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• tail-like view on HTML logfiles

  - by h0b0

  I'm working on an application that creates HTML log files. I'm tired of having to manually reload and scroll to the bottom in the browser to see the latest entries. A solution that does not really satisfy me is using the Firefox plugins ReloadEvery and ScrollyFox. In many situations reloading frequency and scrolling speed are just to slow. Of course I could actually use tail, but I would prefer a rendered HTML page. Do you have any suggestions? Firefox extensions are preferred, but any other tip is appreciated, too.

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• DevConnections new "Fundamentals" Track!

  - by psheriff

  Hi All, I am now the new Track Chair for the "Fundamentals" track at DevConnections. I know many of my readers feel overwhelmed by all of the "advanced" topics out there. The folks at the DevConnections conference realized that too and have added many new sessions that help programmers that are in the beginning to intermediate stage get up to speed on all the new technology that is coming out so fast. I will be presenting a whole day long workshop at the DevConnections conference in Orlando on March 27th entitled "Essential Business Desktop Programming with .NET". In addition I will be presenting the following sessions in the Fundamentals Track. MVVM Made Simple Unit Testing Basics and Architecting Your Application for Unit Testing Data Binding from A-Z in Silverlight From Zero to Windows Phone 7 in 75 MinutesI hope I will see you there! Join me at DevConnections @devconnections in Orlando March 27-30.   Save $200 use discount code DevCon1 Register today at bit.ly/fIZjXO

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• What's a good, quick algorithms refresh?

  - by Casey Patton

  I have programming interviews coming up in a couple weeks. I took an algorithms class a while ago but likely forgot some key concepts. I'm looking for something like a very short book (< 100 pages) on algorithms to get back up to speed. Sorting algorithms, data structures, and any other essentials should be included. It doesn't have to be a book...just looking for a great way to get caught up in about a week. What's the best tool for a quick algorithms intro or refresher?

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• GP11.1

  - by user13334066

  It's the Assen round of the 2011 motogp season, and Ducati have launched their GP11.1. The Ducati's front end woes were quite efficiently highlighted throughout the 2010 season, with both Casey and Nicky regularly visiting the gravel traps. Now the question is: was it really a front end issue. What's most probable is: the GP10 never had a front end issue. It was the rear that was out. So what did Stoner's team do? They came with setup changes that sorted out the rear end, while transferring the problem to the front. And Casey has this brilliant ability to push beyond the limits of a vague and erratic front end...and naturally the real problem lay hidden. Like Kevin Cameron said: in human nature, our strengths are our weaknesses. Casey's pure speed came at a lack of fine machinery feel, which ultimately took the Ducati in a wrong development direction.

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• Announcement Oracle Solaris 11.1 Availability!

  - by uwes

  On 25th of October Oracle announced the availability of Oracle Solaris 11.1. Highlights include: 8x faster database startup and shutdown and online resizing of the database SGA with a new optimized shared memory interface between the database and Oracle Solaris 11.1 Up to 20% throughput increases for Oracle Real Application Clusters by offloading lock management into the Oracle Solaris kernel Expanded support for Software Defined Networks (SDN) with Edge Virtual Bridging enhancements to maximize network resource utilization and manage bandwidth in cloud environments 4x faster Solaris Zone updates with parallel operations shorten maintenance windows New built-in memory predictor monitors application memory use and provides optimized memory page sizes and resource location to speed overall application performance. More information could be found under the following links: Oracle Solaris 11.1 Data Sheet  What's New in Oracle Solaris 11.1 Oracle Solaris 11.1 FAQs Oracle.com Oracle Solaris page Oracle Technology Network Oracle Solaris page Resources for downloading: Download Solaris 11.1 Order Solaris 11.1 media kit Existing customers can quickly and simply update using the network based repository

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• Is there a grey-area with Copyright infringement?

  - by Z.O

  Currently a student, I'm trying to put together a game for iOS. From everywhere I've read, it seems any game's sound and art are apart of their IP and covered under their Copyright. That being said, say I wanted to use the coin sound effect from the original Mario (less than 1s long and used sparsely)... would anyone really care? Having no experience with this, I'm just wondering if cases like this are treated like "Ya you're driving slightly over the speed limit, but nobody cares" or as "you stole that car". Thanks for any insight anyone may be able to provide.

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• PASS Summit 2011 &ndash; Part III

  - by Tara Kizer

  Well we’re about a month past PASS Summit 2011, and yet I haven’t finished blogging my notes! Between work and home life, I haven’t been able to come up for air in a bit.  Now on to my notes… On Thursday of the PASS Summit 2011, I attended Klaus Aschenbrenner’s (blog|twitter) “Advanced SQL Server 2008 Troubleshooting”, Joe Webb’s (blog|twitter) “SQL Server Locking & Blocking Made Simple”, Kalen Delaney’s (blog|twitter) “What Happened? Exploring the Plan Cache”, and Paul Randal’s (blog|twitter) “More DBA Mythbusters”.  I think my head grew two times in size from the Thursday sessions.  Just WOW! I took a ton of notes in Klaus' session.  He took a deep dive into how to troubleshoot performance problems.  Here is how he goes about solving a performance problem: Start by checking the wait stats DMV System health Memory issues I/O issues I normally start with blocking and then hit the wait stats.  Here’s the wait stat query (Paul Randal’s) that I use when working on a performance problem.  He highlighted a few waits to be aware of such as WRITELOG (indicates IO subsystem problem), SOS_SCHEDULER_YIELD (indicates CPU problem), and PAGEIOLATCH_XX (indicates an IO subsystem problem or a buffer pool problem).  Regarding memory issues, Klaus recommended that as a bare minimum, one should set the “max server memory (MB)” in sp_configure to 2GB or 10% reserved for the OS (whichever comes first).  This is just a starting point though! Regarding I/O issues, Klaus talked about disk partition alignment, which can improve SQL I/O performance by up to 100%.  You should use 64kb for NTFS cluster, and it’s automatic in Windows 2008 R2. Joe’s locking and blocking presentation was a good session to really clear up the fog in my mind about locking.  One takeaway that I had no idea could be done was that you can set a timeout in T-SQL code view LOCK_TIMEOUT.  If you do this via the application, you should trap error 1222. Kalen’s session went into execution plans.  The minimum size of a plan is 24k.  This adds up fast especially if you have a lot of plans that don’t get reused much.  You can use sys.dm_exec_cached_plans to check how often a plan is being reused by checking the usecounts column.  She said that we can use DBCC FLUSHPROCINDB to clear out the stored procedure cache for a specific database.  I didn’t know we had this available, so this was great to hear.  This will be less intrusive when an emergency comes up where I’ve needed to run DBCC FREEPROCCACHE. Kalen said one should enable “optimize for ad hoc workloads” if you have an adhoc loc.  This stores only a 300-byte stub of the first plan, and if it gets run again, it’ll store the whole thing.  This helps with plan cache bloat.  I have a lot of systems that use prepared statements, and Kalen says we simulate those calls by using sp_executesql.  Cool! Paul did a series of posts last year to debunk various myths and misconceptions around SQL Server.  He continues to debunk things via “DBA Mythbusters”.  You can get a PDF of a bunch of these here.  One of the myths he went over is the number of tempdb data files that you should have.  Back in 2000, the recommendation was to have as many tempdb data files as there are CPU cores on your server.  This no longer holds true due to the numerous cores we have on our servers.  Paul says you should start out with 1/4 to 1/2 the number of cores and work your way up from there.  BUT!  Paul likes what Bob Ward (twitter) says on this topic: 8 or less cores –> set number of files equal to the number of cores Greater than 8 cores –> start with 8 files and increase in blocks of 4 One common myth out there is to set your MAXDOP to 1 for an OLTP workload with high CXPACKET waits.  Instead of that, dig deeper first.  Look for missing indexes, out-of-date statistics, increase the “cost threshold for parallelism” setting, and perhaps set MAXDOP at the query level.  Paul stressed that you should not plan a backup strategy but instead plan a restore strategy.  What are your recoverability requirements?  Once you know that, now plan out your backups. As Paul always does, he talked about DBCC CHECKDB.  He said how fabulous it is.  I didn’t want to interrupt the presentation, so after his session had ended, I asked Paul about the need to run DBCC CHECKDB on your mirror systems.  You could have data corruption occur at the mirror and not at the principal server.  If you aren’t checking for data corruption on your mirror systems, you could be failing over to a corrupt database in the case of a disaster or even a planned failover.  You can’t run DBCC CHECKDB against the mirrored database, but you can run it against a snapshot off the mirrored database.

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• Toyota's Supply Chain "ran too hot"

  - by [email protected]

  The Feb 28th '10 edition of the Economist had a very informative artical (pg.74) on Toyota's over-stretched supply chain pointing out that they were ' the author of most of its own misfortunes".  James Womack is quoted in the piece on Toyota's rapid expansion 'meant working with a lot of unfamiliar suppliers who didn't have a deep understandin of Toyota's culture.  The majority of the problems almost certainly originated not in the Toyota factories but in those of the supppliers'. One purchasing executive said that it started in mid-2008, when the weaker parts of the supply chain were put under great strain. There is a need for visibility but not always there. Firms need transparancy and speed of communications to make sure defective parts and errors dont reach the customer. It concludes with guidance to manufacturers: "It may be safer not to have all your eggs in one basket, but to have maybe 3 suppliers for major components who can benchmark each other' - Toyota was the peerless exemplar, now seen as an awful warning

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• How to stop programs on starting from returning to log in screen?

  - by Bruce McKean

  I'm not a computer nerd but have been able to fix Ubuntu/Linux problems in the pass two years with a Google search but this on has me stumped. I upgraded to 12.04 about thirty days ago and all was well except that every time I tried to load KeePassX it would go to the login screen. I installed KeePass2 and all seemed to work. Last week I tried to load Bibble5 (Raw photo editor) and it would try to load and then back to the login screen. After a few days I gave up and downloaded Corel After Shot Pro (Corel's now owns Bibble5) and it has the same problem. Could someone please head me into the steps I need to follow to find out what is the cause. I'm interested in learning more about the Linux system how to correct any future problems thanks in advance – Bruce -Computer- Processor : 8x Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2600 CPU @ 3.40GHz Memory : 8155MB (1092MB used) Operating System : Ubuntu 12.04 LTS OpenGL Renderer : GeForce GT 520/PCIe/SSE2

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• How do I get Flash 10.2 RC + Crystal HD for HW accelerated video to work?

  - by Gee

  I have a netbook with a N450 Atom and a BCM70012 aka Crystal HD card. On Windows 7 I can play HD flash video with very little CPU usage because of the RC of Flash 10.2. I did some reading and saw posts claiming that the Crystal HD card is finally supported by the newer Flash 10.2 RC in Ubuntu but I can't get it to work. I can confirm that flash 10.2 is loaded and used, and there's even a HW acceleration option that is enabled in the settings but performance is horrible. From what I read, the Crystal HD card is supposed to be enabled on 10.10 by default - I don't know if it is. I tried installing drivers for it in various ways but HD flash video is still a slideshow So does anyone have it working? If so, how'd you set it up?

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• How to make a ball fall faster on a ramp? Unity3D/C#

  - by Timothy Williams

  So, I'm making a ball game. Where you pick up the ball, drop it on a ramp, and it flies off in to blocks. The only problem right now is it falls at a normal speed, then lightly falls off, not nearly fast enough to get over the wall and hit the blocks. Is there any way to make the ball go faster down the ramp? Maybe even make it go faster depending on what height you dropped it from (e.g. if you hold it way above the ramp, and drop it, it will drop faster than if you dropped it right above the ramp.) Thanks.

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• Improve efficiency of web building setup and processes - Wordpress on Mac

  - by Rob

  Can anyone see any ways in which I can improve my speed and efficiency with the following setup? Or if there are any obvious holes in my building process? This is for building Wordpress websites on Mac: 1) I have a standard Wordpress setup that I work from which includes various plugins that I tend to use across all setups - thus cutting out the step of having to download them all the time! 2) My standard WP files are copied into a Dropbox folder - thus creating backups of the files. 3) I then open up MAMP and setup a local version. 4) I open up Coda and setup the FTP details so files can be uploaded to the live domain by using the publish button. If anyone has any advice on how to improve this process then please let me know!

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• apportcheckresume recurring error and gnome shell fixations

  - by feedyourhead

  Since installing Ubuntu 12.10 Gnome remix I encounter systemm's unpredictable and unwanted behavior. Almost after each resume from suspend (or even after unlocking the screen after it goes blank) I get apportcheckresume error and message "Ubuntu 12.10 has encountered an internal error".Many times the system event wont resume and I need to restart it. Other times log in screen is not visible, the screen is blank and i have to write my password "in blanco". Sometimes additional thing also happens - textures get messed up and background and windows get distorted by horizontal lines Sorry I can't localize the log file for the errors. My system specification: Ubuntu 12.10 3.5.0-19-generic Gnome 3.6 Thinkpad T400 Graphics Mobile Intel® GM45 Express Chipset Intel® Core™2 Duo CPU P8600

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• What is the *correct* term for a program that makes use of multiple hardware processor cores?

  - by Ryan Thompson

  I want to say that my program is capable of splitting some work across multiple CPU cores on a single system. What is the simple term for this? It's not multi-threaded, because that doesn't automatically imply that the threads run in parallel. It's not multi-process, because multiprocessing seems to be a property of a computer system, not a program. "capable of parallel operation" seems too wordy, and with all the confusion of terminology, I'm not even sure if it's accurate. So is there a simple term for this?

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• Can't install fglrx on Kernel 3.11.0-12

  - by byf-ferdy

  I'm running Ubuntu Gnome 13.10 on a Sony Vaio laptop. I tried to install the newest fglrx driver from the cchtml.com guide but no matter which version I use (13.4 or even 13.9) the installation of the generated .debs fails with this message: Error! Bad return status for module build on kernel: 3.11.0-12-generic (x86_64) This seems to be a confirmed bug on launchpad. Currently I'm running the Radeon SI driver but I really need some 3D acceleration. What is there I can do to install any version of fglrx correctly or to speed up the bug-fixing-process? How long does the fixing of these bugs usually take?

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• SQLAuthority News – Great Time Spent at Great Indian Developers Summit 2014

  - by Pinal Dave

  The Great Indian Developer Conference (GIDS) is one of the most popular annual event held in Bangalore. This year GIDS is scheduled on April 22, 25. I will be presented total four sessions at this event and each session is very different from each other. Here are the details of four of my sessions, which I presented there. Pluralsight Shades This event was a great event and I had fantastic fun presenting a technology over here. I was indeed very excited that along with me, I had many of my friends presenting at the event as well. I want to thank all of you to attend my session and having standing room every single time. I have already sent resources in my newsletter. You can sign up for the newsletter over here. Indexing is an Art I was amazed with the crowd present in the sessions at GIDS. There was a great interest in the subject of SQL Server and Performance Tuning. Audience at GIDS I believe event like such provides a great platform to meet and share knowledge. Pinal at Pluralsight Booth Here are the abstract of the sessions which I had presented. They were recorded so at some point in time they will be available, but if you want the content of all the courses immediately, I suggest you check out my video courses on the same subject on Pluralsight. Indexes, the Unsung Hero Relevant Pluralsight Course Slow Running Queries are the most common problem that developers face while working with SQL Server. While it is easy to blame SQL Server for unsatisfactory performance, the issue often persists with the way queries have been written, and how Indexes has been set up. The session will focus on the ways of identifying problems that slow down SQL Server, and Indexing tricks to fix them. Developers will walk out with scripts and knowledge that can be applied to their servers, immediately post the session. Indexes are the most crucial objects of the database. They are the first stop for any DBA and Developer when it is about performance tuning. There is a good side as well evil side to indexes. To master the art of performance tuning one has to understand the fundamentals of indexes and the best practices associated with the same. We will cover various aspects of Indexing such as Duplicate Index, Redundant Index, Missing Index as well as best practices around Indexes. SQL Server Performance Troubleshooting: Ancient Problems and Modern Solutions Relevant Pluralsight Course Many believe Performance Tuning and Troubleshooting is an art which has been lost in time. However, truth is that art has evolved with time and there are more tools and techniques to overcome ancient troublesome scenarios. There are three major resources that when bottlenecked creates performance problems: CPU, IO, and Memory. In this session we will focus on High CPU scenarios detection and their resolutions. If time permits we will cover other performance related tips and tricks. At the end of this session, attendees will have a clear idea as well as action items regarding what to do when facing any of the above resource intensive scenarios. Developers will walk out with scripts and knowledge that can be applied to their servers, immediately post the session. To master the art of performance tuning one has to understand the fundamentals of performance, tuning and the best practices associated with the same. We will discuss about performance tuning in this session with the help of Demos. Pinal Dave at GIDS MySQL Performance Tuning – Unexplored Territory Relevant Pluralsight Course Performance is one of the most essential aspects of any application. Everyone wants their server to perform optimally and at the best efficiency. However, not many people talk about MySQL and Performance Tuning as it is an extremely unexplored territory. In this session, we will talk about how we can tune MySQL Performance. We will also try and cover other performance related tips and tricks. At the end of this session, attendees will not only have a clear idea, but also carry home action items regarding what to do when facing any of the above resource intensive scenarios. Developers will walk out with scripts and knowledge that can be applied to their servers, immediately post the session. To master the art of performance tuning one has to understand the fundamentals of performance, tuning and the best practices associated with the same. You will also witness some impressive performance tuning demos in this session. Hidden Secrets and Gems of SQL Server We Bet You Never Knew Relevant Pluralsight Course SQL Trio Session! It really amazes us every time when someone says SQL Server is an easy tool to handle and work with. Microsoft has done an amazing work in making working with complex relational database a breeze for developers and administrators alike. Though it looks like child’s play for some, the realities are far away from this notion. The basics and fundamentals though are simple and uniform across databases, the behavior and understanding the nuts and bolts of SQL Server is something we need to master over a period of time. With a collective experience of more than 30+ years amongst the speakers on databases, we will try to take a unique tour of various aspects of SQL Server and bring to you life lessons learnt from working with SQL Server. We will share some of the trade secrets of performance, configuration, new features, tuning, behaviors, T-SQL practices, common pitfalls, productivity tips on tools and more. This is a highly demo filled session for practical use if you are a SQL Server developer or an Administrator. The speakers will be able to stump you and give you answers on almost everything inside the Relational database called SQL Server. I personally attended the session of Vinod Kumar, Balmukund Lakhani, Abhishek Kumar and my favorite Govind Kanshi. Summary If you have missed this event here are two action items 1) Sign up for Resource Newsletter 2) Watch my video courses on Pluralsight Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: MySQL, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority Author Visit, SQLAuthority News, T SQL Tagged: GIDS

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• What reasons are there for not using a third party version control service?

  - by Earlz

  I've recently noticed a bit of a trend for my projects as of late. I use to run my own SVN server on my VPS, but recently the nail went in the coffin for that when I got my last project migrated from my server to a Mercurial repo on Bitbucket. What are some of the ramifications to this? (disregarding the change in version control systems) It seems like there has been a huge explosion in version control hosting, and companies like Bitbucket even offer private repos for free, and Github and other such services are extremely cheap now. Also, by using them you get the benefit of their infrastructure's speed and stability. What reasons are there these days to host your own version control? The only real reason I can think of is if your source code is super top secret.

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• draw fog of war using shaders

  - by lezebulon

  I am making a RTS game, and I'd like some advice on how to best render fog of wars, given what I'm already doing. You can imagine this game as being a classic RTS like Age of Empires 2, where the fog of war will basically be handled by a 2D array telling if a given "tile" is explored or not. The specific things to consider here are : 1) I'm only doing a few draw calls to draw the whole screen, using shaders, and I'm not drawing "tile by tile" in a 2D loop 2) The whole map is much bigger than the screen, and the screen can move every frame or so In that case, how could I draw the fog of war ? I have no issue maintaining on the CPU-side a 2D array giving the fog of war for each tile, but what would be the best way to actually display it dynamically ? thanks!

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• Ubuntu stuck in low resolution after UNinstalling / disabling NVidia drivers

  - by Han Cnx

  Tried the Nvidia driver, installed using the Additional Drivers panel. Didn't like it much; the CPU seemed to overheat more and the brightness controls stopped working. Also selecting a second display is a pain using that horrible NVidia settings thing. So wanted to disabled it again.. problem is, UBuntu is then stuck in either 640x480 or 800x600 (second time I tried to install it back and then remove again). How can I get this back the way it was? The original Ubuntu drivers worked just fine, allowing me to run Unity and games properly. I tried a xserver-xorg reconfigure but this didn't do anything. (No xorg.conf file either). This is on a Lenovo Thinkpad T410i

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• Examples of interesting implementations of character stats?

  - by Tchalvak

  I've got this BBG going ( http://ninjawars.net ), and the character stats currently are simplistic. I'm looking to add a few stats to the current 1/2 (strength and maximum hitpoints, essentially). I've come up with: (strength (unchanged), speed, stamina, and some others that are somewhat interesting wildcard stats). However, I'm not satisfied with how boring the effects of some of these stats are, because they're very linear. Better stat, better effects of the stat, but the stats don't interact with each-other, there's no Rock-Paper-Scissors interaction, having more is always better all the time. So what I'd really like is to see examples of interesting character stats or effects of stats? Examples that I can think of off hand: Call of Cthulu's Insanity stat (things get really weird/chaotic if you start losing sanity) White Wolf stats, to a certain extent (the stats themselves have some basic effects, and all skills effectiveness base themselves off of stats as well) What are some other ways people have used stats to check out?

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• Laptop takes a long time to boot after Grub menu

  - by Andres

  I am running a Asus R401VJ laptop (Latin America version of N46VJ) that has a Core i7 CPU and 8GB RAM. After my Grub menu, which is displayed for 2 seconds as I set it up, I'm getting a black screen with a blinking white cursor that is increasing my boot time to about 60 seconds. After a while Ubuntu runs fine, I just want to reduce my boot time. I don't know if this has something to do with my never used Nvidia 2GB GeForce GT 635M graphics card. Always when I tried to install the driver, I ended up with a ~600x800 screen resolution, and I fixed it by deleting a file called: xorg.conf from the /etc/X11/ directory, following a suggestion that I read in another forum. I would appreciate detailed answers, I'm still new at Ubuntu.

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• How do game programmers design their classes to reuse in AI, network and play and pass mode?

  - by Amogh Talpallikar

  For a two player game where, your opponent could be on the network, CPU itself or near you where you would play turn by turn on the same machine. How do people design classes for re-use ? I am in a similar situation and have no experience in making such complex games. But here is what I have thought, If I am a player object , I should only be interacting with the GameManager or GameEngine Singleton , from which I will get various notifications about the game status. I dont care where and who my opponent is, this GameManager depending upon the game mode, will interact with gameNetworkManager , or AI tell me what the opponent played. I am not sure about the scenario where we play and pass [turn by turn on same machine]. Hoping for a brief but clear explanation or at least a link to a similar resource.:)

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• Max Degree of Parallelism Server-Side Setting

  - by Tara Kizer

  Recently I opened a case with Microsoft PSS to help us through a severe performance problem on a new system.  As part of that case, the PSS engineer checked our “max degree of parallelism” server-side setting.  It is our standard to use 4 on our production systems that have 16 CPUs (2 sockets, quad-core, hyper-threaded).  The PSS engineer had me run the below query to get Microsoft’s recommended value of “max degree of parallelism” server-side setting for our 16-CPU system: select case when cpu_count / hyperthread_ratio > 8 then 8 else cpu_count / hyperthread_ratio end as optimal_maxdop_setting from sys.dm_os_sys_info; The query returned 2.  I made the change using sp_configure, and it did not resolve our issue.  We have decided to leave it in place for now.   Do you agree with this query?  What are your thoughts on this? If you decide to change your setting to reflect the output of this query, please test it first to ensure there are no negative side effects.

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• Need more RAM?? Running VMmachine + ubuntu

  - by JBizzle

  So I looked but im running ubuntu in vm machine and its running at a snails pace and I installed the 64bit ver. Running windows 7 64bit the down side is that I only have 2GB of ram installed.....bummer huh I know the answer is im going to need more ram I just want to confirm... Or is there an tip that I can do change some settings to make it run faster in VM? I just want verification on what steps I can take if any to speed things up? Thanks Experts!

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• My First Weeks at Red Gate

  - by Jess Nickson

  Hi, my name’s Jess and early September 2012 I started working at Red Gate as a Software Engineer down in The Agency (the Publishing team). This was a bit of a shock, as I didn’t think this team would have any developers! I admit, I was a little worried when it was mentioned that my role was going to be different from normal dev. roles within the company. However, as luck would have it, I was placed within a team that was responsible for the development and maintenance of Simple-Talk and SQL Server Central (SSC). I felt rather unprepared for this role. I hadn’t used many of the technologies involved and of those that I had, I hadn’t looked at them for quite a while. I was, nevertheless, quite excited about this turn of events. As I had predicted, the role has been quite challenging so far. I expected that I would struggle to get my head round the large codebase already in place, having never used anything so much as a fraction of the size of this before. However, I was perhaps a bit naive when it came to how quickly things would move. I was required to start learning/remembering a number of different languages and technologies within time frames I would never have tried to set myself previously. Having said that, my first week was pretty easy. It was filled with meetings that were designed to get the new starters up to speed with the different departments, ideals and rules within the company. I also attended some lightning talks being presented by other employees, which were pretty useful. These occur once a fortnight and normally consist of around four speakers. In my spare time, we set up the Simple-Talk codebase on my computer and I started exploring it and worked on my first feature – redirecting requests for URLs that used incorrect casing! It was also during this time that I was given my first introduction to test-driven development (TDD) with Michael via a code kata. Although I had heard of the general ideas behind TDD, I had definitely never tried it before. Indeed, I hadn’t really done any automated testing of code before, either. The session was therefore very useful and gave me insights as to some of the coding practices used in my team. Although I now understand the importance of TDD, it still seems odd in my head and I’ve yet to master how to sensibly step up the functionality of the code a bit at a time. The second week was both easier and more difficult than the first. I was given a new project to work on, meaning I was no longer using the codebase already in place. My job was to take some designs, a WordPress theme, and some initial content and build a page that allowed users of the site to read provided resources and give feedback. This feedback could include their thoughts about the resource, the topics covered and the page design itself. Although it didn’t sound the most challenging of projects when compared to fixing bugs in our current codebase, it nevertheless provided a few sneaky problems that had me stumped. I really enjoyed working on this project as it allowed me to play around with HTML, CSS and JavaScript; all things that I like working with but rarely have a chance to use. I completed the aims for the project on time and was happy with the final outcome – though it still needs a good designer to take a look at it! I am now into my third week at Red Gate and I have temporarily been pulled off the website from week 2. I am again back to figuring out the Simple-Talk codebase. Monday provided me with the chance to learn a bunch of new things: system level testing, Selenium and Python. I was set the challenge of testing a bug fix dealing with the search bars in Simple-Talk. The exercise was pretty fun, although Mike did have to point me in the right direction when I started making the tests a bit too complex. The rest of the week looks set to be focussed on pair programming with Mike as we work together on a new feature. I look forward to the challenges that still face me and hope that I will be able to get up to speed quickly. *fingers crossed*

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