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• DVD/CD burning .zip: is it more reliable, faster, longer lasting to burn a zip of files rather than the files as a folder?

  - by Rob

  Is it more reliable, faster, longer lasting to burn to CD/DVD a zip (or a few large zips) of files rather than the files as a folder? Just thinking if 1000s of small files would not be as efficiently recorded compared with one or a few large zips. Also, even after the burning program verifies the disc, I also use Beyond Compare to compare the files with those on the disc. Always binary compares as identical but I hear the drive stuttering presumably as the head is being shifted only slightly each time to seek the next file, which leads me to think that its best to make one or more zips and copy those locally to compare. Or is it that burning invidual files to the disc is not as readable which causes the head to stutter. There aren't any problems, my disc burns are reliable, just thinking more of efficiency and longevity, the discs burn and verify fast enough on my 18x DVD burner. I'm using ImgBurn mostly. Also used Nero in the past. I burn whole discs closed, finalised. Not sure which write mode but would think Disc At Once from a temporary cached image made by the burning program would be the most reliable.

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• XNA Notes 008

  - by George Clingerman

  This week has been a rough one. I’ve been sick and then in some kind of slump for my afternoon coding sessions. It could be from the cold, could be I’m still tired from writing that Windows Phone 7 game development book (which is out now!) or it could just be I’m tired of winter and want some sunshine. All I know is that even while I’m stick, the XNA world keeps going along at it’s whirlwind pace. Below are the things I caught in between my coughing fits.. Time Critical XNA News: The 2011 MVP summit is almost here so pass along your feelings and thoughts so the MVPs can take them and share them with the team in person http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/76317/464136.aspx#464136 Dream Build Play - there’s no new announcement yet, but you can’t get much more to the end of February than this! http://www.dreambuildplay.com/Main/Home.aspx XNA Team: Dean Johnson from the XNA team shares an excellent way of handling Guide.IsTrialMode on WP7 http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dejohn/archive/2011/02/21/calling-guide-istrialmode-on-windows-phone-7.aspx Nick Gravelyn tries a new tactic in deciding if there’s enough interest to develop a sequel or not. Don’t YOU want Pixel Man 2 to come out? http://nickgravelyn.com/pixelman2/ XNA MVPs: Andy “The ZMan” Dunn finally shares what he’s been secretly working on these past 4 months http://twitter.com/#!/The_Zman/status/40590269392887808 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rg8Z0ZdYbvg&feature=youtu.be Joel Martinez lets developers around NYC know they should by signing up for Game Hack Day http://twitter.com/joelmartinez/statuses/41118590862102528 http://gamehackday.org/71fdk XNA Developers: Michael McLaughlin shares an XNA RenderTarget2D Sample http://geekswithblogs.net/mikebmcl/archive/2011/02/18/xna-rendertarget2d-sample.aspx Martin Caine starts a new series on Deferred Rendering in XNA 4.0 http://twitter.com/#!/MartinCaine/status/39735221339291648 http://martincaine.com/xna/deferred_rendering_in_xna_4_introduction ElemenyCy posts about his fun time with the IntermediateSerializer http://www.ubergamermonkey.com/xna/holy-bloated-xml-batman/ Ben Kane releases a narrated dev diary video for Project Splice. Let him know if you’d like to see more! (I know I do!) http://twitter.com/#!/benkane/status/39846959498002432 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EmziXZUo08&feature=youtu.be Jason Swearingen (of Novaleaf) posts his part 1 of Spatial Partitioning solutions http://altdevblogaday.org/2011/02/21/spatial-partitioning-part-1-survey-of-spatial-partitioning-solutions/ Brian Lawson of Dark Flow Studios shares what his been up to lately with lots of pretty screenshots and hints of announcements from Microsoft... http://www.darkflowstudios.com/entry/short-and-sweet-part-1 Luke Avery starts a new blog where he plans on making XNA tutorials for beginners (and he’s got a few started already!) http://programmingwithovery.wordpress.com/ Xbox LIVE Indie Games (XBLIG): GameMarx Episode 10 http://www.gamemarx.com/video/the-show/24/ep-10-february-18-2010.aspx Minecraft clone FortressCraft coming to XBLIG http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-02-23-minecraft-clone-fortresscraft-hits-xblig ezMuze+ starts an IndieGoGo fundraiser campaign to help fund their second game and get it onto even more devices! http://www.indiegogo.com/ezmuze Gamergeddon XBLIG round up http://www.gamergeddon.com/2011/02/20/xbox-indie-game-round-up-february-20th/?utm_campaign=twitter&utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=twitter JForce Games loses their Ego http://jforcegames.com/blog/index.php?itemid=121&catid=4 XNA Game Development: @BallerIndustry reminds all XNA developers that the Maths are important ;) http://twitter.com/#!/BallerIndustry/status/39317618280243200 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjV3XDFsjP4&feature=player_embedded#at=106 @suhinini stumbles on an older but extremely useful post on XNA Content Pipeline debugging http://twitter.com/#!/suhinini/status/39270189476352000 http://badcorporatelogo.wordpress.com/2010/10/31/xna-content-pipeline-debugging-4-0/ XNA Game Development Workshops at Singapore Universities http://innovativesingapore.com/2011/02/xna-game-development-workshops-at-singapore-universities/ Indiefreaks announces that IGF v0.3 is out with Xbox 360 support, SunBurn 2.0.12 and it’s now Open Source! http://twitter.com/#!/indiefreaks/status/39391953971982336 @liotral announces a new series on properly designing a game http://twitter.com/#!/liortal53/status/39466905081217024 http://liortalblog.wordpress.com/2011/02/20/hello-cosmos/ Indies and XNA at CodeStock 2011 http://www.gamemarx.com/news/2011/02/20/indies-and-xna-at-codestock-2011.aspx Train Frontier Express posts about XNA Content Hotloading http://trainfrontierexpress.blogspot.com/2011/02/xna-content-hotloading-overview.html Slyprid announces a new character editor in Transmute http://twitter.com/#!/slyprid/status/40146992818696192 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKhFAc78LDs&feature=youtu.be The XNA 2D from the ground up tutorial series http://xna-uk.net/blogs/darkgenesis/archive/2011/02/23/recap-the-xna-2d-from-the-ground-up-tutorial-series.aspx Sgt.Conker posts a “Clingerman” (hey that’s me!) to stay relevant http://www.sgtconker.com/2011/02/posting-a-clingerman-to-stay-relevant/

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• Regular Expressions Cookbook Is in The Money—Win a Copy

  - by Jan Goyvaerts

  %COOKBOOKFRAME%You may have heard some people say that most book authors never get any royalties. That’s not true because most authors get an advance royalty that is paid before the book is published. That’s the author’s main incentive for writing the book, at least as far as money is concerned. (If money is your main concern, don’t write books.) What is true is that most authors never see any money beyond the advance royalty. Royalty rates are very low. A 10% royalty of the publisher’s price is considered normal. The publisher’s price is usually 45% of the retail price. So if you pay full price in a bookstore, the author gets 4.5% of your money. If there’s more than one author, they split the royalty. It doesn’t take a math degree to figure out that a book needs to sell quite a few copies for the royalty to add up to a meaningful amount of money. But Steven and I must have done something right. Regular Expressions Cookbook is in the money. My royalty statement for the 3rd quartier of 2009, which is the 2nd quarter that the book was on the market, came with a check. I actually received it last month but didn’t get around to blogging about. The amount of the check is insignificant. The point is that the balance is no longer negative. I’m taking this opportunity to pat myself and my co-author on the back. To celebrate the occassion O’Reilly has offered to sponsor a give-away of five (5) copies of Regular Expressions Cookbook. These are the rules of the game: You must post a comment to this blog article including your actual name and actual email address. Names are published, email addresses are not. Comments are moderated by myself (Jan Goyvaerts). If I consider a comment to be offensive or spam it will not be published and not be eligible for any prize. If you don’t know what to say in the comment, just wish me a happy 100000nd birthday, so I don’t have to feel so bad about entering the 6-bit era. Each person commenting has only one chance to win, regardless of the number of comments posted. O’Reilly will be provided with the names and email addresses of the winners (and those email addresses only) in order to arrange delivery. Each winner can choose to receive a printed copy or ebook (DRM-free PDF). If you choose the printed book, O’Reilly pays for shipping to anywhere in the world but not for any duties or taxes your country may impose on books imported from the USA. If you choose the ebook, you’ll need to create an O’Reilly account that is then granted access to the PDF download. You can make your choice after you’ve won, so it doesn’t influence your chance of winning. Contest ends 28 February 2010, GMT+7 (Thai time). Chosen by five calls to Random(78)+1 in Delphi 2010, the winners are: 48: Xiaozu 45: David Chisholm 19: Miquel Burns 33: Aaron Rice 17: David Laing Thanks to everybody who participated. The winners have been notified by email on how to collect their prize.

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• Do We Indeed Have a Future? George Takei on Star Wars.

  - by Bil Simser

  George Takei (rhymes with Okay), probably best known for playing Hikaru Sulu on the original Star Trek, has always had deep concerns for the present and the future. Whether on Earth or among the stars, he has the welfare of humanity very much at heart. I was digging through my old copies of Famous Monsters of Filmland, a great publication on monster and films that I grew up with, and came across this. This was his reaction to STAR WARS from issue 139 of Famous Monsters of Filmland and was written June 6, 1977. It is reprinted here without permission but I hope since the message is still valid to this day and has never been reprinted anywhere, nobody will mind me sharing it. STAR WARS is the most pre-posterously diverting galactic escape and at the same time the most hideously credible portent of the future yet.While I thrilled to the exploits that reminded me of the heroics of Errol Flynn as Robin Hood, Burt Lancaster as the Crimson Pirate and Buster Crabbe as Flash Gordon, I was at the same time aghast at the phantasmagoric violence technology can place at our disposal. STAR WARS raised in my mind the question - do we indeed have a future?It seems to me what George Lucas has done is to masterfully guide us on a journey through space and time and bring us back face to face with today's reality. STAR WARS is more than science fiction, I think it is science fictitious reality.Just yesterday, June 7, 1977, I read that the United States will embark on the production of a neutron bomb - a bomb that will kill people on a gigantic scale but will not destroy buildings. A few days before that, I read that the Pentagon is fearful that the Soviets may have developed a warhead that could neutralize ours that have a capacity for that irrational concept overkill to the nth power. Already, it seems we have the technology to realize the awesome special effects simulations that we saw in the film.The political scene of STAR WARS is that of government by force and power, of revolutions based on some unfathomable grievance, survival through a combination of cunning and luck and success by the harnessing of technology -  a picture not very much at variance from the political headlines that we read today.And most of all, look at the people; both the heroes in the film and the reaction of the audience. First, the heroes; Luke Skywalker is a pretty but easily led youth. Without any real philosophy to guide him, he easily falls under the influence of a mystical old man believed previously to be an eccentric hermit. Recognize a 1960's hippie or a 1970's moonie? Han Solo has a philosophy coupled with courage and skill. His philosophy is money. His proficiency comes for a price - the highest. Solo is a thoroughly avaricious mercenary. And the Princess, a decisive, strong, self-confident and chilly woman. The audience cheered when she wielded a gun. In all three, I missed qualities that could be called humane - love, kindness, yes, I missed sensuality. I also missed a sense of ideals and faith. In this regard the machines seemed more human. They demonstrated real affection for each other and an occasional poutiness. They exhibited a sense of fidelity and constancy. The machines were humanized and the humans conversely seemed mechanical.As a member of the audience, I was swept up by the sheer romantic escapsim of it all. The deering-dos, the rope swing escape across the pit, the ray gun battles and especially the swash buckle with the ray swords. Great fun!But I just hope that we weren't too intoxicated by the escapism to be able to focus on the recognizable. I hope the beauty of the effects didn't narcotize our sensitivity to violence. I hope the people see through the fantastically well done futuristic mirrors to the disquieting reflection of our own society. I hope they enjoy STAR WARS without being "purely entertained".

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• What I Expect From Myself This Year

  - by Lee Brandt

  I am making it a point not to call them resolutions, because the word has become an institution and is beginning to have no meaning. That's why I end up not keeping my resolutions, I think. So in the spirit of holding myself to my own commitments, I will make a plan and some realistic goals. 1.) Lose weight. Everyone has this on their list, but I am going to be conservative and specific. I currently weigh 393lbs. (yeah, I know). So I want to plan to lose 10lbs per month, that's 1lb. every three days, that shouldn't be difficult if I stick to my diet and exercise plan. - How do I do this?     - Diet: vegetarian. Since I already know I have high blood pressure and borderline high cholesterol, a meat-free diet is in order. I was vegan for a little over 2 years in 2006-2008, I think I can handle vegetarian.     - Exercise: at least 3 times (preferably every day) a week for 30 minutes. It has to be something that gets my heart rate up, or burns in my muscles. I can walk for cardio to start and mild calisthenics (girly push-ups, crunches, etc.).         - Move: I spend all my time behind the computer. I have recently started to use a slight variation of the Pomodoro Technique (my Pomodoros are 50 minutes instead of 25). During my 10 minutes every hour to answer emails, chats, etc., I will take a few minutes to stretch. 2.) Get my wife pregnant. We've been talking about it for years. Now that she is done with graduate school and I have a great job, now's the time. We'll be the oldest parents in the PTA most likely, but I don't care. 3.) Blog More. Another favorite among bloggers, but I do have about six drafts for blog posts started. The topics are there all I need to do is flesh out the post. This can be the first hour of any computer time I have after work. As soon as I am done exercising, shower and post. 4.) Speak less. Most people want to speak more. I want to concentrate on the places that I enjoy and that can really use the speakers (like local code camps), rather than trying to be some national speaker. I love speaking at conferences, but I need to spend some more time at home if we're going to get pregnant. 5.) Read more. I got a Kindle for Christmas and I am loving it so far. I have almost finished Treasure Island, and am getting ready to pick my next book. I will probably read a lot of classics for 2 reasons: (1) they teach deep lessons and (2) most are free for the Kindle. 6.) Find my religion. I was raised Southern Baptist, but I want to find my own way. I've been wanting to go to the local Unitarian Church, so I will make a point to go before the end of March. I also want to add a few religious books to my reading list. My boss bought me a copy of Lee Strobel's The Case for Christ: A Journalist's Personal Investigation of the Evidence for Jesus , and I have a copy of Bruce Feiler's Abraham: A Journey to the Heart of Three Faiths (P.S.) . I will start there. Seems like a lot now that I spell it out like this. But these are only starters. I am forty years old. I cannot keep living like I am twenty anymore. So here we go, 2011.

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• 2014 Conferences - JFokus, JavaLand & GeeCon!

  - by Heather VanCura

  There has been a delay in publishing these past event summaries from early 2014--JFokus in February, JavaLand in March, and GeeCon in May. As we plan for Devoxx UK next week, I found these summaries that did not make it past 'draft' stage.  We had some great successes with the first three events of 2014, a Java developer conference trifecta! Participation topics included Java, the JCP program overall and the Adopt-a-JSR programs.   First up in February was JFokus in Stockholm. The energy and talent in Stockholm is amazing and the conference organizers do a stellar job running it and welcoming the speakers of this event.  I enjoyed the city walk and speaker dinner, as well as many opportunities to interact with conference speakers and attendees, both during and after the conference hours. Reza Rehman invited me to speak during his Java EE 7 lab session about the Adopt-a-JSR program, and I gave a quickie session on the JCP and Adopt-a-JSR.  There was also a late night Birds of a Feather (BoF) session held jointly with Cecelia Borg, Martijn Verburg and Reza Rehman.  This was an interactive conversation with a focus on the Java EE community survey results and encouraging more community participation and collaboration in Java development.  The Java 8 keynote by Georges Saab and Mark Reinhold was also very entertaining,  I was sorry to miss FOSDEM happening the previous weekend this year in Brussels, but I hope to attend in 2015.  Favorite take home gift -- Lambdas cap! In March, the inaugural version of the JavaLand conference happened inside Phantasialand, an amusement park in Germany. Markus Eisele suggested having an Early Adopters area at the conference, which I was keen to implement. In 2013 at Devoxx Belgium we held some activities in the Hackergaren area around Lambdas and Java EE 7, so this was a great opportunity to expand on a more interactive conference format and Andreas Badelt from the program committee helped in the planning for this area.  Daniel Bryant and Mani Sarkar from the London Java Community led some general Adopt-a-JSR discussions and AdoptOpen JDK activities.  JCP Spec Leads, Anatole Tresch from Credit Suisse, leading JSR 354, Money & Currency API, and Ed Burns from Oracle, leading JSR 344, JavaServer Faces 2.2, attended to engage with conference attendees on their JSRs.  Favorite - Stephen Chin's roller coaster video. In May, GeeCon in Krakow was anther awesome conference!  The conference organizers were warm and welcoming and I enjoyed time getting to know the other speakers at the event. There was a JCP and Adopt-a-JSR participation session as well as a moderated panel session on Early Adopters.  We had an amazing panel -- Daniel Bryant, Arun Gupta, Tomasz Borek , and Peter Lawrey. The panel discussed the Adopt-a-JSR and Adopt OpenJDK program, and how the participants work together to get involved and contribute to both the Java SE and Java EE platforms.  If was an interesting discussion and sparked some new ideas on how Java User Groups in Poland and around the world can contribute in a significant and meaningful way to create better and more practical Java standards today and in the future.  Favorite take home gift - GeeCon mug!   These were some of the highlights of the events--looking forward to Devoxx UK next week.  I will publish these details tomorrow!

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• JCP Awards 10 Year Retrospective

  - by Heather VanCura

  As we celebrate 10 years of JCP Program Award recognition in 2012,  take a look back in the Retrospective article covering the history of the JCP awards.  Most recently, the JCP awards were  celebrated at JavaOne Latin America in Brazil, where SouJava was presented the JCP Member of the Year Award for 2012 (won jointly with the London Java Community) for their contributions and launch of the Global Adopt-a-JSR Program. This is also a good time to honor the JCP Award Nominees and Winners who have been designated as Star Spec Leads.  Spec Leads are key to the Java Community Process (JCP) program. Without them, none of the Java Specification Requests (JSRs) would have begun, much less completed and become implemented in shipping products.  Nominations for 2012 Start Spec Leads are now open until 31 December. The Star Spec Lead program recognizes Spec Leads who have repeatedly proven their merit by producing high quality specifications, establishing best practices, and mentoring others. The point of such honor is to endorse the good work that they do, showcase their methods for other Spec Leads to emulate, and motivate other JCP program members and participants to get involved in the JCP program. Ed Burns – A Star Spec Lead for 2009, Ed first got involved with the JCP program when he became co-Spec Lead of JSR 127, JavaServer Faces (JSF), a role he has continued through JSF 1.2 and now JSF 2.0, which is JSR 314. Linda DeMichiel – Linda thus involved in the JCP program from its very early days. She has been the Spec Lead on at least three JSRs and an EC member for another three. She holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University. Gavin King – Nominated as a JCP Outstanding Spec Lead for 2010, for his work with JSR 299. His endorsement said, “He was not only able to work through disputes and objections to the evolving programming model, but he resolved them into solutions that were more technically sound, and which gained support of its pundits.” Mike Milikich –  Nominated for his work on Java Micro Edition (ME) standards, implementations, tools, and Technology Compatibility Kits (TCKs), Mike was a 2009 Star Spec Lead for JSR 271, Mobile Information Device Profile 3. David Nuescheler – Serving as the CTO for Day Software, acquired by Adobe Systems, David has been a key player in the growth of the company’s global content management solution. In 2002, he became Spec Lead for JSR 170, Content Repository for Java Technology API, continuing for the subsequent version, JSR 283. Bill Shannon – A well-respected name in the Java community, Bill came to Oracle from Sun as a Distinguished Engineer and is still performing at full speed as Spec Lead for JSR 342, Java EE 7,  as an alternate EC member, and hands-on problem solver for the Java community as a whole. Jim Van Peursem – Jim holds a PhD in Computer Engineering. He was part of the Motorola team that worked with Sun labs on the Spotless VM that became the KVM. From within Motorola, Jim has been responsible for many aspects of Java technology deployment, from an independent Connected Limited Device Configuration (CLDC) and Mobile Information Device Profile (MIDP) implementations, to handset development, to working with the industry in defining many related standards. Participation in the JCP Program goes well beyond technical proficiency. The JCP Awards Program is an attempt to say “Thank You” to all of the JCP members, Expert Group Members, Spec Leads, and EC members who give their time to contribute to the evolution of Java technology.

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• How the SPARC T4 Processor Optimizes Throughput Capacity: A Case Study

  - by Ruud

  This white paper demonstrates the architected latency hiding features of Oracle’s UltraSPARC T2+ and SPARC T4 processors That is the first sentence from this technical white paper, but what does it exactly mean? Let's consider a very simple example, the computation of a = b + c. This boils down to the following (pseudo-assembler) instructions that need to be executed: load @b, r1 load @c, r2 add r1,r2,r3 store r3, @a The first two instructions load variables b and c from an address in memory (here symbolized by @b and @c respectively). These values go into registers r1 and r2. The third instruction adds the values in r1 and r2. The result goes into register r3. The fourth instruction stores the contents of r3 into the memory address symbolized by @a. If we're lucky, both b and c are in a nearby cache and the load instructions only take a few processor cycles to execute. That is the good case, but what if b or c, or both, have to come from very far away? Perhaps both of them are in the main memory and then it easily takes hundreds of cycles for the values to arrive in the registers. Meanwhile the processor is doing nothing and simply waits for the data to arrive. Actually, it does something. It burns cycles while waiting. That is a waste of time and energy. Why not use these cycles to execute instructions from another application or thread in case of a parallel program? That is exactly what latency hiding on the SPARC T-Series processors does. It is a hardware feature totally transparent to the user and application. As soon as there is a delay in the execution, the hardware uses these otherwise idle cycles to execute instructions from another process. As a result, the throughput capacity of the system improves because idle cycles are no longer wasted and therefore more jobs can be run per unit of time. This feature has been in the SPARC T-series from the beginning, so why this paper? The difference with previous publications on this topic is in the amount of detail given. How this all works under the hood is fully explained using two example programs. Starting from the assembly language instructions, it is demonstrated in what way these programs execute. To really see what is happening we go down to the processor pipeline level, where the gaps in the execution are, and show in what way these idle cycles are filled by other copies of the same program running simultaneously. Both the SPARC T4 as well as the older UltraSPARC T2+ processor are covered. You may wonder why the UltraSPARC T2+ is included. The focus of this work is on the SPARC T4 processor, but to explain the basic concept of latency hiding at this very low level, we start with the UltraSPARC T2+ processor because it is architecturally a much simpler design. From the single issue, in-order pipelines of this processor we then shift gears and cover how this all works on the much more advanced dual issue, out-of-order architecture of the T4. The analysis and performance experiments have been conducted on both processors. The results depend on the processor, but in all cases the theoretical estimates are confirmed by the experiments. If you're interested to read a lot more about this and find out how things really work under the hood, you can download a copy of the paper here. A paper like this could not have been produced without the help of several other people. I want to thank the co-author of this paper, Jared Smolens, for his very valuable contributions and our highly inspiring discussions. I'm also indebted to Thomas Nau (Ulm University, Germany), Shane Sigler and Mark Woodyard (both at Oracle) for their feedback on earlier versions of this paper. Karen Perkins (Perkins Technical Writing and Editing) and Rick Ramsey at Oracle were very helpful in providing editorial and publishing assistance.

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• jQuery dropdown is really jumpy

  - by Matthew Westrik

  Hi, I'm making a dropdown menu with jquery (some of the code is borrowed from a tutorial by someone, although I forget who...). When I use the dropdown, it slides up and down really fast, and I can't figure it out. What do you think? HTML <div id="nav"> <ul class="topnav"> <li><a class="selected" href="#" title="home">home</a></li> <li><a href="events/" title="events calendar">events</a></li> <li><a href="photos/" title="photo gallery">photos</a></li> <li><a href="staff/" title="faculty">staff</a> <ul class="subnav"> <li><a href="#">Luke</a></li> <li><a href="#">Darth Vader</a></li> <li><a href="#">Princess Leia</a></li> <li><a href="#">Jabba the Hutt</a></li> </ul> </li> <li><a href="contact/" title="contact">contact</a></li> jQuery $(document).ready(function(){ $("ul.subnav").parent() .hover(function() { $(this).parent().find("ul.subnav").slideDown('fast').show(); //Drop down the subnav on hover... $(this).parent() .hover(function() { }, function(){ $(this).parent().find("ul.subnav").slideUp('slow'); }); $(this).parent().find("ul.subnav") .hover(function() { }, function(){ $(this).parent().find("ul.subnav").slideUp('slow'); }); }).hover(function() { $(this).addClass("subhover"); }, function(){ $(this).removeClass("subhover"); });

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• Why is my Lucene index getting locked?

  - by Andrew Bullock

  I had an issue with my search not return the results I expect. I tried to run Luke on my index, but it said it was locked and I needed to Force Unlock it (I'm not a Jedi/Sith though) I tried to delete the index folder and run my recreate-indicies application but the folder was locked. Using unlocker I've found that there are about 100 entries of w3wp.exe (same PID, different Handle) with a lock on the index. Whats going on? I'm doing this in my NHibernate configuration: c.SetListener(ListenerType.PostUpdate, new FullTextIndexEventListener()); c.SetListener(ListenerType.PostInsert, new FullTextIndexEventListener()); c.SetListener(ListenerType.PostDelete, new FullTextIndexEventListener()); And here is the only place i query the index: var fullTextSession = NHibernate.Search.Search.CreateFullTextSession(this.unitOfWork.Session); var fullTextQuery = fullTextSession.CreateFullTextQuery(query, typeof (Person)); fullTextQuery.SetMaxResults(100); return fullTextQuery.List<Person>(); Whats going on? What am i doing wrong? Thanks

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• Django: Using 2 different AdminSite instances with different models registered

  - by omat

  Apart from the usual admin, I want to create a limited admin for non-staff users. This admin site will have different registered ModelAdmins. I created a folder /useradmin/ in my project directory and similar to contrib/admin/_init_.py I added an autodiscover() which will register models defined in useradmin.py modules instead of admin.py: # useradmin/__init__.py def autodiscover(): # Same as admin.autodiscover() but registers useradmin.py modules ... for app in settings.INSTALLED_APPS: mod = import_module(app) try: before_import_registry = copy.copy(site._registry) import_module('%s.useradmin' % app) except: site._registry = before_import_registry if module_has_submodule(mod, 'useradmin'): raise I also cretated sites.py under useradmin/ to override AdminSite similar to contrib/admin/sites: # useradmin/sites.py class UserAdminSite(AdminSite): def has_permission(self, request): # Don't care if the user is staff return request.user.is_active def login(self, request): # Do the login stuff but don't care if the user is staff if request.user.is_authenticated(): ... else: ... site = UserAdminSite(name='useradmin') In the project's URLs: # urls.py from django.contrib import admin import useradmin admin.autodiscover() useradmin.autodiscover() urlpatterns = patterns('', (r'^admin/', include(admin.site.urls)), (r'^useradmin/', include(useradmin.site.urls)), ) And I try to register different models in admin.py and useradmin.py modules under app directories: # products/useradmin.py import useradmin class ProductAdmin(useradmin.ModelAdmin): pass useradmin.site.register(Product, ProductAdmin) But when registering models in useradmin.py like useradmin.site.register(Product, ProductAdmin), I get 'module' object has no attribute 'ModelAdmin' exception. Though when I try this via shell; import useradmin from useradmin import ModelAdmin does not raise any exception. Any ideas what might be wrong? Edit: I tried going the @Luke way and arranged the code as follows as minimal as possible: (file paths are relative to the project root) # admin.py from django.contrib.admin import autodiscover from django.contrib.admin.sites import AdminSite user_site = AdminSite(name='useradmin') # urls.py (does not even have url patterns; just calls autodiscover()) import admin admin.autodiscover() # products/admin.py import admin from products.models import Product admin.user_site.register(Product) As a result I get an AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'user_site' when admin.user_site.register(Product) in products/admin.py is called. Any ideas? Solution: I don't know if there are better ways but, renaming the admin.py in the project root to useradmin.py and updating the imports accordingly resolved the last case, which was a naming and import conflict.

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• When do you tag your software project?

  - by WilhelmTell of Purple-Magenta

  I realize there are various kinds of software projects: commercial (for John Doe) industrial (for Mr. Montgomery Burns) successful open-source (with audience larger than, say, 10 people) personal projects (with audience size in the vicinity of 1). each of which release a new version of their product on difference conditions. I'm particularly interested in the case of personal projects and open-source projects. When, or under what conditions, do you make a new release of any kind? Do you subscribe to a fixed recurring deadline such as every two weeks? Do you commit to a release of at least 10 minor fixes, or one major fix? Do you combine the two conditions such as at least one condition must hold, or both must hold? I reckon this is a subjective question. I ask this question in light of searching for tricks to keep my projects alive and kicking. Sometimes my projects are active but look as if they aren't because I don't have the confidence to make a release or a tag of any sort for a long time -- in the order of months.

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• Can't Display Bitmap of Higher Resolution than CDC area

  - by T. Jones

  Hi there dear gurus and expert coders. i am not gonna start with im a newbie and don't know much about image programming but unfortunately those are the facts :( I am trying to display an image from a bitmap pointer *ImageData which is of resolution 1392x1032. I am trying to draw that at an area of resolution or size 627x474. However, repeated trying doesnt seem to work. It works when I change the bitmap image I created from *ImageData width and height to resolution or size of around 627x474 I really do not know how to solve this after trying all possible solutions from various forums and google. pDC is a CDC* and memDC is a CDC initialized in an earlier method Anything uninitialized here was initialized in other methods. Here is my code dear humble gurus. Do provide me with guidance Yoda and Obi-Wan provided to Luke Skywalker. void DemoControl::ShowImage( void *ImageData ) { int Width; //Width of Image From Camera int Height; //Height of Image From Camera int m_DisplayWidth = 627 ;//width of rectangle area to display int m_DisplayHeight = 474;//height of rectangle area to display GetImageSize( &Width, &Height ) ; //this will return Width = 1392, Height 1032 CBitmap bitmap; bitmap.CreateBitmap(Width,Height,32,1,ImageData); CBitmap* pOldBitmap = memDC.SelectObject((CBitmap*)&bitmap); pDC->BitBlt(22, 24, 627, 474, &memDC, 0, 0, SRCCOPY); memDC.SelectObject((CBitmap*)pOldBitmap); ReleaseDC(pDC); }

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• Python and a "time value of money" problem.

  - by jamieb

  (I asked this question earlier today, but I did a poor job of explaining myself. Let me try again) I have a client who is an industrial maintenance company. They sell service agreements that are prepaid 20 hour blocks of a technician's time. Some of their larger customers might burn through that agreement in two weeks while customers with fewer problems might go eight months on that same contract. I would like to use Python to help model projected sales revenue and determine how many billable hours per month that they'll be on the hook for. If each customer only ever bought a single service contract (never renewed) it would be easy to figure sales as monthly_revenue = contract_value * qty_contracts_sold. Billable hours would also be easy: billable_hrs = hrs_per_contract * qty_contracts_sold. However, how do I account for renewals? Assuming that 90% (or some other arbitrary amount) of customers renew, then their monthly revenue ought to grow geometrically. Another important variable is how long the average customer burns through a contract. How do I determine what the revenue and billable hours will be 3, 6, or 12 months from now, based on various renewal and burn rates? I assume that I'd use some type of recursive function but math was never one of my strong points. Any suggestions please? Edit: I'm thinking that the best way to approach this is to think of it as a "time value of money" problem. I've retitled the question as such. The problem is probably a lot more common if you think of "monthly sales" as something similar to annuity payments.

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• erlang design of a card game [closed]

  - by user601836

  I would like to discuss with you a possible implementation for a card game in erlang. The only full example I found online is OpenPoker. I would like to create one myself, so here is the implementation I have in mind: A gen_server to represent a deck: when started creates a deck of cards (shuffled). And stores it in its state. provides an handle_call (draw_card) A gen_server to represent the chat room. Stores in its state the registered name of a player process (e.g. player1, player2, luke etc etc). Exports handle_cast to join the chat (executed by default when somebody joins successfully the game) and one to broadcast a chat message to all users by calling an handle_cast on the gen_server representing a player. a gen_fsm to represent a game instance. Has two states (wait_join, and turn). Exports join/1 to join the game, play_card/2 and send_msg/2. One parameter is the pid of the player process. a gen_server to represent the player. Exports only start_link/1 where the parameter is the name to use to register the process (inside the init I call join method of gen_fsm). Has different handle_calls (e.g. get_hand, draw_card) and handle_casts (e.g. play_card, deliver_msg, and send_msg) A gen_server to represent the main process. Exports (join_game/1 which calls player:start_link/1, send_msg/2 to call player's send_msg, play_card/3 to call player's play_card). What do you think of this architecture? Thanks in advance

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• PHP: What is an efficient way to parse a text file containing very long lines?

  - by Shaun

  I'm working on a parser in php which is designed to extract MySQL records out of a text file. A particular line might begin with a string corresponding to which table the records (rows) need to be inserted into, followed by the records themselves. The records are delimited by a backslash and the fields (columns) are separated by commas. For the sake of simplicity, let's assume that we have a table representing people in our database, with fields being First Name, Last Name, and Occupation. Thus, one line of the file might be as follows [People] = "\Han,Solo,Smuggler\Luke,Skywalker,Jedi..." Where the ellipses (...) could be additional people. One straightforward approach might be to use fgets() to extract a line from the file, and use preg_match() to extract the table name, records, and fields from that line. However, let's suppose that we have an awful lot of Star Wars characters to track. So many, in fact, that this line ends up being 200,000+ characters/bytes long. In such a case, taking the above approach to extract the database information seems a bit inefficient. You have to first read hundreds of thousands of characters into memory, then read back over those same characters to find regex matches. Is there a way, similar to the Java String next(String pattern) method of the Scanner class constructed using a file, that allows you to match patterns in-line while scanning through the file? The idea is that you don't have to scan through the same text twice (to read it from the file into a string, and then to match patterns) or store the text redundantly in memory (in both the file line string and the matched patterns). Would this even yield a significant increase in performance? It's hard to tell exactly what PHP or Java are doing behind the scenes.

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• efficient android rendering

  - by llll

  I've read quite a few tutorials on game programming on android, and all of them provide basically the same solution as to drawing the game, that is having a dedicated thread spinning like this: public void run() { while(true) { if(!surfaceHolder.getSurface().isValid()) continue; Canvas canvas = surfaceHolder.lockCanvas(); drawGame(canvas); /* do actual drawing here */ surfaceHolder.unlockCanvasAndPost(canvas); } } now I'm wondering, isn't this wasteful? Suppose I've a game with very simple graphics, so that the actual time in drawGame is little; then I'm going to draw the same things on and on, stealing cpu from the other threads; a possibility could be skipping the drawing and sleeping a bit if the game state hasn't changed, which I could check by having the state update thread mantaining a suitable status flag. But maybe there are other options. For example, couldn'it be possible to synchronize with rendering, so that I don't post updates too often? Or am I missing something and that is precisely what lockCanvas does, that is it blocks and burns no cpu until proper time? Thanks in advance L.

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• Lucene Search Returning Extra, Undesired Records

  - by Brandon

  I have a Lucene index that contains a field called 'Name'. I escape all special characters before inserting a value into my index using QueryParser.Escape(value). In my example I have 2 documents with the following names respectively: Test Test (Test) They get inserted into my index as such (I can confirm this using Luke): [test] [test] [\(test\)] I insert these values as TOKENIZED and using the StandardAnalyzer. When I perform a search, I use the QueryParser.Escape(searchString) against my search string input to escape special characters and then use the QueryParser with my 'Name' field and the StandardAnalyzer to perform my search. When I perform a search for 'Test', I get back both documents in my index (as expected). However, when I perform a search for 'Test (Test)', I am getting back both documents still. I realize that in both examples it matches on the 'test' term in the index, but I am confused in my 2nd example why it would not just pull back the document with the value of 'Test (Test)' because my search should create two terms: [test] and [\(test\)] I would imagine it would perform some sort of boolean operator where BOTH terms must match in that situation so I would get back just one record. Is there something I am missing or a trick to make the search behave as desired?

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• changing the intensity of lighten/darken on bitmaps using PorterDuffXfermode in the Android Paint class

  - by user1116836

  Ok my orignal question has changed. How do i change the intensity of how something like this is effected? DayToNight.setXfermode(new PorterDuffXfermode(Mode.DST_IN)); in my dream world it would have worked like this DayToNight.setXfermode(new PorterDuffXfermode(Mode.DST_IN(10))); the 10 being a level of intensity. An example would be if I had a flickering candle, when the candle burns bright I want the bitmaps I am drawing to the screen to retain their origanol color and brightness, when it flickers I want the bitmaps to be almost blacked out, and I want to darken the Bitmaps as the light dims. I have equations, timers and all that figured out, just not how to actually apply it to change the color/brightness. Maybe burning the images is what im looking for? I just want to change the lightness lol. I feel like using paint.setShader might be a solution, but the information in this area is pretty limited from what i have been able to find. Any help would be appreciated. edit: to be crystal clear, i am looking for a way to lighten/darken bitmaps as I draw them to the canvas

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• determining the starting speed for an accelerated animation (in flash/actionscript but it's a math question)

  - by vulkanino

  This question burns my brain. I have an object on a plane, but for the sake of simplicity let's work just on a single dimension, thus the object has a starting position xs. I know the ending position xe. The object has to move from starting to ending position with an accelerated (acceleration=a) movement. I know the velocity the object has to have at the ending position (=ve). In my special case the ending speed is zero, but of course I need a general formula. The only unknown is the starting velocity vs. The objects starts with vs in xs and ends with ve in xe, moving along a space x with an acceleration a in a time t. Since I'm working with flash, space is expressed in pixels, time is expressed in frames (but you can reason in terms of seconds, it's easy to convert knowing the frames-per-second). In the animation loop (think onEnterFrame) I compute the new velocity and the new position with (a=0.4 for example): vx *= a (same for vy) x += vx (same for y) I want the entire animation to last, say, 2 seconds, which at 30 fps is 60 frames. Now you know that in 60 frames my object has to move from xs to xe with a constant deceleration so that the ending speed is 0. How do I compute the starting speed vs? Maybe there's a simpler way to do this in Flash, but I am now interested in the math/physics behind this.

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• Filtering Security Logs by User and Logon Type

  - by Trido

  I have been asked to find out when a user has logged on to the system in the last week. Now the audit logs in Windows should contain all the info I need. I think if I search for Event ID 4624 (Logon Success) with a specific AD user and Logon Type 2 (Interactive Logon) that it should give me the information I need, but for the life of my I cannot figure out how to actually filter the Event Log to get this information. Is it possible inside of the Event Viewer or do you need to use an external tool to parse it to this level? I found http://nerdsknowbest.blogspot.com.au/2013/03/filter-security-event-logs-by-user-in.html which seemed to be part of what I needed. I modified it slightly to only give me the last 7 days worth. Below is the XML I tried. <QueryList> <Query Id="0" Path="Security"> <Select Path="Security">*[System[(EventID=4624) and TimeCreated[timediff(@SystemTime) &lt;= 604800000]]]</Select> <Select Path="Security">*[EventData[Data[@Name='Logon Type']='2']]</Select> <Select Path="Security">*[EventData[Data[@Name='subjectUsername']='Domain\Username']]</Select> </Query> </QueryList> It only gave me the last 7 days, but the rest of it did not work. Can anyone assist me with this? EDIT Thanks to the suggestions of Lucky Luke I have been making progress. The below is my current query, although as I will explain it isn't returning any results. <QueryList> <Query Id="0" Path="Security"> <Select Path="Security"> *[System[(EventID='4624')] and System[TimeCreated[timediff(@SystemTime) &lt;= 604800000]] and EventData[Data[@Name='TargetUserName']='john.doe'] and EventData[Data[@Name='LogonType']='2'] ] </Select> </Query> </QueryList> As I mentioned, it wasn't returning any results so I have been messing with it a bit. I can get it to produce the results correctly until I add in the LogonType line. After that, it returns no results. Any idea why this might be? EDIT 2 I updated the LogonType line to the following: EventData[Data[@Name='LogonType'] and (Data='2' or Data='7')] This should capture Workstation Logons as well as Workstation Unlocks, but I still get nothing. I then modify it to search for other Logon Types like 3, or 8 which it finds plenty of. This leads me to believe that the query works correctly, but for some reason there are no entries in the Event Logs with Logon Type equalling 2 and this makes no sense to me. Is it possible to turn this off?

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• XNA Notes 006

  - by George Clingerman

  If you used to think the XNA community was small and inactive, hopefully these XNA Notes are opening your eyes. And I honestly feel like I’m still only catching the tail end of everything that’s going on. It’s a large and active community and you can be so mired down in one part of it you miss all sorts of cool stuff another part is doing. XNA is many things to a lot of people and that makes for a lot of really awesome things going on. So here’s what I saw going on this last week! Time Critical XNA New: XNA Team - Peer Review now closes for XNA 3.1 games http://blogs.msdn.com/b/xna/archive/2011/02/08/peer-review-pipeline-closed-for-new-xna-gs-3-1-games-or-updates-on-app-hub.aspx http://twitter.com/XNACommunity/statuses/34649816529256448 The XNA Team posts about a meet up with Microsoft for Creator’s going to be at GDC, March 3rd at the Lobby Bar http://on.fb.me/fZungJ XNA Team: @mklucher is busying playing the the bubblegum on WP7 made by a member of the XNA team (although reportedly made in Silverlight? Crazy! ;) ) http://twitter.com/mklucher/statuses/34645662737895426 http://bubblegum.me Shawn Hargreaves posts multiple posts (is this a sign that something new is coming from the XNA team? Usually when Shawn has time to post, something has just wrapped up…) Random Shuffle http://blogs.msdn.com/b/shawnhar/archive/2011/02/09/random-shuffle.aspx Doing the right thing: resume, rewind or skip ahead http://blogs.msdn.com/b/shawnhar/archive/2011/02/10/doing-the-right-thing-resume-rewind-or-skip-ahead.aspx XNA Developers: Andrew Russel was on .NET Rocks recently talking with Carl and Richard about developing games for Xbox, iPhone and Android http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?ShowNum=635 Eric W. releases the Fishing Girl source code into the wild http://ericw.ca/blog/posts/fishing-girl-now-open-source/ http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/74642/454512.aspx#454512 BinaryTweedDeej reminds that XNA community that Indie City wants you involved http://twitter.com/BinaryTweedDeej/statuses/34596114028044288 http://www.indiecity.com Mike McLaughlin (@mikebmcl) releases his first two XNA articles on the TechNet wiki http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/xna-framework-overview.aspx http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/content-pipeline-overview.aspx John Watte plays around with the Content Pipeline and Music Visualization exploring just what can be done. http://www.enchantedage.com/xna-content-pipeline-fft-song-analysis http://www.enchantedage.com/fft-in-xna-content-pipeline-for-beat-detection-for-the-win Simon Stevens writes up his talk on Vector Collision Physics http://www.simonpstevens.com/News/VectorCollisionPhysics @domipheus puts together an XNA Task Manager http://www.flickr.com/photos/domipheus/5405603197/ MadNinjaSkillz releases his fork of Nick's Easy Storage component on CodePlex http://twitter.com/MadNinjaSkillz/statuses/34739039068229634 http://ezstorage.codeplex.com @ActiveNick was interviewed by Rob Cameron and discusses Windows Phone 7, Bing Maps and XNA http://twitter.com/ActiveNick/statuses/35348548526546944 http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/cc537546 Radiangames (Luke Schneider) posts about converting his games from XNA to Unity http://radiangames.com/?p=592 UberMonkey (@ElementCy) posts about a new project in the works, CubeTest a Minecraft style terrain http://www.ubergamermonkey.com/personal-projects/new-project-in-the-works/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Ubergamermonkey+%28UberGamerMonkey%29 Xbox LIVE Indie Games (XBLIG): VideoGamer Rob review Bonded Realities http://videogamerrob.wordpress.com/2011/02/05/xblig-review-bonded-realities/ XBLIG Round Up on Gamergeddon http://www.gamergeddon.com/2011/02/06/xbox-indie-game-round-up-february-6th/ Are gamers still rating Indie Games after the Xbox Dashboard update? http://www.gamemarx.com/news/2011/02/06/are-gamers-still-rating-indie-games-after-the-xbox-dashboard-update.aspx Joystiq - Xbox Live Indie Gems: Corrupted http://www.joystiq.com/2011/02/04/xbox-live-indie-gems-corrupted/ Raymond Matthews of DarkStarMatryx reviews (Almost) Total Mayhem and Aban Hawkins & the 1000 Spikes http://www.darkstarmatryx.com/?p=225 http://www.darkstarmatryx.com/?p=229 8 Bit Horse reviews Aban Hawkins & the 1000 spikes http://8bithorse.blogspot.com/2011/01/aban-hawkins-1000-spikes-xbl-indie.html 2010 wrap-up for FunInfused Games http://www.krissteele.net/blogdetails.aspx?id=245 NeoGaf roundup of January's XBLIGs http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=420528 Armless Ocotopus interviews Michael Ventnor creator of Bonded Realities http://www.armlessoctopus.com/2011/02/07/interview-michael-ventnor-of-red-crest-studios/ @recharge_media posts about the new city music for Woodvale in Sin Rising http://rechargemedia.com/2011/02/08/new-city-theme-woodvale/ @DrMisty posts some footage of YoYoYo in action http://www.mstargames.co.uk/mistryblogmain/54-yoyoyoblogs/184-video-update.html Xona Games - Decimation X3 on Reviews on the Run http://video.citytv.com/video/detail/782443063001.000000/reviews-on-the-run--february-8-2011/g4/ @benkane gives an early peek at his action RPG coming to XBLIG http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDF_PrvtwU8 Rock, Paper Shotgun talks to Zeboyd games about bringing Cthulhu Saves the World to PC http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/02/11/summoning-cthulhu-natter-with-zeboyd/ Xbox LIVE Indieverse interviews the creator of Bonded Realities http://xbl-indieverse.blogspot.com/2011/02/xbl-indieverse-interview-red-crest.html XNA Game Development: Dream-In-Code posts about an upcoming XNA Challenge/Coding contest http://www.dreamincode.net/forums/blog/1385/entry-3192-xna-challengecontest/ Sgt.Conker covers Fishing Girl and IndieFreaks Game Framework release http://www.sgtconker.com/2011/02/fishing-girl-did-not-sell-a-single-copy/ http://www.sgtconker.com/2011/02/indiefreaks-game-framework-v0-2-0-0/ @slyprid releases Transmute v0.40a with lots of new features and fixes http://twitter.com/slyprid/statuses/34125423067533312 http://twitter.com/slyprid/statuses/35326876243337216 http://forgottenstarstudios.com/ Jeff Brown writes an XNA 4.0 tutorial on Saving/Loading on the Xbox 360 http://www.robotfootgames.com/xna-tutorials/92-xna-tutorial-savingloading-on-xbox-360-40 XNA for Silverlight Developers: Part 3- Animation http://www.silverlightshow.net/items/XNA-for-Silverlight-developers-Part-3-Animation-transforms.aspx?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+xna-connection-twitter-specific-stream+%28XNA+Connection%27s+Twitter+specific+stream%29 The news from Nokia is definitely something XNA developers will want to keep their eye on http://blogs.forum.nokia.com/blog/nokia-developer-news/2011/02/11/letter-to-developers?sf1066337=1

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• XNA Notes 004

  - by George Clingerman

  The XNA community has been crazy busy again. It always make me fee like such a slacker collecting all of these notes as I see the tremendous output from people all over the world and it’s incredible and humbling. There are some amazingly skilled people working with XNA. On another not, I’m going to take a minute to get on my soapbox and say, if you are developing ANYTHING and are not using some sort of source/revision control, START IMMEDIATELY. This applies to teams of one. Projects for fun. And “I back up my hard drive” or “I use dropbox!” does NOT count as using source control. You’ll be doing yourself a HUGE favor if you find one, learn to use it and integrate it into your everyday workflow. I personally use Subversion. It’s hosted offsite at xp.dev.com and I use TortoiseSVN as my front end to interface with the repository. It’s simple and easy to use and has saved me from myself so many time. Honestly, get setup with some type of source control immediately. If you don’t understand how, grab another developer that does and have them walk you through setup and the basics of using it. Ok, I’m done. On to the notes… The XNA Team Only 14 days left to Submit XNA GS 3.1 Games! http://blogs.msdn.com/b/xna/archive/2011/01/24/14-days-left-to-submit-xna-gs-3-1-games-on-app-hub.aspx Shawn Hargreaves shares some great information on Exception Handling best practices on the XNA forums http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/73333/448556.aspx#448556 http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/archive/2008/09/10/vexing-exceptions.aspx XNA MVPs @CatalinZima gives us a peek at Chicken’s Can’t Fly http://www.amusedsloth.com/games/chickens-cant-fly/ Screen-space deformations in XNA for WP7 from Catalin Zima http://twitter.com/CatalinZima/statuses/30313083767357440 http://www.amusedsloth.com/2011/01/screen-space-deformations-in-xna-for-windows-phone-7/ XNA Developers Going to GDC? Don’t miss the XNA panel hosted by a plethora of well known XNA community names! http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/73576/448842.aspx#448842 MasterBlud does an interview with @Xalterax http://twitter.com/MasterBlud/statuses/28510774812999680 http://www.xboxhornet.com/wordpress/?p=7102 Luke Schneider of Radiangames posts about The Radiangames Style http://radiangames.com/?p=532 Holmade Games had a “vote for the new playable character” poll going on for Hurdle Turtle this past week http://holmadegames.blogspot.com/2011/01/new-level-pack-vote-for-your-favorite.html IGF v0.1.0.0 release post mortem http://indiefreaks.com/2011/01/24/v0-1-0-0-release-post-mortem/ James an Super Dunner post Good Morning Gato #46 and a look at the Vampire Smile box art http://www.ska-studios.com/2011/01/21/good-morning-gato-46/ http://www.ska-studios.com/2011/01/20/vampire-smiles-digital-box-art/ Alfredo Di Napoli creates Cow Pong using XNA and F#! http://alfredodinapoli.wordpress.com/2011/01/25/cow-pong-a-simple-xna-game-in-f/ Xbox LIVE Indie Games Signed In Podcast posts Episode #61 http://www.signedinpodcast.com/?p=559 Gamergeddon posts the January 23rd edition of XBLIG Round Up http://www.gamergeddon.com/2011/01/23/xbox-indie-games-round-up-january-23rd/ Indie Asylum posts Antipole Review http://www.indieasylum.com/reviews/38-xblig/112-antipole.html 1UPOrPosion Reviews OSR Unhinged http://www.1uporpoison.com/xblig/osr-unhinged/ DarkstarMatryx review Warbirds at Work http://www.darkstarmatryx.com/?p=185 Review of Aban Hawkins and the 1000 Spikes http://www.armlessoctopus.com/2011/01/24/xbox-indie-review-aban-hawkins-the-1000-spikes/ XboxHornet reviews Corrupted http://www.xboxhornet.com/wordpress/?p=7123 XBLIG 2010: The Best And The Worst http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/JamieMann/20110121/6840/ Xbox LIVE Arcade Sales Analysis - an interesting read for XBLIG developers wondering how they’re doing compared to arcade.. http://www.gamerbytes.com/2011/01/xbla_sales_analysis_dec_2010.php Best of Indies for January 25th http://www.thisisfakediy.co.uk/articles/games/best-of-the-indies-25th-january-2011 Decimation X3 appears as an arcade machine in the wild! http://twitter.com/mdoucette/statuses/29605562484260864 XNA Game Development Guiseppe De Francesco (@PinoEire) announced Torque X 4.0 CEV is now in RC phase! http://www.garagegames.com/community/blogs/view/20779 DrMistry of mstargames shares his struggle (and mistakes) with learning to use the Content Pipeline http://www.mstargames.co.uk/mistryblogmain/35-genblog/181-pontent-cipeline-more-like-it.html New Tutorial posted XNA 2D Basic Collision Detection with Rotation from Ioannis Panagopoulos http://www.progware.org/Blog/post/XNA-2D-Basic-Collision-Detection-with-Rotation.aspx Sgt. Conker roars to life! Doing a much better (and prettier) job of collecting XNA news from around the interwebs. http://www.sgtconker.com/ http://www.sgtconker.com/2011/01/dedication-for-captain-boki/ http://www.sgtconker.com/2011/01/screen-space-deformations-in-xna-for-windows-phone-7/ http://www.sgtconker.com/2011/01/xna-4-0-light-pre-pass-2/ http://www.sgtconker.com/2011/01/indiefreaks-game-framework-0-1-0-0-released/ Offering a little free publicity for XBLIGs http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/73465/448321.aspx#448321 Ben Kane writes about building loot tables from Excel using the Content Pipeline http://benkane.wordpress.com/2011/01/23/building-loot-tables-from-excel-using-the-content-pipeline/ Good tips on attracting a game artist AND an offer to create your cover art for FREE http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/t/72998.aspx If you’re an XBLIG developer keeping your eye on places to release on the PC, might want to be watching the IndieCity blog. Seems like these guys are well on their way to constructing something worth watching. http://www.indiecity.com/blog/ DVMGames spotted a new crowd-funding site for Indies http://twitter.com/DVMGames/statuses/29947274767372289 http://www.8bitfunding.com/ Transmute continues to make progress and there’s a nice dev blog to follow along here http://forgottenstarstudios.com/blog/

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• XNA Notes 005

  - by George Clingerman

  Another week and another crazy amount of activity going on in the XNA community. I’m fairly certain I missed over half of it. In fact, if I am missing things, make sure to email me and I’ll try and make sure I catch it next week! ([email protected]). Also, if you’ve got any advice, things you like/don’t like about the way these XNA Notes are going let me know. I always appreciate feedback (currently spammers are leaving me the nicest comments so you guys have work to do!) Without further ado, here’s this week’s notes! Time Critical XNA News The XNA Team Blob reminds us that February 7th is the last day to submit XNA 3.1 games to peer review! http://blogs.msdn.com/b/xna/archive/2011/01/31/7-days-left-to-submit-xna-gs-3-1-games-on-app-hub.aspx XNA MVPS Chris Williams kicks off the marketing campaign for our book http://geekswithblogs.net/cwilliams/archive/2011/01/28/143680.aspx Catalin Zima posts the comparison cheat sheet for why Angry Birds is different than Chickens Can’t Fly http://www.amusedsloth.com/2011/02/comparison-cheat-sheet-for-chickens-cant-fly-and-angry-birds/ Jim Perry congratulates the developers selected by Game Developer Magazine for Best Xbox LIVE Indie Games of 2010 http://machxgames.com/blog/?p=24 @NemoKrad posts his XNAKUUG talks for all to enjoy http://twitter.com/NemoKrad/statuses/33142362502864896 http://xna-uk.net/blogs/randomchaos/archive/2011/02/03/xblig-uk-2011-january-amp-february-talk.aspx George  (that’s me!) preps for his XNA talk coming up on the 8th http://twitter.com/clingermangw/statuses/32669550554124288 http://www.portlandsilverlight.net/Meetings/Details/15 XNA Developers FireFly posts the last tutorial in his XNA Tower Defense tutorial series http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/26442/451460.aspx#451460 http://xnatd.blogspot.com/2011/01/tutorial-14-polishing-game.html @fredericmy posts the main difference when porting a game from Windows Phone 7 to Xbox 360 http://fairyengine.blogspot.com/2011/01/main-differences-when-porting-game-from.html @ElementCy creates a pretty rad video of a MineCraft type terrain created using XNA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Waw1f7wnl9I Andrew Russel gets the first XNA badge on gamedev.stackexchange http://twitter.com/_AndrewRussell/statuses/32322877004972032 http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/badges?tab=tags And his funding for ExEn has passed $7000 only $3000 to go http://twitter.com/_AndrewRussell/statuses/33042412804771840 Subodh Pushpak blogs about his Windows Phone 7 XNA talk http://geekswithblogs.net/subodhnpushpak/archive/2011/02/01/windows-phone-7-silverlight--xna-development-talk.aspx Slyprid releases the latest version of Transmute and needs more people to test http://twitter.com/slyprid/statuses/32452488418299904 http://forgottenstarstudios.com/ SpynDoctorGames celebrates the 1 year anniversary of Your Doodles Are Bugged! Congrats! http://twitter.com/SpynDoctorGames/statuses/32511689068908544 Noogy (creator of Dust the Elysian Tail) prepares his conversion to XNA 4.0 http://twitter.com/NoogyTweet/statuses/32522008449253376 @philippedasilva posts about the Indiefreaks Game Framework v0.2.0.0 Input management system http://twitter.com/philippedasilva/statuses/32763393957957632 http://indiefreaks.com/2011/02/02/behind-smart-input-system-feature/ Mommy’s Best Games debates what to do about High Scores with their new update http://mommysbest.blogspot.com/2011/02/high-score-shake-up.html @BinaryTweedDeej want to know if there’s anything the community needs to make XNA games for the PC. Give him some feedback! http://twitter.com/BinaryTweedDeej/status/32895453863354368 @mikebmcl promises to write us all a book (I can’t wait to read it!) http://twitter.com/mikebmcl/statuses/33206499102687233 @werezompire is going to live, LIVE, thanks to all the generosity and support from the community! http://twitter.com/werezompire/statuses/32840147644977153 Xbox LIVE Indie Games (XBLIG) Making money in Xbox 360 indie game development. Is it possible? http://www.bitmob.com/articles/making-money-in-xbox-360-indie-game-development-is-it-possible @AlejandroDaJ posts some thoughts abut the bitmob article http://twitter.com/AlejandroDaJ/statuses/31068552165330944 http://www.apathyworks.com/blog/view.php?id=00215 Kobun gets my respect as an XBLIG champion. I’m not sure who Kobun is, but if you’ve every read through the comment sections any time Kotaku writes about XBLIGs you’ll see a lot of confusion, disinformation in there. Kobun has been waging a secret war battling that lack of knowledge and he does it well. Also he’s running a pretty kick ass site for Xbox LIVE Indie Game reviews http://xboxindies.teamkobun.com/ @radiangames releases his last Xbox LIVE Indie Game...for now http://bit.ly/gMK6lE Playing Avaglide with the Kinect controller http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqAYbHww53o http://www.joystiq.com/2011/01/30/kinect-hacks-take-to-the-skies-with-avaglide/ Luke Schneider of Radiangames interviewed in Edge magazine http://www.next-gen.biz/features/radiangames-venture Digital Quarters posts thoughts on why XBLIG’s online requirement kills certain genres http://digitalquarters.blogspot.com/2011/02/thoughts-why-xbligs-online-requirement.html Mommy’s Best Games shares the news that several XBLIGs were featured in the March 2011 issue of Famitsu 360 http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/33455/451487.aspx#451487 NaviFairy continues with his Indie-Game-A-Day http://gaygamer.net/2011/02/indie_game_a_day_epic_dungeon.html http://gaygamer.net/2011/02/indie_game_a_day_break_limit_r.html and more every day...that’s kind of the point! Keep your eye on this series! VVGTV continues with it’s awesome reviews/promotions for XBLIGs http://vvgtv.com/ http://vvgtv.com/2011/02/03/iredia-atrams-secret-xblig-review-2/ http://vvgtv.com/2011/02/02/poopocalypse-coming-soon-to-xblig/ ….and even more, you get the point. Magicka is an Indie Game doing really well on Steam AND it’s made using XNA http://www.magickagame.com/ http://twitter.com/Magickagame/statuses/32712762580799488 GameMarx reviews Antipole http://www.gamemarx.com/reviews/73/antipole-is-vvvvvvery-good.aspx Armless Octopus review Alpha Squad http://www.armlessoctopus.com/2011/01/28/xbox-indie-review-alpha-squad/ An interesting article about Kodu that Jim Perry found http://twitter.com/MachXGames/statuses/32848044105924608 http://www.develop-online.net/news/36915/10-year-old-Jordan-makes-games-The-UK-needs-more-like-her XNA Game Development Sgt. Conker posts about the Natur beta, a new book and whether you can make money with XBLIG http://www.sgtconker.com/ http://www.sgtconker.com/2011/01/a-new-book-on-the-block-and-a-new-natur-beta/ http://www.sgtconker.com/2011/01/making-money-in-xbox-360-indie-game-development-is-it-possible/ Tips for setting up SVN http://bit.ly/fKxgFh @bsimser found tons of royalty free music and soundfx for your XNA Games http://twitter.com/bsimser/statuses/31426632933711872 Post on the new features in the next Sunburn Editor http://www.synapsegaming.com/blogs/fivesidedbarrel/archive/2011/01/28/new-editor-features-prefabs-components-and-more.aspx @jasons_novaleaf posts source code for light pre-pass optimizations for #xna http://twitter.com/jasons_novaleaf/statuses/33348855403642880 http://jcoluna.wordpress.com/2011/02/01/xna-4-0-light-pre-pass-optimization-round-one/ I’ve been learning about doing an A.I. for turn based games and this article was a great resource. http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1535/designing_ai_algorithms_for_.php?print=1

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• Puppet: Making Windows Awesome Since 2011

  - by Robz / Fervent Coder

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/robz/archive/2014/08/07/puppet-making-windows-awesome-since-2011.aspxPuppet was one of the first configuration management (CM) tools to support Windows, way back in 2011. It has the heaviest investment on Windows infrastructure with 1/3 of the platform client development staff being Windows folks.  It appears that Microsoft believed an end state configuration tool like Puppet was the way forward, so much so that they cloned Puppet’s DSL (domain-specific language) in many ways and are calling it PowerShell DSC. Puppet Labs is pushing the envelope on Windows. Here are several things to note: Puppet x64 Ruby support for Windows coming in v3.7.0. An awesome ACL module (with order, SIDs and very granular control of permissions it is best of any CM). A wealth of modules that work with Windows on the Forge (and more on GitHub). Documentation solely for Windows folks - https://docs.puppetlabs.com/windows. Some of the common learning points with Puppet on Windows user are noted in this recent blog post. Microsoft OpenTech supports Puppet. Azure has the ability to deploy a Puppet Master (http://puppetlabs.com/solutions/microsoft). At Microsoft //Build 2014 in the Day 2 Keynote Puppet Labs CEO Luke Kanies co-presented with Mark Russonivich (http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2014/KEY02  fast forward to 19:30)! Puppet has a Visual Studio Plugin! It can be overwhelming learning a new tool like Puppet at first, but Puppet Labs has some resources to help you on that path. Take a look at the Learning VM, which has a quest-based learning tool. For real-time questions, feel free to drop onto #puppet on freenode.net (yes, some folks still use IRC) with questions, and #puppet-dev with thoughts/feedback on the language itself. You can subscribe to puppet-users / puppet-dev mailing lists. There is also ask.puppetlabs.com for questions and Server Fault if you want to go to a Stack Exchange site. There are books written on learning Puppet. There are even Puppet User Groups (PUGs) and other community resources! Puppet does take some time to learn, but with anything you need to learn, you need to weigh the benefits versus the ramp up time. I learned NHibernate once, it had a very high ramp time back then but was the only game on the street. Puppet’s ramp up time is considerably less than that. The advantage is that you are learning a DSL, and it can apply to multiple platforms (Linux, Windows, OS X, etc.) with the same Puppet resource constructs. As you learn Puppet you may wonder why it has a DSL instead of just leveraging the language of Ruby (or maybe this is one of those things that keeps you up wondering at night). I like the DSL over a small layer on top of Ruby. It allows the Puppet language to be portable and go more places. It makes you think about the end state of what you want to achieve in a declarative sense instead of in an imperative sense. You may also find that right now Puppet doesn’t run manifests (scripts) in order of the way resources are specified. This is the number one learning point for most folks. As a long time consternation of some folks about Puppet, manifest ordering was not possible in the past. In fact it might be why some other CMs exist! As of 3.3.0, Puppet can do manifest ordering, and it will be the default in Puppet 4. http://puppetlabs.com/blog/introducing-manifest-ordered-resources You may have caught earlier that I mentioned PowerShell DSC. But what about DSC? Shouldn’t that be what Windows users want to choose? Other CMs are integrating with DSC, will Puppet follow suit and integrate with DSC? The biggest concern that I have with DSC is it’s lack of visibility in fine-grained reporting of changes (which Puppet has). The other is that it is a very young Microsoft product (pre version 3, you know what they say :) ). I tried getting it working in December and ran into some issues. I’m hoping that newer releases are there that actually work, it does have some promising capabilities, it just doesn’t quite come up to the standard of something that should be used in production. In contrast Puppet is almost a ten year old language with an active community! It’s very stable, and when trusting your business to configuration management, you want something that has been around awhile and has been proven. Give DSC another couple of releases and you might see more folks integrating with it. That said there may be a future with DSC integration. Portability and fine-grained reporting of configuration changes are reasons to take a closer look at Puppet on Windows. Yes, Puppet on Windows is here to stay and it’s continually getting better folks.

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