Archives for Fri Feb 11 2011 - Page 11

Creating basic ACPI event makes the system unusably slow

- by skerit

I want to change a few settings on my laptop when I switch to battery power. I created a new event in /etc/acpi/events/cust-battery and it looks like this: event=battery action=/home/skerit/power.sh I put a simple command in the power.sh file: echo This is a test >> /home/skerit/powertest Now, when I tail this file it shows "This is a test" 4-5 times upon switching to battery power. However, the system becomes totally unstable. It slows down significantly. I can't change anything in the terminal. The terminal and certain parts of the screen (like the gnome system monitor applet) go blank from time to time. What can be the cause of that? It's a simple echo that gets executed a few times!

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How can an application (like Firefox) be forced to use a certain network interface?

- by Lekensteyn

I've two interfaces: eth0 and wlan0 on a notebook. Possible use cases: eth0 grants me Internet access, and wlan0 is currently connected to a router which does not have Internet-connectivity. For development purposes, I need to connect to the wlan0 by default, but use eth0 for surfing eth0 and wlan0 are both connected to the Internet. For a torrent application, eth0 should be used for speed, but for portability of the notebook, SSH should have a connection over wlan0 eth0 is a wire connection, wlan0 is a wireless one. Sensible data should be transferred over eth0, but other traffic can go over wlan0 as well. Is there a way to force applications (like nc.traditional or firefox) to use a certain network interface? A wrapper like example-wrapper eth0 program is fine too if such program exist. It would be nice if it could configured within Firefox (in runtime). I'd like to avoid IPTables solutions if possible.

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Assign programs permanently to different sound-outputs in Pulseaudio?

- by Mood

I want to assign Skype input and output to my USB-headset while the rest of my laptop uses the internal sound-card. This is an easy task with PulseAudio Volume control (pavucontrol). The only problem I have is every time a call is made I manually have to set the output and input for Skype to my USB-device . When I hang up, Skype disappears from Volume Control. It reappears again with the next call only this time the default sound-card is selected again. It shouldn’t be hard to let PulseAudio look or the USB-headset is connected when Skype audio comes is before selecting the default. The way to do it is obvious not through Volume Control.

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Should I prevent search engines indexing tag/category pages?

- by Macha

On my site, I currently have no special rules for search engines. It is a blog, statically generated using a Python program. When I search for some of my articles on Google, there is usually a tag or category page included in the results. Sometimes it even ranks ahead of the article itself. Obviously, as these links aren't always going to have the article on them, this aren't the results I want people to click on. So, I'm thinking of setting noindex on these pages. Is there any possible downside to doing so? Is this possible to do via robots.txt, or do I have to add it to all the relevant templates? All I can find for robots.txt are ways to stop the search engine crawling those pages, which isn't what I want - while I don't want them indexed, it's still the only surefire way to find all my blog posts.

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Live chat solutions

- by Lèse majesté

What good live chat/live help solutions are available (preferably for use on a site hosted on a LAMP stack and free)? I'm looking for a way to allow our sales and customer service reps to talk directly with visitors to our site. I've looked at phpopenchat, but it looks very unpolished. The only other free live chat app I've come across looked egregious. The aesthetics and UI design alone made me shudder to think what the underlying code might look like. This isn't a critical feature, and it wouldn't be hard to code up myself, so I'm not really looking for commercial software or paid services (unless there's a really compelling reason to use them). I'm just wondering if any other webmasters have come across a satisfactory free/open source solution for providing live customer support on their website. As a side note, live voice chat would also be an option, but it has to be be designed (or customizable) for customer support rather than a public chatroom. Edit: Looking at the responses, it looks like there probably aren't going to be many free solutions for this type of business-oriented chat solution, so feel free to post answers even if they are commercial solutions as long as they're a good value. Also feel free to post any alternate live support solutions (such as the Skype recommendation) that could be in someway integrated with a website. This will give me a good lay of the land for what people are actually using for live support, and I think will be more helpful to others reading this question.

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website development, where to start from [closed]

- by hopefulLLl

hello everyone.. i am a computer science student,and i know C language. i want to learn making websites but dont know how to go about it. i did learn some HTML, and right now learning CSS from www.w3schools.com . now can anyone tell me what shall i learn next and what all things[languages] i need to learn to start making websites. also refer to the study material if u can. thanks. also, how long will it take me to make some nice websites?

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How to change the sprite colors

- by Mr_Qqn

In my rhythm game, I have a note object which can be of different colors depending on the note chart. I could use a sprite sheet with all the different color variations I use, but I would prefer to parametrize this. (For information, a note sprite is compound with one main color, for example a red note has only red, light red and dark red.) So, how to change the colors of a sprite basing on a new color ? I'm working with opengl, but any algorithm or math explanation will do. :) Thanks

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How should I replan A*?

- by Gregory Weir

I've got a pathfinding boss enemy that seeks the player using the A* algorithm. It's a pretty complex environment, and I'm doing it in Flash, so the search can get a bit slow when it's searching over long distances. If the player was stationary, I could just search once, but at the moment I'm searching every frame. This takes long enough that my framerate is suffering. What's the usual solution to this? Is there a way to "replan" A* without redoing the entire search? Should I just search a little less often (every half-second or second) and accept that there will be a little inaccuracy in the path?

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Which Kinect package for PC takes care of motion tracking too?

- by Extrakun

I am aware that there are opensource drivers for interfacing Kinect with the PC. My question is - the drivers at OpenKinect seems to provide only the images and depth data (from the reading of their wiki and API). It seems that you need to provide your own imaging solution. My question is - is there any all-in-one package, with samples/sources that not only grab images from Kinect, but also do the imaging/motion detection for you?

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How do I get started with fog type effects in a first person game?

- by Dream Lane

Hey guys, I'm currently using JME3 to learn 3d game development in java, and I have run into a situation. I would like to add fog effects to my games, but I don't even know where to start to implement this. I know how to set the camera's far frustum to limit the render distance, but that just simply makes a sharp cutoff. I'd like the fog it up a bit to make it feel more natural. I'm looking for an answer that points me into the correct direction. I'm not looking for specific code snippets or even JME3's engine specifics. I just want to get an idea of how this stuff works in general. Thanks!

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