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• With Choice Comes Complexity

  - by BuckWoody

  "Complex" may be defined as "Having many steps, details or parts." Many of Microsoft's products, including SQL Server, can be complex. I'm stating what most data professionals already know - there's usually multiple ways to do things in SQL Server. For instance, to import some data into a table you can use graphical tools, SQLCMD, bcp, SQL Server Integration Services, BULK INSERT, even PowerShell, just to name a few tools at your disposal. That's really not the issue, though. The bigger issue is that there are normally multiple thought-processes, or methods, that you have available for a task. That's both a strength and a weakness. If things were more simple, you would have fewer choices. Sometimes that's a good thing. Just tell me what I need to do and I'll do it. However, your particular situation may not fit that tool or process, so having more options increases your ability to get your job done the way you need to do it. On the other hand, that's more for you to learn, which is harder. There's another side of this benefit/difficulty that you need to be aware of. Even if you're quite good at what you do, keep in mind that the way you know how to do something may not be the only way to do it. Keep your mind open to new possibilities, and most importantly - to new knowledge. SQL Server professionals teach me something new every day. So embrace the complexity - on balance, it's a good thing! Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Get Started with JavaFX 2 and Scene Builder

  - by Janice J. Heiss

  Up on otn/java is a very useful article by Oracle Java/Middleware/Core Tech Engineer Mark Heckler, titled, “How to Get Started (FAST!) with JavaFX 2 and Scene Builder.”  Heckler, who has development experience in numerous environments, shows developers how to develop a JavaFX application using Scene Builder “in less time than it takes to drink a cup of coffee, while learning your way around in the process”. He begins with a warning and a reassurance: “JavaFX is a new paradigm and can seem a bit imposing when you first take a look at it. But remember, JavaFX is easy and fun. Let's give it a try.” Next, after showing readers how to download and install JDK/JavaFX and Scene Builder, he informs the reader that they will “create a simple JavaFX application, create and modify a window using Scene Builder, and successfully test it in under 15 minutes.” Then readers download some NetBeans files:“EasyJavaFX.java contains the main application class. We won't do anything with this class for our example, as its primary purpose in life is to load the window definition code contained in the FXML file and then show the main stage/scene. You'll keep the JavaFX terms straight with ease if you relate them to the theater: a platform holds a stage, which contains scenes. SampleController.java is our controller class that provides the ‘brains’ behind the graphical interface. If you open the SampleController, you'll see that it includes a property and a method tagged with @FXML. This tag enables the integration of the visual controls and elements you define using Scene Builder, which are stored in an FXML (FX Markup Language) file. Sample.fxml is the definition file for our sample window. You can right-click and Edit the filename in the tree to view the underlying FXML -- and you may need to do that if you change filenames or properties by hand - or you can double-click on it to open it (visually) in Scene Builder.” Then Scene Builder enters the picture and the task is soon done. Check out the article here.

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• Limitations of the SharePoint join using CAML

  - by ybbest

  Limitation One In SharePoint 2010, you can join the primary list to a foreign list and include more than one field from the foreign list. However, the limitation is that the included fields from foreign list have to be the following type: Calculated (treated as plain text) ContentTypeId Counter Currency DateTime Guid Integer Note (one-line only) Number Text The above limitation also explains why you cannot include some types of the fields from the remote list when creating a lookup. Limitation Two When using CAML query to join SharePoint lists, there can be joins to multiple lists, multiple joins to the same list, and chains of joins. However, the limitations are only inner and left outer joins are permitted and the field in the primary list must be a Lookup type field that looks up to the field in the foreign list. Limitation Three The support for writing the JOIN query in CAML is very limited.I have to hand-code the CAML query to join the lists,not fun at all.Although some blogs post mentioned about using LINQ to SharePoint and get the CAML code from there , but I never get it to work.You can check this blog post  for this.Let me know if it works for you. References: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee535502.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.sharepoint.spquery.joins.aspx

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• Must developers understand the business domain or should the specification be sufficient?

  - by Jerome C.

  I work for a company for which the domain is really difficult to understand because it is high technology in electronics, but this is applicable to any software development in a complex domain. The application that I work on displays a lot of information, charts, and metrics which are difficult to understand without experience in the domain. The developer uses a specification to describe what the software must do, such as specifing that a particular chart must display this kind of metrics and this metric is the following arithmetic formula. This way, the developer doesn't really understand the business and what/why he is doing this task. This can be OK if specification is really detailled but when it isn't or when the author has forgotten a use case, this is quite hard for the developer to find a solution. At the other hand, training every developer to all the business aspects can be very long and difficult. Should we give more importance to detailled specification (but as we know, perfect specification does not exist) or should we train all the developers to understand the business domain? EDIT: keep in mind in your answer that the company could used external developpers.

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• Agile project management, agile development: early integration

  - by Matías Fidemraizer

  I believe that agile works if everything is agile. In software development area, in my opinion, if team members' code is integrated early, code will be more in sync and this has a lot of pros: Early integration helps team members to avoid painful merges. Encourages better coding habits, because everyone makes sure that they don't break co-workers' code everyday. Both developers and architects (code reviewers) may detect bad design decisions or just wrong development directions in real-time, preventing useless work. Actually I'm talking about getting the latest version of code base and checking-in your own code to the source control in a daily basis. When you start your coding day (i.e. you arrive to your work), your first action is updating your code base with the latest version from the source control. In the other hand, when you're about an hour to leave from your work and go home, your last action is checking-in your code to the source control and be sure that your day work doesn't break the project's build process. Rather than updating and checking-in your code once you finished an entire task, I believe the best approach is fixing small and flexible personal milestones and checking-in the code once you finish one of these. I really believe that this coding approach fits better in the agile project management concept. Do you know some document, blog post, wiki, article or whatever that you can suggest me that could be in sync with my opinion?. And, do you find any problem working with this approach?. Thank you in advance.

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• Does Altova StyleVision support generation of these specific Word XML Word ML List Numbering Bullet Markup? Extend with custom external XSLT?

  - by Alex S

  Does Altova StyleVision support generation of these specific Word XML Word ML List Numbering Bullet Markup? Extend with custom external XSLT? PS: I know is specific to Altova and their Dev Tools, but just like Eclipse and Visual Studio it is one of the widest used toolkits for XML related development & programming. So, please do not hate, ban or give negative. Linked below is a section of information for Word ML XML and its numbering, list, bullet etc. The markup is pretty extensive. I am wondering if this can be replicated via StyleVision or is this a limitation that needs to extended with an external XSLT? Quote: Key links to the Markup Documentation: http://officeopenxml.com/WPnumbering.php http://officeopenxml.com/WPnumberingAbstractNum.php Also: /WPnumberingLvl.php Short outline of the Documentation there: *Numbering, Levels and Lists* - Overview - Defining a Numbering Scheme - Defining a Particular Level ++ Numbering Level Text ++ Numbering Format ++ Displaying as Numerals Only ++ Restart Numbering ++ Picture or Image as Numbering Symbol ++ Justification ++ Overriding a Numbering Definition If StyleVision supports the above, where and how inside StyleVision can I access or use these properties/ attributes for the markup? From what I've gathered, I think it does not. In the past, I have written XSL-FO and XSL-WordML by hand. So I could write an add-on external XSLT containing Word specific markup for this purpose. *Given the limitation exists, the questions now: * Where and how do I create and linked inside of StyleVision so as to APPLY and EXTEND these capability limitations of StyleVision. AND How could I make it apply only for Word ML / Word XML output styling and be DEACTIVATED/ DISABLED for HTML and PDF output?

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• Estimate of Hits / Visits / Uniques in order to fall within a given Alexa Tier?

  - by Alex C

  I was wondering if anyone could offer up rough estimates that could tell me how many hits a day move you into a given Alexa rank ? Top 5,000 Top 10,000 Top 50,000 Top 100,000 Top 500,000 Top 1,000,000 I know this is incredibly subjective and thus the broad brush strokes with the number ranges... BUT I've got a site currently ranked just over 1.2M worldwide and over 500k in the USA (http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/fstr.net) Pretty cool for something hand-built on weekends (pat self on back) I was applying to an ad-platform and was told that their program doesn't accept webmasters who have an Alexa rank of greater than 100,000. (Time to take back that pat on the back I guess). I know that my hits in the last 30 days are somewhere on the order of 15,000 uniques and 20,000 pageviews. So I'm wondering how much harder do I have to work to achieve my next "goals"? I'd like to break into the top million, then re-evaluate from there. It'd be nice to know what those targets translate into (very roughly of course). I imagine that alexa ranks and tiers become very much exponential as you move up the ranks, but even hearing annecdotal evidence from other webmasters would be really useful to me. (ie: I have a site that is ranked X and it got Y hits in the last 30 days) Thanks :) - Alex

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• How is software used in critical life-or-death systems tested?

  - by waiwai933

  An airplane, as opposed to, for example, a website, is a system where any failure in certain systems is completely unacceptable, since errors in e.g. flight monitoring can cause the autopilot to malfunction and do a dive. Obviously, this doesn't happen since the brilliant engineers at Boeing and Airbus have checks in the autopilot to make sure it doesn't suddenly decide a dive is a perfectly acceptable and safe maneuver. Or perhaps the computer crashes, and the pilots in the newer fly-by-wire aircraft can no longer actually fly the plane. Of course, there are various safety procedures and redundancies built into these systems to prevent a crash (of both the software and the aircraft). However, on the other hand, it's quite obvious that software isn't perfect—both open source and closed source software do crash regularly, and only the simplest "Hello World" program doesn't fail. How can the engineers who design the software systems in the aeronautic, medical, and other life-or-death industries manage to test their software so that it doesn't fail (and if it does fail, at least fail gracefully)? I'm desperately hoping that you're not all going to go: "Oh, I work for Boeing/Airbus/(some other company) and it's not! Have fun on your next flight/hospital visit."

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• Scene graphs and spatial partitioning structures: What do you really need?

  - by tapirath

  I've been fiddling with 2D games for awhile and I'm trying to go into 3D game development. I thought I should get my basics right first. From what I read scene graphs hold your game objects/entities and their relation to each other like 'a tire' would be the child of 'a vehicle'. It's mainly used for frustum/occlusion culling and minimizing the collision checks between the objects. Spatial partitioning structures on the other hand are used to divide a big game object (like the map) to smaller parts so that you can gain performance by only drawing the relevant polygons and again minimizing the collision checks to those polygons only. Also a spatial partitioning data structure can be used as a node in a scene graph. But... I've been reading about both subjects and I've seen a lot of "scene graphs are useless" and "BSP performance gain is irrelevant with modern hardware" kind of articles. Also some of the game engines I've checked like gameplay3d and jmonkeyengine are only using a scene graph (That also may be because they don't want to limit the developers). Whereas games like Quake and Half-Life only use spatial partitioning. I'm aware that the usage of these structures very much depend on the type of the game you're developing so for the sake of clarity let's assume the game is a FPS like Counter-Strike with some better outdoor environment capabilities (like a terrain). The obvious question is which one is needed and why (considering the modern hardware capabilities). Thank you.

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• How is the Ubuntu installation supposed to work?

  - by Bob D

  I have given up on installing Ubuntu 12.04.01 for the sixth time. I finally got Windows XP to work again. So I blitzted the Ubuntu partition and the swap partition and was about to install the sixth try when it occurred to me that ought to ask how is is "supposed" to go. My installer will install Ubuntu on the Linus ext4 partition I created by hand in Windows on my C drive. But the installer keeps insisting on installing the OS on my D drive unless I intervene. So if I choose "do something else" it will accept installing Ubuntu on the C drive in the partition I previously created, but it insists on putting the "Device for boot loader installation" on the D drive. I can select a different drive at this point (where I could not with the "along side windows choice) but what drive to I choose??? It lists sda, sda1, sda5, sdb and sdb1. The five times before this all ended in disaster letting the installer choose. So I need human intervention. Where is the safe place to do this. The results from the previous attempts left me with only the Ubuntu that would boot, the boot to windows from the grub menu failed every time. Is there a better version of Ubuntu I can use? Is V12.04.01 messed up? My goal is still to use Wine on it to run PC programs. I would like to find a shell or skin or something that makes it seem like windows but have the security and power of Linux under the good. I have seen this type of system and it worked very well. I know I am getting long winded but I have been though at least four of the seven rings of hell already, so I want this install to be the last.

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• How to diagram custom programming languages, non textual?

  - by Adam

  I've used and created domain-specific languages before, plenty of times (e.g. using yacc/lex). Normally we'd start with grammar written in BNF, and a bunch of keywords. This is easy to do, easy to share. Recently, I've started working with diagrammatic programming languages - closest parallel is circuit-diagrams in electronics, where it's very difficult to express ideas in text, but very easy to express them in wiring-diagrams. This is a new and novel problem for me: how to efficiently express these mini-languages, and share concepts in them with colleagues? (i.e. how to whiteboard-program within them. Actual programming is easy - you have physical components to hand) Are there tools for this? Or good/best practices (e.g. equivalent of "always use BNF as starting point for your new DSL, and use tools like yacc to generate the parser, compiler, etc"). My googlefu is proving weak - all I get is false positives for wiring diagrams, and UML editors (since these are custom languages, UML doesn't seem to help)

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• Long-term Freelance contract: should it have a salary-day or not?

  - by otto

  I don't like to speak about money. I just like to work. I still believe in a relationship between good work and good compensation. Hence I don't want ask my employer about my compensations, actually they are asking me. So I created a liberal contract with unspecified salary-day -- I did not want to lose my rights to my own projects and I did not pay any attention to the salary-day. Now the firm said that they would have paid me 1 month earlier if I had provided a tax -paper. I provided it before the next payment -day (unspecified). During the next month, the co-employer pretty much blocks my working -- does not allow me to access working repository and the co-employer goes to cruise when we should finalize a project so I cannot do anything. Now the project is not finalized, the co-employer has apparently provided some false statements to the boss about my doings (not getting anything for one month's work and 1 month when the co-employer pretty much wasted just my time) -- I was only allowed to debug the code of my co-employer and not to do anything. I feel that co-employer did not allow me to work by purpose so that they have an excuse not to pay any salary. The co-employer says that I cannot speak to the boss. The boss say that I need to speak directly to co-employer, not to him. I haven't said anything about the situation. I did not get things done because I was not allowed and now I am not even allowed to speak. Boss is the person who pays salaries. But both boss and co-employer have stages in the firm -- I think co-employer and boss are the same person pretty much, they created a theatre so that they get almost 2 month's work for free. Now I have multiple ideas how to avoid this kind of situations in the future: specify the salary day make sure you can speak directly to the manager and the boss, not through middle-hand other?

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• Which web site gives the most accurate indication of a programmer's capabilities?

  - by Jerry Coffin

  If you were hiring programmers, and could choose between one of (say) the top 100 coders on topcoder.com, or one of the top 100 on stackoverflow.com, which would you choose? At least to me, it would appear that topcoder.com gives a more objective evaluation of pure ability to solve problems and write code. At the same time, despite obvious technical capabilities, this person may lack any hint of social skills -- he may be purely a "lone coder", with little or no ability to help/work with others, may lack mentoring ability to help transfer his technical skills to others, etc. On the other hand, stackoverflow.com would at least appear to give a much better indication of peers' opinion of the coder in question, and the degree to which his presence and useful and helpful to others on the "team". At the same time, the scoring system is such that somebody who just throws up a lot of mediocre (or even poor answers) will almost inevitably accumulate a positive total of "reputation" points -- a single up-vote (perhaps just out of courtesy) will counteract the effects of no fewer than 5 down-votes, and others are discouraged (to some degree) from down-voting because they have to sacrifice their own reputation points to do so. At the same time, somebody who makes little or no technical contribution seems unlikely to accumulate a reputation that lands them (even close to) the top of the heap, so to speak. So, which provides a more useful indication of the degree to which this particular coder is likely to be useful to your organization? If you could choose between them, which set of coders would you rather have working on your team?

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• Advantage of Software Development [on hold]

  - by user93319

  The worth of a brand that a corporation carries is way too high than its physical presence. If you are venturing into an online business, you need to take special care about the corporate image of your business. Nowadays, it is very important for every organization to have its own website. To enhance the online presence of a company it is important to have a good website design as well as the blueprint of the design. A quality site can enhance organizational growth and it can lend a hand an in achieving company’s goals promptly. When websites have gained so much meaning, it is advisable for an organization to seek professional support for the construction of its own exclusive portals. Expert help may again is essential when one needs for a complete renovation on the Web. Any group is necessary to do a bit of introspection before it make a decision to look for the services of a professional web software development company. It is good to be completely clear-headed regarding one’s requirements. To start with, a business should be familiar with who its potential clientele are. Once this main factor has been give consideration, an association can go ahead and get its website designed accordingly. On approaching a corporation that offers software development services India to its customers, a client can make sure that their site is ready with all the most up-to-date features. Professional Assistance Matters Professional service supplier is identified to furnish a site with easy to use features that prompt visitors to come back again and again. Yet one more benefit of receiving aid from professionals is that they can let you know of the type of content that you should place on display over your site. For example, a business that wants to draw the interest of experts belong to the corporate world must make sure that the language used on its website is crisp and official.

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• Is my concept in open source license correct?

  - by tester

  I would like to justify whether my concept in the open source license is correct, as you know that, misunderstanding the terms may lead to a serious law sue. Thank you. The main difference among the open source license is whether the license is copyleft. Copyleft license means allow the others to reproduce, modify and distribute the products but the released product is bound by the same licensing restriction. That means they have to use the same license for the modified version. Also, the copyleft license require all the released modified version to be free software. On the other hand, if any others create derived work incorporating non-copyleft licensed code, they can choose any license for the code. The serveral kinds of license and comparsion GPL is a restrictive license. Software requires to released as GPL license if that integrate or is modified from the other GPL license software . The library used in developing GPL license software are also restricted to GPL and LGPL , proprietary software are not allowed to employ (or complied with) in any part of the GPL application. LGPL is similar to GPL , but was more permissive with regarding allow the using of other non-GPL software. BSD is relatively simple license, it allow developer to do anything on the original source code . The license holder do not hold any legal responsibilities for their released product. Apache license is evolved from the BSD license. The legal terms are improved and are written by legal professionals in a more modern way. It covers comprehensive intellectual property ownership and liability issues. Also, are there any popular license beside these? Thank you

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• Finishing an iteration early

  - by f1dave

  I'd like some input on this on those working with agile methodologies... A current project is finding that development on our planned user stories is finishing some time before the end of the iteration, and that the testing effort and business acceptance is what's actually dragging us out longer towards the end. This means that the devs in question have spare time, and they're essentially going out to the iteration+1 backlog and starting work on cards there before our current iteration cards are 'done'. As iteration manager, I want to put a stop to this - I want a more team-orientated approach where the group takes ownership of getting all the cards done, as opposed to "Well, dev's done so what do I dev next?" The problem I face is convincing the team of this. On one hand, I understand why the devs don't want to test the code they've written (there are unit tests they write of course, but the manual testing to be done could be influenced by their bias). The team sees working ahead as making our next iterations easier, because a lot of the work is done before we start. I see this as screwing with the whole system of planning/actuals - but it's difficult to convince the team as to why this matters. What advice can you guys and girls give? How do we stop devs reaching ahead? What should they be doing instead? How much of a problem is this in the scheme of things, if things are still getting done?

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• Complexity of defense AI

  - by Fredrik Johansson

  I have a non-released game, and currently it's only possible to play with another human being. As the game rules are made up by me, I think it would be great if new players could learn basic game play by playing against an AI opponent. I mean it's not like Tennis, where the majority knows at least the fundamental rules. On the other hand, I'm a bit concerned that this AI implementation can be quite complex. I hope you can help me with an complexity estimation. I've tried to summarize the gameplay below. Is this defense AI very hard to do? Basic Defense Game Play Player Defender can move within his land, i.e. inside a random, non-convex, polygon. This land will also contain obstacles modeled as polygons, that Defender has to move around. Player Attacker has also a land, modeled as another such polygon. Assume that Defender shall defend against Attacker. Attacker will then throw a thingy towards Defender's land. To be rewarded, Attacker wants to hit Defender's land, and Defender will want to strike away the thingy from his land before it stops to prevent Attacker from scoring. To feint Defender, Attacker might run around within his land before the throw, and based on these attacker movements Defender shall then continuously move to the best defense position within his land.

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• Use MvcContrib Grid to Display a Grid of Data in ASP.NET MVC

  The past six articles in this series have looked at how to display a grid of data in an ASP.NET MVC application and how to implement features like sorting, paging, and filtering. In each of these past six tutorials we were responsible for generating the rendered markup for the grid. Our Views included the <table> tags, the <th> elements for the header row, and a foreach loop that emitted a series of <td> elements for each row to display in the grid. While this approach certainly works, it does lead to a bit of repetition and inflates the size of our Views. The ASP.NET MVC framework includes an HtmlHelper class that adds support for rendering HTML elements in a View. An instance of this class is available through the Html object, and is often used in a View to create action links (Html.ActionLink), textboxes (Html.TextBoxFor), and other HTML content. Such content could certainly be created by writing the markup by hand in the View; however, the HtmlHelper makes things easier by offering methods that emit common markup patterns. You can even create your own custom HTML Helpers by adding extension methods to the HtmlHelper class. MvcContrib is a popular, open source project that adds various functionality to the ASP.NET MVC framework. This includes a very versatile Grid HTML Helper that provides a strongly-typed way to construct a grid in your Views. Using MvcContrib's Grid HTML Helper you can ditch the <table>, <tr>, and <td> markup, and instead use syntax like Html.Grid(...). This article looks at using the MvcContrib Grid to display a grid of data in an ASP.NET MVC application. A future installment will show how to configure the MvcContrib Grid to support both sorting and paging. Read on to learn more! Read More >

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• Music Art Food Drink: Oracle Social Plaza - Tues 10/2

  - by Bob Rhubart

  Join Oracle's social media mavens plus hundreds of your closest friends at this all-social social… What: Oracle Social Plaza When: Tuesday, October 2, 2012Noon to 8:00 pm Where: Mint Plaza Fifth Street between Mission and Market San Francisco It's a full-on treat for all your senses, featuring music, art, food, and fashion. Music will be provided by indy favs Golden State and dance-rageous local DJ Brandon Arnovick. Watch as artists, including Melanie Alveres, create works of art live, then bid on their creations. Want to do a little creating on your own? Try mugging in the Social PhotoBooth. If you're into fashion, 20 local fashion designers will be on hand with their latest creations. And if you like t-shirts, there'll be live screen printing, with free t-shirts for the first 300 guests. Food and drink? Starting at 4:30 pm there will be two bars, along with munchies from one of those outrageous San Francisco food trucks. And don't worry about missing Larry Ellison's keynote. You can watch if from here.

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• Fix for poor hd playback for 11.04 upwards

  - by mark kirby

  Hi guys ive seen loads of posts on this site about poor 720/1080p playback in recent ubuntu versions I had this problem and fixed it so I thought id share it with everyone.... 1 install mplayer 2 install smplayer frontend {in software center} 3 open smplayer 4 go to "OPTIONS" then "PREFRENCES" then "GENRAL" 5 if you have a nvidia card choose "OUTPUT DRIVER" and select "VDPAU" {for ATI or AMD choose xv (0 - ATI Radeon AVIVO video) I dont know if this will work as my card is nvidia but it should) 6 go to performance on the left hand side and set both local and streaming cache to 99999 (this may also fix dvd playback if you set that cache aswell} 7 check the box for "ALLOW HARD FRAME DROP" and set "LOOP FILTER" to skip only on HD 8 Set the "THREDS FOR DECODING OPTION TO THE NUMBER OF CORES YOUR CPU HAS IF YOU HAVE MORE THAN ONE CPU ADD UP ALL THE CORES FOR BEST PERFORMANCE" 9 Enjoy you HD movies again on ubuntu...... I have a pretty avrage machine heres my spec.... 2x Pentium 4 ht 3 ghz Stock dell power and motherboard GFORCE 310 HDMI 24 inch full HD tv as a monitor so any one with dule core cpu should have no problems getting this to work. hope this helps someone out.

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• Can JSON be made easily and safely editable by the non-technical Excel crowd?

  - by glitch

  I'm looking for a data storage format that's very intuitive and easy to edit. It should be ideally targeted towards the same crowd as Excel. At the same time I would like the data structure to be a tree. Ideally this would be JSON, since it offers both the tree aspect and allows for more interesting constructs like arrays. That and parsing libraries for JSON are ubiquitous, so I don't have to reinvent the wheel. The problem is that, at least with a non-specialized text editor, JSON is a giant pain to edit for a non-technical user. I'm thinking along the lines of someone who might have used Excel in the past, but never a real text editor. Someone who might not be comfortable with the idea of preserving JSON syntax by hand. Are there data formats out there that would fit this profile? I'd very much prefer this to be a JSON actually, but then it would require a solid editing tool that would hide the underlying implementation from the user. Think Excel and how it abstracts CSV syntax from the user. The reason I'm looking for something like this is because the team has been working with pretty hierarchical data for a while now and we've hit the limits of how easy it is to represent in simple CSVs without having to create complex rules for how represent hierarchy semantics from each row. Any suggestions?

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• How to test the tests?

  - by Ryszard Szopa

  We test our code to make it more correct (actually, less likely to be incorrect). However, the tests are also code -- they can also contain errors. And if your tests are buggy, they hardly make your code better. I can think of three possible types of errors in tests: Logical errors, when the programmer misunderstood the task at hand, and the tests do what he thought they should do, which is wrong; Errors in the underlying testing framework (eg. a leaky mocking abstraction); Bugs in the tests: the test is doing slightly different than what the programmer thinks it is. Type (1) errors seem to be impossible to prevent (unless the programmer just... gets smarter). However, (2) and (3) may be tractable. How do you deal with these types of errors? Do you have any special strategies to avoid them? For example, do you write some special "empty" tests, that only check the test author's presuppositions? Also, how do you approach debugging a broken test case?

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• Cleaning Up Online Games with Positive Enforcement

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  Anyone who has played online multiplayer games, especially those focused on combat, can attest to how caustic other players can be. League of Legends creators are fighting that, rather successfully, with a positive-reinforcement honor system. The Mary Sue reports: Here’s the background: Six months ago, Riot established Team Player Behavior — affectionately called Team PB&J — a group of experts in psychology, neuroscience, and statistics (already, I am impressed). At the helm is Jeffrey Lin, better known as Dr. Lyte, Riot’s lead designer of social systems. As quoted in a recent article at Polygon: We want to show other companies and other games that it is possible to tackle player behavior, and with certain systems and game design tools, we can shape players to be more positive. Which brings us to the Honor system. Honor is a way for players to reward each other for good behavior. This is divvied up into four categories: Friendly, Helpful, Teamwork, and Honorable Opponent. At the end of a match, players can hand out points to those they deem worthy. These points are reflected on players’ profiles, but do not result in any in-game bonuses or rewards (though this may change in the future). All Honor does is show that you played nicely. 6 Ways Windows 8 Is More Secure Than Windows 7 HTG Explains: Why It’s Good That Your Computer’s RAM Is Full 10 Awesome Improvements For Desktop Users in Windows 8

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• Java Champion Dick Wall Explores the Virtues of Scala (otn interview)

  - by Janice J. Heiss

  In a new interview up on otn/java, titled “Java Champion Dick Wall on the Virtues of Scala (Part 2),” Dick Wall explains why, after a long career in programming exploring Lisp, C, C++, Python, and Java, he has finally settled on Scala as his language of choice. From the interview: “I was always on the lookout for a language that would give me both Python-like productivity and simplicity for just writing something and quickly having it work and that also offers strong performance, toolability, and type safety (all of which I like in Java). Scala is simply the first language that offers all those features in a package that suits me. Programming in Scala feels like programming in Python (if you can think it, you can do it), but with the benefit of having a compiler looking over your shoulder and telling you that you have the wrong type here or the wrong method name there.The final ‘aha!’ moment came about a year and a half ago. I had a quick task to complete, and I started writing it in Python (as I have for many years) but then realized that I could probably write it just as fast in Scala. I tried, and indeed I managed to write it just about as fast.”Wall makes the remarkable claim that once Java developers have learned to work in Scala, when they work on large projects, they typically find themselves more productive than they are in Java. “Of course,” he points out, “people are always going to argue about these claims, but I can put my hand over my heart and say that I am much more productive in Scala than I was in Java, and I see no reason why the many people I know using Scala wouldn’t say the same without some reason.”Read the interview here.

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• How can I use domain masking without having self referral in Google Analytics

  - by Cdore

  I have one old domain that points to a website's server's ip (let's call it www.oldsite.com). I have a new one, www.newsite.com, that is set up to be forwarded to a specific page on the website. Due to the way the host of newsite.com places the website in a frame, in Google Analystics, the newsite.com is listed as a source rather than the source they were at before hand, causing a self referral. A solution is to edit the code of the iframe as I looked up, but there's no way to really edit the host's masking source code of course. Another solution I did previously was have www.newsite.com point to the address that www.oldsite.come pointed to. It solved the analytics problems, but in exchange, the url masking no longer worked. In the address bar, it came up as www.oldsite.com. Is there a way to make me have url masking and be able to forward to agree with google analytics? The server of the website is hosted on a cloud server, if this is anymore information.

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