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• How-To Backup, Swap, and Update Your Wii Game Saves

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  Whether you want to backup your game saves because you’ve worked so hard on them or you want to import game saves precisely so you don’t have to work so hard, we’ve got you covered. Image adapted from icon set by GasClown. There are a multitude of reasons you might want to export and import game saves from your Wii including: saving the progress on your favorite games before sending in your Wii for service, copying the progress to a friend’s or your secondary Wii, and importing saved games from the web or your friend’s Wii so that you don’t have to bust your ass to unlock all the specialty items yourself. (Here’s looking at you Mario Kart and House of the Dead: Overkill.) Latest Features How-To Geek ETC How To Create Your Own Custom ASCII Art from Any Image How To Process Camera Raw Without Paying for Adobe Photoshop How Do You Block Annoying Text Message (SMS) Spam? How to Use and Master the Notoriously Difficult Pen Tool in Photoshop HTG Explains: What Are the Differences Between All Those Audio Formats? How To Use Layer Masks and Vector Masks to Remove Complex Backgrounds in Photoshop Bring Summer Back to Your Desktop with the LandscapeTheme for Chrome and Iron The Prospector – Home Dash Extension Creates a Whole New Browsing Experience in Firefox KinEmote Links Kinect to Windows Why Nobody Reads Web Site Privacy Policies [Infographic] Asian Temple in the Snow Wallpaper 10 Weird Gaming Records from the Guinness Book

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• Product Recommendation: Good job scheduler for windows servers?

  - by Bret Fisher

  Looking for a mostly-GUI tool that is low cost (less then $1k, but not required) and allows you to create scheduled tasks and jobs without writing vbscript, batch files, or powershell. Something simple that speaks SMB/CIFS, SMTP, LDAP, etc. for such things as "delete some files based on a list of folders from this text file" or "disable all users with expired accounts" or "delete all disabled users not in this AD group". I've seen some of the big multi-OS enterprise task automation systems and they just look way overkill. We're a windows-only shop, Server 2003 or newer and there's got to be a simple non-agent based product that is drag-n-drop for some of this basic automation. Today we use all three languages mentioned above, and the scripts are not as reliable as a workflow-based-tool would be. Thanks.

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• Paint.NET equivalent for Linux?

  - by Macha

  On Windows, my favorite image editor is Paint.NET. However, on Linux, GIMP is as unfriendly as photoshop despite having less features. (i.e. It takes ages to load, their's far too much stuff). Most of my image editing is simple things where Photoshop or GIMP would be overkill. Paint.NET does not run on Wine or Mono. So is there any similar fast and simple but powerful image editor available for Linux? EDIT: There is a Mono version available, but I don't want to have to deal with installing svn versions of mono, and compiling the version myself.

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• How best to implement HTML5 support for my validation library

  - by Vivin Paliath

  I have created an annotation-based validation library called regula. There seems to be some amount of interest around the framework and the next thing I'd like to do is to support HTML5 validation. Originally I figured that I would check to see if the browser supported the HTML5 validation that has been specified and to either emulate or delegate to built-in regula equivalents. This is trivial for things like required, but once you start getting into the date-validation, it gets tricky (date widgets, localization, etc.). So I have a few options in front of me: Full HTML5 Shim along with widgets (for date stuff etc.): I feel like this is overkill and essentially reinventing the wheel since this is already covered by things like modernizr. Use HTML5 validation if available (either native, or provided by shim; otherwise ignore): What this means is that if HTML5 validation is available (natively or through a shim) I will use it, otherwise I will ignore it. I'm leaning towards the latter since currently if someone wants to use HTML5 validation, they will most probably require a shim since not all browsers support HTML5. Which option do you think is better?

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• Would Using a PHP Framework Be Beneficial in My Context?

  - by Fractal

  I've just started work at a small start-up company who mainly uses PHP to develop their front-end apps. I had no prior PHP experience before joining, and this has led to my apps becoming large pieces of spaghetti code. I essentially started by adding code to implement an initial feature, and then continued to hack in more code to implement further features – without much thought for the overall design. The apps themselves output XML to render on small mobile devices. I recently started looking into frameworks that I could use. I reckon an advantage would be that they seem to force developers to modularise their programs using good-practice design patterns. This seems great for someone in my position. The extra functions they provide, for example: interfacing with databases in such a way as to make SQL injection impossible, would be very useful too. The downside I can see is that there will be a lot of overhead for me in terms of the time taken to learn the framework itself (while still getting to grips with PHP itself). I'm also worried that it will be overkill for the scale of the apps we develop. They tend to be programs that interface with a fairly simple back-end DB, and will generate about 5 different XML screens. Probably around 1 or 2 thousand lines of code. The time it takes just to configure the frameworks may not be worth it. The final problem I can see is that developers in the company – who have to go over my code, and who do not know the PHP framework I may use – will have a much harder time understanding it. Given those pros and cons, I'm still not sure on what the best course of action will be; so any advice will be greatly appreciated.

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• How can I check Internet connectivity in a console?

  - by Ashfame

  Is there an easy way to check Internet connectivity from console? I am trying to play around in a shell script. One idea I seem is to wget --spider http://www.google.co.in/ and check the HTTP response code to interpret if the Internet connection is working fine. But I think there must be easy way without the need of checking a site that never crash ;) Edit: Seems like there can be a lot of factors which can be individually examined, good thing. My intention at the moment is to check if my blog is down. I have setup cron to check it every minute. For this, I am checking the HTTP response code of wget --spider to my blog. If its not 200, it notifies me (I believe this will be better than just pinging it, as the site may under be heavy load and may be timing out or respond very late). Now yesterday, there was some problem with my Internet. LAN was connected fine but just I couldn't access any site. So I keep on getting notifications as the script couldn't find 200 in the wget response. Now I want to make sure that it displays me notification when I do have internet connectivity. So, checking for DNS and LAN connectivity is a bit overkill for me as I don't have that much specific need to figure out what problem it is. So what do you suggest how I do it?

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• What is the best way to restrict access to adult content on Ubuntu?

  - by Stephen Myall

  I bought my kids a PC and installed 12.04 (Unity) on it. The bottom line is, I want my children to use the computer unsupervised while I have confidence they cannot access anything inappropriate. What I have looked at: I was looking at Scrubit a tool which allows me configure my wifi router to block content and this solution would also protect my other PC and mobile devices. This may be overkill as I just want the solution to work on one PC. I also did some Google searches and came across the application called Nanny (it seems to look the part). My experience of OSS is that the best solutions frequently never appear first on a Google search list and in this case I need to trust the methods therefore my question is very specific. I want to leverage your knowledge and experience to understand “What is the best way to restrict adult content on 12.04 LTS” as this is important to me. It maybe a combination of things so please don't answer this question "try this or that", then give me some PPA unless you can share your experience of how good it is and of course if there are any contraints. Thanks in advance

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• Animating DOM elements vs refreshing a single Canvas

  - by mgibsonbr

  A few years ago, when the HTML Canvas element was still kinda fresh, I wrote a small game in a rather "unusual" way: each game element had its own canvas, and frequently animated elements even had multiple canvases, one for each animation sprite. This way, the translation would be done by manipulating the DOM position of the canvases, while the sprite animation would consist of altering the visibility of the already drawn canvases. (z-indexes, of course, were the tricky part) It worked like a charm: even in IE6 with excanvas it showed a decent performance, and everything was rather consistent between browsers, including some smartphones. Now I'm thinking in writing a larger game engine in the same fashion, so I'm wondering whether it would be a good idea to do so in the current context (with all the advances in browsers and so on). I know I'm trading memory for time, so this needs to be customizable (even at runtime) for each machine the game will be running. But I believe using separate canvases would also help to avoid the game "freezing" on CPU spikes, since the translation would still happen even if the redraws lag for a while. Besides, the browsers' rendering engines are already optimized in may ways, so I'm guessing this scheme would also reduce the load on the CPU (in contrast to doing everything in JavaScript - specially the less optimized ones). It looks good in my head, but I'd like to hear the opinion of more experienced people before proceeding further. Is there any known drawback of doing this? I'm particulartly unexperienced in dealing with the GPU, so I wonder whether this "trick" would nullify any benefit of using a single, big canvas. Or maybe on modern devices it's overkill (though I'm skeptic about the claims that canvas+js - especially WebGL - will ever be a good alternative to native code). Any thoughts?

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• When does the "Do One Thing" paradigm become harmful?

  - by Petr

  For the sake of argument here's a sample function that prints contents of a given file line-by-line. Version 1: void printFile(const string & filePath) { fstream file(filePath, ios::in); string line; while (file.good()) { getline(file, line); cout << line << endl; } } I know it is recommended that functions do one thing at one level of abstraction. To me, though code above does pretty much one thing and is fairly atomic. Some books (such as Robert C. Martin's Clean Code) seem to suggest breaking the above code into separate functions. Version 2: void printLine(const string & line) { cout << line << endl; } void printLines(fstream & file) { string line; while (file.good()) { getline(file, line); printLine(line); } } void printFile(const string & filePath) { fstream file(filePath, ios::in); printLines(file); } I understand what they want to achieve (open file / read lines / print line), but isn't it a bit of overkill? The original version is simple and in some sense already does one thing - prints a file. The second version will lead to a large number of really small functions which may be far less legible than the first version. Wouldn't it be, in this case, better to have the code at one place? At which point does the "Do One Thing" paradigm become harmful?

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• How to define type-specific scripts when using a 'type object' programming pattern?

  - by Erik

  I am in the process of creating a game engine written in C++, using the C/C++ SQLite interface to achieve a 'type object' pattern. The process is largely similar to what is outlined here (Thank you Bob Nystrom for the great resource!). I have a generally defined Entity class that when a new object is created, data is taken from a SQLite database and then is pushed back into a pointer vector, which is then iterated through, calling update() for each object. All the ints, floats, strings are loaded in fine, but the script() member of Entity is proving an issue. It's not much fun having a bunch of stationary objects laying around my gameworld. The only solutions I've come up with so far are: Create a monolithic EntityScript class with member functions encompassing all game AI and then calling the corresponding script when iterating through the Entity vector. (Not ideal) Create bindings between C++ and a scripting language. This would seem to get the job done, but it feels like implementing this (given the potential memory overhead) and learning a new language is overkill for a small team (2-3 people) that know the entirety of the existing game engine. Can you suggest any possible alternatives? My ideal situation would be that to add content to the game, one would simply add a script file to the appropriate directory and append the SQLite database with all the object data. All that is required is to have a variety of integers and floats passed between both the engine and the script file.

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• Media Sharing on Windows Server 2008 R2

  - by HCL

  I want a Server 2008R2 (x64) to act as DNLA-Server. I remember I tried this with a Server 2008 about two years ago and this was only possible with some ugly hacks. Is it on Server 2008R2 now possible to enable Windows MediaPlayer Media-Sharing by installing the desktop experience packet? Has someone already experience on this. Or is there another possibility to allow media sharing on a Server 2008R2 "the designated way"? I remember that on Server 2008 the way was to install the old MediaConnect-Pacakge. But I hesitate to install such a component on a server. Anciently I installed VirtualServer with Vista and enabled the media server there in, but this seems to me somewhat overkill for such a simple task.

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• Software management for 2 programmers

  - by kajo

  me and my very good friend do a small bussiness. We have company and we develop web apps using Scala. We have started 3 months ago and we have a lot of work now. We cannot afford to employ another programmer because we can't pay him now. Until now we try to manage entire developing process very simply. We use excel sheets for simple bug tracking and we work on client requests on the fly. We have no plan for next week or something similar. But now I find it very inefficient and useless. I am trying to find some rules or some methodology for small team or for only two guys. For example Scrum is, imo, unadapted for us. There are a lot of roles (ScrumMaster, Product Owner, Team...) and it seems overkill. Can you something advise me? Have you any experiences with software management in small teams? Is any methodology of current agile development fitten for pair of programmers? Is there any software management for simple bug tracking, maybe wiki or time management for two coders? thanks a lot for sharing.

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• Encrypt connection between apache web server and mysql server.

  - by microchasm

  I'm setting up a local webapp. I have a CentOS-5 box that will be the webserver (Apache 2.2). I have another box (RHEL5) that will be used only for MySQL. The data will be encrypted on the webserver via PHP before being sent to the MySQL box and inserted into the db. All web-based connections to the webserver will be encrypted via SSL. From the research I've done, it's not totally clear on whether or not there is a need to encrypt the connection to the db from webserver (NB paranoia level: Orange). If it is not overkill, or even if it is (unless it is a really bad idea for some reason), any advice or pointers on the direction to take to get this done would be appreciated.

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• Infrastructure to effectively set up experiements and learn from them

  - by David

  Open-org.com is in the early stages of creating our first product, a place on the web, where one can ask lawyers questions at a fraction of their normal costs. An early stage front page can be found here. I got inspired by this video, which is recommended by Jeff Atwood, which talks about getting feedback faster, which is the reason for this question. The problem Needless to say, we want our conversion rates to be as high as possible. Therefore, we want to be able to rapidly set up a new experiment where we change something on the site (like moving an image slightly, rewriting a sentence etc.). We then want to present the modified page to a random subset of the users. After that we will compare the conversion rates of the experiment with another version. I could very well imagine that we want to run 10-100 experiments simultaneously and it would be nice to have features, where experiments that obviously have worse results will be ended before schedule. My question Does infrastructure to support the whole process exist? A short description of our infrastructure... We use EC2 and PHP and have a script to automatically start up new instances with all needed software. Still, starting up a new server for every experiment, seems like a bit of overkill, so I am wondering what other options exist. Btw. If you feel like working for Open-org.com, you can pick a task, and start working, or suggest a new task. All profits are given out to the contributors.

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• Relative encapsulation design

  - by taher1992

  Let's say I am doing a 2D application with the following design: There is the Level object that manages the world, and there are world objects which are entities inside the Level object. A world object has a location and velocity, as well as size and a texture. However, a world object only exposes get properties. The set properties are private (or protected) and are only available to inherited classes. But of course, Level is responsible for these world objects, and must somehow be able to manipulate at least some of its private setters. But as of now, Level has no access, meaning world objects must change its private setters to public (violating encapsulation). How to tackle this problem? Should I just make everything public? Currently what I'm doing is having a inner class inside game object that does the set work. So when Level needs to update an objects location it goes something like this: void ChangeObject(GameObject targetObject, int newX, int newY){ // targetObject.SetX and targetObject.SetY cannot be set directly var setter = new GameObject.Setter(targetObject); setter.SetX(newX); setter.SetY(newY); } This code feels like overkill, but it doesn't feel right to have everything public so that anything can change an objects location for example.

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• Many small scripts, one repository or multiple?

  - by The Jug

  A co-worker and myself have run into an issue that we have multiple opinions on. Currently we have a git repository that we are keeping all of our cronjobs in. There are about 20 crons and they are not really related except for the fact that they are all small python scripts and essential for some activity. We are using a fabric.py file to deploy and a requirements.txt file to manage requirements for all of the scripts. Our issue is basically, do we keep all of these scripts in one git repository or should we be separating them out into their own repositories? By keeping them in one repository it is easier to deploy them onto one server. We can use just one cron file for all the scripts. However this feels wrong, as the 20 cronjobs are not logically related. Additionally, when using one requirements.txt file for all the scripts, it's hard to figure out what the dependencies are for a particular script and they all have to use the same versions of packages. We could separate all of the scripts out into their own repositories but this creates 20 different repositories that need to be remembered and dealt with. Most of these scripts are not very large and that solution seems to be overkill. A related question is, do we use one big crontab file for all cronjobs, or a separate file for each? If each has their own, how does one crontab's installation avoid overwriting the other 19? This also seems like a pain as there would then by 20 different cron files to keep track of. In short, our main question and issue is do we keep them all closely bundled as one repository or do we separate them out into their own repository with their own requirements.txt and fabfile.py? We feel like we're also probably looking over some really simple solution. Is there an easier way to deal with this issue?

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• Indexing text file content with command line query

  - by Drew Carlton

  I take daily notes in a plaintext file labeled with date in the YYYYMMDD format. These files are no more than 100 lines long, and are written in a blog style format. I'd like to be able search these files as if they were blog posts indexed by google, with some phrase query returning the most relevant/recent date filenames, with a snippet containing the relevant part. Ideally it would be something like this: #searchindex "laptop no sound" returns: 20100909.txt: ... laptop sound isn't working... 20100101.txt ... sound is too loud... debating what laptop to buy... and so on and so forth. I'm working on a linux platform (Debian with GNOME). I've looked at beagle and tracker, but they just seem complete overkill for what I want.

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• Automatically updating routing table on server

  - by bramp

  I have a LAN with three routers on it, one connected to the Internet, one VPN router connected to a few remote sites, and a final route connected to a private network (using BGP to get prefix advertisements). On the same LAN I have multiple Linux servers which needs access to the networks behind each router. I have achieved this by configuring static routes on the server, pointing the different network prefixes to the correct router. This has worked well, but every time we connect to a new remote VPN, we have to change all the servers to be aware that the network is now accessible via the VPN, and not via the default Internet route. What I want is a way to automatically update the routes on all of the servers, when the route is added to a routers. Now, I could install Quagga or something similar on all the servers to receive router advertisements, but that seems like overkill. So my question is what is the easiest/simpliest way to update the routing tables on the server automatically, and what protocol is best suited for this purpose. thanks

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• How to use my computer to control a lamp?

  - by nona urbiz

  I've been researching computer automation systems, but everything I've found has been overkill for what I'm interested in. Can anyone help me control a lamp that is on my desk, plugged in the wall beneath the desk, with my computer (also on the desk, usually). What got me thinking is that I have the lamp plugged into a Belkin extension cord/surge protector that came with a wireless switch that toggles the power going to 6 of the eight sockets. Can I somehow hook my computer into this? I'm not too afraid to get into some wiring type thing, but do have a somewhat limited budget. It'd also be cool to get a dimmer in the loop too. thanks aha. after more research, i have realized what i'm looking for is instructions for a DIY version of this that won't look so ugly, and that i can build a UI for rather than shortcuts.

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• how can I git-revise configs in my /etc/ dir? (sudo has different keys..)

  - by Dean Rather

  I'd like to keep some of the folders in my /etc/ dir git-revised, cause I'm quite new to server administration and am constantly messing around in my /etc/nginx/ and /etc/bind/ directories. I've heard of people git-revising their either /etc/ directories, but that seems a bit like overkill, as at this point I'm only messing in those 2 subdirectories. The problem I'm having is that if I sudo my git operations, I don't have the right pubkeys to push to my remote repo (bitbucket). But if I don't sudo, I need to mess around with all the permissions (again, not very pro at this). Does anyone know best practices for managing their configs? or how I should solve this problem? Thanks, Dean. PS. It's Ubuntu 12.04, Git, nginx, bind9, amazon aws, bitbucket...

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• Should the syntax for disabling code differ from that of normal comments?

  - by deltreme

  For several reasons during development I sometimes comment out code. As I am chaotic and sometimes in a hurry, some of these make it to source control. I also use comments to clarify blocks of code. For instance: MyClass MyFunction() { (...) // return null; // TODO: dummy for now return obj; } Even though it "works" and alot of people do it this way, it annoys me that you cannot automatically distinguish commented-out code from "real" comments that clarify code: it adds noise when trying to read code you cannot search for commented-out code for for instance an on-commit hook in source control. Some languages support multiple single-line comment styles - for instance in PHP you can either use // or # for a single-line comment - and developers can agree on using one of these for commented-out code: # return null; // TODO: dummy for now return obj; Other languages - like C# which I am using today - have one style for single-line comments (right? I wish I was wrong). I have also seen examples of "commenting-out" code using compiler directives, which is great for large blocks of code, but a bit overkill for single lines as two new lines are required for the directive: #if compile_commented_out return null; // TODO: dummy for now #endif return obj; So as commenting-out code happens in every(?) language, shouldn't "disabled code" get its own syntax in language specifications? Are the pro's (separation of comments / disabled code, editors / source control acting on them) good enough and the cons ("shouldn't do commenting-out anyway", not a functional part of a language, potential IDE lag (thanks Thomas)) worth sacrificing? Edit I realise the example I used is silly; the dummy code could easily be removed as it is replaced by the actual code.

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• Data structure for bubble shooter game

  - by SundayMonday

  I'm starting to make a bubble shooter game for a mobile OS. Assume this is just the basic "three or more same-color bubbles that touch pop" and all bubbles that are separated from their group fall/pop. What data structures are common for storing the bubbles? I've considered using an undirected, connected graph where each node is a bubble. This seems like it could help answer the question "which bubbles (if any) should fall now?" after some arbitrary bubbles are popped and corresponding nodes are removed from the graph. I think the answer is all bubbles that were just disconnected from the graph should fall. However the graph approach might be overkill so I'm not sure. Another consideration for the data structure is collision detection. Perhaps being able to grab a list of neighboring bubbles in constant time for a particular "bubble slot" is useful. So the collision detection would be something like "moving bubble is closest to slot ij, neighbors of slot ij are bubbles a,b,c, moving bubble is sufficiently close to bubble b hence moving bubble should come to rest in slot ij". A game like this could be probably be made with a relatively crude grid structure as the primary data structure. However it seems like answering "which bubbles (if any) should fall now?" would be trickier with this data structure.

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• Authorization design-pattern / practice?

  - by Lawtonfogle

  On one end, you have users. On the other end, you have activities. I was wondering if there is a best practice to relate the two. The simplest way I can think of is to have every activity have a role, and assign every user every role they need. The problem is that this gets really messy in practice as soon as you go beyond a trivial system. A way I recently designed was to have users who have roles, and roles have privileges, and activities require some combinations of privileges. For the trivial case, this is more complex, but I think it will scale better. But after I implemented it, I felt like it was overkill for the system I had. Another option would be to have users, who have roles, and activities require you to have a certain role to perform with many activities sharing roles. A more complex variant of this would given activities many possible roles, which you only needed one of. And an even more complex variant would be to allow logical statements of role ownership to use an activity (i.e. Must have A and (B exclusive or C) and must not have D). I could continue to list more, but I think this already gives a picture. And many of these have trade offs. But in software design, there are oftentimes solutions, while perhaps not perfect in every possible case, are clearly top of the pack to an extent it isn't even considered opinion based (i.e. how to store passwords, plain text is worse, hashing better, hashing and salt even better, despite the increased complexity of each level) (i.e. 2, Smart UI designs for applications are bad, even if it is subjective as to what the best design is). So, is there a best practice for authorization design that is not purely opinion based/subjective?

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• Minimizing windows to tray in xfce

  - by Gryllida

  For XFCE (v. 4.8), I'm searching for possible options to minimize windows to tray (iconify). This means that 1) they're not in the window listing and 2) they're not in the alt+TAB menu and 3) when closed, the window hides (it disappears from window listing but still stays running). "alltray" has some weird GTK-related bug (https://bugs.launchpad.net/alltray/+bug/589831; windows hide but unhiding doesn't do anything; they stay in the tray icon until the user undocks them). "trayer" complains that "another systray is already running" and there's no obvious workaround. This question here is to ask about possible minimalistic (as everything in XFCE is) solutions which don't involve manual compiling, and aren't an overkill like cairo-dock is (a rather bloated gnome-style application which creates a new large 'tray' instead of using the existing one). Thanks!

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• Does SMTP greylisting a) stop much spam and b) stop much legitimate mail?

  - by Whisk

  I've just set up an SMTP server on a relatively little used domain using Postfix and enabled greylisting with SQLGrey. So far it seems to be working OK, and while there's the slight irritation of delays to emails from new senders, I can see from the logs that it's deterring a number of spam messages. In your experience does greylisting effectively stop much spam? Is it a useful addition to e.g. SpamAssassin or is adding it on top overkill/unnecessary? If I were to roll this out to heavier use domains (perhaps with more demanding users) would you anticipate a significant portion of poorly configured mail servers that would end up bouncing or losing messages?

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