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• From the Tips Box: Pre-installation Prep Work Makes Service Pack Upgrades Smoother

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  Last month Microsoft rolled out Windows 7 Service Pack 1 and, like many SP releases, quite a few people are hanging back to see what happens. If you want to update but still error on the side of caution, reader Ron Troy  offers a step-by-step guide. Ron’s cautious approach does an excellent job minimizing the number of issues that could crop up in a Service Pack upgrade by doing a thorough job updating your driver sets and clearing out old junk before you roll out the update. Read on to see how he does it: Just wanted to pass on a suggestion for people worried about installing Service Packs.  I came up with a ‘method’ a couple years back that seems to work well. Run Windows / Microsoft Update to get all updates EXCEPT the Service Pack. Use Secunia PSI to find any other updates you need. Use CCleaner or the Windows disk cleanup tools to get rid of all the old garbage out there.  Make sure that you include old system updates. Obviously, back up anything you really care about.  An image backup can be real nice to have if things go wrong. Download the correct SP version from Microsoft.com; do not use Windows / Microsoft Update to get it.  Make sure you have the 64 bit version if that’s what you have installed on your PC. Make sure that EVERYTHING that affects the OS is up to date.  That includes all sorts of drivers, starting with video and audio.  And if you have an Intel chipset, use the Intel Driver Utility to update those drivers.  It’s very quick and easy.  For the video and audio drivers, some can be updated by Intel, some by utilities on the vendor web sites, and some you just have to figure out yourself.  But don’t be lazy here; old drivers and Windows Service Packs are a poor mix. If you have 3rd party software, check to see if they have any updates for you.  They might not say that they are for the Service Pack but you cut your risk of things not working if you do this. Shut off the Antivirus software (especially if 3rd party). Reboot, hitting F8 to get the SafeMode menu.  Choose SafeMode with Networking. Log into the Administrator account to ensure that you have the right to install the SP. Run the SP.  It won’t be very fancy this way.  Maybe 45 minutes later it will reboot and then finish configuring itself, finally letting you log in. Total installation time on most of my PC’s was about 1 hour but that followed hours of preparation on each. On a separate note, I recently got on the Nvidia web site and their utility told me I had a new driver available for my GeForce 8600M GS.  This laptop had come with Vista, now has Win 7 SP1.  I had a big surprise from this driver update; the Windows Experience Score on the graphics side went way up.  Kudo’s to Nvidia for doing a driver update that actually helps day to day usage.  And unlike ATI’s updates (which I need for my AGP based system), this update was fairly quick and very easy.  Also, Nvidia drivers have never, as I can recall, given me BSOD’s, many of which I’ve gotten from ATI (TDR errors).How to Enable Google Chrome’s Secret Gold IconHTG Explains: What’s the Difference Between the Windows 7 HomeGroups and XP-style Networking?Internet Explorer 9 Released: Here’s What You Need To Know

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• Is there an IDE that can simplify the process of creating a game matchmaking website?

  - by Scott

  Yes, I'm an old guy. And I'm well versed in "C" and have written several games which I have been selling on the web for a number of years. And now, I would like to adapt one of my games to be "online". Sounds simple. I'm sure I can use the thousands of lines of "C" code that I've already written. Right? So my initial investigation begins. First, I think I'll need a server program that lives on a dedicated server (or a VPS probably) that talks to a bunch of client applications that live on individual devices around the world. I can certainly handle that! (I think to myself). I'll break up my existing game into two pieces, a client piece that is just the game displays and buttons, and a server piece that does everything else. Piece of cake, right? But that means that the "server piece" must be executed on a remote machine somewhere and run 24/7. Can I do that? [apparently, that question is so basic, so uneducated, and so lame, that nobody has ever posed it before. Because hours of Googling does not yield an answer. Fine. I'll assume I can do that and move on.] I'll need a "game room", which to me means a website where you log in and then go to a lobby of some kind where you can setup your preferences, see if any of your friends are connected, and create or join games. Should be easy, but it's not. No way. Can I do all this with my local website builder? (which happens to be 90 Second Website Builder, a nice product, btw). It turns out, I can not. I can start with that, but must modify each page, so I can interact with my sql database. So I begin making each page a "PHP" page and dynamically modifying the HTML code with PHP code. I'm already starting to get a headache. Because the resulting web pages looked terrible, I began looking at using JQuery. I want to user a JQuery dialog on my website to display a list of friends and allow the user to select one to invite to the game. [google search for "how to populate a JQuery dialog from a sql database" yields nothing but more confusion.] Javascript? Java? HTML? XML? HTML5? PHP? JQuery? Flash? Sockets? Forms? CSS? Learning about each one of these, and how they interact with each other and/or depend on each other is too much for my feeble old brain. Can anyone simplify this process for me? Is there an IDE that will help me do all this without having to go back to college for a few years? Thanks, Scott

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• AccelerometerInput XNA GameComponent

  - by Michael B. McLaughlin

  Bad accelerometer controls kill otherwise good games. I decided to try to do something about it. So I create an XNA GameComponent called AccelerometerInput. It’s still a beta project but you are welcome to try it, use it, modify it, etc. I’m releasing under the terms of the Microsoft Public License. Important info: First, it only supports tilt-style controls currently. I have not implemented motion-style controls yet (and make no promises as to when I might find time to do so). Second, I commented it heavily so that you can (hopefully) understand what it is doing. Please read the comments and examine the sample game for a usage overview. There are configurable parameters which I encourage you to make use of (both by modifying the default values where your testing shows it to be appropriate and also by implementing a calibration mechanism in your game that lets the user adjust those configurable values based on his or her own circumstances). Third, even with this code, accelerometer controls are still a fairly advanced topic area; you will likely find nothing but disappointment if you simply plunk this into some project without testing it on a device (or preferably on several devices). Fourth, if you do try this code and find that something doesn’t work as expected on your phone, please let me know as I want to improve it and can only do so with your help. Let me know what phone model it is, what you tried doing, what you expected, and what result you had instead. I may or may not be able to incorporate it into the code, but I can let others know at the very least so that they can make appropriate modifications to their games (I’m hopeful that all phones are reasonably similar in their workings and require, at most, a slight calibration change, but I simply don’t know). Fifth, although I’ll do my best to answer any questions you may have about it, I’m very busy with a number of things currently so it might take a little while. Please look through the code and examine the comments and sample game first before asking any questions. It’s likely that the answer is in there. If not, or if you just aren’t really sure, ask away. Sixth, there are differences between a portrait-mode game and a landscape mode game (specifically in the appropriate default tilt adjustment for toward the user/away from the user calculations). This is documented and the default is set for landscape. If you use this for a portrait game, make the appropriate change (look for the TODO: comment in AccelerometerInput.cs). Seventh, no provision whatsoever is made for disabling screen locking. It is up to you to implement that and to take appropriate measures to detect when the user has been idle for too long and timeout the game. That code is very game-specific. If you have questions about such matters, consult the relevant MSDN documentation and, if you still have questions, visit the App Hub forums and ask there. I answer questions there a lot and so I may even stumble across your question and answer it. But that’s a much better forum than the comments section here for questions of that sort so I would appreciate it if you asked idle detection-related questions there (or on some other suitable site that you may be more familiar and comfortable with). Eighth, this is an XNA GameComponent intended for XNA-based games on WP7. A sufficiently knowledgeable Silverlight developer should have no problem adapting it for use in a Silverlight game or app. I may create a Silverlight version at some point myself. Right now I do not have the time, unfortunately. Ok. Without further ado: http://www.bobtacoindustries.com/developers/utils/AccelerometerInput.zip Have a great St. Patrick’s Day!

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• 11.10 desktop alerts (volume change and terminal bell) stopped working but all other audio still works

  - by FlabbergastedPickle

  All, My sound works just fine in 11.10 64-bit install on HP dm1-4050 Sandy Bridge notebook (e.g. audio works in Banshee, flash, games, browser, Thunderbird email notification, etc.), but the core desktop notifications (e.g. pressing a tab in a terminal where there is more than one option should trigger a terminal bell, or changing volume using volume keys should be accompanied with the supporting "quack" that the volume app makes) do not work. I've intentionally disabled login sound as explained here on ask ubuntu but even enabling it back makes no difference. These notifications did work before just fine and I am not sure when did the actually stop working but it must've been fairly recently. Only things I did were trying to install some ppa edge xorg drivers for my intel card (a separate issue) but also reverted them all with ppa-purge once I discovered they did not improve anything. Other thing I did was check volume settings with alsamixer and did alsactl store for the soundcard after I did some experimenting with volume settings for PCM (on my laptop PCM at 100% crackles so I had to lower it and make pulseaudio ignore its setting as per ask ubuntu's page). That said, neither of these should have any bearing on the said notifications since the volume is up and they clearly work everywhere else but the core desktop events. The system ready drum sound when Ubuntu boots and user reaches the login screen also does not work. The guest login behaves exactly same as mine. Audio works (including the login sound since I've not disabled it for the guest account), but no quacks when changing the volume or terminal bell sounds... I've tried copying ubuntu sounds to /usr/share/sounds/ as suggested on ask ubuntu and that did not work. I also tried using dconf-editor to check sound theme settings and tried both freedesktop (which is what it was set to) and ubuntu, as suggested on ask ubuntu. This did not work either. I tried purging the ~/.pulse folder and the /tmp/*pulse* entries, rebooting and restarting pulseaudio with -D flag. While audio came back on and behaved just fine in all aspects (e.g. one can adjust volume levels, play music, games, in-browser sound stuff, and other app alerts) except for the system ready drum sound (at the login screen), and any system event (terminal bell and volume change quack sound). It is interesting that the quack sound works inside system settings-sound when adjusting levels there, but it does not when volume is changed via top bar's volume settings... I do recall that at one point yesterday when I was restarting pulseaudio the quacks that accompany volume change did start working but I have no idea what caused that. This was also when I first realized those alerts were not working. After rebooting it was again gone. I did compile my own 3.0.14-rt31 kernel a little while ago as instructed on one of the wiki's for the 11.10 rt kernel. Everything works as before except for the said sound alerts. I am not sure if this began happening since I started using the rt kernel though and yesterday's momentary ability to hear those quacks while changing the volume make me believe that the kernel is not one responsible for this problem. One more thing I can think of is that I used alsoft-conf tool to configure buffering on the OpenAL (due to TA Spring's choppy audio) and changed in there default audio device to ALSA. I also tried reverting it to Pulseaudio as the only allowed output but the bottom part of the Backend tab always reverts to ALSA even when I select Pulseaudio. The pulseaudio does remain as the only active choice on top. This, however, once again does not make any sense in terms of preventing desktop audio alerts when everything else including OpenAL games plays sound just fine... So, there you have it, as verbose as I could make it :-). I tried all I could find on this issue and had no luck so far... Any ideas?

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• Elo system behaves oddly in program I've created

  - by adc

  Alright, so I'm looking to build a small program (C# and XAML) that, essentially, does this: Generate array of players. Each player has a current rating and a true rating. I set current rating to 1200 as a starting point right now; I've also tried setting it to true rating and the average of the two. True rating is what their skill level actually is. Their true rating is calculated based on percentages from the current League of Legends rating system; generating an array of 970 thousand generates results very similar to the data from here: (removed due to URL limit - but trust me, the results are very similar). This array is of length specified by the user. If need be, sort the array from smallest to largest. Play X number of games, again specified by the user. This is done by taking the array of players (which is sorted by Current Rating after being created) and running through it in groups of 10. The first five are on team one, the second five are on team two. It then takes the True Rating of these players and calculates an expected chance to win using the Elo system. It generates a random double and compares it to the expected chance to win; if the number is lower, team one wins - otherwise team two wins. I then update the rating of the players via, again, the Elo system - giving the winning team a score of 1 and the losing team a score of 0. I use a K value of 36 (but have tried 12, 24, and even higher ones) and an F value of 400. After going through the entire loop of players (which I have conveniently forced to be a multiple of ten), it sorts the array - again via current rating. This, if my understanding of the Elo system is correct, runs properly. However, it doesn't seem to work. I have a running test telling me how many players of the full array are within 100 current rating of their true rating. I would expect some portion of the population to be outside this range (as probability is not always going to go in their favor), but a full 40-45% of the population is outside of this range. I also have it outputting the maximum difference between true and current rating - and I have never seen this drop below 500! It hovers between 550-600, occasionally going over or under. I'm at a loss as to what to change - I've fiddled with the K and F values, where I start all the players, etc. but nothing changes the fact that eventually a good 40% of the population is outside the range. And it isn't that I have it playing too few games - it's now run through over 60 thousand games and the problem never disappears or really fluctuates. The full C# code, including everything except the XAML file and the Player class (pastebin is being very slow and I can only post two links, so I can't link to the XAML file): http://pastebin.com/rFcZRL84 The Player class: http://pastebin.com/4cJTdTRu I guess my question is did I do anything wrong? Is there a problem with the way I implemented the system, or is it just that Riot uses a significantly modified Elo system? I don't think it's the latter, as that still wouldn't explain the massive true and current rating differences to me, however.

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• Make the Time

  - by WonderOfItAll

  Took the little one to the pool tonight for swim lessons. Okay, Okay. They're not really lessons so much as they are "Hey, here's a few bucks, let me rent out a small section of your pool to swim around with my little one" Saw a dad at the pool. Bluetooth on, iPad in hand, and two year old somewhere around there. Saw a mom at the pool. Arguing with her five year old to NOT take a shower after swimming. Bluetooth on, iPad in hand, work laptop open on stadium seats. Her reasoning for not wanting the child to shower "Look, I have to get this stuff to the office by 6:30, we don't have time for you to shower. Let's go" Wait, isn't the whole point of this little experience called Mommy and Me (or, as in my case, Daddy and Me). Wherein Mommy/Daddy is supposed to spend time with little one. Not with the Bluetooth. Not with the work laptop. Dad (yeah, the same dad from earlier), in the pool. Bluetooth off (it's not waterproof or I'm sure he would've had it on), two year old in hand and iPad somewhere put away. Getting frustrated with kid because he won't 'perform' on command. Here's a little exchange Kid: "I don't wanna get in the water" Dad: "Well, we're here for 30 minutes, get in the water" Kid: "No, don't wanna" Dad: "Fine, I'm getting in" and, true to his word, in he goes, off to swim. Kid: Crying Dad: "Well, c'mon" Kid: Walking to stands Dad: Ignoring kid Kid: At stands Dad: Out of pool, drying off. Frustrated. Grabs bag, grabs kid, leaves How sad. It really seems like I am living in a generation of parents who view their children as one big scheduled distraction to another. It's almost like the dad was saying "Look, little 2 year old boy, I have a busy scheduled. Right now my Outlook Calendar tells me that I have 30 mins to spend with you, so, let's go kid: PERFORM because I have the time" Really? Can someone please tell me when the hell this happened? When did spending time with your kid, spending time with your family, spending time with your spouse, etc... become a distraction? I've seen people at work all day Tweeting throughout the day, checked in with Four Square, IM up and running constantly so they can 'stay in touch' only to see these same folks come home and be irritated because their kids or their spouse wants to connect with the. I've seen these very same people leave the house, go to the corner bar/store/you-name-the-place to be 'alone' only to find them there, plugged in, tweeting away, etc, etc, etc I LOVE technology. I love working with technology. But I also know that I am a human being. A person who, by very definition, is a social being. I needed social interactions and contact--and, no, I'm not talking about the Social Graph kind of connections, I'm talking about those interactions which, *GASP* involve eye to eye contact and human contact. A recent study found that the number one complaint of kids is that they feel they have to compete with technology for their parents time and attention. The number one wish from high school kids? That there parents would turn off the computer/tv/cell phone at dinner. This, coming from high school kids. Shouldn't that tell you a whole helluva lot? So, do yourself a favor tomorrow. Plug into technology all day. Throw yourself into it. Be passionate about what you do. When you walk through the door to your family, turn it all off for 30 mins and be there with your loved ones. If you can manage to play Angry Birds, I'm sure you can handle being disconnected for 30 minutes. Make the time

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• MySQL Server 5.6 defaults changes

  - by user12626240

  We're improving the MySQL Server defaults, as announced by Tomas Ulin at MySQL Connect. Here's what we're changing:  Setting  Old  New  Notes back_log  50  50 + ( max_connections / 5 ) capped at 900 binlog_checksum  off  CRC32  New variable in 5.6 binlog_row_event_max_size  1k  8k flush_time  1800  Windows changes from 1800 to 0  Was already 0 on other platforms host_cache_size  128  128 + 1 for each of the first 500 max_connections + 1 for every 20 max_connections over 500, capped at 2000  New variable in 5.6 innodb_autoextend_increment  8  64  Now affects *.ibd files. 64 is 64 megabytes innodb_buffer_pool_instances  0  8. On 32 bit Windows only, if innodb_buffer_pool_size is greater than 1300M, default is innodb_buffer_pool_size / 128M innodb_concurrency_tickets  500  5000 innodb_file_per_table  off  on innodb_log_file_size  5M  48M  InnoDB will always change size to match my.cnf value. Also see innodb_log_compressed_pages and binlog_row_image innodb_old_blocks_time 0  1000 1 second innodb_open_files  300  300; if innodb_file_per_table is ON, higher of table_open_cache or 300 innodb_purge_batch_size  20  300 innodb_purge_threads  0  1 innodb_stats_on_metadata  on  off join_buffer_size 128k  256k max_allowed_packet  1M  4M max_connect_errors  10  100 open_files_limit  0  5000  See note 1 query_cache_size  0  1M query_cache_type  on/1  off/0 sort_buffer_size  2M  256k sql_mode  none  NO_ENGINE_SUBSTITUTION  See later post about default my.cnf for STRICT_TRANS_TABLES sync_master_info  0  10000  Recommend: master_info_repository=table sync_relay_log  0  10000 sync_relay_log_info  0  10000  Recommend: relay_log_info_repository=table. Also see Replication Relay and Status Logs table_definition_cache  400  400 + table_open_cache / 2, capped at 2000 table_open_cache  400  2000   Also see table_open_cache_instances thread_cache_size  0  8 + max_connections/100, capped at 100 Note 1: In 5.5 there was already a rule to make open_files_limit 10 + max_connections + table_cache_size * 2 if that was higher than the user-specified value. Now uses the higher of that and (5000 or what you specify). We are also adding a new default my.cnf file and guided instructions on the key settings to adjust. More on this in a later post. We're also providing a page with suggestions for settings to improve backwards compatibility. The old example files like my-huge.cnf are obsolete. Some of the improvements are present from 5.6.6 and the rest are coming. These are ideas, and until they are in an official GA release, they are subject to change. As part of this work I reviewed every old server setting plus many hundreds of emails of feedback and testing results from inside and outside Oracle's MySQL Support team and the many excellent blog entries and comments from others over the years, including from many MySQL Gurus out there, like Baron, Sheeri, Ronald, Schlomi, Giuseppe and Mark Callaghan. With these changes we're trying to make it easier to set up the server by adjusting only a few settings that will cause others to be set. This happens only at server startup and only applies to variables where you haven't set a value. You'll see a similar approach used for the Performance Schema. The Gurus don't need this but for many newcomers the defaults will be very useful. Possibly the most unusual change is the way we vary the setting for innodb_buffer_pool_instances for 32-bit Windows. This is because we've found that DLLs with specified load addresses often fragment the limited four gigabyte 32-bit address space and make it impossible to allocate more than about 1300 megabytes of contiguous address space for the InnoDB buffer pool. The smaller requests for many pools are more likely to succeed. If you change the value of innodb_log_file_size in my.cnf you will see a message like this in the error log file at the next restart, instead of the old error message: [Warning] InnoDB: Resizing redo log from 2*64 to 5*128 pages, LSN=5735153 One of the biggest challenges for the defaults is the millions of installations on a huge range of systems, from point of sale terminals and routers though shared hosting or end user systems and on to major servers with lots of CPU cores, hundreds of gigabytes of RAM and terabytes of fast disk space. Our past defaults were for the smaller systems and these change that to larger shared hosting or shared end user systems, still with a bias towards the smaller end. There is a bias in favour of OLTP workloads, so reporting systems may need more changes. Where there is a conflict between the best settings for benchmarks and normal use, we've favoured production, not benchmarks. We're very interested in your feedback, comments and suggestions.

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• Is Visual Source Safe (The latest Version) really that bad? Why? What's the Best Alternative? Why? [closed]

  - by hanzolo

  Over the years I've constantly heard horror stories, had people say "Real Programmers Dont Use VSS", and so on. BUT, then in the workplace I've worked at two companies, one, a very well known public facing high traffic website, and another high end Financial Services "Web-Based" hosted solution catering to some very large, very well known companies, which is where I currently Reside and everything's working just fine (KNOCK KNOCK!!). I'm constantly interfacing with EXTREMELY Old technology with some of these financial institutions.. OLD LIKE YOU WOULDN'T BELIEVE.. which leads me to the conclusion that if it works "LEAVE IT", and that maybe there's some value in old technology? at least enough value to overrule a rewrite!? right?? Is there something fundamentally flawed with the underlying technology that VSS uses? I have a feeling that if i said "someone said VSS Sucks" they would beg to differ, most likely give me this look like i dont know -ish, and I'd never gain back their respect and my credibility (well, that'll be hard to blow.. lol), BUT, give me an argument that I can take to someone whose been coding for 30 years, that builds Platforms that leverage current technology (.NET 3.5 / SQL 2008 R2 ), write's their own ORM with scaffolding and is able to provide a quality platform that supports thousands of concurrent users on a multi-tenant hosted solution, and does not agree with any benefits from having Source Control Integrated, and yet uses the Infamous Visual Source Safe. I have extensive experience with TFS up to 2010, and honestly I think it's great when a team (beyond developers) can embrace it. I've worked side by side with someone whose a die hard SVN'r and from a purist standpoint, I see the beauty in it (I need a bit more, out of my SS, but it surely suffices). So, why are such smarties not running away from Visual Source Safe? surely if it was so bad, it would've have been realized by now, and I would not be sitting here with this simple old, Check In, Check Out, Version Resistant, Label Intensive system. But here I am... I would love to drop an argument that would be the end all argument, but if it's a matter of opinion and personal experience, there seems to be too much leeway for keeping VSS. UPDATE: I guess the best case is to have the VSS supporters check other people's experiences and draw from that until we (please no) experience the breaking factor ourselves. Until then, i wont be engaging in a discussion to migrate off of VSS.. UPDATE 11-2012: So i was able to convince everyone at my work place that since MS is sun downing Visual Source Safe it might be time to migrate over to TFS. I was able to convince them and have recently upgraded our team to Visual Studio 2012 and TFS 2012. The migration was fairly painless, had to run analyze.exe which found a bunch of errors (not sure they'll ever affect the project) and then manually run the VSSConverter.exe. Again, painless, except it took 16 hours to migrate 5 years worth of everything.. and now we're on TFS.. much more integrated.. much more cooler.. so all in all, VSS served it's purpose for years without hick-up. There were no horror stories and Visual Source Save as source control worked just fine. so to all the nay sayers (me included). there's nothing wrong with using VSS. i wouldnt start a new project with it, and i would definitely consider migrating to TFS. (it's really not super difficult and a new "wizard" type converter is due out any day now so migrating should be painless). But from my experience, it worked just fine and got the job done.

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• Software and/(x)or Hardware Projects for Pre-School Kids

  - by haylem

  I offered to participate at my kid's pre-school for various activities (yes, I'm crazy like that), and one of them is to help them discover extra-curricular (big word for a pre-school, but by lack of a better one... :)) hobbies, which may or may not relate to a professional activity. At first I thought that it wouldn't be really easy to have pre-schoolers relate to programming or the internal workings of a computer system in general (and I'm more used to teaching middle-school to university-level students), but then I thought there must be a way. So I'm trying to figure out ways to introduce very young kids (3yo) to computer systems in a fun and preferably educational way. Of course, I don't expect them to start smashing the stack for fun and profit right away (or at least not voluntarily, though I could use the occasion for some toddler tests...), but I'm confident there must be ways to get them interested in both: using the systems, becoming curious about understanding what they do, interacting with the systems to modify them. I guess this setting is not really relevant after all, it's pretty much the same as if you were aiming to achieve the same for your own kids at home. Ideas Considering we're talking 3yo pre-schoolers here, and that at this age some kids are already quite confident using a mouse (some even a keyboard, if not for typing, at least to press some buttons they've come to associate with actions) while others have not yet had any interaction with computers of any kind, it needs to be: rather basic, demonstrated and played with in less then 5 or 10 minutes, doable in in groups or alone, scalable and extendable in complexity to accommodate their varying abilities. The obvious options are: basic smallish games to play with, interactive systems like LOGO, Kojo, Squeak and clones (possibly even simpler than that), or thngs like Lego Systems. I guess it can be a thing to reflect on both at the software and the hardware levels: it could be done with a desktop or laptop machine, a tablet, a smartphone (or a crap-phone, for that matter, as long as you can modify it), or even get down to building something from scratch (Raspberry Pi and Arduino being popular options at the moment). I can probably be in the form of games, funny visualizations (which are pretty much games) w/ Prototype, virtual worlds to explore. I also thought on the moment (and I hope this won't offend anyone) that some approaches to teaching pets could work (reward systems, haptic feedback and such things could quickly point a kid in the right direction to understanding how things work, in a similar fashion - I'm not suggesting to shock the kids!). Hmm, Is There an Actual Question in There? What type of systems do you think might be a good fit, both in terms of hardware and software? Do you have seen such systems, or have anything in mind to work on? Are you aware of some research in this domain, with tangible results? Any input is welcome. It's not that I don't see options: there are tons, but I have a harder time pinpointing a more concrete and definite type of project/activity, so I figure some have valuable ideas or existing ones. Note: I am not advocating that every kid should learn to program, be interested in computer systems, or that all of them in a class would even care enough to follow such an introduction with more than a blank stare. I don't buy into the "everybody would benefit from learning to program" thing. Wouldn't hurt, but not necessary in any way. But if I can walk out of there with a few of them having smiled using the thing (or heck, cried because others took them away from them), that'd be good enough. Related Questions I've seen and that seem to complement what I'm looking for, but not exactly for the same age groups or with the same goals: Teaching Programming to Kids Recommendations for teaching kids math concepts & skills for programming?

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• Using a Visual Sourcesafe 2005 database with VB6 still launches VSS 6.0d

  - by John Galt

  I know all versions of VSS have many horror stories and I feel I will escape to a better source control mechanism someday but in the short term I am just trying to do a little cleanup and would like your advice on this issue: Objective - consolidate old VB6 source code in a "new" VSS 2005 database (currently all these old projects are checked in to an "old" VSS 6.0d database); eventually, eliminate the "old" VSS. Progress so far - The new VSS 2005 database now contains a mixture of projects. Some are using Visual Studio 2008, some use Vstudio 2005, and the more recently added ones are the above mentioned VB6 projects. Individually all these projects and "solutions" come up OK, I can check in - check out, launch SourceSafe, view differences, etc. But all the VB6 projects now in a VSS 2005 database launch VSS 6.0d when asked, rather than VSS 2005. Is this normal and just something to cope with until I get to some better nonVSS approach? Or can VB6 be re-configured someway to launch VSS 2005 when I click Tools-SourceSafe-Run SourceSafe? I seem to recall VSS 6.0d got "integrated" into VB6 by way of the "Add-In Manager". At this point, the development PC with VB6 installed has both VSS 2005 and VSS 6.0d clients installed.

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• Mercurial: a few questions all related to .hgignore

  - by WizardOfOdds

  I've been working for a long time with a .hgignore file that was fine and recently added one new type of files to ignore. When running "hg status", I noticed this: M .hgignore So Mercurial considers the .hgignore to be a file that needs to be tracked (if it's a the root of the project). Now I've read various docs but my points weren't specifically adressed so here are some very detailed questions which hopefully can help me figure this out (it would be great is someone answering could quote and address these three points [even with a simply yes/no answer for each question]): Should .hgignore be at the root of the project? (I guess it should, seen that a developer can potentially be working on several projects which would all have different .hgignore requirements) Can .hgignore be ignored be Mercurial? If it can be ignored, should .hgignore be ignored by Mercurial (which is different than the previous question) In the case where .hgignore should not be ignored, can't some really bad thing happens if you suddenly rollback way earlier, when a really old and incomplete .hgignore was used? I think I saw weird things happening with certain per-user IDE project files (I'm not saying all IDEs project files are per-user only, but some definitely are) that were supposed to be ignored, but then the user rolls back to an old version, where an old .hgignore gets used, and then suddenly files supposed to be ignored are committed because the old .hgignore didn't exclude these.

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• Multiple Out-of-Browser Applications in One Application

  - by Otaku

  I'm looking at a scenario where I need to create a single "master" Silverlight application and then add "child" applications for an out-of-browser Silverlight application. The scenario is something like this. A user will visit a gameboard web site and choose a game to play. Let's call it Checkers. He likes it, so then he installs the out-of-browser app to his desktop. He then finds Chess, and installs that too. For both games, while played on the site, he has stats (games played, win/loss records, etc.). For each game on the site, he navigates to a different page. But now he wants to play offline and view his stats and other cross-games information. He wants to have a single app to launch to play either game. From his single out-of-browser app, he sees that Go is also available, and he places a checkmark against it to download on his next connection. Does anyone have any experience at developing multiple out-of-browser Silverlight apps that reside within a single master app? What considerations need to be had for this type of design? How would this work in terms of install experience from different web pages?

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• iPhone 4.0 on iPhone but still Ad-Hoc compile for 3.1.3?

  - by Mark

  Device: Version : 3.1 Build: 3511 Device: iPhone OS: iPhone OS 4.0 xCode 3.2.2 (Old) xCode 3.2.3 (New; For iPhone 4.0 Beta) Background: As you can see I installed 4.0 on my iPhone as I read on this forum it's really hard to near impossible to downgrade back to 3.1.3, but it's my only device I have and use for development. When I try to continue to develop and build with the old xCode it tells me that "No provisioned iPhone OS device is connected". When I select Simulator it does compile and build, however when I spread this file it does not work on the devices of my testers, they get a Signed error. When I run the new xCode, it does compile and build on the Device and when I spread this file, it does work on the devices of my testers (which are running the current official version 3.1.3). Questions: Why is there a difference between building for Simulator and Device? A simulator build never seem to work on the devices of my testers because of signing issues and the build for device does work. Currently it seems the old xCode became useless, however I read that you may not use the Beta xCode to build your application for release. So knowing the above how am I able to pull this off with my current setup due the fact the old xCode won't let me build properly.

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• Svn repository split problem

  - by Tuminoid

  I want to split a directory from a large Subversion repository to a repository of its own, and keep the history of the files in that directory. I tried the regular way of doing it first svnadmin dump /path/to/repo > largerepo.dump cat largerepo.dump | svndumpfilter include my/directory >mydir.dump but that does not work, since the directory has been moved and copied over the years and files have been moved into and out of it to other parts of the repository. The result is a lot of these: svndumpfilter: Invalid copy source path '/some/old/path' Next thing I tried is to include those /some/old/path as they appear and after a long, long list of files and directories included, the svndumpfilter completes, BUT importing the resulting dump isn't producing the same files as the current directory has. So, how do I properly split the directory from that repository while keeping the history? EDIT: I specifically want trunk/myproj to be the trunk in a new repository PLUS have the new repository include none of the other old stuff, ie. there should not be possibility for anyone to update to old revision before the split and get/see the files. The svndumpfilter solution I tried would achieve exactly that, sadly its not doable since the path/files have been moved around. The solution by ng isn't accetable since its basically a clone+removal of extras which keeps ALL the history, not just relevant myproj history. BUMP C'moon, there must be someone who definitely knows if this is doable or not, and how!

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• Solution for cleaning an image cache directory on the SD card

  - by synic

  I've got an app that is heavily based on remote images. They are usually displayed alongside some data in a ListView. A lot of these images are new, and a lot of the old ones will never be seen again. I'm currently storing all of these images on the SD card in a custom cache directory (ala evancharlton's magnatune app). I noticed that after about 10 days, the directory totals ~30MB. This is quite a bit more than I expected, and it leads me to believe that I need to come up with a good solution for cleaning out old files... and I just can't think of a great one. Maybe you can help. These are the ideas that I've had: Delete old files. When the app starts, start a background thread, and delete all files older than X days. This seems to pose a problem, though, in that, if the user actively uses the app, this could make the device sluggish if there are hundreds of files to delete. After creating the files on the SD card, call new File("/path/to/file").deleteOnExit(); This will cause all files to be deleted when the VM exits (I don't even know if this method works on Android). This is acceptable, because, even though the files need to be cached for the session, they don't need to be cached for the next session. It seems like this will also slow the device down if there are a lot of files to be deleted when the VM exits. Delete old files, up to a max number of files. Same as #1, but only delete N number of files at a time. I don't really like this idea, and if the user was very active, it may never be able to catch up and keep the cache directory clean. That's about all I've got. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

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• Display a input type=file over another input type=file

  - by Kevin Sedgley

  WARNING: Lengthy description coming up! I have written an uploader based upon APC progress uploader for PHP. This works fine and dandy, but the script as a whole (apc etc) is intended to be used only for those with Javascript. To achieve this, I have searched for any input type=file, and replaced these with an absolutely positioned form that appears over the original area where the old file input area was. The reasons for this are so the new uploader can submit to a hidden in page IFrame has to be in a seperate <form> in order to submit to the APC reciever to display the progress upload bar. allows it to be used within any form with an input type=file throughout the site I have used JQuery to do this, with the following code: Original HTML form code: <div><input type="file" name="media" id="media" /></div> Find position of div block code: // get the parent div, and properties thereof parentDiv = $(this).closest('div'); w = $(parentDiv).width(); h = $(parentDiv).height(); loc = $(parentDiv).offset(); Locate new block over old block: $('#_sender').appendTo('body').css({left:loc.left,top:loc.top,position:'absolute',zIndex:400,height:h,width:w}).show(); This works fine, and shows over the old block OK. The problem: When other elements in the DOM before or above it change (in this case a "tree view" selector is pushing the old block down) the new upload form gets moved over other elements. Is there a JQuery (or JS) method for changing this upon DOM change? Some kind of .onchange for the page?! Or an .onmove for the original block? Thanks in advance you lovely people Before DOM change: . After: .

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• Which cast am I using?

  - by Knowing me knowing you

  I'm trying to cast away const from an object but it doesn't work. But if I use old C-way of casting code compiles. So which casting I'm suppose to use to achieve this same effect? I wouldn't like to cast the old way. //file IntSet.h #include "stdafx.h" #pragma once /*Class representing set of integers*/ template<class T> class IntSet { private: T** myData_; std::size_t mySize_; std::size_t myIndex_; public: #pragma region ctor/dtor explicit IntSet(); virtual ~IntSet(); #pragma endregion #pragma region publicInterface IntSet makeUnion(const IntSet&)const; IntSet makeIntersection(const IntSet&)const; IntSet makeSymmetricDifference(const IntSet&)const; void insert(const T&); #pragma endregion }; //file IntSet_impl.h #include "StdAfx.h" #include "IntSet.h" #pragma region ctor/dtor template<class T> IntSet<T>::IntSet():myData_(nullptr), mySize_(0), myIndex_(0) { } IntSet<T>::~IntSet() { } #pragma endregion #pragma region publicInterface template<class T> void IntSet<T>::insert(const T& obj) { /*Check if we are initialized*/ if (mySize_ == 0) { mySize_ = 1; myData_ = new T*[mySize_]; } /*Check if we have place to insert obj in.*/ if (myIndex_ < mySize_) {//IS IT SAFE TO INCREMENT myIndex while assigning? myData_[myIndex_++] = &T(obj);//IF I DO IT THE OLD WAY IT WORKS return; } /*We didn't have enough place...*/ T** tmp = new T*[mySize_];//for copying old to temporary basket std::copy(&myData_[0],&myData_[mySize_],&tmp[0]); } #pragma endregion Thanks.

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• Java assignment issues - Is this atomic?

  - by Bob

  Hi, I've got some questions about Java's assigment. Strings I've got a class: public class Test { private String s; public synchronized void setS(String str){ s = s + " - " + str; } public String getS(){ return s; } } I'm using "synchronized" in my setter, and avoiding it in my getter, because in my app, there are a tons of data gettings, and very few settings. Settings must be synchronized to avoid inconsistency. My question is: is getting and setting a variable atomic? I mean, in a multithreaded environment, Thread1 is about to set variable s, while Thread2 is about to get "s". Is there any way the getter method could get something different than the s's old value or the s's new value (suppose we've got only two threads)? In my app it is not a problem to get the new value, and it is not a problem to get the old one. But could I get something else? What about HashMap's getting and putting? considering this: public class Test { private Map<Integer, String> map = Collections.synchronizedMap(new HashMap<Integer, String>()); public synchronized void setMapElement(Integer key, String value){ map.put(key, value); } public String getValue(Integer key){ return map.get(key); } } Is putting and getting atomic? How does HashMap handle putting an element into it? Does it first remove the old value and put the now one? Could I get other than the old value or the new value? Thanks in advance!

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• jquery: mouseleave event seems to fire when it's not supposed to

  - by Jeremy

  Given the following html table and script shown below I am having a problem where the mouse leave event appears to fire right after the mouse enter, even if I don't move the mouse out of the row. <script type="text/javascript" language="javascript"> function highlightRows(iMainID) { $('tr[mainid=' + iMainID+ ']').each(function() { if ($(this).attr('old') == undefined) { $(this).attr('old', $(this).css('backgroundColor')); } $(this).animate({ backgroundColor: "#FFFFCC" }, 500); $(this).mouseout(function() { if ($(this).attr('old') != undefined) { $(this).animate({ backgroundColor: $(this).attr('old') }, 500); } }); }); } </script> <table> <tr> <td mainid="1" onmouseover='highlightRows(1)'><div>text</div></td> <td mainid="1" onmouseover='highlightRows(1)'><div>text</div></td> <td mainid="2" onmouseover='highlightRows(2)'><div>text</div></td> </tr> <table>

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• JS: capture a static snapshot of an object at a point in time with a method

  - by Barney

  I have a JS object I use to store DOM info for easy reference in an elaborate GUI. It starts like this: var dom = { m:{ old:{}, page:{x:0,y:0}, view:{x:0,y:0}, update:function(){ this.old = this; this.page.x = $(window).width(); this.page.y = $(window).height(); this.view.x = $(document).width(); this.view.y = window.innerHeight || $(window).height(); } I call the function on window resize: $(window).resize(function(){dom.m.update()}); The problem is with dom.m.old. I would have thought that by calling it in the dom.m.update() method before the new values for the other properties are assigned, at any point in time dom.m.old would contain a snapshot of the dom.m object as of the last update – but instead, it's always identical to dom.m. I've just got a pointless recursion method. Why isn't this working? How can I get a static snapshot of the object that won't update without being specifically told to? Comments explaining how I shouldn't even want to be doing anything remotely like this in the first place are very welcome :)

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• question about MySQL database migration

  - by WilliamLou

  Hi there: If I have a MySQL database with several tables on a live server, now I would like to migrate this database to another server. Of course, the migration I mean here involves some database tables, for example: add some new columns to several tables, add some new tables etc.. Now, the only method I can think of is to use some php/python(two scripts I know) script, connect two databases, dump the data from the old database, and then write into the new database. However, this method is not efficient at all. For example: in old database, table A has 28 columns; in new database, table A has 29 columns, but the extra column will have default value 0 for all the old rows. My script still needs to dump the data row by row and insert each row into the new database. Is there any tools or a better method than writing a script yourself? Here, I dont need to worry about multithread writing problems etc.., I mean the old database will be down (not open to public usage etc.., only for upgrade ) for a while. Thanks!!

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• Accepting more simultaneous keyboard inputs

  - by unknownthreat

  Sometimes, a normal computer keyboard will only accept user's inputs up to a certain key simultaneously. I got a logitech keyboard that can accept up to 3-4 key presses at the same time. The computer does not accept any more input if you press more than 4 keys for this keyboard. And it also depends on certain areas of your keyboard as well. Some locations allow more key to be pressed (like the arrow keys), while some locations permit you to press only 1-2 keys. This also differs from keyboard to keyboard as well. Some older keyboards only accept up 1-2 keys. This isn't problematic with usual office work, but when it comes to gaming. For instance, imagine a platform game, where you have to jump, attack, and control direction at the same time. This implies several key presses and some keyboards cannot accept such simultaneous input. However, I've tried this on several games and the amount of possible keyboard inputs seem to be also different. Therefore, we have two issues: Keyboards have different amount of simultaneous inputs. Some games can accept more keyboard inputs than other games. At first, I thought this is hardware only problem, but why do some programs behave differently? Why some programs can accept more keyboard inputs than other programs? So how can we write our programs to accept more keyboard inputs?

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• Hashtable resizing leaks memory

  - by thpetrus

  I wrote a hashtable and it basically consists of these two structures: typedef struct dictEntry { void *key; void *value; struct dictEntry *next; } dictEntry; typedef struct dict { dictEntry **table; unsigned long size; unsigned long items; } dict; dict.table is a multidimensional array, which contains all the stored key/value pair, which again are a linked list. If half of the hashtable is full, I expand it by doubling the size and rehashing it: dict *_dictRehash(dict *d) { int i; dict *_d; dictEntry *dit; _d = dictCreate(d->size * 2); for (i = 0; i < d->size; i++) { for (dit = d->table[i]; dit != NULL; dit = dit->next) { _dictAddRaw(_d, dit); } } /* FIXME memory leak because the old dict can never be freed */ free(d); // seg fault return _d; } The function above uses the pointers from the old hash table and stores it in the newly created one. When freeing the old dict d a Segmentation Fault occurs. How am I able to free the old hashtable struct without having to allocate the memory for the key/value pairs again?

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• Have you had DLL's fail after upgrading to 64 bit server?

  - by quakkels

  Hey All, I'm wondering if anyone else has experienced failed DLL's after upgrading their servers. My company is in the process of upgrading our code and server's after ten years of using classic ASP. We've set up our new server running Windows 2008 and IIS 7. Our classic ASP code and our new asp.net mvc code work pretty well. Our problems started happening when we began moving our old websites to the new server. When trying to load the page on the actual server machine's browser, we initially got a 500 error. If we refreshed the page then some of the page would load but then display an error: Server object error 'ASP 0177 : 800401f3' Server.CreateObject Failed /folder/scriptname.asp, line 24 800401f3 btw: On remote machines we would just get 500 errors. Line 24 is the first executable code in the script: '23 lines of comments set A0SQL_DATA = server.createobject("olddllname.Data") 'the rest of the script That specific line is trying to use a ten year old DLL to create a server object. I don't think the server configuration is a problem because I'm able to create "adodb.recordset" server objects without any problems. Is there an issue when running correctly registered old DLL's on 64 bit systems? Is there a way to get old DLL's working on 64 bit systems?

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• changing the serialization procedure for a graph of objects (.net framework)

  - by pierusch

  Hello I'm developing a scientific application using .net framework. The application depends heavily upon a large data structure (a tree like structure) that has been serialized using a standard binaryformatter object. The graph structure looks like this: <serializable()>Public class BigObjet inherits list(of smallObject) end class <serializable()>public class smallObject inherits list(of otherSmallerObjects) end class ... The binaryFormatter object does a nice job but it's not optimized at all and the entire data structure reaches around 100Mb on my filesystem. Deserialization works too but it's pretty slow (around 30seconds on my quad core). I've found a nice .dll on codeproject (see "optimizing serialization...") so I wrote a modified version of the classes above overriding the default serialization/deserialization procedure reaching very good results. The problem is this: I can't lose the data previosly serialized with the old version and I'd like to be able to use the new serialization/deserialization method. I have some ideas but I'm pretty sure someone will be able to give me a proper and better advice ! use an "helper" graph of objects who takes care of the entire serialization/deserialization procedure reading data from the old format and converting them into the classes I nedd. This could work but the binaryformatter "needs" to know the types being serialized so........ :( modify the "old" graph to include a modified version of serialization procedure...so I'll be able to deserialize old file and save them with the new format......this doesn't sound too good imho. well any help will be higly highly appreciated :)

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