4.0, why not? As with previous versions of Visual Studio there's a free Express Edition and VS2010 and ASP.NET 4.0 runs side-by-side with earlier versions of Visual Studio and ASP.NET. And with Visual Studio 2010's multi-targeting you can even use VS2010 as your development editor for ASP.NET 2.0 and ASP.NET 3.5 web applications. (Although be forewarned if you have multiple developers working on the application that the project files in VS2010 and earlier versions of Visual Studio differ.) This week's article on 4Guys explores my favorite new features of Visual Studio 2010. Here's an excerpt: The Visual Studio 2010 user experience is noticeably different than with previous versions. Some of the changes are cosmetic - gone is the decades-old red and orange color scheme, having been replaced with blues and purples - while others are more substantial. For instance, the Visual Studio 2010 shell was rewritten from the ground up to use Microsoft's Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). In addition to an updated user experience, Visual Studio introduces an array of new features designed to improve developer productivity. There are new tools for searching for files, types, and class members; it's now easier than ever to use IntelliSense; the Toolbox can be searched using the keyboard; and you can use a single editor - Visual Studio 2010 - to work on. This article explores some of the new features in Visual Studio 2010. It is not meant to be an exhaustive list, but rather highlights those features that I, as an ASP.NET developer, find most useful in my line of work. Read on to learn more! And, in closing, here are some helpful VS2010 and ASP.NET 4.0 links: One click installation for ASP.NET 4.0, Visual Web Developer 2010, .NET Framework 4.0, and ASP.NET MVC 2 Eight Quick Hit videos showing some of the cool new VS2010 features VS2010 and ASP.NET 4.0 Release Announcement with some great info/links from none other than Scott Guthrie Happy Programming!Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Advice for how to handle company pride

  - by user17971

  We have this "amazing" little product using the latest development methodologies, components with all the bells and whistles. I took over this product maybe 6 months ago and struggled with it from day one. Even though it is supposedly is state of the art because of all its amazing structure, using dependency injections, inversion of control from the unity framework, hibernation and is domain driven in a .net mvvm xaml application to make it streamlined and modular. I knew from the moment I saw the monolith that it was going to be an uphill struggle for me. A lot of little code-bits scattered all around in neatly organized paradigms. Debugging is difficult, tracing the code is difficult, making new code is difficult, although some modifications is surprisinly easy but it doesn't out weight the problems I have with the code by a long shot. When I took over the project I was told that the new management console was ready for delivery and all I had to do was compile it and drop it. This was the beginning of a uphill struggle, our customer didn't agree at all that this was the functionality they had asked for so I had to do modifications to the program to their specifications. Since the project pretty much has been overdue since I took over it it has always been important that we didn't add or change much to the original system. I could modify the existing bits. fast forward until today where I finally completed all their comments and issues with the program but now I think that the users has opened their eyes (even though they saw this program many times) that they will be going backwards with this new system, that it will be much worse than the tool they got today (for a long time due to the fact that I'm the only resource on the project, project manager, tester, developer, integration specialist etc) My problem is that I lost faith in this system quite early due to the nature of the program. Although I made many changes and improvements to the system I wholeheartedly sympathize with the poor users who are going to start using this system. Its not nearly doing all the things it should do. I had this conversation internally with my boss where I told him what I thought about it, that if I were the customer I wouldn't have spent money developing it. So what do I do now? The system in ready, on a staging system and nobody likes it, its too slow and boring and does maybe do 50% of what they need it to do. Despite how much energy and working around the clock I've done to this project: I won't mind scrapping the system but we've spent much money (well my salaries) developing it and my company wants us to be proud of everything we do and advocate it. How will I tackle the contractor when he asks for advice? Surely I can tell him, this is what we agreed upon based on your use case scenarios, and be done with it? How will I inform my boss about this progress? He knows what I feel about it but I always get the feeling he let my criticism pass him by as just hot air, gone tomorrow,.

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• What's Bringing SharePoint 2007 Server to a hault?

  - by juanlarios

  I've been having issues with my teste environment and I'm hoping someone has run into this problem and can point me in the right direction. I noticed: SharePoint Server Memory is through the roof at times and so is the CPU usage. Most of CPU usage is a sql proccess. Running out of disk space all the time. I looked in the Logs located in the 12 hive and sure enough I have 1G log files that are hard to open because of the size. The following are the 3 error messages that are flooding my SharePoint logs:   04/05/2010 16:02:36.99     OWSTIMER.EXE (0x0B94)                       0x0BA4    Windows SharePoint Services       Timer                             5uuf    Monitorable    The previous instance of the timer job 'Variations Propagate Page Job Definition', id '{F9A73EB4-90FE-4574-AD99-B4034056F915}' for service '{F89169F9-707B-4588-9ED0-E6D399FE5E3D}' is still running, so the current instance will be skipped.  Consider increasing the interval between jobs.    04/05/2010 15:59:51.51     OWSTIMER.EXE (0x0B94)                       0x0BA4    Windows SharePoint Services       Timer                             5uuf    Monitorable    The previous instance of the timer job 'Profile Synchronization', id '{A05E3439-8DCD-449A-9D9E-46D601CACAA2}' for service '{F89169F9-707B-4588-9ED0-E6D399FE5E3D}' is still running, so the current instance will be skipped.  Consider increasing the interval between jobs.     04/05/2010 15:56:25.53     OWSTIMER.EXE (0x0B94)                       0x0BA4    Windows SharePoint Services       Timer                             5uuf    Monitorable    The previous instance of the timer job 'Scheduled Unpublish', id '{6298F93F-388D-46B9-809E-CEDBB8659661}' for service '{F89169F9-707B-4588-9ED0-E6D399FE5E3D}' is still running, so the current instance will be skipped.  Consider increasing the interval between jobs.     04/05/2010 15:54:14.73     OWSTIMER.EXE (0x0B94)                       0x0BA4    Windows SharePoint Services       Timer                             5uuf    Monitorable    The previous instance of the timer job 'Config Refresh', id '{C42DA970-3DA3-4AA2-94E5-8499C5B80A3E}' for service '{7F6D2CBE-8071-4A30-B313-7C9989FC2D87}' is still running, so the current instance will be skipped.  Consider increasing the interval between jobs.       I'm googling around but haven't found much. I know one other person posted something about this back in 2008, but no answers were reached. I have already checked the databases to see if any of them have gone offline for whatever reason, but from SQL everything is fine. I recently re-created an SSP and deleted an old ssp. So I thought maybe that was causing it, and who knows? maybe that causes some of the problems or maybe all. I'm running configuration wizard and see if anything changes. Please if someone has had similar issues let me know.

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• Has test driven development (TDD) actually benefited a real world project?

  - by James

  I am not new to coding. I have been coding (seriously) for over 15 years now. I have always had some testing for my code. However, over the last few months I have been learning test driven design/development (TDD) using Ruby on Rails. So far, I'm not seeing the benefit. I see some benefit to writing tests for some things, but very few. And while I like the idea of writing the test first, I find I spend substantially more time trying to debug my tests to get them to say what I really mean than I do debugging actual code. This is probably because the test code is often substantially more complicated than the code it tests. I hope this is just inexperience with the available tools (RSpec in this case). I must say though, at this point, the level of frustration mixed with the disappointing lack of performance is beyond unacceptable. So far, the only value I'm seeing from TDD is a growing library of RSpec files that serve as templates for other projects/files. Which is not much more useful, maybe less useful, than the actual project code files. In reading the available literature, I notice that TDD seems to be a massive time sink up front, but pays off in the end. I'm just wondering, are there any real world examples? Does this massive frustration ever pay off in the real world? I really hope I did not miss this question somewhere else on here. I searched, but all the questions/answers are several years old at this point. It was a rare occasion when I found a developer who would say anything bad about TDD, which is why I have spent as much time on this as I have. However, I noticed that nobody seems to point to specific real-world examples. I did read one answer that said the guy debugging the code in 2011 would thank you for have a complete unit testing suite (I think that comment was made in 2008). So, I'm just wondering, after all these years, do we finally have any examples showing the payoff is real? Has anybody actually inherited or gone back to code that was designed/developed with TDD and has a complete set of unit tests and actually felt a payoff? Or did you find that you were spending so much time trying to figure out what the test was testing (and why it was important) that you just tossed out the whole mess and dug into the code?

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• SFML 2.0 Too Many Variables in Class Preventing Draw To Screen

  - by Josh

  This is a very strange phenomenon to me. I have a class definition for a game, but when I add another variable to the class, the draw method does not print everything to the screen. It will be easier understood showing the code and output. Code for good draw output: class board { protected: RectangleShape rect; int top, left; int i, j; int rowSelect, columnSelect; CircleShape circleArr[4][10]; CircleShape codeArr[4]; CircleShape keyArr[4][10]; //int pegPresent[4]; public: board(void); void draw(RenderWindow& Window); int mouseOver(RenderWindow& Window); void placePeg(RenderWindow& Window, int pegSelect); }; Screen: Code for missing draw: class board { protected: RectangleShape rect; int top, left; int i, j; int rowSelect, columnSelect; CircleShape circleArr[4][10]; CircleShape codeArr[4]; CircleShape keyArr[4][10]; int pegPresent[4]; public: board(void); void draw(RenderWindow& Window); int mouseOver(RenderWindow& Window); void placePeg(RenderWindow& Window, int pegSelect); }; Screen: As you can see, all I do is un-comment the protected array and most of the pegs are gone from the right hand side. I have checked and made sure that I didn't accidentally created a variable with that name already. I haven't used it anywhere. Why does it not draw the remaining pegs as it should? My only thought is that maybe I am declaring too many variables for the class, but that doesn't really make sense to me. Any thoughts and help is greatly appreciated.

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• Managing Regulated Content in WebCenter: USDM and Oracle Offer a New Part 11 Compliant Solution for Life Sciences

  - by Michael Snow

  Guest post today provided by Oracle partner, USDM  Regulated Content in WebCenterUSDM and Oracle offer a new Part 11 compliant solution for Life Sciences (White Paper) Life science customers now have the ability to take advantage of all of the benefits of Oracle’s WebCenter Content, a global leader in Enterprise Content Management.   For the past year, USDM has been developing best practice compliance solutions to meet regulated content management requirements for 21 CFR Part 11 in WebCenter Content. USDM has been an expert in ECM for life sciences since 1999 and in 2011, certified that WebCenter was a 21CFR Part 11 compliant content management platform (White Paper).  In addition, USDM has built Validation Accelerators Packs for WebCenter to enable life science organizations to quickly and cost effectively validate this world class solution.With the Part 11 certification, Oracle’s WebCenter now provides regulated life science organizations  the ability to manage REGULATORY content in WebCenter, as well as the ability to take advantage of ALL of the additional functionality of WebCenter, including  a complete, open, and integrated portfolio of portal, web experience management, content management and social networking technology.  Here are a few screen shot examples of Part 11 functionality included in the product: E-Sign, E-Sign Rendor, Meta Data History, Audit Trail Report, and Access Reporting. Gone are the days that life science companies have to spend millions of dollars a year to implement, maintain, and validate ECM systems that no longer meet the ever changing business and regulatory requirements.  Life science companies now have the ability to use WebCenter Content, an ECM system with a substantially lower cost of ownership and unsurpassed functionality.Oracle has been #1 in life sciences because of their ability to develop cost effective, easy-to-use, scalable solutions which help increase insight and efficiency to drive growth for their customers.  Adding a world class ECM solution to this product portfolio allows life science organizations the chance to get rid of costly ECM systems that no longer meet their needs and use WebCenter, part of the Oracle Fusion Technology stack, with their other leading enterprise applications.USDM provides:•    Expertise in Life Science ECM Business Processes•    Prebuilt Life Science Configuration in WebCenter •    Validation Accelerator Packs for WebCenterUSDM is very proud to support Oracle’s expanding commitment to Life Sciences…. For more information please contact:  [email protected] Oracle will be exhibiting at DIA 2012 in Philadelphia on June 25-27. Stop by our booth (#2825) to learn more about the advantages of a centralized ECM strategy and see the Oracle WebCenter Content solution, our 21 CFR Part 11 compliant content management platform.

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• What is the use of Association, Aggregation and Composition (Encapsulation) in Classes

  - by SahilMahajanMj

  I have gone through lots of theories about what is encapsulation and the three techniques of implementing it, which are Association, Aggregation and Composition. What i found is, Encapsulation Encapsulation is the technique of making the fields in a class private and providing access to the fields via public methods. If a field is declared private, it cannot be accessed by anyone outside the class, thereby hiding the fields within the class. For this reason, encapsulation is also referred to as data hiding. Encapsulation can be described as a protective barrier that prevents the code and data being randomly accessed by other code defined outside the class. Access to the data and code is tightly controlled by an interface. The main benefit of encapsulation is the ability to modify our implemented code without breaking the code of others who use our code. With this feature Encapsulation gives maintainability, flexibility and extensibility to our code. Association Association is a relationship where all object have their own lifecycle and there is no owner. Let’s take an example of Teacher and Student. Multiple students can associate with single teacher and single student can associate with multiple teachers but there is no ownership between the objects and both have their own lifecycle. Both can create and delete independently. Aggregation Aggregation is a specialize form of Association where all object have their own lifecycle but there is ownership and child object can not belongs to another parent object. Let’s take an example of Department and teacher. A single teacher can not belongs to multiple departments, but if we delete the department teacher object will not destroy. We can think about “has-a” relationship. Composition Composition is again specialize form of Aggregation and we can call this as a “death” relationship. It is a strong type of Aggregation. Child object dose not have their lifecycle and if parent object deletes all child object will also be deleted. Let’s take again an example of relationship between House and rooms. House can contain multiple rooms there is no independent life of room and any room can not belongs to two different house if we delete the house room will automatically delete. The question is: Now these all are real world examples. I am looking for some description about how to use these techniques in actual class code. I mean what is the point for using three different techniques for encapsulation, How these techniques could be implemented and How to choose which technique is applicable at time.

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• The Softer Side of Customer Experience

  - by Christina McKeon

  It’s election season in the U.S., and you know what that means. It means I stop by the recycling bin in my garage before entering the house with the contents of my mailbox. A couple of weeks ago, I was doing my usual direct mail purge when I came across a piece from The Container Store®. This piece would have gone straight to the recycling bin, but the title stopped me: Learn what WE STAND FOR! Under full disclaimer, I’m probably a “frequent flier” at The Container Store. One can never be too organized! Now, back to the direct mail piece. I opened it to discover that The Container Store has taken their customer experience beyond “a shopping experience that makes you smile” to giving customers more insight and transparency into how they feel about their employees, the vendors they partner with, and the communities they live in. The direct mail piece included several employees showcasing a skill, hobby or talent with their photo and a personal note that used one word to describe what these employees believe The Container Store stands for. I do not recall the last time I read through an entire piece of direct mail. But this time, I pored over all the comments and photos.  Summer, a salesperson, believes that one word is PASSION. Thomas in distribution center inventory systems chooses the word ACTION. The list goes on to include MATCHLESS, FUN, FAMILY, LOVE, and EMPOWERMENT. The Container Store is running a contest asking you to tell them what nonprofit organization you stand for. Anyone can submit their favorite nonprofit to win cash, products and services from The Container Store. Don’t forget about the softer side of customer experience. With many organizations working feverishly to transform their business into being more customer-centric, it’s easy to get caught up in processes and technology. Focusing on people and social responsibility often falls behind and becomes a lower priority. Keeping people and social responsibility at the forefront is crucial. Your customers will use your processes and technology, but they will see or hear your people and feel their passion. The latter is what they will remember most about your brand. I’m sure there are many other great examples of the softer side of customer experience. Please share your examples in the comments section.

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• How can I get my ATI / AMD drivers to work with any kernel above 3.2.0.x?

  - by TorakTu

  How can I get my ATI / AMD drivers to work with any kernel above 3.2.0.x ? WHAT DID WORK Installed original AMD64 version of Ubuntu 12.04 ISO image. Burned DVD and installed which shown kernel 3.2.0-23 to begin with. Got 5.1 surround sound working. Got ATI ( Now its AMD ) video drivers installed for my Radeon HD R6870 Video card from AMD's website. fglrxinfo came up and reported as normal. THE PROBLEM Kernel 3.2.0.x kept locking up so I tried higher kernel versions. But ATI / AMD Drivers do not install on any kernel Above 3.2.0.x WHAT I HAVE TRIED I have gone over this tutorial many times ( https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BinaryDriverHowto/ATI ) and it doesn't work on ANY kernel except 3.2.0.x. The problems I am having here are that the ATI / AMD drivers working for the 12.04 Precise with kernel 3.2.0-23 and 24, But the computer kept locking up. Although all my games would work, the lock ups were random and were constant. So I looked all over the web for 3 days trying to find an answer and the lock up issue was said to just update the kernel. So I did. Have tried many kernels. All of them .. no lock ups. BUT the Restricted AMD drivers from the AMD website will not install. And none of the OpenSource AMD drivers have EVER installed no matter what Kernel or version I tried. EXAMPLE OUTPUT OF 3D TYPE OF ERRORS Javax.media.opengl.GLException: glXGetConfig failed: error code GLX_NO_EXTENSION at com.sun.opengl.impl.x11.X11GLDrawableFactory.glXGetConfig(X11GLDrawableFactory.java:651) at com.sun.opengl.impl.x11.X11GLDrawableFactory.xvi2GLCapabilities(X11GLDrawableFactory.java:350) at com.sun.opengl.impl.x11.X11GLDrawableFactory.chooseGraphicsConfiguration(X11GLDrawableFactory.java:174) at javax.media.opengl.GLCanvas.chooseGraphicsConfiguration(GLCanvas.java:520) at javax.media.opengl.GLCanvas.<init>(GLCanvas.java:131) at haven.HavenPanel.<init>(HavenPanel.java:68) at haven.HavenPanel.<init>(HavenPanel.java:78) at haven.MainFrame.<init>(MainFrame.java:182) at haven.MainFrame.main2(MainFrame.java:306) at haven.MainFrame.access$100(MainFrame.java:34) at haven.MainFrame$7.run(MainFrame.java:360) at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:722) And of course this is what fglrxinfo shows : X Error of failed request: BadRequest (invalid request code or no such operation) Major opcode of failed request: 139 (ATIFGLEXTENSION) Minor opcode of failed request: 66 () Serial number of failed request: 13 Current serial number in output stream: 13 EDIT : I forgot to mention that I DID look at this post over the last few days and it did not help.

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• prism and multiple screens

  - by Avi

  OK - I am studying Prism a little because of a "free weekend" offer on Pluralsight. As this is proving too complex for me, I went to the Prism book and looked at the forward, and this is what it said: What comes after “Hello, World?” WPF and Silverlight developers are blessed with an abundance of excellent books... There’s no lack of tutorials on Model-View-ViewModel ... But they stop short of the guidance you need to deliver a non-trivial application in full. Your first screen goes well. You add a second screen and a third. Because you started your solution with the built-in “Navigation Application Template,” adding new screens feels like hanging shirts on a closet rod. You are on a roll. Until the harsh reality of real application requirements sets in. As it happens, your application has 30 screens not three. There’s no room on that closet rod for 30 screens. Some screens are modal pop-ups; you don’t navigate to a pop-up. Screens become interdependent such that user activity in one screen triggers changes that propagate throughout the UI. Some screens are optional; others are visible only to authorized users. Some screens are permanent, while other screens can be opened and closed at will. You discover that navigating back to a previously displayed screen creates a new instance. That’s not what you expected and, to your horror, the prior instance is gone along with the user’s unsaved changes. Now the issue is, I don't relate to this description. I've never been a UI programmer, but same as everyone else I'm using Windows apps such as MS-Office, and web sites such as Amazon, Facebook and StackExchange. And I look at these and I don't see many "so many screens" issues! Indeed, the only applications having many windows I can think of is Visual Studio. Maybe also Visio, a little. But take Word - You have a ribbon and a main window. Or take Facebook: You have those lists on the left (Favorites, Lists, Groups etc.), the status middle, the adds and then the Contacts sidebar. But it's only one page. Of course, I understand that in enterprise scenarios there are dashboad applications where multiple segments of the screen are updated from multiple non-related services. This I dig. But other scenarios? So - What am I missing? What is the "multiple screens" monster Pirsm is supposed to be the silver bullet solution for? Shoud I invest in studying Prism in addition to learning WPF or ASP.NET MVC?

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• How to run software, that is not offered though package managers, that requires ia32-libs

  - by Onno

  I'm trying to install the Arma 2 OA dedicated server on a Virtualbox VM so I can test my own missions in a sandbox environment in a way that lets me offload them to another computer in my network. (The other computer is running the VM, but it's a windows machine, and I didn't want to hassle with its installation) It needs at least 2, and preferably 4GB of ram, so I thought I would install the AMD64 version of ubuntu 13.10 to get this going. 'How do you run a 32-bit program on a 64-bit version of Ubuntu?' already explained how to install 32bit software though apt-get and/or dpkg, but that doesn't apply in this case. The server is offered as a compressed download on the site of BI Studio, the developer of the Arma games. Its installation instructions are obviously slightly out of date with the current state of the art. (probably because the state of the art has been updated quite recently :) ) It states that I have to install ia32-libs, which has now apparently been deprecated. Now I have to find out how to get the right packages installed to make sure that it will run. My experience level is like novice-intermediate when it comes to these issues. I've installed a lot of packages though apt-get; I've solved dependency issues in the past; I haven't installed much software without using package managers. I can handle myself with basic administrative work like editing conf files and such. I have just gone ahead and tried to install it without installing ia32-libs through apt-get but to install gcc to get the libs after all. My reasoning being that gcc will include the files for backward compatibility coding and on linux all libs are (as far as I can tell) installed at a system level in /libs . So far it seems to start up. (I can connect with the game server trough my in-game network browser, so it's communicating) I'm not sure if there's any dependency checking going on when running the game server program, so I'm left with a couple of questions: Does 13.10 catch any calls to ia32libs libraries and translate the calls to the right code on amd64? If it runs, does that mean that all required libraries have been loaded correctly, or is there a change of it crashing later on when a library that was needed is missing after all? Is it necessary to do a workaround such as installing gcc? How do I find out what libraries I might need to run this software? (or any other piece of 32-bit software that isn't offered through a package manager)

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• Does the method of adjustment matter, or just the final calibration?

  - by Steve

  A company produces software (and hardware) that is used to both perform automatic adjustments on electronic test equipment as well as perform calibrations of the same equipment. The results of the calibrations are put onto a certificate of calibration that is sent to the customer along with the equipment. This calibration certificate states various conditions of the calibration, such as what hardware (models/serial numbers) and software (version) was used to perform the calibration, as well as things like environmental conditions, etc. Making the assumption that the software used to produce the data (and listed on the calibration certificate) used on the certificate of calibration must have gone through a "test/release" process and must be considered "released" software - does this also mean that the software used for adjustment must also be released? I believe that the method (software/environmental conditions/etc) used or present during adjustment doesn't matter, all that really matters is the end result of the calibration, the conditions present during the calibration, and whether or not the equipment was within the specifications. The real question I'm hoping to get answered: Is there a reputable source (e.g. NIST or somewhere similar) that addresses this question? (I have searched...) The thinking is that during high volume production runs, the "unreleased" system can be used to perform adjustments, as long as a released system is used to perform the calibrations, since the time required to perform the adjustments is much longer than the calibration. This unreleased system will eventually become released for use, but currently is not. Also, please not that there is a distinction between "adjustment" and "calibration". The definition from BIPM International vocabulary of metrology, 2.39: Operation that, under specified conditions, in a first step, establishes a relation between the quantity values with measurement uncertainties provided by measurement standards and corresponding indications with associated measurement uncertainties (of the calibrated instrument or secondary standard) and, in a second step, uses this information to establish a relation for obtaining a measurement result from an indication. Followed by NOTE 2 (emphasis in original text): Calibration should not be confused with adjustment of a measuring system, often mistakenly called "self-calibration", nor with verification of calibration As a side note, I'm not sure why this got down voted. It's regarding software and it's use before and after release for use. I believe there is a best practice that can be applied and this is (hopefully) not primarily opinion based.

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• Getting a virus is *very* annoying

  - by bconlon

  I spent most of yesterday removing an annoying virus from my PC. I feel slightly foolish for getting one in the first place, but after so many years I guess I was always going to eventually succumb. I was also a little surprised at the failure of various tools at removing it. The virus would redirect the browser to websites including ‘licosearch’, ‘hugosearch’ and ‘facebook’, and the disk would be thrashing away infecting dlls in some way. I had the full up to date version of McAfee installed. This identified that there was an issue in some dlls on the system and was able to ‘fix’ them. But they kept getting re-infected. So I installed Microsoft Security Essentials and this too was able to identify and ‘fix’ the infected dlls. The system scans take forever and I really expected better results. I also tried Malwarebytes, Hitman Pro, AVG and Sophos to no avail. Eventually I thought I’d investigate myself. It turned out that on reboot, the virus would start 3 instances of Firefox.exe which I’m guessing would do bad things including infecting as many dlls on the system as possible. I removed Firefox and the virus cleverly then launched 3 instances of Chrome! So I uninstalled Chrome and yes, it then started to launch 3 instances of iexplore.exe. If I’m honest, by this stage I was just seeing if it would be able to use any of the browsers! As it was starting these on reboot, I looked in my User Startup folder and there was a <randomly named>.exe and several log files. I deleted these and rebooted. When I looked they had been recreated. So I then looked in the registry Run and RunOnce entries: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run. Sure enough there were entries to run a file in C:\Program Files\<random name folder>\<random name file>.exe. I deleted this and rebooted and it was fixed. I also looked in the event log and found a warning that Winlogon had failed to start the file C:\Program Files\<random name folder>\<random name file>.exe So I also checked HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon and this entry had also been changed. Finally I ran a full system scan to clean up any infected dlls. I hope it’s gone for good!  #

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• How do I know if I am using Scrum methodologies?

  - by Jake

  When I first started at my current job, my purpose was to rewrite a massive excel-VBA workbook-application to C# Winforms because it was thought that the new C# app will fix all existing problems and have all the new features for a perfect world. If it were a direct port, in theory it would be easy as i just need to go through all the formulas, conditional formatting, validations, VBA etc. to understand it. However, that was not the case. Many of the new features are tightly dependant on business logic which I am unfamiliar with. As a solo programmer, the first year was spent solely on deciphering the excel workbook and writing the C# app. In theory, I had the business people to "help" me specify requirements, how GUI looks and work, and testing of the app etc; but in practice it is like a contant tsunami of feature creep. At the beginning of the second year I managed to convince the management that this is not going anywhere. I made them start from scratch with the excel-VBA. I have this "issue log" saved on the network, each time they found something they didn't like about the excel-VBA app, they will write it in there. I check the log daily and consolidate issues (in my mind) mainly into 2 groups: (1) requires massive change. (2) can be fixed in current version. For massive change issues, I make a copy of the latest excel-VBA and give it a new version number, then work on it whenever I can. For current version fixes, I make the changes in a few days to a week, and then immediately release it. I also ensure I update the same change in any in-progress massive change future versions. This has gone on for about 4 months and I feel it works great. I made many releases and solved many real issues, also understood the business logic more and more. However, my boss (non-IT trained) thinks what I am doing are just adhoc changes and that i am not looking at the "bigger picture". I am struggling to convince my boss that this works. So I hope to formalise my approach and maybe borrow a buzzword to confuse him. Incidentally, I read about Agile and SCRUM, about backlog and sprints. But it's all very vague to me still. QUESTION (finally): I want to tell him that this is SCRUM! But I want to hold my breath first and ask whether my current approach is considered SCRUM or SCRUM-like? How can I make it more SCRUM-like? Note that I have only myself, there's no project leader or teams.

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• Nvidia driver overscan issue second monitor via dvi-d cable

  - by benmichael

  Ok, I know that I have a bit of a bizarre setup, but here goes. I have an old laptop, HP Pavilion 6000. The graphics card in there is a GeForce 7150M. The monitor connection is an old 18pin. The external monitor I use is a Samsung SyncMaster 2333. Don't ask me why, but this monitor only has a dvi-d connection (yes, i have searched it). So I have the monitor plugged into the laptop. If I use any of the Nvidia propriety drivers and try to set the resolution up to 1920x1080 (the monitor's native resolution), I get a massive overscan issue. Over the years I have tried to get this to work, tinkering with my xorg.conf to death. I have also tried this on every Ubuntu since 10.04, on all the corresponding LUbuntus, and on all the Linux Mints since Lisa. Exact same issue. I have even tried it in WinDoze and it works perfectly there (although I did get the error once, but was unable to reproduce it). Using the Open Source drivers it works perfectly iff I switch off the laptop monitor (this makes no difference with the Nvidia drivers). I would have happily gone on using the Open Source drivers, except that since upgrading to LUbuntu 12.10, the Open Source drivers make my monitor completely hazy and have the same overscan issue until I (through the haze, only because I know where things are) go to the monitor settings, activate the laptop's monitor, then deactivate it, and suddenly it comes right. I have to do this every time. So I have to find a way to fix one of them, so I may as well tackle the propriety drivers, hence this overlong question. Amidst other things, I have tried the nvidia-settings, but because it is connected to an 18pin, it detects the monitor as a vga monitor and does not give me overscan correction options. I have tried custom modlines (although there are always more of those try), I have tried using xrandr, and I have tried all the FlatPanelOptions. What I have not tried is a Gentoo build, as I don't have time any more to do that installation, but up to about three years ago when I ran Gentoo exclusively I did not have this issue. Below is an link to an image with a red highlight around the portion of the screen visible to me, the numbers around it are the number of pixels which are cut off. This does seem to drift a few pixels every now and then. Thanks in advance. Nvidia driver issue image

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• Enterprise with eyes on NoSQL

  - by thegreeneman

  Since joining Oracle a few months back, I have had the fortune of being able to interact with a number of large enterprise organizations and discuss their current state of adoption for NoSQL database technology.   It is worth noting that a large percentage of these organizations do have some NoSQL use and have been steadily increasing their understanding of its applicability for certain data management workloads.   Thru those discussions I’ve learned that it seems one of the biggest issues confronting enterprise adoption of NoSQL databases is the lack of standards for access, administration and monitoring.    This was not so much of an issue with the early adopters of NoSQL technology because they employed a highly DevOps centric approach to application deployment leaving a select few highly qualified developers with the task of managing the production of the system that they designed and implemented. However, as NoSQL technology moves out of the startup and into the hands of larger corporate entities, developers with a broad skill set that are capable of both development and I.T. type production management are in short supply and quickly get moved on to do new projects, often moving to different roles within the company.  This difference in the way smaller more agile startups operate as compared to more established companies is revealing a gap in the NoSQL technology segment that needs to get addressed.    This is one of places that a company such as Oracle has a leg up in the NoSQL Database front.  A combination of having gone thru a past database maturization process,  combined with a vast set of corporate relationships that have grown hand in hand to solve these types of issues, Oracle is in a great place to lead the way in closing the requirements gap for NoSQL technology.  Oracle's understanding of the needs specific to mature organizations have already made their way into the Oracle’s NoSQL Database offering with features such as:  One click cluster deployment with visual topology planning,  standards based monitoring protocols such as SNMP, support for data access for reporting via standard SQL  and integration with emerging standards for data access such as MapReduce.  Given the exciting developments we’re driving in the Oracle NoSQL Database group, I will have a lot more to say about this topic as we move into the second half of the year.

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• Movement prediction for non-shooters

  - by ShadowChaser

  I'm working on an isometric (2D) game with moderate-scale multiplayer - 20-30 players. I've had some difficulty getting a good movement prediction implementation in place. Right now, clients are authoritative for their own position. The server performs validation and broad-scale cheat detection, and I fully realize that the system will never be fully robust against cheating. However, the performance and implementation tradeoffs work well for me right now. Given that I'm dealing with sprite graphics, the game has 8 defined directions rather than free movement. Whenever the player changes their direction or speed (walk, run, stop), a "true" 3D velocity is set on the entity and a packet it sent to the server with the new movement state. In addition, every 250ms additional packets are transmitted with the player's current position for state updates on the server as well as for client prediction. After the server validates the packet, it gets automatically distributed to all of the other "nearby" players. Client-side, all entities with non-zero velocity (ie/ moving entities) are tracked and updated by a rudimentary "physics" system - basically nothing more than changing the position by the velocity according to the elapsed time slice (40ms or so). What I'm struggling with is how to implement clean movement prediction. I have the nagging suspicion that I've made a design mistake somewhere. I've been over the Unreal, Half-life, and all other movement prediction/lag compensation articles I could find, but they all seam geared toward shooters: "Don't send each control change, send updates every 120ms, server is authoritative, client predicts, etc". Unfortunately, that style of design won't work well for me - there's no 3D environment so each individual state change is important. 1) Most of the samples I saw tightly couple movement prediction right into the entities themselves. For example, storing the previous state along with the current state. I'd like to avoid that and keep entities with their "current state" only. Is there a better way to handle this? 2) What should happen when the player stops? I can't interpolate to the correct position, since they might need to walk backwards or another strange direction if their position is too far ahead. 3) What should happen when entities collide? If the current player collides with something, the answer is simple - just stop the player from moving. But what happens if two entities take up the same space on the server? What if the local prediction causes a remote entity to collide with the player or another entity - do I stop them as well? If the prediction had the misfortune of sticking them in front of a wall that the player has gone around, the prediction will never be able to compensate and once the error gets to high the entity will snap to the new position.

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• NVIDIA Additional Drivers Empty - maximum resolution 640x480 - Driver disappears

  - by Hannibal

  EDIT: Optimus card. For resolution please read this thread: "You do not appear to be using the nvidia x server"(screenshot included) And this: Ubuntu 11.10 problem with Nvidia Thanks! I know, I know yet another NVIDIA question. So I did all the research. I uninstalled and installed nvidia-settings and drivers and nvidia-current from PPE repositories which are the most updated ones. I executed nvidia-xconfig. I have two major problems. One: Additional Drivers setting is empty! It doesn't contain any driver although one is installed. I have executed apt-get update too. But still the list is empty. Two: If I execute nvidia-xconfig it will properly configure an xorg.conf file. I restart but the maximum resolution I got is 640x480. I tried the xrandr but I can't add any resolution to display LVDS1. Some weird error occurs. So I can't add a proprietary driver and I can't boot in with the xorg file created by Nvidia... What can I do? With some work ( unistall nvidia-current and install libgl1-mesa-glx I was able to activate some kind of usage of my card because the resolution got better... and I added bumbelbee to because I have multiple video cards... ) but still the list is empty. I don't know what to do at this point??!!! Also: this is the most important part. When I first installed my ubuntu yesterday 11.10 one I saw the driver!! The driver was there... And then I ofc updated every package from internet.. And after that it was gone. And I can't bring it back. So there must be something wrong with one of the updates. But which???? Thanks for any extra info you can provide! I'm really desperate to solve this issue.

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