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• Antenna Aligner part 1: In the beginning.

  - by Chris George

  Picture the scene, it's 9pm, I'm in my caravan (yes I know, I've heard all the jokes!) with my family and I'm trying to tune the tv by moving the aerial, retuning, moving the aerial again, retuning... 45 mins and much cursing later I succeed. Surely there must be an easier way than this? Aha, an app; there must be an app for that? So I search in the AppStore for such an app, but curiously drew a blank. Then the seeds of the idea started to grow. I can code, I work in a software house with lots of very clever people, surely I can make an app that points to the nearest digital tv transmitter! Not having looked into app development before, I investigated how one goes about making an iPhone app and was quickly greeted by a now familiar answer "Buy a mac!". That was not an option for many reasons, mostly wife related! My dreams were starting to fade until one of my colleagues pointed out that within Red Gate, the very company I work for, there was on-going development on a piece of software that would allow me to write an app using Visual Studio on a Windows machine, Nomad! Once I signed up for the beta program I got to work learning the Jquery mobile / Phonegap framework. Within a couple of hours I had written (in Visual Studio), built in the cloud (using Nomad) and published (via TestFlight) my first iPhone app onto my iPhone ! It didn't do much, but it was a step in the right direction. To be continued...

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• XNA texture stretching at extreme coordinates

  - by Shaun Hamman

  I was toying around with infinitely scrolling 2D textures using the XNA framework and came across a rather strange observation. Using the basic draw code: spriteBatch.Begin(SpriteSortMode.Deferred, null, SamplerState.PointWrap, null, null); spriteBatch.Draw(texture, Vector2.Zero, sourceRect, Color.White, 0.0f, Vector2.Zero, 2.0f, SpriteEffects.None, 1.0f); spriteBatch.End(); with a small 32x32 texture and a sourceRect defined as: sourceRect = new Rectangle(0, 0, Window.ClientBounds.Width, Window.ClientBounds.Height); I was able to scroll the texture across the window infinitely by changing the X and Y coordinates of the sourceRect. Playing with different coordinate locations, I noticed that if I made either of the coordinates too large, the texture no longer drew and was instead replaced by either a flat color or alternating bands of color. Tracing the coordinates back down, I found the following at around (0, -16,777,000): As you can see, the texture in the top half of the image is stretched vertically. My question is why is this occurring? Certainly I can do things like bind the x/y position to some low multiple of 32 to give the same effect without this occurring, so fixing it isn't an issue, but I'm curious about why this happens. My initial thought was perhaps it was overflowing the coordinate value or some such thing, but looking at a data type size chart, the next closest below is an unsigned short with a range of about 32,000, and above is an unsigned int with a range of around 2,000,000,000 so that isn't likely the cause.

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• Directional and orientation problem

  - by Ahmed Saleh

  I have drawn 5 tentacles which are shown in red. I have drew those tentacles on a 2D Circle, and positioned them on 5 vertices of the that circle. BTW, The circle is never be drawn, I have used it to simplify the problem. Now I wanted to attached that circle with tentacles underneath the jellyfish. There is a problem with the current code but I don't know what is it. You can see that the circle is parallel to the base of the jelly fish. I want it to be shifted so that it be inside the jelly fish. but I don't know how. I tried to multiply the direction vector to extend it but that didn't work. // One tentacle is constructed from nodes // Get the direction of the first tentacle's node 0 to node 39 of that tentacle; Vec3f dir = m_tentacle[0]->geNodesPos()[0] - m_tentacle[0]->geNodesPos()[39]; // Draw the circle with tentacles on it Vec3f pos = m_SpherePos; drawCircle(pos,dir,30,m_tentacle.size()); for (int i=0; i<m_tentacle.size(); i++) { m_tentacle[i]->Draw(); } // Draw the jelly fish, and orient it on the 2D Circle gl::pushMatrices(); Quatf q; // assign quaternion to rotate the jelly fish around the tentacles q.set(Vec3f(0,-1,0),Vec3f(dir.x,dir.y,dir.z)); // tanslate it to the position of the whole creature per every frame gl::translate(m_SpherePos.x,m_SpherePos.y,m_SpherePos.z); gl::rotate(q); // draw the jelly fish at center 0,0,0 drawHemiSphere(Vec3f(0,0,0),m_iRadius,90); gl::popMatrices();

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• Report from OpenWorld Shanghai

  - by jmorourke

  Oracle OpenWorld Shanghai 2013 was held July 22nd – 25th at the International Expo Center in Shanghai, China. The conference drew over 19,000 attendees from 44 countries. In addition, 580 CxOs attended the Executive Edge program, and 430+ partners attended the Oracle Partner Network Exchange. The conference included a number of sessions on Big Data, Business Analytics, Business Intelligence and Enterprise Performance Management delivered by Oracle, our partners and customers.  I had the pleasure to attend the conference and delivered three sessions focused on Oracle’s Hyperion Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) applications. Each of my sessions was well-attended, and in a few cases was standing room only, so there is clearly a lot of interest in the China market in EPM. The EPM and BI demo pods in the DemoGrounds at the conference also received a lot of traffic. In addition to the conference sessions I delivered, I had several meetings with customers and partners in Shanghai.These sessions and meetings I attended made clear the interest that customers in China have in improving their planning, management reporting, financial reporting, and profitability management processes. In fact, with the China Ministry of Finance now standardizing on XBRL for annual reporting across multiple agencies in China, there is a great opportunity here for our disclosure management application. One interesting finding is that the China market may not be ready for cloud-based applications as many companies are state-owned and have security concerns, so on-premise applications are likely to see continued demand.  For more information about the Oracle OpenWorld China 2013 conference, please check the web  site:  http://www.oracle.com/events/apac/cn/en/openworld/index.htmlAnd don’t forget, Oracle OpenWorld San Francisco 2013 is just around the corner in September of 2013. Please check the web site for registration and content information: http://www.oracle.com/openworld/index.html

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• What is wrong with my logic for the divide and conquer algorithm for Closest pair problem?

  - by Programming Noob

  I have been following Coursera's course on Algorithms and came up with a thought about the divide/conquer algorithm for the closest pair problem, that I want clarified. As per Prof Roughgarden's algorithm (which you can see here if you're interested): For a given set of points P, of which we have two copies - sorted in X and Y direction - Px and Py, the algorithm can be given as closestPair(Px,Py): Divide points into left half - Q, and right half - R, and form sorted copies of both halves along x and y directions - Qx,Qy,Rx,Ry Let closestPair(Qx,Qy) be points p1 and q1 Let closestPair(Rx,Ry) be p2,q2 Let delta be minimum of dist(p1,q1) and dist(p2,q2) This is the unfortunate case, let p3,q3 be the closestSplitPair(Px,Py,delta) Return the best result Now, the clarification that I want is related to step 5. I should say this beforehand, that what I'm suggesting, is barely any improvement at all, but if you're still interested, read ahead. Prof R says that since the points are already sorted in X and Y directions, to find the best pair in step 5, we need to iterate over points in the strip of width 2*delta, starting from bottom to up, and in the inner loop we need only 7 comparisions. Can this be bettered to just one? How I think is possible seemed a little difficult to explain in plain text, so I drew a diagram and wrote it on paper and uploaded it here: Since no one else came up with is, I'm pretty sure there's some error in my line of thought. But I have literally been thinking about this for HOURS now, and I just HAD to post this. It's all that is in my head. Can someone point out where I'm going wrong?

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• Antenna Aligner part 1: In the beginning.

  - by Chris George

  Picture the scene, it's 9pm, I'm in my caravan (yes I know, I've heard all the jokes!) with my family and I'm trying to tune the tv by moving the aerial, retuning, moving the aerial again, retuning... 45 mins and much cursing later I succeed. Surely there must be an easier way than this? Aha, an app; there must be an app for that? So I search in the AppStore for such an app, but curiously drew a blank. Then the seeds of the idea started to grow. I can code, I work in a software house with lots of very clever people, surely I can make an app that points to the nearest digital tv transmitter! Not having looked into app development before, I investigated how one goes about making an iPhone app and was quickly greeted by a now familiar answer "Buy a mac!". That was not an option for many reasons, mostly wife related! My dreams were starting to fade until one of my colleagues pointed out that within Red Gate, the very company I work for, there was on-going development on a piece of software that would allow me to write an app using Visual Studio on a Windows machine, Nomad! Once I signed up for the beta program I got to work learning the Jquery mobile / Phonegap framework. Within a couple of hours I had written (in Visual Studio), built in the cloud (using Nomad) and published (via TestFlight) my first iPhone app onto my iPhone ! It didn't do much, but it was a step in the right direction. To be continued...

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• How difficult is it for an artist to make their own artwork cohesive to another artists' style? [on hold]

  - by user36200

  I have a lot of artwork I purchased from a website, but the artist who drew the game assets is unavailable. I need to create additional artwork which fits with this style, but I am not an artist- nor do I have any idea of how artists work. Obviously, the solution is to find a new artist, who I can pay to draw this artwork while keeping it to look at certain way. I am scared of wasting money though. I don't want to contract an artist, only to find out it is extremely difficult for someone to match another person's art style. I don't need it to be identical, I just need it to be cohesive. I also want to know what I'm asking of people, before I ask them. Artists are workers just like me, and deserve to be understood when contracted. As an artist, is it extra difficult or time consuming to alter your artwork to match a certain style? Does it require a lot of talent to make a cohesive piece of art? To be specific, I am talking about structures, such as 2D symbols of towns for a map. They all have this "gritty" penciling effect to them and lots of saturated colors, which is what will be required when I say "cohesive". Along with looking like the architecture belongs in the same world.

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• Artificial Intelligence ... how to make an object roam freely/avoid other objects, and model consciousness? [on hold]

  - by help bonafide pigeons

  Say a simple free roam battle scene in which a player runs around freely and engages in battle with other enemies/objects, as shown below: The dragon/dinosaur (or whatever that thing I drew appears to be) will, by some measure, try and avoid attacks so it is modeled to appear to have a conscious desire to avoid pain. My question is ... since this is very complex, many possible strategies for solving this, algorithms, etc., what is the basic idea behind how this would be accomplished in any sort? Like, we can assume the enemy in the picture is not just going to aimlessly hop around and avoid, but freely be modeled to behave as if it were really exploring/fighting. For the best example I can give, witness the behavior of the enemies in Final Fantasy 12 in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mO0TkmhiQ6w How do the pros, or how would anyone attempt solve/implement this? PS: I have tried several times to give an image the "illusion" that is has a conciousness, but aside from emulating a real animal's consciousness in complete, I fall short and get choppy moving images that follow predictable patterns, error-prone movements, and the worst imaginable scenario of a battle engagement.

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• What makes you look like a bad developer (ie a hacker) [on hold]

  - by user134583

  This comes from a lot of people about me, so I have to look at myself. So I would wonder what make one a bad developer (ie a hacker). These are a few things about me I used IDE intensively, all features, you name it: auto-completion, refactoring, quick fixes, open type, view hierarchy, API documentation, etcc When I deal with writing code for a project in domain I am not used to (I can't have fluency in this, this is new), I only have a very rough high level ideas. I don't use the standard modeling diagrams for early detail planning. Unorthodox diagrams that I invented when I need to draw the design in details. I don't use UML or similar, I find them not enough. I divide the sorts of diagram I drew into 3 types. Very high level diagrams which probably can be understood by almost anybody. Data entity diagram used for modeling data objects only (like ER diagrams and tree for inheritances and composition). Action diagrams for agents/classes and their interactions on data objects they contain. Constantly changing the interface (public methods) between interacting agents/classes if the need arises. I am more refrained when the interface and the module have matured Write initial concept code in a quick hackie way just so that the module works in the general cases so that I can play around with it. The module will be re-factored intensively after playing around so I could see more corner cases that I couldn't or (wouldn't want) anticipate before writing code. Using JUnit for integration-like test by using TestSuite class and ordering Unit test classes in the suite Using debugger almost anytime there is a problem instead of reading the code Constantly search on the internet for how to do some thing with some library that I haven't used a lot. So judgment, am I a bad developer? a hacker? Put in other words, to make sure this is not considered off-topic: - Is this bad practice to make your code too agile during incubating/prototyping phase of software development - Is it bad practice to use JUnit for integration testing, (I know there are other framework for integration testing, but those frameworks are for a specific products, not general)

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• HMTL5 Anti Aliasing Browser Disable

  - by Tappa Tappa

  I am forced to consider writing a library to handle the fundamental basics of drawing lines, thick lines, circles, squares etc. of an HTML5 canvas because I can't disable a feature embedded in the browser rendering of the core canvas algorithms. Am I forced to build the HTML5 Canvas rendering process from the ground up? If I am, who's in with me to do this? Who wants to change the world? Imagine a simple drawing application written in HTML5... you draw a shape... a closed shape like a rudimentary circle, free hand, more like an onion than a circle (well, that's what mine would look like!)... then imagine selecting a paint bucket icon and clicking inside that shape you drew and expecting it to be filled with a color of your choice. Imagine your surprise as you selected "Paint Bucket" and clicked in the middle of your shape and it filled your shape with color... BUT, not quite... HANG ON... this isn't right!!! On the inside of the edge of the shape you drew is a blur between the background color and your fill color and the edge color... the fill seems to be flawed. You wanted a straight forward "Paint Bucket" / "Fill"... you wanted to draw a shape and then fill it with a color... no fuss.... fill the whole damned inside of your shape with the color you choose. Your web browser has decided that when you draw the lines to define your shape they will be anti-aliased. If you draw a black line for your shape... well, the browser will draw grey pixels along the edges, in places... to make it look like a "better" line. Yeah, a "better" line that **s up the paint / flood fill process. How much does is cost to pay off the browser developers to expose a property to disable their anti-aliasing rendering? Disabling would save milliseconds for their rendering engine, surely! Bah, I really don't want to have to build my own canvas rendering engine using Bresenham line rendering algorithm... WHAT CAN BE DONE... HOW CAN THIS BE CHANGED!!!??? Do I need to start a petition aimed at the WC3???? Will you include your name if you are interested??? UPDATED function DrawLine(objContext, FromX, FromY, ToX, ToY) { var dx = Math.abs(ToX - FromX); var dy = Math.abs(ToY - FromY); var sx = (FromX < ToX) ? 1 : -1; var sy = (FromY < ToY) ? 1 : -1; var err = dx - dy; var CurX, CurY; CurX = FromX; CurY = FromY; while (true) { objContext.fillRect(CurX, CurY, objContext.lineWidth, objContext.lineWidth); if ((CurX == ToX) && (CurY == ToY)) break; var e2 = 2 * err; if (e2 > -dy) { err -= dy; CurX += sx; } if (e2 < dx) { err += dx; CurY += sy; } } }

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• iTextSharp renders image with poor quality in PDF

  - by Sebastian

  Hello, I'm using iTextSharp to print a PDF document. Everything goes ok until I have to print the company logo in it. First I noticed that the logo had poor quality, but after testing with several images, I realize that was the iTextSharp rendering it poorly. The test I did to say this was to print the PDF using my code and then edit the document with Acrobat 8.0 and I drew an image. Then printed the two documents and saw the noticeable difference. My question is that if anyone know if this can be due to a scaling problem where I'm failing to tell iTextSharp how it must render the image or is an iTextSharp limitation. The code to render the image is the following: Dim para As Paragraph = New Paragraph para.Alignment = Image.RIGHT_ALIGN para.Add(text) Dim imageFile As String = String.Format("{0}{1}", GetAppSetting("UploadDirectory"), myCompany.LogoUrl) Dim thisImage As Image = Image.GetInstance(imageFile) thisImage.Alignment = Image.LEFT_ALIGN para.Add(thisImage) The printed images are the following: Image printed directly with iTextSharp Image edited and printed with Acrobat 8 Please let me know if I need to provide more info. Thanks

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• Drawing a path with a line in OpenLayers using JavaScript

  - by Andreas Grech

  I have seen the examples presented here of how to draw a line but the examples only show how to do it with the mouse, by clicking. What I want to do is draw the line manually using JavaScript given a list of Longitude and Latitude coordinates. The reason I cannot work on the source provided in the link above is because they are only calling activate on the feature, and then let the user point and click on the map. Has anyone ever drew a path on an OpenLayers map programatically? What I want to do is exactly this: http://openspace.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/openspace/example4.html, but without using OpenSpace.

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• Perl - Internal File (create and execute)

  - by drewrockshard

  I have a quick question about creating files with perl and executing them. I wanted to know if it was possible to generate a file using perl (I actually need a .bat script) and then execute this file internally to the program. I know I can create files, and I have with perl, however, I'm wanting to do this internally to the program. So, what I want it to do is actually create a batch script internally to the program (no file is actually written to the disk, everything remains in memory, or the perl program), and then once it completes the writing of the file, I'd like to be able to actually execute this file, and then discard the file it just wrote. I'm basically trying to have it create a batch script on the fly, so that I can just have output text files from the output of the script, rather than creating the batch script on disk, then executing it, and then deleting the batch file from disk when its done. Can this be done and how would I go about doing this? Regards, Drew

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• Binding scattered/overlapping images to a WPF Canvas

  - by bufferz

  I am porting a GDI application over to WPF, where I displayed several dozen images onto Form, then drew polygons, circles, rectangles, etc over the top of these images using GDI Pens and Brushes. I'm starting to get the hang of WPF binding and would like to store all of these images and markup graphics in my ViewModel. My VM contains an ObservableCollection of my custom DrawingEntitys, DrawingEntity contains DependencyProperties for BitmapSource, Height, Width, CanvasTopLeftY, and CanvasTopLeftX, that I update frequently in the collection. I know my binding is working, I just can't figure out how to bind and draw this collection onto a Canvas. I've played around with ItemsControl and ItemsSource to death, too many different ways to list here. I can display the DrawingEntity.Bitmaps onto the canvas but Canvas.Top won't bind to CanvasTopLeftY in the DrawingEntity, everything is overlapped at 0,0. I think I'm missing an obvious strategy. Any ideas?

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• jQuery autocomplete function, how to add support for words not available in the database yet?

  - by Lyon

  Hi, I'm looking to implement a tag system like how SO uses on their site, where users can specify multiple tag words. However, on top of all the other autocomplete functions available as jquery plugins, I also want to allow users to enter new words not in the database. Does anyone know of any plugin that can do that? Or if there isn't, how one can add that functionality to an existing autocomplete function? I'm exploring Drew Wilson's autosuggest plugin at the moment, as it supports multiple tags well: http://code.drewwilson.com/entry/autosuggest-jquery-plugin Any help appreciated! Thanks :)

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• How does a WCF server inform a WCF client about changes? (Better solution then simple polling, e.g.

  - by Ian Ringrose

  see also "WCF push to client through firewall" I need to have a WCF client that connect to a WCF server, then when some of the data changes on the server the clients need to update its display. As there is likely to be a firewall between the clients and the server. All communications must be over HTTP The server can not make an (physical) outgoing call to the client. As I am writing both the client and the server I do not need to limit the solution to only using soap etc. I am looking for built in surport for "long polling" / "Comet" etc Thanks for the most informative answer from Drew Marsh on how to implement long polling in WCF. However I thought the main “selling point” of WCF was that you could do this sort of thing just by configuring the channels to be used in the config file. E.g I want a channel that logically two way but physically incoming only.

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• Accessing structure through pointers [c]

  - by Blackbinary

  I've got a structure which holds names and ages. I've made a linked-list of these structures, using this as a pointer: aNode *rootA; in my main. Now i send **rootA to a function like so addElement(5,"Drew",**rootA); Because i need to pass rootA by reference so that I can edit it in other functions (in my actual program i have two roots, so return will not work) The problem is, in my program, i can't say access the structure members. *rootA->age = 4; for example doesnt work. Hopefully you guys can help me out. Thanks!

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• How do I make lines scale when using GLOrtho?

  - by Mason Wheeler

  I'm using GLOrtho to set up a 2D view that I can render textures onto. It works really well, up until I try to zoom in on the image. If I pass half the width and half the height of the viewport to GLOrtho, I end up with all my textures displayed twice as big as normal, which is exactly what I expect. But then I try to draw a box around part of the image and it all falls apart. I call glBegin(GL_LINE_LOOP), place the four vertices, and call glEnd, and I expect to see the same thing I would see if I drew it at normal zoom level, doubled. Instead, I get lines that are all the right length, but they all come out one pixel wide, instead of two, and it looks really bad. What am I missing?

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• Project Euler #163 understanding

  - by Paul

  I spent quite a long time searching for a solution to this problem. I drew tons of cross-hatched triangles, counted the triangles in simple cases, and searched for some sort of pattern. Unfortunately, I hit the wall. I'm pretty sure my programming/math skills did not meet the prereq for this problem. So I found a solution online in order to gain access to the forums. I didn't understand most of the methods at all, and some just seemed too complicated. Can anyone give me an understanding of this problem? One of the methods, found here: http://www.math.uni-bielefeld.de/~sillke/SEQUENCES/grid-triangles (Problem C) allowed for a single function to be used. How did they come up with that solution? At this point, I'd really just like to understand some of the concepts behind this interesting problem. I know looking up the solution was not part of the Euler spirit, but I'm fairly sure I would not have solved this problem anyhow.

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• iPhone WebApp Question

  - by Henry D'Andrea

  I have this code- /** Save the web view as a screenshot. Currently only supports saving to the photo library. / - (void)saveScreenshot:(NSArray)arguments withDict:(NSDictionary*)options { CGRect screenRect = [[UIScreen mainScreen] bounds]; CGRect imageRect = CGRectMake(0, 0, CGRectGetWidth(screenRect), CGRectGetHeight(screenRect)); UIGraphicsBeginImageContext(imageRect.size); [webView.layer renderInContext:UIGraphicsGetCurrentContext()]; UIImage *viewImage = UIGraphicsGetImageFromCurrentImageContext(); UIGraphicsEndImageContext(); UIImageWriteToSavedPhotosAlbum(viewImage, self, nil, nil); UIAlertView *alert= [[UIAlertView alloc] initWithTitle:nil message:@"Image Saved" delegate:self cancelButtonTitle:@"OK" otherButtonTitles:nil]; [alert show]; [alert release]; } This is for saving whatever you drew in my app. How would I add the button for this in the HTML code. How do i call from it?

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• How do I resize a flat vector icon so that it preserves hard edges in Photoshop (CS4)

  - by Adam Singer

  I recently purchased Drew Wilson's Pictos icon library. It is a library of flat, monochromatic icons for use on the web and elsewhere. The only issue is: they're vectors. I know my way around Illustrator a little bit, but ultimately I want to import these icons into Photoshop and resize to various dimensions. The problem I'm having: when I import an icon and resize it to, say, 20x20 pixels, I notice that there is a fair bit of aliasing around the edges of the icon. I'm sure there is some magic number where the edges of these icons will remain crisp, but I can't find any option or setting that will allow me to size these icons properly. Is there a way in Photoshop to snap these icons to the closest size that removes or minimizes the aliasing?

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• How to avoid Modal Storyboard infinite loop

  - by misthills

  I've written a number of iOS applications a year ago on an old version of Xcode. I've just started a new project and discovered the storyboard feature in the latest Xcode. It turns out this is perfect for the application I am writing as it consists of ~30 interlinked screens. My question is, how do I structure my storyboard and segues to allow my application to follow a circular path through my screens. I have seen a number of examples that simply segue screen 1 to screen 2 and then screen 2 to screen 1 using the modal option. This clearly works but when I debug an application built this way, it instantiates a new instance of each screen (view controller) for every segue performed. In the diagram below (apologies, I drew a nice picture but due to my newbie status, was not able to post it), how do I go from screen 1 to screen 2 to screen 3 and back to original screen 1 without creating a new instance? // Screen 1 --> Screen 2 --> Screen3 // ^ | // | | // +-------------------------+

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• Four Emerging Payment Stories

  - by David Dorf

  The world of alternate payments has been moving fast of late.  Innovation in this area will help both consumers and retailers, but probably hurt the banks (at least that's the plan).  Here are four recent news items in this area: Dwolla, a start-up in Iowa, is trying to make credit cards obsolete.  Twelve guys in Des Moines are using $1.3M they raised to allow businesses to skip the credit card networks and avoid the fees.  Today they move about $1M a day across their network with an average transaction size of $500. Instead of charging merchants 2.9% plus $.30 per transaction, Dwolla charges a quarter -- yep, that coin featuring George Washington. Dwolla (Web + Dollar = Dwolla) avoids the credit networks and connects directly to bank accounts using the bank's ACH network.  They are signing up banks and merchants targeting both B2B and C2B as well as P2P payments.  They leverage social networks to notify people they have a money transfer, and also have a mobile app that uses GPS location. However, all is not rosy.  There have been complaints about unexpected chargebacks and with debit fees being reduced by the big banks, the need is not as pronounced.  The big banks are working on their own network called clearXchange that could provide stiff competition. VeriFone just bought European payment processor Point for around $1B.  By itself this would not have caught my attention except for the fact that VeriFone also announced the acquisition of GlobalBay earlier this month.  In addition to their core business of selling stand-beside payment terminals, with GlobalBay they get employee-operated mobile selling tools and with Point they get a very big payment processing platform. MasterCard and Intel announced a partnership around payments, starting with PayPass, MasterCard's new payment technology.  Intel will lend its expertise to add additional levels of security, which seems to be the biggest barrier for consumer adoption.  Everyone is scrambling to get their piece of cash transactions, which still represents 85% of all transactions. Apple was awarded another mobile payment patent further cementing the rumors that the iPhone 5 will support NFC payments.  As usual, Apple is upsetting the apple cart (sorry) by moving control of key data from the carriers to Apple.  With Apple's vast number of iTunes accounts, they have a ready-made customer base to use the payment infrastructure, which I bet will slowly transition people away from credit cards and toward cheaper ACH.  Gary Schwartz explains the three step process Apple is taking to become a payment processor. Below is a picture I drew representing payments in the retail industry. There's certainly a lot of innovation happening.

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• Week 21: FY10 in the Rear View Mirror

  - by sandra.haan

  FY10 is coming to a close and before we dive into FY11 we thought we would take a walk down memory lane and reminisce on some of our favorite Oracle PartnerNetwork activities. June 2009 brought One Red Network to partners offering access to the same virtual kickoff environment used by Oracle employees. It was a new way to deliver valuable content to key stakeholders (and without the 100+ degree temperatures). Speaking of hot, Oracle also announced in June new licensing options for our ISV partners. This model enables an even broader community of ISVs to build, deploy and manage SaaS applications on the same platform. While some people took the summer off, the OPN Program team was working away to deliver a brand new partner program - Oracle PartnerNetwork Specialized - at Oracle OpenWorld in October. Specialized. Recognized. Preferred. If you haven't gotten the message yet, we may need an emergency crew to pull you out from that rock you've been hiding under. But seriously, the announcement at the OPN Forum drew a big crowd and our FY11 event is shaping up to be just as exciting. OPN Specialized was announced in October and opened our doors for enrollment in December 2009. To mark our grand opening we held our first ever social webcast allowing partners from around the world to interact with us live throughout the day. We had a lot of great conversations and really enjoyed the chance to speak with so many of you. After a short holiday break we were back at it - just a small announcement - Oracle's acquisition of Sun. In case you missed it, here is a short field report from Ted Bereswill, SVP North America Alliances & Channels on the partner events to support the announcement: And while we're announcing things - did we mention that both Ted Bereswill and Judson Althoff were named Channel Chiefs by CRN? Not only do we have a couple of Channel Chiefs, but Oracle also won the Partner Program 5 Star Programs Award and took top honors at the CRN Channel Champion Awards for Financial Factors/Financial Performance in the category of Data and Information Management and the and Xchange Solution Provider event in March 2010. We actually caught up with Judson at this event for a quick recap of our participation: But awards aside, let's not forget our main focus in FY10 and that is Specialization. In April we announced that we had over 35 Specializations available for partners and a plan to deliver even more in FY11. We are just days away from the end of FY10 but hope you enjoyed our walk down memory lane. We are already planning lots of activity for our partners in FY11 starting with our Partner Kickoff event on June 29th. Join us to hear the vision and strategy for FY11 and interact with regional A&C leaders. We look forward to talking with you then. The OPN Communications Team

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• Hadoop growing pains

  - by Piotr Rodak

  This post is not going to be about SQL Server. I have been reading recently more and more about “Big Data” – very catchy term that describes untamed increase of the data that mankind is producing each day and the struggle to capture the meaning of these data. Ten years ago, and perhaps even three years ago this need was not so recognized. Increasing number of smartphones and discernable trend of mainstream Internet traffic moving to the smartphone generated one means that there is bigger and bigger stream of information that has to be stored, transformed, analysed and perhaps monetized. The nature of this traffic makes if very difficult to wrap it into boundaries of relational database engines. The amount of data makes it near to impossible to process them in relational databases within reasonable time. This is where ‘cloud’ technologies come to play. I just read a good article about the growing pains of Hadoop, which became one of the leading players on distributed processing arena within last year or two. Toby Baer concludes in it that lack of enterprise ready toolsets hinders Hadoop’s apprehension in the enterprise world. While this is true, something else drew my attention. According to the article there are already about half of a dozen of commercially supported distributions of Hadoop. For me, who has not been involved into intricacies of open-source world, this is quite interesting observation. On one hand, it is good that there is competition as it is beneficial in the end to the customer. On the other hand, the customer is faced with difficulty of choosing the right distribution. In future, when Hadoop distributions fork even more, this choice will be even harder. The distributions will have overlapping sets of features, yet will be quite incompatible with each other. I suppose it will take a few years until leaders emerge and the market will begin to resemble what we see in Linux world. There are myriads of distributions, but only few are acknowledged by the industry as enterprise standard. Others are honed by bearded individuals with too much time to spend. In any way, the third fact I can’t help but notice about the proliferation of distributions of Hadoop is that IT professionals will have jobs.   BuzzNet Tags: Hadoop,Big Data,Enterprise IT

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