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• Desktop Fun: Runic Style Fonts

  - by Asian Angel

  Most of the time regular fonts are just what you need for documents, invitations, or adding text to images. But what if you are in the mood for something unusual or unique to add that perfect touch? If you like older runic style writing, then enjoy finding some new favorites for your collection with our Runic Style Fonts collection. Temple photo by ShinyShiny. Note: To manage the fonts on your Windows 7, Vista, & XP systems see our article here. The Runic Style Fonts Sable Download Worn Manuscript Download JSL Ancient Download Antropos Download Cave Gyrl Download The Roman Runes Alliance Download Ancient Geek Download Troll Download Runish Quill MK *includes two font types Download DS RUNEnglish 2 Download Runes Written *includes two font types Download Wolves And Ravens Download Art Greco Download Dalek Download Glagolitic AOE Download Linear B Download Cartouche Download Greywolf Glyphs *includes 62 individual characters Note: This group represents A – Z in all capital letters. Note: This group represents A – Z in all lower case letters. Note: This group represents the numbers 0 – 9. Download Africain *includes 62 individual characters Note: This group represents A – Z in all capital letters. Note: This group represents A – Z in all lower case letters. Note: This group represents the numbers 0 – 9. Download Cave Writings *includes 52 individual characters Note: This group represents A – Z in all capital letters. Note: This group represents A – Z in all lower case letters. Download For more great ways to customize your computer be certain to look through our Desktop Fun section. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC HTG Projects: How to Create Your Own Custom Papercraft Toy How to Combine Rescue Disks to Create the Ultimate Windows Repair Disk What is Camera Raw, and Why Would a Professional Prefer it to JPG? The How-To Geek Guide to Audio Editing: The Basics How To Boot 10 Different Live CDs From 1 USB Flash Drive The 20 Best How-To Geek Linux Articles of 2010 Five Sleek Audi R8 Car Themes for Chrome and Iron MS Notepad Replacement Metapad Returns with a New Beta Version Spybot Search and Destroy Now Available as a Portable App (PortableApps.com) ShapeShifter: What Are Dreams? [Video] This Computer Runs on Geek Power Wallpaper Bones, Clocks, and Counters; A Look at the First 35,000 Years of Computing

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• Oracle Service Cloud May 2014 Release – Focus on your driving by JP Saunders

  - by Tuula Fai

  The next time you’re twiddling dials on your car’s dashboard to get the air to blow in the right direction, and the right song to play on the stereo, while pulling on the wires to charge your phone and punching in passwords to re-sync your hands-free headset to take a call, consider this… Does having a better dashboard UI in your car improve your driving performance? The Tesla car has one of the most modern and intuitive dashboards in any commercial car today. It is actually based on the design of a smart phone, which can download apps and updates directly from the cloud.  The 17” touchscreen, Lynx-based dashboard totally integrates all channels and devices, allowing the driver to focus on the smooth driving and power of this luxury (toy) car.  What the folks at Tesla didn't do was avoid the complexity of our needs. Instead, they streamlined them. And, while we might not all be able to afford a Tesla, their approach demonstrates that a modern UI approach can ultimately make a positive difference in our lives and businesses.  This is why the productivity and effectiveness of a Modern Contact Center is many times greater than that of a traditional contact center. Agents in a Modern Contact Center get to focus on the task at hand, the customer engagement, rather than stumbling their way through Lego blocks of complexity.  The Oracle Service Cloud is a modern approach to customer service that empowers your agents to achieve greater focus on improving your operational and strategic success through streamlined business processes.  Here are some of the recent May 2014 release highlights to the Oracle Service Cloud: Performance Enhanced Desktop UI A modern agent desktop interface that optimizes clumsy tasks, logins, screens and workflows and is optimized for agent and system performance. Improvements include performance for drag-and-drop configurable views, saved searches, and improved caching for high-speed performance even during disconnected or slow internet access.  Customer Experience Routing A streamlined automatic way to connect the right customer need to the best agent skills, based on multidimensional variables such as product skills, language skills, workload, call volume to optimize the connection and resolution experience. On-The-Go Mobile Improvements to the Agent mobile app that extend connectivity to websites, and customer surveys that are mobile-ready and rendered for any device, and ensure the customer’s voice is captured while the insight is still top of mind.  Infused Social Engagement Enhancements to infused social capabilities allow agents to respond in social threads directly from within the agent desktop, with the information becoming part of the incident record for automatic actions (such as replay or escalate) triggered off the response. Front-End Siebel Contact Center The market leading online Web Customer Self-Service interface from the Oracle Service Cloud, is now out-of-the-box ready for Oracle Siebel customers. Deploy a new online web self-service interface in a matter of weeks to have customers self-serve and self-solve answers, with escalated incidents routed directly into the Oracle Siebel Contact Center. For more information on the latest enhancements for the Oracle Service Cloud, please see the Oracle Service Cloud May 2014 Capabilities and Benefits. Related blogs: Oracle Service Cloud Feb 2014

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• Throwing exception from a property when my object state is invalid

  - by Rumi P.

  Microsoft guidelines say: "Avoid throwing exceptions from property getters", and I normally follow that. But my application uses Linq2SQL, and there is the case where my object can be in invalid state because somebody or something wrote nonsense into the database. Consider this toy example: [Table(Name="Rectangle")] public class Rectangle { [Column(Name="ID", IsPrimaryKey = true, IsDbGenerated = true)] public int ID {get; set;} [Column(Name="firstSide")] public double firstSide {get; set;} [Column(Name="secondSide")] public double secondSide {get; set;} public double sideRatio { get { return firstSide/secondSide; } } } Here, I could write code which ensures that my application never writes a Rectangle with a zero-length side into the database. But no matter how bulletproof I make my own code, somebody could open the database with a different application and create an invalid Rectangle, especially one with a 0 for secondSide. (For this example, please forget that it is possible to design the database in a way such that writing a side length of zero into the rectangle table is impossible; my domain model is very complex and there are constraints on model state which cannot be expressed in a relational database). So, the solution I am gravitating to is to change the getter to: get { if(firstSide > 0 && secondSide > 0) return firstSide/secondSide; else throw new System.InvalidOperationException("All rectangle sides should have a positive length"); } The reasoning behind not throwing exceptions from properties is that programmers should be able to use them without having to make precautions about catching and handling them them. But in this case, I think that it is OK to continue to use this property without such precautions: if the exception is thrown because my application wrote a non-zero rectangle side into the database, then this is a serious bug. It cannot and shouldn't be handled in the application, but there should be code which prevents it. It is good that the exception is visibly thrown, because that way the bug is caught. if the exception is thrown because a different application changed the data in the database, then handling it is outside of the scope of my application. So I can't do anything about it if I catch it. Is this a good enough reasoning to get over the "avoid" part of the guideline and throw the exception? Or should I turn it into a method after all? Note that in the real code, the properties which can have an invalid state feel less like the result of a calculation, so they are "natural" properties, not methods.

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• What is this algorithm for converting strings into numbers called?

  - by CodexArcanum

  I've been doing some work in Parsec recently, and for my toy language I wanted multi-based fractional numbers to be expressible. After digging around in Parsec's source a bit, I found their implementation of a floating-point number parser, and copied it to make the needed modifications. So I understand what this code does, and vaguely why (I haven't worked out the math fully yet, but I think I get the gist). But where did it come from? This seems like a pretty clever way to turn strings into floats and ints, is there a name for this algorithm? Or is it just something basic that's a hole in my knowledge? Did the folks behind Parsec devise it? Here's the code, first for integers: number' :: Integer -> Parser Integer number' base = do { digits <- many1 ( oneOf ( sigilRange base )) ; let n = foldl (\x d -> base * x + toInteger (convertDigit base d)) 0 digits ; seq n (return n) } So the basic idea here is that digits contains the string representing the whole number part, ie "192". The foldl converts each digit individually into a number, then adds that to the running total multiplied by the base, which means that by the end each digit has been multiplied by the correct factor (in aggregate) to position it. The fractional part is even more interesting: fraction' :: Integer -> Parser Double fraction' base = do { digits <- many1 ( oneOf ( sigilRange base )) ; let base' = fromIntegral base ; let f = foldr (\d x -> (x + fromIntegral (convertDigit base d))/base') 0.0 digits ; seq f (return f) Same general idea, but now a foldr and using repeated division. I don't quite understand why you add first and then divide for the fraction, but multiply first then add for the whole. I know it works, just haven't sorted out why. Anyway, I feel dumb not working it out myself, it's very simple and clever looking at it. Is there a name for this algorithm? Maybe the imperative version using a loop would be more familiar?

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• Looking for cheap Wireless router, with USB for attached USB disk drive

  - by geoffc

  I have a 802.11b router at home (DLink DI-614+ (B rev)) and it is working perfectly well for me. I want to replace it though, since it is out of updates, and now several years old and heck, I want a new toy to configure! I was trying to decide what to get. I could care less about 802.11g or n support, since B is fast enough, but every device in my house is now B/G, so G would be fine for me. N buys me little to nothing. (Small enough house that range is a non-issue). The features I realized I want are a USB port for sharing a USB hard drive. I would like to have a central device I could store files on. I do not want to waste the power of an always running PC to do this, so a router seems like the place to go. I would love it, if it could support Vonage VOIP as well, then I could ditch a power brick from a second device (I have the small DLink Vonage VOIP box). All the current examples of this router (with USB drive, yet to find one with VOIP too!) are in the $100+ range, and N and silly, when a B/G is in the $30 range around here.

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• Should I enabled 802.3x hardware flow control?

  - by Stu Thompson

  What is the conventional wisdom regarding 802.3x flow control? I'm setting up a network at a new colo and am wondering if I should be enabling it or not. My oh-cool-a-bright-and-shiny-new-toy self wants to enable it, but this seems like one of those decisions that could blow up in my face later on. My network: An HP ProCurve 2510G-24 switch A pair of Debian 5 HP DL380 G5's with built-in NC373i 2-port NIC LACP'd as one link. 9000 jumbo frames enabled. (Application) A pair of hand-built Ubuntu server with 4-port Intel Pro/1000 LACP'd as one link. 9000 jumbo frames enabled. (NAS) A few other servers with with single 1Gbps ports, but one with 100Mbps. Most of this kit is 802.3x. I've been enabling it as I go along, and am about to test the network. But as my 'go live' day nears, I am worried about the 802.3x decision as I've never explicitly used it before. Also, I've read some 10-year old articles out there on the Intertubes that warn against using flow control. Should I be enabling 802.3x hardware flow control?

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• How do I avoid the loader lock?

  - by Mark0978

  We have a managed app, that uses an assembly. That assembly uses some unmanaged C++ code. The Managed C++ code is in a dll, that depends on several other dlls. All of those Dlls are loaded by this code. (We load all the dll's that ImageCore.dll depends on first, so we can tell which ones are missing, otherwise it would just show up as ImageCore.dll failed to load, and the log file would give no clues as to why). class Interop { private const int DONT_RESOLVE_DLL_REFERENCES = 1; private static log4net.ILog log = log4net.LogManager.GetLogger("Imagecore.NET"); [DllImport("kernel32.dll", CharSet = CharSet.Auto, SetLastError = true)] private static extern IntPtr LoadLibraryEx(string fileName, IntPtr dummy, int flags); [DllImport("kernel32.dll", CharSet = CharSet.Auto, SetLastError = true)] private static extern IntPtr FreeLibrary(IntPtr hModule); static private String[] libs = { "log4cplus.dll", "yaz.dll", "zlib1.dll", "libxml2.dll" }; public static void PreloadAssemblies() { for (int i=0; i < libs.Length; ++i) { String libname = libs[i]; IntPtr hModule = LoadLibraryEx(libname, IntPtr.Zero, DONT_RESOLVE_DLL_REFERENCES); if(hModule == IntPtr.Zero) { log.Error("Unable to pre-load '" + libname + "'"); throw new DllNotFoundException("Unable to pre-load '" + libname + "'"); } else { FreeLibrary(hModule); } } IntPtr h = LoadLibraryEx("ImageCore.dll", IntPtr.Zero, 0); if (h == IntPtr.Zero) { throw new DllNotFoundException("Unable to pre-load ImageCore.dll"); } } } And this code is called by public class ImageDoc : IDisposable { static ImageDoc() { ImageHawk.ImageCore.Utility.Interop.PreloadAssemblies(); } ... } Which is static constructor. As near as I can understand it, as soon as we attempt to use an ImageDoc object, the dll that contains that assembly is loaded and as part of that load, the static constructor is called which in turn causes several other DLLs to be loaded as well. What I'm trying to figure out, is how do we defer loading of those DLLs so that we don't run smack dab into this loader lock that is being kicked out because of the static constructor. I've pieced this much together by looking at: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vsto/thread/dd192d7e-ce92-49ce-beef-3816c88e5a86 http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa290048%28VS.71%29.aspx http://forums.devx.com/showthread.php?t=53529 http://www.yoda.arachsys.com/csharp/beforefieldinit.html But I just can't seem to find a way to get these external DLLs to load without it happening at the point the class is loading. I think I need to get these LoadLibrary calls out of the static constructor, but don't know how to get them called before they are needed (except for how it is done here). I would prefer to not have to put this kind of knowledge of the dlls into every app that uses this assembly. (And I'm not sure that would even fix the problem.... The strange thing is that the exception only appears to be happening while running within the debugger, not while running outside the debugger.

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• What mobile phones are viable for a "nerdy" person? [closed]

  - by Blixt

  This community wiki is for determining a list of good mobile phone choices if you are "nerdy" (definition follows.) As a point of reference, the almost two years old N95 8GB will be used. Mostly because that's what I can most relate to since I've had it since it came out. Today, iPhone and other modern mobile phones really out-shine it in usability and interface. However, it still does everything I want it to do (and here's the definition of "nerdy"; modify as needed): Syncs contacts, calendar, tasks and mail in the background Can run multiple installable applications in the background (Google Maps with Latitude, for example) Good amount of space for music etc. Lets you develop your own little toy applications (Python; not to mention it can also run an Apache server with a public URL!) Tethering! Supports Flash (maybe not very important, but it has its uses) Has a manufacturer that believes in the nerdiness! (The people at Nokia Labs make lots of cool stuff and share early versions with the community and are generally open) A high resolution screen (at least 320x240) Special hardware features such as an accelerometer and GPS What's missing from the N95 8GB but still qualifies as good, "nerdy", qualities: 7.2 Mbit/s (or faster) internet through HSDPA or HSPA+. A good web browser that can do most of the stuff a desktop browser can (especially render sites properly and run JavaScript correctly) Touch (especially multi-touch) More special hardware features such as a compass Intuitive and fluent user interface (Shiny stuff) Ability to configure it to trust root certificates of my own choice A processor fast enough to run Quake 3! =)

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• Installing Visual Studio Express on Windows 8.1

  - by robrene

  I've been trying to install the latest version of Microsoft Visual Studio Express from their website to toy around with the IDE and C# development in general. I have a relatively fresh and completely vanilla installation of Windows 8.1 Professional x64 for this purpose. I come from a Linux background, where installing software (especially software distributed by the maintainer of the OS) is usually done with package managers. First, I tried to look for Visual Studio in the Windows 8 Store. There was one entry, but it did not have an installation button. Instead, it redirected me to their website. From all the products listed under the "Download" section on their website, I decided Visual Studio 2013 Express for Windows Desktop was the best for me. I selected it and clicked on "Install now". An installer program downloaded, and I'm assuming that the installer downloaded the necessary files as it was running. When it was done, it asked for a reboot, to which I obliged. However, I can't seem to find the IDE installed anywhere? It doesn't show up anywhere in the Start menu interface. I can't find any executables that look like they might be the IDE in its installation folder. Running the installer again and selecting "Repair" does download some files, but after its requested reboot, nothing has changed. The only thing that I can find is an advertisement link to "Try other Visual Studio 2013 Products" in my start menu. I suppose my question is what I have to do to run Visual Studio 2013 Express on Windows 8.1? Am I not looking in the right places? Am I doing the installation process wrong? Thanks in advance

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• A view from the call center for the Nashville Flood telethon

  - by Rob Foster

  I want to break away from my usual topic of something technical and talk about what I experienced tonight while working in the call center for the Nashville Flood telethon, which was broadcast on WSMV, CNN, and The Weather Channel.  We started receiving calls about 7pm local time and to be honest, I had no idea what to expect when going into this.  I mean, I'm a pretty good talker, but this is different...We had a good script of what to say and how we were supposed to say it, as well as paper forms and pens that we used to collect information from people who wanted to donate their money to help.  I took my first few calls pretty easily and it went pretty quick and easy.  Everyone was upbeat and happy to be in the call center as well as people happy to be donating money. Pizza, snacks, and soft drinks were flowing well.  Everyone is smiling and happy.  :) About 3 or 4 calls into my night, I got a call from a lady that had lost 2 family members in West Nashville who drowned in the floods.  She was crying when she called and I of course tried to console her.  She told me how bad her situation was, losing family members and much of her neighborhood.  After all this, she still just wanted to help other people.  She was donating all the money that she could to the telethon and I want to share a direct quote from her: "I want to donate this instead of buying flowers for my family members' funeral because people out there need help.". Please let me pause while I get myself together <again>.  That caught me so off guard (and still does). I had kids calling wanting to donate their allowance, open their piggy banks, whatever they could do.  These are kids.  Kids not much older than my boys.  Kids who should be focused on buying the next cool video game or toy or whatever but wanted to do something.  Everyone just seemed to want to help. I took calls from as far away as British Columbia as well and pretty much coast to coast.  how cool is that? Yet another thing that caught me off guard.  This kind lady that called from British Columbia told me how much she loved visiting Nashville and just hated to see this happen.  I belive that she said that she will be attending the CMA Fest this year too.  I was sure to tell her not to cancel her plans!  :) It felt like every call I took (and I took A LOT, as did everyone else) was very personal and heartfelt.  I've never had the privelage to do anything like this and fell lucky to have been able to help out with answering phones and logging donations.  Nashville will bounce back very quickly, people are out there day and night helping each other, and the spirits are very high here.  I hope that one day, my kids read this blog and better understand who they are, where they come from, and what the human spirt is and can be.  I love this city, I love the people here, I love the culture and even more than ever am proud to say that this is me.  This is us.  We are Nashville!

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• My First Iteration Zero

  - by onefloridacoder

  I recently watched a web cast that covered the idea of planning from the concept stage to the product backlog.  It was the first content I had seen related to Iteration Zero and it made a lot of sense from a planning and engagement perspective where the customer is concerned.  It illuminated some of the problems I’ve experienced with getting a large project of the ground.  The idea behind this is to just figure out get everyone to understand what needs to be constructed and to build the initial feature set from a *very* high level.  Once that happens other parts of the high level construction start to take place.  You end up with a feature list that describes what the business wants the system to do, and what it potentially may (or may not) interact with.  Low tech tools are used to create UI mockups that can be used as a starting point for some of the key UI pieces. Toward the end of the webcast they speaker introduced something that was new to me.  He referred to it as an executable skeleton or the steel thread.  The idea with this part of the webcast was to describe walking through the different mocked layers of the application.  Not all layers and collaborators are involved at this stage since it’s Iteration Zero, and each layer is either hard-coded or completely mocked to provide a 35K foot view of how the different layers layers work together.  So imagine two actors on each side of a layer diagram and the flow goes down from the upper left side down through a a consumer, thorough a service layer and then back up the service layer to the destination/actor. I would imagine much could be discussed moving through new/planned or existing/legacy layers, or a little of both to see what’s implied by the current high-level design. One part of the web cast has the business and design team creating the product box (think of your favorite cereal or toy box) with all of the features and even pictures laid out on the outside of the box.  The notion here is that if you handed this box to someone and told them your system was inside they would have an understanding of what the system would be able to do, or the features it could provide.    One of the interesting parts of the webcast was where the speaker described that he worked with a couple of groups in the same room and each group came up with a different product box – the point is that each group had a different idea of what the system was supposed to do.  At this point of the project I thought that to be valuable considering my experience has been that historically this has taken longer than a week to realize that the business unit and design teams see the high level solution differently.  Once my box is finished I plan on moving to the next stage of solution definition which is to plan the UI for this small application using Excel, to map out the UI elements.  I’m my own customer so it feels like cheating, but taking these slow deliberate steps have already provided a few learning opportunities.    So I resist the urge to load all of my user stories into my newly installed VS2010  TFS project and try to reduce or add to, the number of user stories and/or refine the high level estimates I’ve come up with so far.

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• Screen Aspect Ratio

  - by Bill Evjen

  Jeffrey Dean, Pixar Aspect Ratio is very important to home video. What is aspect ratio – the ratio from the height to the width 2.35:1 The image is 2.35 times wide as it is high Pixar uses this for half of our movies This is called a widescreen image When modified to fit your television screen They cut this to fit the box of your screen When a comparison is made huge chunks of picture is missing It is harder to find what is going on when these pieces are missing The whole is greater than the pieces themselves. If you are missing pieces – you are missing the movie The soul and the mood is in the film shots. Cutting it to fit a screen, you are losing 30% of the movie Why different aspect ratios? Film before the 1950s 1.33:1 Academy Standard There were all aspects of images though. There was no standard. Thomas Edison developed projecting images onto a wall/screen He didn’t patent it as he saw no value in it. Then 1.37:1 came about to add a strip of sound This is the same size as a 35mm film Around 1952 – TV comes along NTSC Television followed the Academy Standard (4x3) Once TV came out, movie theater attendance plummets So Film brought forth color to combat this. Also early 3D Also Widescreen was brought forth. Cinema-Scope Studios at the time made movies bigger and bigger There was a Napoleon movie that was actually 4x1 … really wide. 1.85:1 Academy Flat 2.35:1 Anamorphic Scope (aka Panavision/Cinemascope) Almost all movies are made in these two aspect ratios Pixar has done half in one and half in the other Why choose one over the other? Artist choice It is part of the story the director wants to tell Can we preserve the story outside of the theaters? TVs before 1998 – they were very square Now TVs are very wide Historical options Toy Story released as it was and people cut it in a way that wasn’t liked by the studio Pan and Scan is another option Cut and then scan left or right depending on where the action is Frame Height Pixar can go back and animate more picture to account for the bottom/top bars. You end up with more sky and more ground The characters seem to get lost in the picture You lose what the director original intended Re-staging For animated movies, you can move characters around – restage the scene. It is a new completely different version of the film This is the best possible option that Pixar came up with They have stopped doing this really as the demand as pretty much dropped off Why not 1.33 today? There has been an evolution of taste and demands. VHS is a linear item The focus is about portability and not about quality Most was pan and scan and the quality was so bad – but people didn’t notice DVD was introduced in 1996 You could have more content – two versions of the film You could have the widescreen version and the 1.33 version People realized that they are seeing more of the movie with the widescreen High Def Televisions (16x9 monitors) This was introduced in 2005 Blu-ray Disc was introduced in 2006 This is all widescreen You cannot find a square TV anymore TVs are roughly 1.85:1 aspect ratio There is a change in demand Users are used to black bars and are used to widescreen Users are educated now What’s next for in-flight entertainment? High Def IFE Personal Electronic Devices 3D inflight

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• How do you update live web sites with code changes?

  - by Aaron Anodide

  I know this is a very basic question. If someone could humor me and tell me how they would handle this, I'd be greatful. I decided to post this because I am about to install SynchToy to remedy the issue below, and I feel a bit unprofessional using a "Toy" but I can't think of a better way. Many times I find when I am in this situation, I am missing some painfully obvious way to do things - this comes from being the only developer in the company. ASP.NET web application developed on my computer at work Solution has 2 projects: Website (files) WebsiteLib (C#/dll) Using a Git repository Deployed on a GoGrid 2008R2 web server Deployment: Make code changes. Push to Git. Remote desktop to server. Pull from Git. Overwrite the live files by dragging/dropping with windows explorer. In Step 5 I delete all the files from the website root.. this can't be a good thing to do. That's why I am about to install SynchToy... UPDATE: THANKS for all the useful responses. I can't pick which one to mark answer - between using a web deployment - it looks like I have several useful suggesitons: Web Project = whole site packaged into a single DLL - downside for me I can't push simple updates - being a lone developer in a company of 50, this remains something that is simpler at times. Pulling straight from SCM into web root of site - i originally didn't do this out of fear that my SCM hidden directory might end up being exposed, but the answers here helped me get over that (although i still don't like having one more thing to worry about forgetting to make sure is still true over time) Using a web farm, and systematically deploying to nodes - this is the ideal solution for zero downtime, which is actually something I care about since the site is essentially a real time revenue source for my company - i might have a hard time convincing them to double the cost of the servers though. -- finally, the re-enforcement of the basic principal that there needs to be a single click deployment for the site OR ELSE THERE SOMETHING WRONG is probably the most useful thing I got out of the answers. UPDATE 2: I thought I come back to this and update with the actual solution that's been in place for many months now and is working perfectly (for my single web server solution). The process I use is: Make code changes Push to Git Remote desktop to server Pull from Git Run the following batch script: cd C:\Users\Administrator %systemroot%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd.exe stop site "/site.name:Default Web Site" robocopy Documents\code\da\1\work\Tree\LendingTreeWebSite1 c:\inetpub\wwwroot /E /XF connectionsconfig Web.config %systemroot%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd.exe start site "/site.name:Default Web Site" As you can see this brings the site down, uses robocopy to intelligently copy the files that have changed then brings the site back up. It typically runs in less than 2 seconds. Since peak traffic on this site is about 2 requests per second, missing 4 requests per site update is acceptable. Sine I've gotten more proficient with Git I've found that the first four steps above being a "manual process" is also acceptable, although I'm sure I could roll the whole thing into a single click if I wanted to. The documentation for AppCmd.exe is here. The documentation for Robocopy is here.

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• Why Apple’s New SDK Limitation is So Offensive

  - by TStewartDev

  I am not an Apple fanboy, nor have I ever been. However, I have owned a Mac, an iPod, and an iPhone in my lifetime, and for more than a decade, I have defended Apple against the untruths that the haters so enjoy spewing. I encouraged my wife to buy a MacBook when she needed a new laptop two years ago, and I often recommend them to my friends and relatives. I have proudly and happily used my first generation iPhone for nearly three years. Now, for the first time in well over ten years, I find myself ready to swear off Apple and encourage everyone I know to do the same. I was disappointed when Apple wouldn't allow native apps, but I still bought the iPhone. I've stomached their ambiguous app approval process even though it's apparent that Steve may just reject your app because he doesn't like you or feels threatened by you (I'm still lamenting the rejection of the Google Voice app). But, as a developer, I can no longer tolerate Apple's terms and the kind of totalitarian control they indicate Apple wants. In case you are not already familiar, Apple has dictated in their OS 4.0 SDK license agreement (the now infamous Section 3.3.1) that all apps developed for the iPhone must be coded in C, C++, or Objective C, and moreover, that using any cross-compiling platforms is a violation of the agreement. For those of you who aren't developers, let me try to illustrate why this angers those of us who are. Imagine you're a professional writer. You've had articles published in some journals and magazines, and you've got a couple popular books out there, too. You've got an idea for a new book, and so you take it to your publisher. Your publisher agrees that it's a good idea. "But," says the publisher, "we want to hold our books to a tighter standard so that our readers get the experience we want them to have. Therefore, from now on, all our writers may only use words from this list of the 10,000 most common English words. Furthermore, if you cite any other works or quote anyone, they must comply with that same list, or you'll have to rewrite the entire work as well in case our readers want to look up your citation." What do you do? If your work is a children's book, this probably isn't a big deal to you. If it's an autobiography, textbook, or even a novel, though, you're going to have a lot of trouble describing your content with only common words. It's going to take you longer to complete your book, too, since you'll be looking up less common words frequently to see if you can use them. You could always go to another publisher, but this one has the best ability to distribute your book. The next largest distributor can only do a quarter as much. You could abandon the project altogether, but then everyone loses. Isn't this a silly scenario? Who would put such a limitation on writers? Yet this is very much what Apple is doing. They are using their dominant position in the market to coerce developers to write their apps exclusively for the iPhone OS by making it too expensive to write for multiple platforms. It is at least a threefold attack, striking at Adobe who is set to release a compiler that lets Flash source be compiled to iPhone binaries; striking at Google whose Android platform stands the best chance at the moment of providing serious competition to the iPhone; and reinforcing their own strong position by keeping popular apps exclusively to iPhone. And while developers are already very upset about this, the sad fact is that most of us will cave and give in to Apple because consumers don't know any better. They will continue to buy Apple's toy forcing developers to play Apple's maniacal game in order to make any money, at least until Steve Jobs decides he doesn't like them or he intends to release a competing application (bye-bye OpenFeint). Apple has been kept in check on the desktop front by a very dominant Microsoft, but I'm afraid that their success with iPods, iTunes, and iPhones has created a monster that we may have to bear until it is slain by an anti-trust suit or dies with the retirement of Steve Jobs.

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• What's a good way to teach my son to program Java

  - by Software Monkey

  OK, so I've read through various posts about teaching beginner's to program, and there were some helpful things I will look at more closely. But what I want to know is whether there are any effective tools out there to teach a kid Java specifically? I want to teach him Java specifically because (a) with my strong background in C I feel that's too complex, (b) Java is the other language I know extremely well and therefore I can assist meaningfully without needing to teach myself a new but (to me) useless language, and (c) I feel that managed languages are the future, and lastly (d) Java is one of the simplest of all the languages I know well (aside from basic). I learned in basic, and I am open to teaching that first, but I am unaware of a decent free basic shell for Windows (though I haven't really searched, yet since it's not my first choice), and would anyway want to progress quickly to Java. My son is 8, so that's a couple of years earlier than I started - but he has expressed an interest in learning to program (possibly because I work from home a lot and he sees me programming all the time). If no-one can suggest a tool designed for this purpose, I will probably start him off with text/console based apps to teach the basics, and then progress to GUI building. Oh, one last thing, I am not a fan of IDE's (old school text editor type), so I would not be put off at all by a system that has him typing real code, and would likely prefer that to a toy drag/drop system. EDIT: Just to clarify; I really am specifically after ways to teach him Java; there are already a good many posts with good answers for other language alternatives - but that's not what I am looking for here. EDIT: What about Java frameworks for 2D video games - can anyone recommend any of them from personal experience? I like the idea of him starting with the mechanics in place (main game loop, scoring, etc) and adding the specifics for a game of his own imagining - that's what I did, though for me it was basic on a Commodore VIC-20 and a Sinclair ZX-81.

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• Throttling outbound API calls generated by a Rails app

  - by Sharpie

  I am not a professional web developer, but I like to wrench on websites as a hobby. Recently, I have been playing with developing a Rails app as a project to help me learn the framework. The goal of my toy app is to harvest data from another service through their API and make it available for me to query using a search function. However, the service I want to pull data from imposes a rate limit on the number of API calls that may be executed per minute. I plan on having my app run a daily update which may generate a burst of API calls that far exceeds the limit provided by the external service. I wish to respect the performance of the external site and so would like to throttle the rate at which my app executes the calls. I have done a little bit of searching and the overwhelming amount of tutorial material and pre-built libraries I have found cover throttling inbound API calls to a web app and I can find little discussion of controlling the flow of outbound calls. Being both an amateur web developer and a rails newbie, it is entirely possible that I have been executing the wrong searches in the wrong places. Therefore my questions are: Is there a nice website out there aggregating Rails tutorials that has material related to throttling outbound API requests? Are there any ruby gems or other libraries that would help me throttle the requests? I have some ideas of how I might go about writing a throttling system using a queue-based worker like DelayedJob or Resque to manage the API calls, but I would rather spend my weekends building the rest of the site if there is a good pre-built solution out there already.

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• malloc works, cudaHostAlloc segfaults?

  - by Mikhail

  I am new to CUDA and I want to use cudaHostAlloc. I was able to isolate my problem to this following code. Using malloc for host allocation works, using cudaHostAlloc results in a segfault, possibly because the area allocated is invalid? When I dump the pointer in both cases it is not null, so cudaHostAlloc returns something... works in_h = (int*) malloc(length*sizeof(int)); //works for (int i = 0;i<length;i++) in_h[i]=2; doesn't work cudaHostAlloc((void**)&in_h,length*sizeof(int),cudaHostAllocDefault); for (int i = 0;i<length;i++) in_h[i]=2; //segfaults Standalone Code #include <stdio.h> void checkDevice() { cudaDeviceProp info; int deviceName; cudaGetDevice(&deviceName); cudaGetDeviceProperties(&info,deviceName); if (!info.deviceOverlap) { printf("Compute device can't use streams and should be discared."); exit(EXIT_FAILURE); } } int main() { checkDevice(); int *in_h; const int length = 10000; cudaHostAlloc((void**)&in_h,length*sizeof(int),cudaHostAllocDefault); printf("segfault comming %d\n",in_h); for (int i = 0;i<length;i++) { in_h[i]=2; } free(in_h); return EXIT_SUCCESS; } ~ Invocation [id129]$ nvcc fun.cu [id129]$ ./a.out segfault comming 327641824 Segmentation fault (core dumped) Details Program is run in interactive mode on a cluster. I was told that an invocation of the program from the compute node pushes it to the cluster. Have not had any trouble with other home made toy cuda codes.

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• What are practical guidelines for evaluating a language's "Turing Completeness"?

  - by AShelly

  I've read "what-is-turing-complete" and the wikipedia page, but I'm less interested in a formal proof than in the practical implications of being Turing Complete. What I'm actually trying to decide is if the toy language I've just designed could be used as a general-purpose language. I know I can prove it is if I can write a Turing machine with it. But I don't want to go through that exercise until I'm fairly certain of success. Is there a minimum set of features without which Turing Completeness is impossible? Is there a set of features which virtually guarantees completeness? (My guess is that conditional branching and a readable/writeable memory store will get me most of the way there) EDIT: I think I've gone off on a tangent by saying "Turing Complete". I'm trying to guess with reasonable confidence that a newly invented language with a certain feature set (or alternately, a VM with a certain instruction set) would be able to compute anything worth computing. I know proving you can building a Turing machine with it is one way, but not the only way. What I was hoping for was a set of guidelines like: "if it can do X,Y,and Z, it can probably do anything".

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• Linear feedback shift register?

  - by Mattia Gobbi

  Lately I bumped repeatedly into the concept of LFSR, that I find quite interesting because of its links with different fields and also fascinating in itself. It took me some effort to understand, the final help was this really good page, much better than the (at first) cryptic wikipedia entry. So I wanted to write some small code for a program that worked like a LFSR. To be more precise, that somehow showed how a LFSR works. Here's the cleanest thing I could come up with after some lenghtier attempts (Python): def lfsr(seed, taps): sr, xor = seed, 0 while 1: for t in taps: xor += int(sr[t-1]) if xor%2 == 0.0: xor = 0 else: xor = 1 print xor sr, xor = str(xor) + sr[:-1], 0 print sr if sr == seed: break lfsr('11001001', (8,7,6,1)) #example I named "xor" the output of the XOR function, not very correct. However, this is just meant to show how it circles through its possible states, in fact you noticed the register is represented by a string. Not much logical coherence. This can be easily turned into a nice toy you can watch for hours (at least I could :-) def lfsr(seed, taps): import time sr, xor = seed, 0 while 1: for t in taps: xor += int(sr[t-1]) if xor%2 == 0.0: xor = 0 else: xor = 1 print xor print time.sleep(0.75) sr, xor = str(xor) + sr[:-1], 0 print sr print time.sleep(0.75) Then it struck me, what use is this in writing software? I heard it can generate random numbers; is it true? how? So, it would be nice if someone could: explain how to use such a device in software development come up with some code, to support the point above or just like mine to show different ways to do it, in any language Also, as theres not much didactic stuff around about this piece of logic and digital circuitry, it would be nice if this could be a place for noobies (like me) to get a better understanding of this thing, or better, to understand what it is and how it can be useful when writing software. Should have made it a community wiki? That said, if someone feels like golfing... you're welcome.

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• Code bacteria: evolving mathematical behavior

  - by Stefano Borini

  It would not be my intention to put a link on my blog, but I don't have any other method to clarify what I really mean. The article is quite long, and it's in three parts (1,2,3), but if you are curious, it's worth the reading. A long time ago (5 years, at least) I programmed a python program which generated "mathematical bacteria". These bacteria are python objects with a simple opcode-based genetic code. You can feed them with a number and they return a number, according to the execution of their code. I generate their genetic codes at random, and apply an environmental selection to those objects producing a result similar to a predefined expected value. Then I let them duplicate, introduce mutations, and evolve them. The result is quite interesting, as their genetic code basically learns how to solve simple equations, even for values different for the training dataset. Now, this thing is just a toy. I had time to waste and I wanted to satisfy my curiosity. however, I assume that something, in terms of research, has been made... I am reinventing the wheel here, I hope. Are you aware of more serious attempts at creating in-silico bacteria like the one I programmed? Please note that this is not really "genetic algorithms". Genetic algorithms is when you use evolution/selection to improve a vector of parameters against a given scoring function. This is kind of different. I optimize the code, not the parameters, against a given scoring function.

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• How do programming languages bind identifiers to functions

  - by sub

  I'm talking about C and/or C++ here as this are the only languages I know used for interpreters where the following could be a problem: If we have an interpreted language X how can a library written for it add functions to the language which can then be called from within programs written in the language? PHP example: substr( $str, 5, 10 ); How is the function substr added to the "function pool" of PHP so it can be called from within scripts? It is easy for PHP storing all registered function names in an array and searching through it as a function is called in a script. However, as there obviously is no eval in C(++), how can the function then be called? I assume PHP doesn't have 100MB of code like: if( identifier == "substr" ) { return PHP_SUBSTR(...); } else if( ... ) { ... } Ha ha, that would be pretty funny. I hope you have understood my question so far. How do interpreters solve this problem? How can I solve this for my own experimental toy interpreter?

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• animated swap position of two buttons

  - by Jagat

  I am trying to swap the position of two buttons. my swapping code looks as below. private void exchangeButtons(Button btn1, Button btn2) { // Create the animation set AnimationSet exchangeAnimation = new AnimationSet(true); TranslateAnimation translate = new TranslateAnimation( Animation.RELATIVE_TO_SELF, btn2.getLeft(), Animation.RELATIVE_TO_SELF, btn1.getLeft(), Animation.RELATIVE_TO_SELF, btn2.getRight(), Animation.RELATIVE_TO_SELF, btn1.getRight() ); translate.setDuration(500); exchangeAnimation.addAnimation(translate); // int fromX = btn1.getLeft(); // int fromY = btn1.getRight(); // int toX = btn2.getLeft(); // int toY = btn2.getRight(); Log.d("ArrangeMe", "view1 pos:" + btn1.getLeft() + ", " +btn1.getRight() + "view2 pos:" + btn2.getLeft() + ", " + btn2.getRight()); AnimationSet exchangeAnimation1 = new AnimationSet(true); TranslateAnimation translate1 = new TranslateAnimation( Animation.RELATIVE_TO_SELF, btn1.getLeft(), Animation.RELATIVE_TO_SELF, btn2.getLeft(), Animation.RELATIVE_TO_SELF, btn1.getRight(), Animation.RELATIVE_TO_SELF, btn2.getRight() ); translate1.setDuration(500); exchangeAnimation1.addAnimation(translate1); // EXECUTE btn1.startAnimation(exchangeAnimation); btn2.startAnimation(exchangeAnimation1); } I call the code as below exchangeButtons(button1, button2); my layout looks as below what happens when i execute the code is, instead of the buttons exchanging their positions, they just disappear for sometime[may be 500 ms] and reappear as they were originally. how to resolve this problem ? will it work properly in device ? regards

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• How to do cleanup reliably in python?

  - by Cheery

  I have some ctypes bindings, and for each body.New I should call body.Free. The library I'm binding doesn't have allocation routines insulated out from the rest of the code (they can be called about anywhere there), and to use couple of useful features I need to make cyclic references. I think It'd solve if I'd find a reliable way to hook destructor to an object. (weakrefs would help if they'd give me the callback just before the data is dropped. So obviously this code megafails when I put in velocity_func: class Body(object): def __init__(self, mass, inertia): self._body = body.New(mass, inertia) def __del__(self): print '__del__ %r' % self if body: body.Free(self._body) ... def set_velocity_func(self, func): self._body.contents.velocity_func = ctypes_wrapping(func) I also tried to solve it through weakrefs, with those the things seem getting just worse, just only largely more unpredictable. Even if I don't put in the velocity_func, there will appear cycles at least then when I do this: class Toy(object): def __init__(self, body): self.body.owner = self ... def collision(a, b, contacts): whatever(a.body.owner) So how to make sure Structures will get garbage collected, even if they are allocated/freed by the shared library? There's repository if you are interested about more details: http://bitbucket.org/cheery/ctypes-chipmunk/

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• Game architecture: modeling different steps/types of UI

  - by Sander

  I have not done any large game development projects, only messed around with little toy projects. However, I never found an intuitive answer to a specific design question. Namely, how are different types/states of UI modeled in games? E.g. how is a menu represented? How is it different from a "game world" state (let's use an FPS as an example). How is an overlaid menu on top of a "game world" modeled? Let's imagine the main loop of a game. Where do the game states come into play? It it a simple case-by-case approach? if (menu.IsEnabled) menu.Process(elapsedTime); if (world.IsEnabled) world.Process(elapsedTime); if (menu.IsVisible) menu.Draw(); if (world.IsVisible) world.Draw(); Or are menu and world represented somewhere in a different logic layer and not represented at this level? (E.g. a menu is just another high-level entity like e.g. player input or enemy manager, equal to all others) foreach (var entity in game.HighLevelEntities) entity.Process(elapsedTime); foreach (var entity in game.HighLevelEntities) entity.Draw(elapsedTime); Are there well-known design patterns for this? Come to think of it, I don't know any game-specific design patterns - I assume there are others, as well? Please tell me about them.

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• forward invocation, by hand vs magically?

  - by John Smith

  I have the following two class: //file FruitTree.h @interface FruitTree : NSObject { Fruit * f; Leaf * l; } @end //file FruitTree.m @implementation FruitTree //here I get the number of seeds from the object f @end //file Fruit @interface Fruit : NSObject { int seeds; } -(int) countfruitseeds; @end My question is at the point of how I request the number of seeds from f. I have two choices. Either: Since I know f I can explicitly call it, i.e. I implement the method -(int) countfruitseeds { return [f countfruitseeds]; } Or: I can just use forwardInvocation: - (NSMethodSignature *)methodSignatureForSelector:(SEL)selector { // does the delegate respond to this selector? if ([f respondsToSelector:selector]) return [f methodSignatureForSelector:selector]; else if ([l respondsToSelector:selector]) return [l methodSignatureForSelector:selector]; else return [super methodSignatureForSelector: selector]; } - (void)forwardInvocation:(NSInvocation *)invocation { [invocation invokeWithTarget:f]; } (Note this is only a toy example to ask my question. My real classes have lots of methods, which is why I am asking.) Which is the better/faster method?

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