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In a browser, is it best to use one huge spritesheet or many (10000) different PNG's?

- by Nick

I'm creating a game in jQuery, where I use about 10000 32x32 tiles. Until now, I have been using them all separately (no sprite sheet). An average map uses about 2000 tiles (sometimes re-used PNG's but all separate divs) and the performance ranges from stable (Chrome) to a bit laggy (Firefox). Each of these divs are positioned absolutely using CSS. They do not need to be updated every tick, just when a new map is loaded. Would it be better for performance to use spritesheet methods for the divs using CSS background-positioning, like gameQuery does? Thank you in advance!

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How do I control how often search engines visit my site?

- by Nick

I've been using the following line in the <head> of my sites for years: <meta name="revisit-after" content="3 days" /> I recently discovered that it's not one of the meta tags that Google understands, which I take to mean that there's no point in including it, and that it's been doing no good at all for years. How often do search engines crawl a website by default, and what reliable ways are there to increase or decrease that frequency?

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2 Hard Drives.One Partition

- by Nick

I have two hard drives (One 500 GB and the other 750 GB). I would like to create a single partition which will include these 2 hard drives. I guess it works only with identical hard drives, correct me if I am wrong. I have these 2 drives at an old computer which I tuned and may turn it into a web server,so I'm going to install ubuntu on them. How can I make 2 or more hard drives behave as one in one partition?

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Rendering citations and references in HTML using PHP/Perl/Python/

- by Nick

Is there a PHP/Perl/Python/... library for picking citations out of an HTML file and rendering a nice list of references at the bottom, like in Wikipedia? I'm developing a website with heavily-sourced content, and I'd really like to have automatically-generated lists of formatted references, like in Wikipedia. (Check out their philosophy page, and see how the superscript numbered citations interact with the references at the bottom. This is all dynamically generated, automatically ordered & linked.) They do it really well: the citations are linked to the references (which are backlinked to the citations), when you click on one of the links, the target is highlighted, etc. I'm tempted to build the site on MediaWiki just for this one feature, but it seems like overkill. Do I have any options?

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Hard time installing Ubuntu

- by Nick

I have a MSI GT780DXR that currently is booting windows 7. I've been trying to dual boot windows 7 and ubuntu for some time now. Here's specs that I think would make a difference Windows 7 500GB*2 RAID 0 hard drives. (Hardware RAID I'm not sure if it's a dedicated RAID card though) 7200RPM Nvidia GT570M Background: I tried to install 12.04 (64 bit) a few times but the Desktop live cd and pendrive boots with a black screen. I've tried wubi but it boots to a black screen as well. I then tried the alternative 12.04 (64 bit) and went through the installation all the way til partitioning. I let Ubuntu notice the raid setup and I setup my swap, /, and home drives, I used my free space to create the three partitions. I tried to resize the windows drive and it told me I couldn't and to be happy with my current setup. When I finally got past I got an error on installing GRUB 2 and decided to skip it and continued on to finish installation. When I tried to boot up I got an invalid partition table error. Windows recovery disc, and a GPARTED live cd couldn't find any hard drives. I ended up following advice and typed this into the recovery command prompt. bootrec /fixmbr bootrec /fixboot bootrec /rebuildBcd It worked and here I am now. The question is, how would I be able to dual boot windows 7 and Ubuntu 12.04 with this information? Thanks,

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How can I compile an IP address to country lookup database to make available for free?

- by Nick

How would I go about compiling an accurate database of IP addresses and their related countries to make available as an open source download for any web developer who wants to perform a geographic IP lookup? It seems that a company called MaxMind has a monopoly on geographic IP data, because most online tutorials I've seen for country lookups based on IP addresses start by suggesting a subscription to MaxMind's paid service (or their less accurate free 'Lite' version). I'm not completely averse to paying for their solution or using the free one, but the concept of an accurate open source equivalent that anyone can use without restriction appeals to me, and I think it would be useful for the web development community. How is geographic IP data collected, and how realistic is it to hope to maintain an up-to-date open version?

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Lightweight Ubuntu

- by Nick Berardi

Just to start off, I know of lubuntu but it really doesn't meet what I am looking for. Basically what I am looking for is the standard Desktop Ubuntu install, but with out all the word processing, multimedia, and games installed. I have seen posts out about how to get the desktop environment running on Ubuntu server, but they seem complicated, and never seem to equal the standard Desktop install. So my question is, is there anyway to tell the standard Desktop install not to install all the applications? Or is there a distro available that leaves all the applications out, and just has the standard desktop look and feel? What I really want this for is, is for development purposes to run on a VM to do Mono development.

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What should I think about when switching from Python to Java?

- by Nick Rosencrantz

I was a Java developer in the early 2000s, switched to Python in 2008 and now Iäm working in Java again. Is there anything special you think I should keep in mind when going back to a Java environment? I used to work with EJB 1.0, I didn't work with EJB 2.0 and now we have JPA instead. I'm comfortable programming in Java and my new job with Java is much better than my Python job even though Python is my favorite language the tools and others things about my Java job makes it much better. I found when I searched jobs that demand for Java developer was much greater than demand for Python programmers- do you have a similar experience? Thank you

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MySQL: operation of summing and division ?

- by Nick

Alright, so I have a user table and would like to get the max value for the user with the highest amount of points divided by a score. Below is a rough idea of what I'm looking for: SELECT MAX(SUM(points)/SUM(score)) FROM users I'm not interested in adding up both columns and dividing, rather I'm interested in dividing the points and score for each user and retrieve the highest value out of the lot.

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Hosting a website from a dynamic IP

- by nick

I recently upgraded my internet to the point that it is much faster and more reliable than my current webhost. I would like to move my current domain to be hosted at home, but my IP address is dynamic. As far as I know, I only get a new IP when I restart my modem and or router (which is almost never) or when cable one (my ISP) pushes out a firmware update (rarely). There are a few ways I can see doing this 1) convince my ISP to give me a static IP 2) assign my router my current IP to force a static IP (which might work?) 3) set my dns record to my current IP address and update it on the rare occasions that it changes. Obviously I'm hoping that the first one works, but I don't want to pay a lot of extra money (if that's what it takes) to get a static IP address. Has anyone had any luck with something like that?

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Windows 8.1 - unfixable grub

- by Nick

I have a Gigabyte laptop that came with secure boot and windows 8. After a bit of battling, I managed to get my dual boot with Ubuntu 13.10.. Anyway, I upgraded zindows to 8.1, now grub is gone. I restarted from a live CD and chrooted to my drive. I used boot-repair multiple times (with successful output) both in default and with some advanced options; also reinstalled grub manually... Each time it tries once to boot to grub but gives a message for a very short amount of time. I recorded it and it is a regular bios message "Rebbot and Select proper Boot device of Insert Boot media in selected boot device and press a key" I even tried something called EasyBCD under winblows, it shows the correct boot options, but same there, it is unable to make the linux partition fire up. Anyway, no way to boot my linux box. Does anyone have an idea how to fix this? No need to redirect me to another post with grub reinstall or boot-repair, seen them all... I am thinking of trying this other boot loader, refind, to see if it works http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/index.html Also re-reading this bios message, I'm thinking my partition might not have a boot flag anymore... I'll try that too with parted. Although both grub and win 8 are supposed to fire up from the same boot partition (the EFI one) Please help! thx

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How to synchronise the acceleration, velocity and position of the monsters on the server with the players?

- by Nick

I'm building an MMO using Node.js, and there are monsters roaming around. I can make them move around on the server using vector variables acceleration, velocity and position. acceleration = steeringForce / mass; velocity += acceleration * dTime; position += velocity * dTime; Right now I just send the positions over, and tell the players these are the "target positions" of the monsters, and let the monsters move towards the target positions on the client with a speed dependant on the distance of the target position. It works but looks rather strange. How do I synchronise these properly with the players without looking funny to them, taking into account the server lag? The problem is that I don't know how to make use of the correct acceleration/velocity values here; right now they just move directly in a straight line to the target position instead of accelerating/braking there properly. How can I implement such behaviour?

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Quickly package command fails

- by Nick Lemaire

I get an error when trying to package my quickly application: lemaire@laptop:~/Quickly/unity-bookmarks$ quickly package ........Ubuntu packaging created in debian/ ............An error has occurred during package building ERROR: package command failed Aborting It doesn't really give me an indication of what went wrong. It used to work before. If you need to take a look at the code: lp:~koukin/+junk/unity-bookmarks

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Multiplication for MVP matrices: Any benefits to doing so within the vertex shader?

- by Nick Wiggill

I'd like to understand under what circumstances (if any) it is worth doing MVP matrix multiplication inside a vertex shader. The vertex shader is run once per vertex, and a single mesh typically contains many vertices. All MVP inputs remain the same for each vertex in the vertex batch relating to a given draw call (model). Surely then, you're always better off keeping the multiplications in the client code, such that you pass in the whole MVP precalculated as a uniform? (avoiding redundant ops between individual vertices)

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Stop Google Analytics from appending hostname?

- by Nick Q.

I've come across an Analytics profile that is appending the rest of a URL to the end of a page's path. For example when looking at the page that exists at http://example.com/page I would expect to see /page but instead it shows me /page/http://example.com/. The profile has no filters applied to it, and until July was reporting as expected (/page), in July the site in question switched hosts (and absolutely nothing else, so I'm not sure that's the problem). The analytics code on the site is the standard Google Async code with a domain set. All other profiles for the site show /page as expected. Any ideas as to how I can get the profile to function as expected?

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Results stored in a session - good idea?

- by Nick

To give a bit of background, lets say it's a generic results page, which is paginated so there are X results per page. Generally to do this, I have two queries on the page: to get the total number of results to get the results, limiting by the correct page's resultset However, recently I've been trying to cut down on the queries the site is making, and I thought one way to do this would be to only do the query if any parameters to the page have changed (except of course the page number)? This would then cache all the result id's in a session, which can be sliced when I need to return the correct resultset for that page. I was trying to look around the net to see if there are downsides of this method, but I've found very little information about it. Has anyone done this before? Is it a good idea?

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Cheap ways to do scaling ops in shader?

- by Nick Wiggill

I've got an extensive world terrain that uses vec3 for the vertex position attribute. That's good, because the terrain has endless gradations due to the use of floating point. But I'm thinking about how to reduce the amount of data uploaded to the GPU. For my terrain, which uses discrete / grid-based vertex positions in x and z, it's pretty clear that I can replace my vec3s (floats, really) with shorts, halving the per-vertex position attribute cost from 12 bytes each to 6 bytes. Considering I've got little enough other vertex data, and an enormous amount of terrain data to push into the world, it's a major gain. Currently in my code, one unit in GLSL shaders is equal to 1m in the world. I like that scale. If I move over to using shorts, though, I won't be able to use the same scale, as I would then have a very blocky world where every step in height is an entire metre. So I see these potential solutions to scale the positional data correctly once it arrives at the vertex shader stage: Use 10:1 scaling, i.e. 1 short unit = 1 decimetre in CPU-side code. Do a division by 10 in the vertex shader to scale incoming decimetre values back to metres. Arbirary (non-PoT) divisions tend to be slow, however. Use (some-power-of-two):1 scaling (eg. 8:1), which enables the use of a bitshift (eg. val >> 3) to do the division... not sure how performant this is in shaders, though. Not as intuitive to read values, but possibly quite a bit faster than div by a non-PoT value. Use a texture as lookup table. I've heard that this is really fast. Or whatever solutions others can offer to achieve the same results -- minimal vertex data with sensible scaling.

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Is there a word or description for this type of query?

- by Nick

We have the requirement to find a result in a collection of records based on a prioritised set of search criteria against a relational db (I'm talking indexed field matching here rather than text search). The way we are thinking about designing the query is to begin with a highly refined and specific set of criteria. If there are no results for this initial query we want to progressively reduce the criteria one by one in order of reducing priority, querying each time such a less specific set of criteria until we find a result we can accept. Alternatively, we have considered starting with a smaller set of criteria and increasing until we have reduced number of results down to the last set. What I would like to know is if an existing term to describe this type of query exists? So that we can look to model our own on existing patterns and use best practice.

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How to sum and divide in MySql [migrated]

- by Nick

Alright, so I have a user table and would like to get the max value for the user with the highest amount of points divided by a score. Below is a rough idea of what I'm looking for: SELECT MAX(SUM(points)/SUM(score)) FROM users I'm not interested in adding up both columns and dividing, rather I'm interested in dividing the points and score for each user and retrieve the highest value out of the lot.

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Rotate Rigged and Animated Scene?

- by Nick

I have a rigged and animated mesh that I need to import into Unity. We several characters that all use the same script, and access their bones to do procedural animations as well. The problem is that the new model I was given is facing the wrong way. Instead of facing forward, the model is facing the right.. Is there any way to rotate the model with it's animations without screwing it up, so that it will import properly in unity facing forward? Because of the way it was done, selecting everything in the scene and just rotating it by 90 degrees ruins some of the animations, so I need a program that can fix this.

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Wubi doesn't install Ubuntu

- by Nick

I've tried 4 times on 2 different computers. After downloading wubi, and installing Ubuntu inside Windows XP, I restart and get the dual boot screen. I choose Ubuntu, and then nothing, my screen flashes for a few minutes with the Ubuntu colors. I restart and go to Ubuntu recovery, where it says "shadow passwords now on" and "clock off by a day-Fixed". I restart to only get the same thing, but Xubuntu, in stalled on one, but it's Ubuntu I want to try. Any thoughts ??

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Dual Boot Windows 8 and Ubuntu

- by Nick

My laptop has two hard drives, one 320GB HDD and a 30GB SSD. I installed Windows 8 on the HDD and Ubuntu on the SSD. However, after I installed Ubuntu, Windows 8 did not appear on the boot list. I tried boot-repair, but this didn't help.Here is the output of my fdisk -l: Disk /dev/sda: 320.1 GB, 320072933376 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders, total 625142448 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x6cd9314a Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 * 2048 625139711 312568832 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT Disk /dev/sdb: 30.0 GB, 30016659456 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 3649 cylinders, total 58626288 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x6cd93132 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdb1 * 2048 207126 102539+ 83 Linux /dev/sdb2 208894 58626047 29208577 5 Extended /dev/sdb5 208896 4112383 1951744 82 Linux swap / Solaris /dev/sdb6 4114432 58626047 27255808 83 Linux Disk /dev/mmcblk0: 3965 MB, 3965190144 bytes 49 heads, 48 sectors/track, 3292 cylinders, total 7744512 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x0009c694 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/mmcblk0p1 * 8192 7744511 3868160 b W95 FAT32 I also tried sudo grub-update, but that also did nothing.

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Can anyone recommend a good SMS gateway for PHP?

- by Nick

I'm looking for an SMS gateway that has the following criteria: Supports sending from short codes Opt-in capabilities for end-user (will require user to opt in before sending message) Has a clean API, preferably an XML/ REST API, although SOAP is fine The cheaper the better Honestly, I keep searching and searching all permutations of "SMS Gateway API" etc... on Google and I can't find any great services that can support all of these criteria. There are a lot of really SEO optimized sites and I can't tell which of them are legit. I'm looking for something that will be easy and quick to implement, and none of my colleagues have any recommendations. What APIs have you used (preferably with PHP) that have gotten this job done? Which services have been the most pleasant to deal with, both technically and support-wise? Update: Will be sending primarily (probably solely) in the US.

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Is it possible to modify a video codec + distribute it?

- by Nick

this is my first question on this particular stackexchange node, not sure if it's the most appropriate place for this question (if not, guidance to the appropriate node would be appreciated). the abstract: I'm interested in modifying existing video codecs and distributing my modded codecs in such a way as to make them easily added to a users codec library... for example to be added to their mpeg streamclip, ffmpeg etc. some details: I've had some experience modifying codecs by hacking ffmpeg source files and compiling my hacked code (so that for ex: my version of ffmpeg has a very different h.263 than yours). I'm interested now in taking these modified codecs and somehow making them easily distributable, so others could "add them" to their "libraries." Also, I realize there are some tricky rights/patent issues here, this is in part my motivation. I'm interested in the patent quagmires, and welcome any thoughts on this as well. ctx link: if it helps (to gauge where I'm coming from) here's a link to a previous codec-hacking project of mine http://nickbriz.com/glitchcodectutorial/

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What are the app file size limitations for different smartphone OSes & carriers?

- by Nick Gotch

I know the iPhone App Store limits how large an app can be in general and there are also limitations with AT&T over the size it can be to transmit over a data plan vs WiFi. I have no idea what, if any, these limits are for Android apps and what I'm finding online is a mix of different numbers. Does anyone know these numbers definitively? The Android game I'm porting is in the 20-30MB range and we'd like to know if we need to further reduce its size.

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