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• How do "custom software companies" deal with technical debt?

  - by andy

  What are "custom software companies"? By "custom software companies" I mean companies that make their money primarily from building custom, one off, bits of software. Example are agencies or middle-ware companies, or contractors/consultants like Redify. What's the opposite of "custom software companies"? The oposite of the above business model are companies that focus on long term products, whether they be deployable desktop/mobile apps, or SaaS software. A sure fire way to build up technical debt: I work for a company that attempts to focus on a suite of SaaS products. However, due to certain constraints we sometimes end up bending to the will of certain clients and we end building bits of custom software that can only be used for that client. This is a sure fire way to incur technical debt. Now we have a bit of software to maintain that adds nothing to our core product. If custom work is a sure fire way to build technical debt, how do agencies handle it? So that got me thinking. Companies who don't have a core product as the center of their business model, well they're always doing custom software work. How do they cope with the notion of technical debt? How does it not drive them into technical bankruptcy?

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• Standards for how developers work on their own workstations

  - by Jon Hopkins

  We've just come across one of those situations which occasionally comes up when a developer goes off sick for a few days mid-project. There were a few questions about whether he'd committed the latest version of his code or whether there was something more recent on his local machine we should be looking at, and we had a delivery to a customer pending so we couldn't wait for him to return. One of the other developers logged on as him to see and found a mess of workspaces, many seemingly of the same projects, with timestamps that made it unclear which one was "current" (he was prototyping some bits on versions of the project other than his "core" one). Obviously this is a pain in the neck, however the alternative (which would seem to be strict standards for how each developer works on their own machine to ensure that any other developer can pick things up with a minimum of effort) is likely to break many developers personal work flows and lead to inefficiency on an individual level. I'm not talking about standards for checked-in code, or even general development standards, I'm talking about how a developer works locally, a domain generally considered (in my experience) to be almost entirely under the developers own control. So how do you handle situations like this? Are the one of those things that just happens and you have to deal with, the price you pay for developers being allowed to work in the way that best suits them? Or do you ask developers to adhere to standards in this area - use of specific directories, naming standards, notes on a wiki or whatever? And if so what do your standards cover, how strict are they, how do you police them and so on? Or is there another solution I'm missing? [Assume for the sake of argument that the developer can not be contacted to talk through what he was doing here - even if he could knowing and describing which workspace is which from memory isn't going to be simple and flawless and sometimes people genuinely can't be contacted and I'd like a solution which covers all eventualities.]

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• Two things I learned this week...

  - by noreply(at)blogger.com (Thomas Kyte)

  I often say "I learn something new about Oracle every day".  It really is true - there is so much to know about it, it is hard to keep up sometimes.Here are the two new things I learned - the first is regarding temporary tablespaces.  In the past - when people have asked "how can I shrink my temporary tablespace" I've said "create a new one that is smaller, alter your database/users to use this new one by default, wait a bit, drop the old one".  Actually I usually said first - "don't, it'll just grow again" but some people really wanted to make it smaller.Now, there is an easier way:http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E11882_01/server.112/e26088/statements_3002.htm#SQLRF53578Using alter tablespace temp shrink space .The second thing is just a little sqlplus quirk that I probably knew at one point but totally forgot.  People run into problems with &'s in sqlplus all of the time as sqlplus tries to substitute in for an &variable.  So, if they try to select '&hello world' from dual - they'll get:ops$tkyte%ORA11GR2> select '&hello world' from dual;Enter value for hello: old   1: select '&hello world' from dualnew   1: select ' world' from dual'WORLD------ worldops$tkyte%ORA11GR2> One solution is to "set define off" to disable the substitution (or set define to some other character).  Another oft quoted solution is to use chr(38) - select chr(38)||'hello world' from dual.  I never liked that one personally.  Today - I was shown another wayhttps://asktom.oracle.com/pls/apex/f?p=100:11:0::::P11_QUESTION_ID:4549764300346084350#4573022300346189787 ops$tkyte%ORA11GR2> select '&' || 'hello world' from dual;'&'||'HELLOW------------&hello worldops$tkyte%ORA11GR2>just concatenate '&' to the string, sqlplus doesn't touch that one!  I like that better than chr(38) (but a little less than set define off....)

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• Handling Deployment to Multiple Environments

  - by JayGee

  How should I handle deploying web applications to multiple servers? Constraints I have a dev, test and prod environment. No build server is available. Developers can't deploy to prod. The people that do deploy to prod copy files from test to prod. They don't have VS installed. Currently The way it's handled is using web.config transform. However, to deploy to prod involves putting prod code on the test server where it's copied over. Problem Sometimes simple mistakes are made, such as forgetting to change test back to the right environment after deployment. Or the test config gets moved to prod instead of the prod config. Solution So the question is, what is the best way to prevent mistakes from happening? My first thought is let the app determine which server it's on at runtime and use the appropriate settings/connection strings/etc... However, the server names could change in the not too distant future. So if multiple apps are hard coded, that would mean updating all of them. The easiest way to handle that situation would be to place a DLL in the GAC that determines the environment. Are there any drawbacks or possible complications that this would cause? Or is there a better solution to the problem than this?

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• 10 Tech Products Ahead of Their Time [Video]

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  Sometimes a product just can’t help but be too far ahead of it’s time to be adopted. Check out these 10 products that had their moment of glory a moment (or a decade) too soon. At Mashable they’ve gathered up 10 products that hit the market too soon for people to really appreciate them. Among them, as seen in the video above, a super simple internet-focused computer. At the time it hit the market people simply didn’t get the value of having a cheap, easy to use internet terminal. It probably didn’t help much that the 1990s internet didn’t have the plethora of powerful and useful web-based applications we have now. None the less we now have tons of lightweight and “underpowered” devices focused on the internet experience (like netbooks, iPads, smart phones, chromebooks, and more). Hit up the link below to see the 9 other gems from their collection of products ahead of their times. 10 Tech Products Ahead of Their Time [Mashable] How to Make and Install an Electric Outlet in a Cabinet or DeskHow To Recover After Your Email Password Is CompromisedHow to Clean Your Filthy Keyboard in the Dishwasher (Without Ruining it)

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• What benefits can I get upgrading my ASP.NET (Webform) + DAL(EF) + Repository + BLL structure to MVC?

  - by Etienne

  I'm in the process of defining an approach that may best fit our needs for a big web application development. For now, I'm thinking going with an ASP.NET Architecture with a DAL using Entity Framework, a Repository concept to not access DAL directly from BLL and a BLL that call the repository and make every manipulations necessary to prepare data to push in a presentation layer (.aspx files). I don't plan to use ASP.Net controls and prefer to keep things simple and lightweight using plain html, jQuery UI controls and do most of the server calls with jQuery Ajax. Sometimes, when needed, I plan to use handlers (.ashx) to call BLL methods that will return JSON or HTML to client for dynamic stuff. My solution also has a test project that Mock the Repository with in-memory data to not repose on database for testing BLL methods... It may be usefull to add that we will build a big application over this architecture with hundreds of tables and store procedures with a lot of reading and writing to database. My question is, having this architecture in mind, Is there any evident advantages that I can obtain by using an MVC3 project instead of the described architecture base on Webform? Do you see any problem in this architecture that may cause us problem during the next steps of development? I know the MVC pattern for using it in others projects with Django... but the Microsoft MVC implementation look so much more complex and verbose than Django MVC and it's why I'm hesitating (or waiting for a little push?) right now before jumping into it... We are in a real project with deadlines and don't want to slow the development process without any real benefits.

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• SEHException throw using Microsoft XACT Audio Framework (XACT3)

  - by Sweta Dwivedi

  I have been developing a game using Kinect + XNA and using Microsoft Audio Creation tool (XACT3) for managing my sound files and music, however in the code an SEHException is thrown whenever it tries to get the wave file from the wave Bank . . Sometimes the code works magically and all of a sudden it will start throwing this exception randomly ..I need a help on solving this exception /*Declaring Audio Engine for music*/ AudioEngine engine; SoundBank soundBank; WaveBank waveBank; Cue cue; /*Declaring Audio engine for sound effects*/ AudioEngine engine1; SoundBank soundbank; WaveBank wavebank; Cue effect; engine = new AudioEngine(@"Content\therapy.xgs"); soundBank = new SoundBank(engine, @"Content\Sound Bank.xsb"); **waveBank = new WaveBank(engine, @"Content\Wave Bank.xwb");** cue = null; engine1 = new AudioEngine(@"Content\Music_Manager\Sound_effects.xgs"); soundbank = new SoundBank(engine1, @"Content\Music_Manager\Sound1.xsb"); **wavebank = new WaveBank(engine1, @"Content\Music_Manager\Wave1.xwb");** effect = null; cue = soundBank.GetCue("hypnotizing"); cue.Play();

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• What happens to remounted data/directories

  - by cauon

  According to suggestions in this post I am trying to improve my system to run better with a Solid State Drive. But regarding to RAMdisks and /etc/fstab usage I have some understanding problems coming up. So let's say I add the following lines to /etc/fstab tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime,nodiratime,mode=1777 0 0 tmpfs /var/spool tmpfs defaults,noatime,nodiratime,mode=1777 0 0 tmpfs /var/tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime,nodiratime,mode=1777 0 0 tmpfs /var/log tmpfs defaults,noatime,nodiratime,mode=0755 0 0 I know that on startup these locations should now get mounted into the RAM (hopefully). But what happens to the physical space that was mounted on those places before? Is it gone? Will it be back when I edit my /etc/fstab back to the Version without tmpfs? Will the space still be allocated on my SSD in a way that I can't use it for any other data? Sometimes it is suggested to add the following line, too: none /var/cache aufs dirs=/tmp:/var/cache=ro 0 0 What does this actually do? I noticed that /var/cache takes almost 1GB of space on my harddisk. So should i clear the directory before activating this line? (this is related to the former question) This causes me some confusions and I hope you can give me some clarifications. UPDATE I've downloaded a image with 600MB in size into /tmp that is mounted with the tmpfs settings above. Now I wanted to compare the RAM usage before and after the download. I expect the RAM usage to be increased by 600MB after the download. But the System Monitoring Tool showed me no changes at all. How can this be? Does tmpfs work other than I actually expect it to?

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• Continuous integration never results in build errors

  - by Jon

  Hi, I'm working with a variety of Java EE websites which use internal libraries we've developed. For each website, we only upgrade to new versions of our internal libraries as needed, and before committing we make sure that the site compiles fine. What this means is that when TeamCity does a build of one of our sites, the site compiles fine, but later when the site is updated to the latest version of internal libraries, there might be a compile error. Is there a good way to handle this? We're not using Maven yet; would using Maven mean that our websites could automatically use the latest version of internal libraries? Thanks. Clarification: What we sometimes run into is this: Project A depends on a library, and is currently using library version 1.0 Project B also depends on that library. I make changes to the library so that it is now version 1.5. Project B now uses 1.5. Project A and project B have both been built just fine by the CI server (TeamCity) Working on project A again, I update to 1.5 and discover that 1.5 has breaking changes in it. Is there a way for the CI server to discover these kinds of breaking changes?

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• WPF and Composite Application Library &ndash; Missing The Point

  - by David Totzke

  I have a headache and it’s not even 9AM yet.  Well, ok, it’s nearly ten here now in GMT –5 but it’s before nine somewhere still. Sometimes people will miss the point of something so utterly and completely that one is left wondering how such a person can even dress themselves. Writing an application using WPF and the Composite Application Library (Prism) means that one must learn the various programming idioms common to these frameworks.  The Windows Forms event driven model simply will not suffice.  You need to come to grips with the idea of a very loosely coupled application.  Concepts that must be absorbed and internalized include Data Binding, Control and Data Templates, Commands, Dependency Injection, and Inversion of Control, as well as the Supervising Controller, Presentation Model and Model-View-View-Model patterns. It is as simple as that.  Not to embrace these concepts is to invite pain.  It is to invite noodles; and not the holy kind. Someone actually said to me that “just because it’s not WPF, doesn’t mean it’s wrong.”  And he’s right.  Unless, of course, you are writing a WPF application and especially if you are using the Composite Application Library. In simple terms then; YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG!   Dave Just because I can…

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• 2D XNA C#: Texture2D Wrapping Issue

  - by Kieran

  Working in C#/XNA for a Windows game: I'm using Texture2D to draw sprites. All of my sprites are 16 x 32. The sprites move around the screen as you would expect, by changing the top X/Y position of them when they're being drawn by the spritebatch. Most of the time when I run the game, the sprites appear like this: and when moved, they move as I expect, as one element. Infrequently they appear like this: and when moved it's like there are two sprites with a gap in between them - it's hard to describe. It only seems to happen sometimes - is there something I'm missing? I'd really like to know why this is happening. [Edit:] Adding Draw code as requested: This is the main draw routine - it first draws the sprite to a RenderTarget then blows it up by a scale of 4: protected override void Draw(GameTime gameTime) { // Draw to render target GraphicsDevice.SetRenderTarget(renderTarget); GraphicsDevice.Clear(Color.CornflowerBlue); Texture2D imSprite = null; spriteBatch.Begin(SpriteSortMode.FrontToBack, null, SamplerState.PointWrap, null, null); ManSprite.Draw(spriteBatch); base.Draw(gameTime); spriteBatch.End(); // Draw render target to screen GraphicsDevice.SetRenderTarget(null); imageFrame = (Texture2D)renderTarget; GraphicsDevice.Clear(ClearOptions.Target | ClearOptions.DepthBuffer, Color.DarkSlateBlue, 1.0f, 0); spriteBatch.Begin(SpriteSortMode.FrontToBack, null, SamplerState.PointClamp, null, null); spriteBatch.Draw(imageFrame, new Vector2(0, 0), null, Color.White, 0, new Vector2(0, 0), IM_SCALE, SpriteEffects.None, 0); spriteBatch.End(); } This is the draw routine for the Sprite class: public virtual void Draw(SpriteBatch spriteBatch) { spriteBatch.Draw(Texture, new Vector2(PositionX, PositionY), null, Color.White, 0.0f, Vector2.Zero, Scale, SpriteEffects.None, 0.3f); }

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• How to disable "N" Wireless Mode RTL8192 (Thinkpad Edge 15 Core i5) in natty

  - by Gustavo Rubio

  I've seen many owners of thinkpad edges which are supossed to be linux-friendly having problems with wireless adapter. I've found several links inside askubuntu and in ubuntuforums which have a lot of work-arounds for those problems, mine seems to be wierd though. I use my laptop on both my office and at home. At home I have a router which is A/B/G and here at home the wireless connection works just fine, using a WEP key. But in work I have a B/G/N wireless router and it doesn't work, my guess is that this adapter works with N modes but somehow this is buggy in the bundled driver in natty. I've tried to disable the "N" mode in the router but that didn't work. Later I went to realtek website, downloaded their driver and compiled myself, kinda seems to work most of the time but sometimes some websites keep trying to load or load just parts of it and images start to look like their links are broken and so on, much like what you get when you were loading a page and suddenly the connection is lost. This problem, as I said, is only using the realtek driver from their website. Dmesg gives me this a lot of these: [ 5869.049454] rtl8192se_update_ratr_table: ratr_index=0 ratr_table=0x00000ff5 [ 5879.240563] DHCP pkt src port:68, dest port:67!! So I thougth I might as well switch back to the original driver which seems to work just fine on A/B/G wireless networks but not on N networks so if anybody knows how to disable that mode from within the driver please let us know :) Thanks in advance! PS: I do found a link to a similar question and it was answered but let me remind you I'm NOT using the intel version of wireless for my thinkpad but the realtek (RTL8192SvB)

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• Any Practical Alternative to the Signals + Slots model for GUI Programming?

  - by IntermediateHacker

  The majority of GUI Toolkits nowadays use the Signals + Slots model. It was Qt and GTK+, if I am not wrong, who pioneered it. You know, the widgets or graphical objects (sometimes even ones that aren't displayed) send signals to the main-loop handler. The main-loop handler then calls the events, callbacks or slots assigned for that widget / graphical object. There are usually default (and in most cases virtual) event-handlers already provided by the toolkit for handling all pre-defined signals, therefore, unlike previous designs where the developer had to write the entire main-loop and handler for each and every message himself (think WINAPI), the developer only has to worry about the signals he needs to implement new functionality on. Now this design is being used in most modern toolkits as far as I know. There are Qt, GTK+, FLTK etc. There is Java Swing. C# even has a language feature for it ( events and delegates ), and Windows Forms has been developed on this design. In fact, over the last decade, this design for GUI programming has become a kind of an unwritten standard. Since it increases productivity and provides greater abstraction. However, my question is: Is there any alternative design, that is parallel or practical for modern GUI programming? i.e Is the Signals + Slots design, the only practical one in town? Is it feasible to do GUI Programming with any other design? Are any modern (preferably successful and popular) GUI toolkits built on an alternative design?

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• Fuzzing for Security

  - by Sylvain Duloutre

  Yesterday, I attended an internal workshop about ethical hacking. Hacking skills like fuzzing can be used to quantitatively assess and measure security threats in software.  Fuzzing is a software testing technique used to discover coding errors and security loopholes in software, operating systems or networks by injecting massive amounts of random data, called fuzz, to the system in an attempt to make it crash. If the program contains a vulnerability that can leads to an exception, crash or server error (in the case of web apps), it can be determined that a vulnerability has been discovered.A fuzzer is a program that generates and injects random (and in general faulty) input to an application. Its main purpose is to make things easier and automated.There are typically two methods for producing fuzz data that is sent to a target, Generation or Mutation. Generational fuzzers are capable of building the data being sent based on a data model provided by the fuzzer creator. Sometimes this is simple and dumb as sending random bytes, swapping bytes or much smarter by knowing good values and combining them in interesting ways.Mutation on the other hand starts out with a known good "template" which is then modified. However, nothing that is not present in the "template" or "seed" will be produced.Generally fuzzers are good at finding buffer overflow, DoS, SQL Injection, Format String bugs etc. They do a poor job at finding vulnerabilites related to information disclosure, encryption flaws and any other vulnerability that does not cause the program to crash.  Fuzzing is simple and offers a high benefit-to-cost ratio but does not replace other proven testing techniques.What is your computer doing over the week-end ?

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• Meaning of offset in pygame Mask.overlap methods

  - by Alan

  I have a situation in which two rectangles collide, and I have to detect how much did they collide so so I can redraw the objects in a way that they are only touching each others edges. It's a situation in which a moving ball should hit a completely unmovable wall and instantly stop moving. Since the ball sometimes moves multiple pixels per screen refresh, it it possible that it enters the wall with more that half its surface when the collision is detected, in which case i want to shift it position back to the point where it only touches the edges of the wall. Here is the conceptual image it: I decided to implement this with masks, and thought that i could supply the masks of both objects (wall and ball) and get the surface (as a square) of their intersection. However, there is also the offset parameter which i don't understand. Here are the docs for the method: Mask.overlap Returns the point of intersection if the masks overlap with the given offset - or None if it does not overlap. Mask.overlap(othermask, offset) -> x,y The overlap tests uses the following offsets (which may be negative): +----+----------.. |A | yoffset | +-+----------.. +--|B |xoffset | | : :

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• Can thousands of backlinks from the same site harm PageRank?

  - by Dejan Pelzel

  I just noticed that one particular site has almost 7000 backlinks linking back to our website. The site is something like a news aggregator and for each post they created around 20 (sometimes much more) backlinks back to our page and they basically linked over 400 pages. I am beginning to get concerned that this amount of links might harm our page. They seem to have more backlinks to our page than all the other pages combined and more backlinks that our website has pages. We have seen a massive negative effect going on for quite a while and the PageRank seems to have dropped to None (Not even 0). But I am not sure when and why exactly that happened seeing that PageRank updates take quite a while to appear. The site linking to us is otherwise pretty reputable and doesn't seem to be having any problems with their rank. (PR 6 actually) I was thinking of using the Google disavow tool for this site, but I don't want to make things even worse. Do you think these are harmful? If so, how do I fix this? Thanks :)

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• [Dear Recruiter] I developed in Mo'Fusion

  - by refuctored

  Forward: Sometimes I really feel like technology recruiters have no experience or knowledge of the field they are recruting for.  A warning to those companies hiring technical recruiters -- ensure that the technical recruiters you hire to fill a position are actually technical.  Here's proof below, where I make up completely ridiculous technologies, but still have interest from the recruiter for an interview. Letter to me: Hello - Your name came up as a possible match for a long term contract Cold Fusion Developer role I have in Bothell, WA.  This role requires you to be onsite in Bothell, WA. This is  a tough role to fill so I was hoping you might have someone you can recommend? Unfortunately no telecommute. Thank you! Sincerly, Mindy Recruiter My response: Mindy -- Wow I'm super-excited that you took the time to contact me about this position!  Let me tell you, you won't be disappointed with my skill set! Firstly, I've been developing in ColdFusion since 1993 before it was owned by Adobe and it was operating under code name, "Hot-Jack".  Recently I started developing under the Domain-View-Driven-Domain-Model (DVDDM), integrating client-side CF on Moobuntu.  Not only do I have a boat load of ColdFusion EXP,  I also have a ton of experience in the open source communities lesser known derivative of CF, Mo'Fusion (MF).  I've also invested thousands of hours of my time learning esoteric programming languages. Look forward to working with you! George And her response: Hi George – just left you a message. Give me a call at your convenience.  The role does require someone to be onsite here.. are you able to relocate yourself? Mindy [Sigh]

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• How should I deal with user agent parsing in logs?

  - by Mr. Jefferson

  My web app project includes logging functionality so we can see where visitors are coming from (referrer URL), what the popular user agents are, what pages are most popular, etc. The log is stored in SQL Server, and when I query the user agents I use a large (almost 100 lines) and growing CASE statement to separate the user agents using string matching (i.e. if the user agent contains the string "Firefox/9" then it's Firefox 9). Is there a better way to do this so I don't have to continually add to that CASE statement to deal with new browser releases? Also, how should I deal with less common, weird/unknown user agents? I've seen the following in the logs and been unable to find good information online about what they are: WordPress/3.3.1; http://www.facecolony.org Mozilla/4.0 ( http://www.hairirons.org redips; <a href=http://hairirons.org/>chi hair iron</a>) I'd guess they're bots/crawlers, but the sites they point to don't appear to reference web crawlers (or even be available sometimes). I've seen other user agents aren't familiar to me, but I know they're bots because they include "bot" or "spider" or something similar in them.

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• What would be the level of effort required to implement a screencapture command on a PS3 game?

  - by Sean Scott

  Looking to see what the level of effort is for implementing a screen capture command into PS3 game by a mid-level PS3 game developer. Bonus for a description of what is involved in the process... EDIT Not sure how to get back my question since it was the first but let me clarify some things. @Nate Bross, nope I am not the actor although i've fielded calls for him on occasion @coderanger my intent was to try and speak to other PS3 developers, however coming from a web development no one in my social circle close or extended develops on the PS3. Additionally i'm interested in hearing the effort required in terms of hours so that this information can be passed on to a client. A client who has a game on the PS3 using the unreal engine. Convo with devs sometimes go something like "can you implement feature a" which gets a response "this will take us 8 weeks and an army". Trying to be educated before the ask. I hope that helps If anyone here is a PS3 game dev and would like to respond off site so as not to break NDA that would be awesome. @Roger it would be from within the game, something that users can use. Something akin to the iphone screencap utility. No need to get fancier than that.

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• How can I perform 2D side-scroller collision checks in a tile-based map?

  - by bill

  I am trying to create a game where you have a player that can move horizontally and jump. It's kind of like Mario but it isn't a side scroller. I'm using a 2D array to implement a tile map. My problem is that I don't understand how to check for collisions using this implementation. After spending about two weeks thinking about it, I've got two possible solutions, but both of them have some problems. Let's say that my map is defined by the following tiles: 0 = sky 1 = player 2 = ground The data for the map itself might look like: 00000 10002 22022 For solution 1, I'd move the player (the 1) a complete tile and update the map directly. This make the collision easy because you can check if the player is touching the ground simply by looking at the tile directly below the player: // x and y are the tile coordinates of the player. The tile origin is the upper-left. if (grid[x][y+1] == 2){ // The player is standing on top of a ground tile. } The problem with this approach is that the player moves in discrete tile steps, so the animation isn't smooth. For solution 2, I thought about moving the player via pixel coordinates and not updating the tile map. This will make the animation much smoother because I have a smaller movement unit per frame. However, this means I can't really accurately store the player in the tile map because sometimes he would logically be between two tiles. But the bigger problem here is that I think the only way to check for collision is to use Java's intersection method, which means the player would need to be at least a single pixel "into" the ground to register collision, and that won't look good. How can I solve this problem?

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• How can I make an MMORPG appeal to casual players?

  - by Philipp

  I believe that there is a significant market of players who would enjoy the exploration and interaction aspects of MMORPGs, but simply don't have the time for the endless grinding marathons which are part of the average MMORPG. MMORPGs are all about interaction between players. But when different players have different amounts of time to invest into a game, those with less time to spend will soon lack behind their power-leveling friends and won't be able to interact with them anymore. One way to solve this would be to limit the progress a player can achieve per day, so that it simply doesn't make sense to play more than one or two hours a day. But even the busiest casual players sometimes like to spend a whole sunday afternoon playing a video game. Just stopping them after two hours would be really frustrating. It also creates a pressure to use the daily progress limit every day, because otherwise the player would feel like wasting something. This pressure would be detrimental for casual gamers. What else could be done to level the playing field between those players who play 40+ hours a week and those who can't play more than 10?

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• Yahoo search: different results shown in two identical searches

  - by Marco Demaio

  Hello,simple question: searching on http://www.yahoo.it for villa matrimonio bologna I noticed Yahoo shows different results. You need to retry few times to get this done maybe exiting the browser and openeing it again, or maybe searching once and then clearing browser cookies and then search again (it's even easier to test if you use two different browsers at the same time to search for the same phrase). Anyway in order to reproduce this easily I write down here the query shown in the address bar after the search, so you can just click on these to see the results shown by entering these query: http://it.search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=AirvLYKvBMPP_6MpAmONN14brK5_?vc=&p=villa+matrimonio+bologna&toggle=1&cop=mss&ei=UTF-8&fr=yfp-t-709 http://it.search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=AirvLYKvBMPP_6MpAmONN14brK5_?vc=&p=villa+matrimonio+bologna&toggle=1&cop=mss&ei=UTF-8&fr=sfp Note the last parameter fr is different, but it's Yahoo that set it (not me), I don't even know what it means. You can see in the search box that the searched phrase is IDENTICAL in both cases. So why Yahoo is giving out different results on same search phrase? I used the same browser and performed the test in few minutes by simply trying more than once. You may also notice that the number of results returned (written on the left side of the page) is different, for the 1st search it returns 274K results, for the 2nd one 5.38M results. Actually you might think that this is just an error on Yahoo, but it's almost 1 year that while looking once in a while at some websites to see how they are ranking on Yahoo and also Google, I noticed that two searches on the same phrase show up different results even on the same day after few minutes/hours. I couldn't reproduce this behaviour also on Google so I can not say for sure, but since it seems to me it happened sometimes I was wondering if anyone of you noticed it too. Do you know if this is the normal behaviour of search engines? Because if it's normal (and it's just me that noticed it only now) I wonder how do you understand how well a site is ranking on a search engine, you could even see one of your customer's website ranking differently compared to what your customer sees on his PC.

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• RAM caching causes severe performance drops

  - by B T

  I have read plenty of threads on memory caching and the standard response of "large cache is good, it shouldn't effect performance", "the kernel knows best". I have recently upgraded from 12.04 to 12.10 and changed from VirtualBox to VMware Workstation and the performance differences are severe (I suspect it is because of the latter). When I am running my virtual machine the system load monitor graph shows less than 50% memory usage generally. System load indicator is showing me that the rest of my RAM is used in the cache all the time. Plain and simple this is the comparison: BEFORE Cache was very sparingly used, pretty much none of my memory usage was the cache Swappiness was 0 (caused my memory to be used first, then swap only if needed) Performance was quite good and logical RAM was used fully first, caching was minimal. I could run enough software to utilize my full 4GB of RAM without any performance degradation whatsoever Swap space was then used as needed which was obviously slower (I am on a HDD) but was still usable when the current program was loaded into memory AFTER Cache is used to fill the full 4GB as soon as my virtual machine is run Swappiness is 0 (same behaviour as before but cache uses full memory straight away) Performance is terrible and unusable while running Ubuntu software Basic things like changing windows takes 2 minutes + Changing screens happens frame by frame over sometimes up to 5 minutes Cannot run an IDE and VM like I could with ease before So basically, any suggestions on how to take my performance back to how it was before while keeping my current setup? My suspicion is VMWare is the problem, but how do I see what is tied to the use of the cache? Surely there is a way to control this behaviour in software as polished as VMware? Thanks EDIT: Could also be important to note that the behaviour differs depending on whether VMware is open or closed. If VMware is open, then the ram will lock at like 50% and 50% cache and go into the complete lock up mentioned above. Contrastingly, if VMware is closed (after being open), then the RAM will continue to rise as it needs / cache will stay as the complete remaining memory and there is no noticeable performance degradation.

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• Frequent Disconnects with an Intel 3945ABG Wireless Card

  - by Alex Forsythe

  I'm brand new to Ubuntu, and I really love it so far, but one issue I have encountered is that my WLAN is disconnecting about every 5-10 minutes. Often times the connection is repaired automatically, but sometimes the network manager will repeatedly reject my encryption key (which of course is correct). Occasionally after a disconnect, the wireless network fails to show up at all. The only way I can solve this seems to be by completely restarting Ubuntu or connecting with a USB wireless adapter. I am using WPA/WPA2 encryption, which I've read can cause problems with network-manager, but I experience the exact same issues with WICD. I should probably note that I've not experienced any of these issues using Windows 7 on my other partition. I have a hunch that there may be a better driver out there for my card, but I have no idea how to go about searching for it or installing it. Any help would be really appreciated! lsb_release -a No LSB modules are available. Distributor ID: Ubuntu Description: Ubuntu 11.10 Release: 11.10 Codename: oneiric lspci -nnk 09:00.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5752 Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express [14e4:1600] (rev 02) Subsystem: Dell Device [1028:0201] Kernel driver in use: tg3 Kernel modules: tg3 0c:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 3945ABG [Golan] Network Connection [8086:4222] (rev 02) Subsystem: Intel Corporation Device [8086:1020] Kernel driver in use: iwl3945 Kernel modules: iwl3945 rfkill list 0: phy0: Wireless LAN Soft blocked: no Hard blocked: no 2: dell-wifi: Wireless LAN Soft blocked: no Hard blocked: no 3: dell-bluetooth: Bluetooth Soft blocked: yes Hard blocked: no

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• How do I target a specific driver for libata kernel parameter modding?

  - by DanielSmedegaardBuus

  Sorry for the cryptic title. Not sure how to phrase it. This is it in a nutshell: I'm running a 22-disk setup, 19 of those in a ZFS array, 15 of those backed by three port multipliers attached to SATA controllers driven by the sata_sil24 module. When running full speed (SATA2, i.e. 3 Gbps), the operation is pretty quirky (simple read errors will throw an entire PMP into spasms for a long time, sometimes with pretty awful results). Booting with kernel parameter libata.force=1.5G to force SATA controllers into "legacy" speeds completely fixes all issues with the PMPs. Thing is, my ZFS pool is backed by a fast cache SSD on my ICH10R controller. Another SSD on this same controller holds the system. Doing libata.force=1.5G immediately shaves about 100 MB/s off the transfer rate of my SSDs. For the root drive, that's not such a big deal, but for the ZFS cache SSD, it is. It effectively makes the entire zpool slower for sustained transfers than it would've been without the cache drive. Random access and fs tree lookups, of course still benifit. I'm hoping, though, that there's some way to pass the .force=1.5G parameter on to just the three SATA controllers being backed by the sata_sil24 module. But listing the module options for this, no such option exists. Is this possible? And if so, how? Thanks :)

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