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• I Could Sure Use Some Windows Azure Code Samples…

  - by BuckWoody

  There are multiple ways to learn, and one of the most effective is with examples. You have multiple options with Windows Azure, including the Software Development Kit, the Windows Azure Training Kit and now another one…. the Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework,, a free, centralized code sample library driven by developers' real-world pains and needs. The goal is to provide customer-driven code samples for all Microsoft development technologies, and Windows Azure is included. Once you hit the site, you download an EXE that will create a web-app based installer for a Code Browser.   Once inside, you can configure where the samples store data and other settings, and then search for what you want.   You can also request a sample – if enough people ask, we do it. OneCode also partnered with gallery and Visual Studio team to develop this Sample Browser Visual Studio extension.  It’s an easy way for developers to find and download samples from within Visual Studio.  

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• Why binding is not a native feature in most of the languages?

  - by Gulshan

  IMHO binding a variable to another variable or an expression is a very common scenario in mathematics. In fact, in the beginning, many students think the assignment operator(=) is some kind of binding. But in most of the languages, binding is not supported as a native feature. In some languages like C#, binding is supported in some cases with some conditions fulfilled. But IMHO implementing this as a native feature was as simple as changing the following code- int a,b,sum; sum := a + b; a = 10; b = 20; a++; to this- int a,b,sum; a = 10; sum = a + b; b = 20; sum = a + b; a++; sum = a + b; Meaning placing the binding instruction as assignments after every instruction changing values of any of the variable contained in the expression at right side. After this, trimming redundant instructions (or optimization in assembly after compilation) will do. So, why it is not supported natively in most of the languages. Specially in the C-family of languages? Update: From different opinions, I think I should define this proposed "binding" more precisely- This is one way binding. Only sum is bound to a+b, not the vice versa. The scope of the binding is local. Once the binding is established, it cannot be changed. Meaning, once sum is bound to a+b, sum will always be a+b. Hope the idea is clearer now. Update 2: I just wanted this P# feature. Hope it will be there in future.

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• How to Clean Up and Fix Your Music Library with the MusicBrainz Database

  - by Erez Zukerman

  Over the years, some of us accumulate lots and lots of music files. Since these come from a variety of sources, they’re not always as neat as they could be. If your music library is in a bit of a jumble with tags missing, oddly named files and incomplete albums, read on to see how easy it is to make it neat once and for all. MusicBrainz is an online database that uses audio “fingerprints” to identify music tracks even when they’re incorrectly labelled. We’ll be using this database through a free client called Picard, available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. So first thing, head on over to Picard’s download page and get the installer. If you use Linux, you can install Picard using your package manager. Once you finish going through the installer, run Picard. Your firewall might pop up an alert telling you Picard is trying to access the Internet; you should agree to let Picard through. You will now see the main Picard interface. Click View > File browser (or press Ctrl+B). Latest Features How-To Geek ETC Learn To Adjust Contrast Like a Pro in Photoshop, GIMP, and Paint.NET Have You Ever Wondered How Your Operating System Got Its Name? Should You Delete Windows 7 Service Pack Backup Files to Save Space? What Can Super Mario Teach Us About Graphics Technology? Windows 7 Service Pack 1 is Released: But Should You Install It? How To Make Hundreds of Complex Photo Edits in Seconds With Photoshop Actions Awesome 10 Meter Curved Touchscreen at the University of Groningen [Video] TV Antenna Helper Makes HDTV Antenna Calibration a Snap Turn a Green Laser into a Microscope Projector [Science] The Open Road Awaits [Wallpaper] N64oid Brings N64 Emulation to Android Devices Super-Charge GIMP’s Image Editing Capabilities with G’MIC [Cross-Platform]

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• How can I get Transaction Logs to auto-truncate after Backup

  - by Yaakov Ellis

  Setup: Sql Server 2008 R2, databases set up with Full recovery mode. I have set up a maintenance plan that backs up the transaction logs for a number of databases on the server. It is set to create backup files in sub-directories for each database, verify backup integrity is turned on, and backup compression is used. The job is set to run once every 2 hours during business hours (8am-6pm). I have tested the job and it runs fine, creates the log backup files as it should. However, from what I have read, once the transaction log is backed up, it should be ok to truncate the transaction log. I do not see any option for doing this in the Sql Server Maintenance Plan designer. How can I set this up?

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• unix command to verify span of word in text

  - by Ocasta Eshu

  What unix command(s) can I use to determine the line span that a word appears in text? The "span" being equal to the line number of the last instance of a word minus the line number of the first instance of the word. 1| unix is on two lines 2| once above, and once below 3| unix In the example above the "span" of 'unix' would be 2 (3-1). So far I've been trying to make use of grep -n but I don't think that grep is powerful enough. Maybe some use of sed or awk? Thanks!

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• OS specific network delay, why?

  - by Atilla Filiz

  Since my new ISP installed their own router to my house(I rented a room in a student house so don't have much control on these), I started having strange delays. Any outgoing connection I do, be it http or ssh, is delayed for several seconds, and once it is established, I have no further problems. I open several simultaneous tabs in my browser and after about 5 to 8 seconds, they all connect and load simultaneously and quiet fast. I can actually play online games once I connect.What's more interesting is, I experience this only with Linux distros, namely Arch and some versions of Ubuntu. Access with Windows installs are quiet normal. What might be wrong with my router? Everything was fine with my old router but I have to use this one now.

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• Formatting minified jQuery, JavaScript using the Internet Explorer 9 Developer Toolbar

  - by Harish Ranganathan

  Much has been talked about the F12 developer toolbar in IE and the support it provides for web developers.  Starting IE8, the Developer Toolbar is a menu item that helps you view the page source, scripts, profiling and many other details of the rendered page.  It even allows script debugging from within and that makes it a truly powerful web developer tool bar. With IE9, the developer toolbar got even better with the Networking Tab that allows you to inspect the traffic/time taken and drill down into the Request/Response headers and other specifics. The script tab allows you to view the scripts used in the page. One of the challenges of working with JavaScript / jQuery when they are minified, is that, it becomes really hard to read.  Minified JavaScript is a compression technique and also a best practice for delivering faster web pages.  However, when you would like to debug, minified JavaScript files become very hard since they aren't properly formatted.  Take the case of the above sample, which is a basic MVC 3 Web Application.  It uses the minified jQuery and modernizr files. Once we select the above scripts, the script source looks as follows:- But with the “Format JavaScript” option in the Configuration icon, Once you click on the “Format JavaScript”, you can see the formatted JavaScript as per screen below:- This makes the script readable and also easy for debugging.  Cheers !!!

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• How do you prefer to handle image spriting in your web projects?

  - by Macy Abbey

  It seems like these days it is pretty much mandatory for web applications to sprite images if they want many images on their site AND a fast load time. (Spriting is the process of combining all images referenced from a style sheet into one/few image(s) with each reference containing a different background position.) I was wondering what method of implementing sprites you all prefer in your web applications, given that we are referring to non-dynamic images which are included/designed by the programming team and not images which are dynamically uploaded by a third party. 1. Add new images to an existing sprite by hand, create new css reference by hand. 2. Generate a sprite server-side from your css files which all reference single images set to be background images of an html element that is the same size of the image you are spriting once per build and update all css references programmatically. 3. Use a sprite generating program to generate a sprite image for you once per release and hand insert the new css class / image into your project. 4. Other methods? I prefer two as it requires very little hand-coding and image editing.

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• How can I better implement A star algorithm with a very large set of nodes?

  - by Stephen

  I'm making a game with nodejs in which many enemies must converge on the player as the player moves around a relatively open space (right now it is an open field with few obstacles, but eventually there may be some small buildings in the field with 1 or 2 rooms). It's a multiplayer game using websockets, so the server needs to keep track of enemies and players. I found this javascript A* library which I've modified to be used on the server as a nodejs module. The library utilizes a Binary Heap to track the nodes for the algorithm, so it should be pretty fast (and indeed, with a small grid, say 100x100 it is lightning fast). The problem is that my game is not really tile-based. As the player moves around the map, he is moving on a more or less 1-to-1 per-pixel coordinate system (the player can move in 8 directions, 1 or 2 pixels at a time). In preliminary tests, on an 800x600 field, the path-finding can take anywhere from 400 to 1000 ms. Multiply that by 10 enemies and the game starts to get pretty choppy. I have already set it up so that each enemy will only do a path-finding call once per second or even as slow as once every 2 seconds (they have to keep updating their path because the players can move freely). But even with this long interval, there are noticeable lag spikes or chops every couple of seconds as the enemies update their paths. I'm willing to approach the problem of path-finding differently, if there's another option. I'm assuming that the real problem is the enormous grid (800x600). It also occurs to me that maybe the large arrays are to blame, as I've read that V8 has trouble with large arrays.

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• Coding Dynamic Events?

  - by Joey Green

  I have no idea what the title of this question should be so bare with me. My game has turns. On a turn a player does something and this can result in a random number of explosions that occur at different times. I know when the explosions are done. I need to know when ALL are done and then do some other action. Also, each explosion is the same amount of time, say 3 seconds.. Right now I'm thinking of using a counter to hold how many explosions are happening. Then once the explosion is finished decrement this counter. Once the counter is zero, do my action. This idea is inspired by objective-c memory management btw. Anyways, does this sound like a good approach or would there be another way. An alternative might be to figure out the explosion who happened last and let it be responsible for calling this subsequent action. I'm asking mostly, because I haven't done this before and am trying to figure out if there are bugs that may occur that I'm not foreseeing.

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• How do I identify mouse clicks versus mouse down in games?

  - by Tristan

  What is the most common way of handling mouse clicks in games? Given that all you have in way of detecting input from the mouse is whether a button is up or down. I currently just rely on the mouse down being a click, but this simple approach limits me greatly in what I want to achieve. For example I have some code that should only be run once on a mouse click, but using mouse down as a mouse click can cause the code to run more then once depending on how long the button is held down for. So I need to do it on a click! But what is the best way to handle a click? Is a click when the mouse goes from mouse up to down or from down to up or is it a click if the button was down for less then x frames/milliseconds and then if so, is it considered mouse down and a click if its down for x frames/milliseconds or a click then mouse down? I can see that each of the approaches can have their uses but which is the most common in games? And maybe i'll ask more specifically which is the most common in RTS games?

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• DAC pack up all your troubles

  - by Tony Davis

  Visual Studio 2010, or perhaps its apparently-forthcoming sister, "SQL Studio", is being geared up to become the natural way for developers to create databases. Central to this drive is the introduction of 'data-tier application components', or DACs. Applications are developed as normal but when it comes to deployment, instead of supplying the DBA with a bunch of scripts to create the required database objects, the developer creates a single DAC Package ("DAC Pack"); a zipped XML file containing all the database objects needed by the application, along with versioning information, policies for deployment, and so on. It's an intriguing prospect. Developers can work on their development database using their existing tools and source control, and then package up the changes into a single DACPAC for deployment and management. DBAs get an "application level view" of how their instances are being used and the ability to collectively, rather than individually, manage the objects. The DBA needing to manage a large number of relatively small databases can use "DAC snapshots" to get a quick overview of what has changed across all the databases they manage. The reason that DAC packs haven't caused more excitement is that they can only be pushed to SQL Server 2008 R2, and they must be developed or inspected using Visual Studio 2010. Furthermore, what we see right now in VS2010 is more of a 'work-in-progress' or 'vision of the future', with serious shortcomings and restrictions that render it unsuitable for anything but small 'non-critical' departmental databases. The first problem is that DAC packs support a limited set of schema objects (corresponding closely to the features available on 'Azure'). This means that Service Broker queues, CLR Objects, and perhaps most critically security (permissions, certificates etc.), are off-limits. Applications that require these objects will need to add them via a post-deployment TSQL script, rather defeating the whole idea. More worrying still is the process for altering a database with a DAC pack. The grand 'collective' philosophy, whereby a single XML file can be used for deploying and managing builds and changes, extends, unfortunately, to database upgrades. Any change to a database object will result in the creation of a new database, copying the data from the old version, nuking the previous one, and then renaming the new one. Simple eh? The problem is that even something as trivial as adding a comment to a stored procedure in a 5GB database will require the server to find at least twice as much space, as well sufficient elbow-room in the transaction log for copying the largest table. Of course, you'll need to take the database offline for the full course of the deployment, which is likely to take a long time if there is a lot of data. This upgrade/rename process breaks the log chain, makes any subsequent full restore operation highly complicated, and will also break log shipping. As with any grand vision, the devil is always in the detail. It's hard to fathom why Microsoft hasn't used a SQL Compare-style approach to the upgrade process, altering a database with a change script, and this will surely be adopted in the near future. Something had to be in place for VS2010, but right now DAC packs only make sense for Azure. For this, they're cute, but hardly compelling. Nevertheless, DBAs would do well to get familiar with VS 2010 and DAC packs. Like it or not, they're both coming. Cheers, Tony.

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• Anatomy of a .NET Assembly - Signature encodings

  - by Simon Cooper

  If you've just joined this series, I highly recommend you read the previous posts in this series, starting here, or at least these posts, covering the CLR metadata tables. Before we look at custom attribute encoding, we first need to have a brief look at how signatures are encoded in an assembly in general. Signature types There are several types of signatures in an assembly, all of which share a common base representation, and are all stored as binary blobs in the #Blob heap, referenced by an offset from various metadata tables. The types of signatures are: Method definition and method reference signatures. Field signatures Property signatures Method local variables. These are referenced from the StandAloneSig table, which is then referenced by method body headers. Generic type specifications. These represent a particular instantiation of a generic type. Generic method specifications. Similarly, these represent a particular instantiation of a generic method. All these signatures share the same underlying mechanism to represent a type Representing a type All metadata signatures are based around the ELEMENT_TYPE structure. This assigns a number to each 'built-in' type in the framework; for example, Uint16 is 0x07, String is 0x0e, and Object is 0x1c. Byte codes are also used to indicate SzArrays, multi-dimensional arrays, custom types, and generic type and method variables. However, these require some further information. Firstly, custom types (ie not one of the built-in types). These require you to specify the 4-byte TypeDefOrRef coded token after the CLASS (0x12) or VALUETYPE (0x11) element type. This 4-byte value is stored in a compressed format before being written out to disk (for more excruciating details, you can refer to the CLI specification). SzArrays simply have the array item type after the SZARRAY byte (0x1d). Multidimensional arrays follow the ARRAY element type with a series of compressed integers indicating the number of dimensions, and the size and lower bound of each dimension. Generic variables are simply followed by the index of the generic variable they refer to. There are other additions as well, for example, a specific byte value indicates a method parameter passed by reference (BYREF), and other values indicating custom modifiers. Some examples... To demonstrate, here's a few examples and what the resulting blobs in the #Blob heap will look like. Each name in capitals corresponds to a particular byte value in the ELEMENT_TYPE or CALLCONV structure, and coded tokens to custom types are represented by the type name in curly brackets. A simple field: int intField; FIELD I4 A field of an array of a generic type parameter (assuming T is the first generic parameter of the containing type): T[] genArrayField FIELD SZARRAY VAR 0 An instance method signature (note how the number of parameters does not include the return type): instance string MyMethod(MyType, int&, bool[][]); HASTHIS DEFAULT 3 STRING CLASS {MyType} BYREF I4 SZARRAY SZARRAY BOOLEAN A generic type instantiation: MyGenericType<MyType, MyStruct> GENERICINST CLASS {MyGenericType} 2 CLASS {MyType} VALUETYPE {MyStruct} For more complicated examples, in the following C# type declaration: GenericType<T> : GenericBaseType<object[], T, GenericType<T>> { ... } the Extends field of the TypeDef for GenericType will point to a TypeSpec with the following blob: GENERICINST CLASS {GenericBaseType} 3 SZARRAY OBJECT VAR 0 GENERICINST CLASS {GenericType} 1 VAR 0 And a static generic method signature (generic parameters on types are referenced using VAR, generic parameters on methods using MVAR): TResult[] GenericMethod<TInput, TResult>( TInput, System.Converter<TInput, TOutput>); GENERIC 2 2 SZARRAY MVAR 1 MVAR 0 GENERICINST CLASS {System.Converter} 2 MVAR 0 MVAR 1 As you can see, complicated signatures are recursively built up out of quite simple building blocks to represent all the possible variations in a .NET assembly. Now we've looked at the basics of normal method signatures, in my next post I'll look at custom attribute application signatures, and how they are different to normal signatures.

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• How to fix sudo: setreuid(ROOT_UID, user_uid): Operation not permitted error?

  - by David R.

  I am using LDAP authentication on my Ubuntu 11.10 server. I installed libpam-ldap, and configured things accordingly. It works great, except that I get this error every once in a while when I try to sudo: sudo: setreuid(ROOT_UID, user_uid): Operation not permitted I know I have sudoers set up correctly, since it works most of the time. It's not just my log in either, others have the same problem when I have it. When this error is occurring, I can't ssh in with my regular system user at all. When I sign in directly, I can't get any gnome-terminal to start. Once I restart the server, the problem goes away. 'Course, that's not a solution, if it was a prod server, I'd be in trouble. How do I fix this? Edit 3/1/12: I just figured out that if stop and start the nscd service, the problem goes away. service nscd stop service nscd start Not much of a solution since I have to be logged into the server directly, not via ssh.

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• Proper way to let user enter password for a bash script using only the GUI (with the terminal hidden)

  - by MountainX

  I have made a bash script that uses kdialog exclusively for interacting with the user. It is launched from a ".desktop" file so the user never sees the terminal. It looks 100% like a GUI app (even though it is just a bash script). It runs in KDE only (Kubuntu 12.04). My only problem is handling password input securely and conveniently. I can't find a satisfactory solution. The script was designed to be run as a normal user and to prompt for the password when a sudo command is first needed. In this way, most commands, those not requiring sudo rights, are run as the normal user. What happens (when the script is run from the terminal) is that the user is prompted for their password once and the default sudo timeout allows the script to finish, including any additional sudo commands, without prompting the user again. This is how I want it to work when run behind the GUI too. The main problem is that using kdesudo to launch my script, which is the standard GUI way, means that the entire script is executed by the root user. So file ownerships get assigned to the root user, I can't rely upon ~/ in paths, and many other things are less than ideal. Running the entire script as the root user is just a very unsatisfactory solution and I think it is a bad practice. I appreciate any ideas for letting a user enter the sudo password just once via GUI while not running the whole script as root. Thanks.

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• Must have iPad apps [closed]

  - by Michael Ellick Ang

  What apps would you install/buy once you purchase an iPad ? One app per answer please.

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• How Mars Lost Its Atmosphere [Video]

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  Scientists have long theorized that Mars once had an atmosphere and surface water–but where did it go? This video showcases one of their theories about Mars’ vanished water reserves. Courtesy of NASA and the NASAexplorer channel: When you take a look at Mars, you probably wouldn’t think that it looks like a nice place to live. It’s dry, it’s dusty, and there’s practically no atmosphere. But some scientists think that Mars may have once looked like a much nicer place to live, with a thicker atmosphere, cloudy skies, and possibly even liquid water flowing over the surface. So how do you go from something like this–to something like this? NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft will give us a clearer idea of how Mars lost its atmosphere, and scientists think that several processes have had an impact. For more information about MAVEN, check out the mission page here. NASA – MAVEN: Mars Atmospheric Loss How to Get Pro Features in Windows Home Versions with Third Party Tools HTG Explains: Is ReadyBoost Worth Using? HTG Explains: What The Windows Event Viewer Is and How You Can Use It

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• Why does my browser take me to Scour.com? (redirect virus)

  - by Paula DiTallo

  The "scour" or Rootkit.Win32.TDSS virus has a long history which can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scour Here is the primary symptom: after searching for something in your web browser using google, one of the results that you click on redirects you to scour.com. If you've executed ClamWin, Malwarebytes, McAfee, Norton, etc. to find and isolate the virus without any luck--this isn't really a surprise, since this virus attaches to existing system drivers. I only know of one reliable package that will remove this without ill effects--like adding new spyware. This package is called TDSSKiller. I have seen multiple websites that claim to have this software available, but the one that I know is reliable is located here: http://support.kaspersky.com/viruses/solutions?qid=208280684 Once you go to Kaspersky's tech support site, the TDSSKiller zip file is available for downloading. When you execute this software, you will be able to "cure" or repair the infected driver. Remember to jot down the name of the driver for future reference--should you need to reinstall the driver from a "same-as" working computer, or your install disk if the repair is ineffective. The driver that happened to get infected on my computer was the tcpip.sys driver. This caused my win sockets to loose their ip addresses. In most other instances, less critical drivers such as HDAudBus.sys are infected. In my case, I was not through correcting my computer problems until I corrected the broken WinSock issue and loaded an earlier version of the tcpip.sys driver from: C:\WINDOWS\ServicePackFiles\i386 which I placed in: C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers Don't forget to reboot your computer after your repair! Once you download TDSSKiller and cure/repair your infected driver(s), the redirect on google searches should disappear .

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• Stop VLC player from saving effects & filter settings

  - by bocamax

  VLC Player v1.1.11 Windows 7 Ultimate VLC player launches each new video with setting I used once to brighten a dark video. On a second computer, VLC player opens all videos rotated 270 which was a feature I used once. I now have to manually uncheck Image adjust on one computer & uncheck Transform on another for each video to have it play without these custom settings. I've custom mapped VLC Hotkeys that I use extensively. As a result, I do not want to "reset preferences" and lose my Hotkey mapping. VLC Tools Settings Video Effects Basic Image Adjust (Brightness, Contrast, etc.) VLC Tools Settings Video Effects Basic Transform (Rotate 90, 180, 270) Is there a setting I'm not finding to stop VLC from applying a one time adjustment to all videos?

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• Detecting Request that uses invalid Encoding using Modsecurity

  - by Ali Ahmad

  I am trying write a virtual patch using modsecurity for my hosted web application using following rule i.e. <Location /index.php> SecDefaultAction phase:2,t:none,log,deny # Validate parameter names SecRule ARGS_NAMES "!^(articleid)$" \ "msg:'Unknown parameter: %{MATCHED_VAR_NAME}'" # Expecting articleid only once SecRule &ARGS:articleid "!@eq 1" \ "msg:'Parameter articleid seen more than once'" # Validate parameter articleid SecRule ARGS:articleid "!^[0-9]{1,10}$" \ "msg:'Invalid parameter articleid'" </Location> The problem is how can i reject requests that use invalid encoding as a global WAF configuration so that this patch cannot be circumvented.

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• HTML5 Development for Dummies

  - by Geertjan

  What's HTML5 all about and what does it actually mean, concretely, to develop HTML5 applications? NetBeans IDE 7.3 provides something called "Project Easel", which is a bundling of HTML5-related tools into a coherent toolset. Within a matter of hours, you'll know everything you need to know about what all this is about if you follow the steps below.  Get A Solid Overview. Start by viewing this screencast from JavaOne 2012 (click the media link on the right side once you've clicked the link below, a downloadable MP4 file is also available there):https://oracleus.activeevents.com/connect/sessionDetail.ww?SESSION_ID=4038That is an awesome way to get you in the right mindframe for what HTML5 is and how it fits into the programming world, together with a very cool and entertaining demo, presented by JB Brock. He starts with about three slides and then does a super awesome demo that puts you into the picture very quickly. Understand How HTML5 Relates To Java EE. Now here's a very cool follow up to the above, again demo-driven (click the media links on the right side once you've clicked the link below):https://oracleus.activeevents.com/connect/sessionDetail.ww?SESSION_ID=4737David Konecny takes the Affable Bean project created via the NetBeans E-commerce Tutorial and creates an HTML5 front end for it! I.e., you are shown how HTML5 can provide a different front end, as an alternative to JSF. Why would you do that? Well, that's explained in David's session, as well as in JB Brock's session, i.e., choose the right technology for the right situation. Sometimes HTML5 might make sense, other times JSF might make sense. Follow The NetBeans Screencasts. To revise and firm up everything you've learned from the above two JavaOne sessions, watch two screencasts by Ken Ganfield, part 1, Getting Started with HTML5 and part 2, Working with JavaScript in HTML5 Applications. In particular, you'll learn how NetBeans IDE provides tools to thoroughly cover the needs of HTML5 developers. Having taken the above three steps, you now have a thorough background, together with an understanding of the tools and procedures needed for creating your own HTML5 applications.

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• XNA Masking Mayhem

  - by TropicalFlesh

  I'd like to start by mentioning that I'm just an amateur programmer of the past 2 years with no formal training and know very little about maximizing the potential of graphics hardware. I can write shaders and manipulate a multi-layered drawing environment, but I've basically stuck to minimalist pixel shaders. I'm working on putting dynamic point light shadows in my 2d sidescroller, and have had it working to a reasonable degree. Just chucking it in without working on serious optimizations outside of basic culling, I can get 50 lights or so onscreen at once and still hover around 100 fps. The only issue is that I'm on a very high end machine and would like to target the game at as many platforms I can, low and high end. The way I'm doing shadows involves a lot of masking before I can finally draw the light to my light layer. Basically, my technique to achieveing such shadows is as follows. See pics in this album http://imgur.com/a/m2fWw#0 The dark gray represents the background tiles, the light gray represents the foreground tiles, and the yellow represents the shadow-emitting foreground tile. I'll draw the light using a radial gradient and a color of choice I'll then exclude light from the mask by drawing some geometry extending through the tile from my point light. I actually don't mask the light yet at this point, but I'm just illustrating the technique in this image Finally, I'll re-include the foreground layer in my mask, as I only want shadows to collect on the background layer and finally multiply the light with it's mask to the light layer My question is simple - How can I go about reducing the amount of render target switches I need to do to achieve the following: a. Draw mask to exclude shadows from the foreground to it's own target once per frame b. For each light that emits shadows, -Begin light mask as full white -Render shadow geometry as transparent with an opaque blendmode to eliminate shadowed areas from the mask -Render foreground mask back over the light mask to reintroduce light to the foreground c. Multiply light texture with it's individual mask to the main light layer.

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• Lenovo ThinkPad L520 slows down when AC power adapter is plugged in

  - by Aamir

  I have a new laptop Lenovo ThinkPad L520 (7859-5BG) Core i5-2520M(2.5GHz) with 4GB RAM. Having installed Ubuntu 11.10 32-bit, while browsing with Chrome on GNOME classic (no effects), I noticed 173% CPU usage by chrome browser process, and the system slowly got very very slow, Now, at this stage as I removed the power adapter, the system suddenly got faster (and stopped the lagging behavior) and CPU usage drops down to 48% !! Observation 1: I was browsing through chrome when my system seemed to be seriously lagging, so I killed chrome to see if it gets any faster. But there remained no difference. Notice that CPU usage was a bit strange here. It showed no high activity, but as soon as I would click on applications in gnome panel, it would shoot CPU usage to 70, or 80 or 90 or 143% etc. depending on how quickly i clicked back and forth. At this instance I removed by AC adapter of my laptop, and suddenly system got fine. So i again clicked on gnome panel, and noticed that it now took only 7% or 12% or 13% at max, with same kind of clicks in application menu. Observation 2: At the other times, with AC adapter plugged in, top indicates four instances of chromium taking 90%, 60%, 47% and 2% (for example), and then once I take out the AC adapter same processes take lesser CPU all of a sudden Intermediate conclusions: What does this indicate ? I cannot figure out any "other" process in "top" that is suddenly being triggered, its the same process that hogs up my CPU once AC power is plugged in ! NOTE: the problem is now CONFIRMED, as i can repeat that when I have power adapter plugged in ! Can anyone tell me what exactly does this indicate ? What is wrong, is it some bug with power management or what ?

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• Bot strategy in an arena

  - by joulesm

  I am writing the player's behavior for an arena game, and I'm wondering if you could offer some strategies. I'm writing it in Python, but I'm just interested in the high level game play. Here are the game aspects: Arena is a circle of a given size. The arena's size shrinks every round to help break any ties. Players are much smaller circles, and can be on teams of 1 or 2 players. Players attack by colliding with other players, and based on the physics of the collision (speed of both players, angle), one could force another player out of the arena. Once a player is out of the arena, they are out of the game (for that round). The goal is to be on the only team with players left in the arena. All other players have been pushed (through collisions or mistakes) out of the arena. It is possible for there to be no winner if the last two players exit the arena at the same time. Once the player has been programmed, the game just runs. There is no human intervention in the game. I'm thinking it's easiest to implement a few simple programmatic rules for my player to follow. For example, stay close to center of the arena, attack opponents from the inner side of the arena, etc. Are there any good simple game strategies? Would adding a random aspect to the game help? For example, to avoid predictability by the other team or something. Thanks in advance.

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• how to rotate one squid user among multiple IPs based on number of requests processed by each IP

  - by Arvind

  I want to set up a Squid ACL in the following manner-- For example, my Squid Proxy Server has 10 IP addresses- now I have a user 'demouser'. I want that for the very first request sent to 'demouser' this user uses IP address #1, for the second request it uses IP address #2, for the 3rd request of the day it uses IP address #3 and so on till it uses up all IPs. One more level of control I would like is that once the user has used up all available IP addresses once per address, then it does not allow the proxy request to go through. How do I set up such a configuration on Squid Proxy server ACL? Even a document or how to would be very helpful. The official wiki talks about one 'weird' case- choosing an IP address based on time of day the request was made to the proxy server. The other cases are all regular use cases which are not even remotely near my requirement as specified above.

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