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• The biggest ADF conference "down under"

  - by Chris Muir

  While Oracle Open World is the place to be for ADF presentations, for Aussies living in Perth, San Francisco is a tad far away (believe me from experience, the 23hrs flight from PER-SYD-SFO is tedious).  That's why I'm very excited to see that the Australian Oracle User Group at this year's Perth conference is running its largest set of ADF presentation to date: 5! Okay, it doesn't compare to the 60 ADF sessions at OOW, but it's a small conference of around 300 people that runs for 2 days with 54 sessions total, not 40000 people that runs for 5 days with 1900+ sessions, so I think that's a good effort for a conference that's at the end of the earth! What's even better about this year's conference, is the AUSOUG conference is moving away from just consultants and Oracle staff presenting, but will also include customers presenting on ADF too.  This again proves Perth is a little ADF hotspot, which puts a tear to an ADF product manager's eye let me tell you ;-) The ADF sessions will include: Kevin Payne - JWH Group - ADF Mobile Application Development Matthew Carrigy - Department of Finance Western Australia - The times, they are a-changin’ - An Oracle Forms to JDeveloper ADF  Case Study Penny Cookson & Chris Noonan - Sage Computing Services - Impress your bosses with JDeveloper ADF dashboards on their iPads ...oh and... Chris Muir - Oracle Corporation - Speed-Dating Oracle JDeveloper 12c and Oracle ADF New Features  Chris Muir - Oracle Corporation - Develop Mobile Apps for Smart Devices: Converging Web and Native Applications You can check out the conference schedule here.  I hope you'll support these ADF presenters by attending the AUSOUG Perth conference, I look forward to seeing you there.

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• How Many Google +1's Does a Website need in order for Google WebMaster's Tools to Show Characteristics

  - by Asaph

  I have added the Google +1 Button to my website and discovered the new Social Activity section in Google WebMaster's Tools. Apparently, one of the interesting things you can learn about your audience is demographic data. But in GWT, the Social Activity Audience section for my site (currently 82 +1's), says the following: Your site doesn’t have enough +1's yet to show characteristics But I'm not sure how many +1's is enough. Google's official help page for the Audience section offers little insight: The Audience page displays information about people who have +1'd your pages, including the total number of unique users, their location, and their age and gender. All information is anonymized; Google doesn't share personal information about people who have +1’d your pages. To protect privacy, Google won't display age, gender, or location data unless a certain minimum number of people have +1'd your content. But what is that "certain minimum number"? I've tried Googling this but all I could find to date was this page which doesn't answer the question. So how many +1's does a site need before GWT will show me audience demographic characteristics?

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• Simple Multiplayer CCG System

  - by TobiHeidi

  I am working on a cross plattform Multiplayer CCG (web, android, ios). Here are my goals in design: I want to game to be easly accessible and understandable for non CCG players within the first minute of play. a single game should be played by 2 - 4 players a once, without problems if one players drops out during play. players should make their next turn simultaneous (without waiting for other to make their turns) My current approach: each Card has a point value for four Elements. In each Turn an Element is (randomly) selected and every Player chooses 1 card out of 3. The Player choosen the card with the highest value for that element wins the Round. After 10 Rounds the players a ranked by how many rounds they won. Why does this approach seems not optimal? It seems really to easy to determin the next best turn. Your own turn is to little affected by the play style of the others. I would love the have a system where some cards are better against other cards. A bit of rock paper scissors where you have to think about what next turn the other players will make or so. But really think freely. I would love to hear ideas may it be additions or new systems to make a CCG with roughly the stated design goals. Thanks

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• Modern techniques for spriting

  - by DevilWithin

  Hello, I would like to know the flow for making modern 2D game artwork. How are the assets made nowadays? Bitmap? Vector-based? Hand-drawn and painted? Drawn digitally? Modeled in 3D and exported to bitmaps? I would like some information on programs as well, for fine looking art. Why does Flash's vector art style look good in most games? How do I make equivalent graphics with external tools? Or equaly good and not vector-based, anyway. Any special hints for animating? An answer oriented towards a one-man-army indie developer with little experience but some artistic sense would be appreciated! Not a complete dummy with paint programs, but also not a master at all, just need efficient ways to achieve results. Thanks. NOTE: Pixel art is not the goal of this question, nothing related to direct pixel manipulation should be brought up here, but you're free to do exactly that :)

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• Five Holiday Gaming Tips for an Active Game Table

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  Getting together for the holidays represents a great oppurtunity to introduce new players to the fun of tabletop gaming. Make sure to introduce them right with these five handy tips. Courtesy of GeekDad, we find five tips for introducing new players to the fun of tabletop games old and new over the holidays. Tip number one: 1. Start short. Not everyone is ready for a multi-hour game session right after a big holiday dinner. Post-prandial drowsiness doesn’t go well with a game that takes twenty minutes to set up and another fifteen to explain, so don’t lose your audience before you get to the good stuff. Pick something speedy that gets people into the game with little downtime. If possible, get them laughing — I hear it causes the release of endorphins, which makes them feel better, which will lead to more gaming. (We’ll work on the dopamine receptors later, when you get them hooked on learning new games.) Games like Zombie Dice and Spot It! are easy to teach and can handle a pile of players. FlowerFall and Ca$h ‘n’ Gun$ are guaranteed to make people gravitate to the game table to see what’s going on. How To Delete, Move, or Rename Locked Files in Windows HTG Explains: Why Screen Savers Are No Longer Necessary 6 Ways Windows 8 Is More Secure Than Windows 7

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• Newbie seeking advice on programming in general

  - by user974685

  need some of you to remember back to a time when you might have been bad at programming... Been at my new job (as a software developer) for a couple of months now, passed probation period. Have very little programming experience (C++ only) and am currently working with asp.net MVC and silverlight. So there's a website the company has been working on and I am joining the effort to make it better, iron out bugs etc. The problem is - learning about a system/website which has already been made, via visual studio. I ALWAYS feel HUGELY overwhelmed, never knowing which part of this line should I look up, and generally having lots of trouble getting the big picture. Visual studio itself is something I'm finding it difficult to get to grips with, let alone the asp.net framework. I get the impression that because my coworkers have more experience than me, they are getting all the good jobs, and I am left with crap to do - stuff which is not even vaguely programming. Meaning they are learning/creating more, and I am learning/creating near nothing. I'm getting demoralised, and too scared to say anything. I'm not stupid, I've read and practiced plenty of the fundamental programming concepts...I'm just bloody scared of this damn framework. I look at it and just feel paralyzed. The result is that I keep asking the older veteran guy of questions, and he is getting irritated, and would rather give me easy/mindless/non programming jobs to avoid wasting time with helping me out. Then when I don't understand something, I'm hesitating about whether or not I should ask him yet, and trying to decide if it would be a waste of time. I'm the kind of person who picks things up slowly, but with a lot of attention to detail. The former I think is making me look incompetent though. Anyone get where I'm coming from please say something helpful....I'm scared of losing my job in a few months or something...

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• Introducing Programming To a Mathematician

  - by ell

  I currently am a programmer, I'm almost 16 years of age and have pretty much narrowed my careers down to something involving a Computer Science degree or Electrical Engineering degree (I know they are quite different but this question is about my friend) but my friend isn't so sure. He is very interested in maths and is very good at it and I think he would enjoy programming but he isn't willing to try it (edit he is willing to try but has never done before). Can anyone give me an suggestions for a language or tool that he could dabble in programming (at a reasonably basic level I assume) to solve maths problems or involve some kind of maths. As I say he enjoys maths a lot but I think he would enjoy programming, the problem is I don't want him to be put off by the stuff that isn't relevant at introductory levels such as memory allocation et al. I know that is very important but the point is that I want him to learn a bit of programming with maths then hopefully if he is interested enough he can start learning programming as programming. Thanks in advance, ell. Edit: Its not that he's completely uninterested - more that he hasn't actively explored the area before, maybe because he isn't informed about it. I wouldn't want to force him to do something he doesn't want to, I see this as more of a little push so that he can learn about programming. If he doesn't like it - fair enough, I can't control that and don't want to but if he turns out to enjoy it - this push will have been the right thing.

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• Emulator PCSX Reloaded - Fullscreen not working on Unity

  - by Leonardo Montenegro

  I have an older PS1 console with a couple of games I bought some years ago. On my pc, I'm using PCSX Reloaded - the best PS1 emulators for Linux I found so far. But I'm having a little issue on Ubuntu 12.04 Precise. I'm using Unity 3D and I'm trying to run some of my original PS1 games on PCSX Reloaded. Everything works nicely, except for fullscreen. I toggle fullscreen and specify maximum resolution for my monitor, but on fullscreen mode, both left and top unity bars aren't getting hidden. I tried changing between other graphic modes like Gnome Classic and Gnome Classic w/o Effects. On both, PCSX shows bars in fullscreen mode, so it isn't an Unity-specific issue, but an emulator problem. It's a bit annoying play games this way, so basically I'm running games on window mode for now. I'm using default OpenGL graphic plugin on this emulator. I tried changing to X11 graphic plugin and fullscreen worked, but graphics on X11 plugin aren't as good as OpenGL one. Anyone know a way to get fullscreen working on PCSX using OpenGL plugin? Or maybe another graphic plugin w/ OpenGL support.

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• How to make the run button run the project, not the file, in Eclipse

  - by Roy T.

  I'm using the Spring IDE, a variant of Eclipse to create a Java project. One big irritation I have is that when I press the run button Eclipse tries to run the current file, which usually fails because it doesn't have a main method. I've set up run configurations in the hope that would make the play button default to the run configuration instead of the current file, but that doesn't work either. Now to run my application correctly I have to press the little arrow next to play, select my favorite run configuration and then it works, this is only two extra clicks but it's tedious, the button is small and I feel like I shouldn't have to perform these extra steps. I mean what is the point of run configurations and projects if it still tries to run a file by default? Even more preferably I wouldn't even want to touch the mouse but just press Ctrl+F11, but this has the same behavior. All above applies to debugging as well btw. So my question is this: how do I make the run and debug buttons (and their short keys) default to the project's run configuration instead of to trying (and failing) to run only the current file? Much like it is in Visual Studio and other IDEs?

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• Guide.BeginShowMessageBox wrapper

  - by Daniel Moth

  While coding for Windows Phone 7 using Silverlight, I was really disappointed with the built-in MessageBox class, so I found an alternative. My disappointment was the fact that: Display of the messagebox causes the phone to vibrate (!) Display of the messagebox causes the phone to make an annoying sound. You can only have "ok" and "cancel" buttons (no other button captions). I was using the messagebox something like this: // Produces unwanted sound and vibration. // ...plus no customization of button captions. if (MessageBox.Show("my message", "my caption", MessageBoxButton.OKCancel) == MessageBoxResult.OK) { // Do something Debug.WriteLine("OK"); } …and wanted to make minimal changes throughout my code to change it to this: // no sound or vibration // ...plus bonus of customizing button captions if (MyMessageBox.Show("my message", "my caption", "ok, got it", "that sucks") == MyMessageBoxResult.Button1) { // Do something Debug.WriteLine("OK"); } It turns out there is a much more powerful class in the XNA framework that delivered on my requirements (and offers even more features that I didn't need like choice of sounds and not blocking the caller): Guide.BeginShowMessageBox. You can use it simply by adding an assembly reference to Microsoft.Xna.Framework.GamerServices. I wrote a little wrapper for my needs and you can find it here (ready to enhance with your needs): MyMessageBox.cs.txt. Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

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• "Failed to create swap space" error during installation

  - by Welsh Heron

  I've been trying to install Ubuntu for the past two days or so, but I've been running into a problem: every time I run the installation program on the LiveCD, I always get the same (or a very similar) error: "Failed to create Swap space The creation of swap space in partition #3 of SCSI5 (0,0,0)(sda) failed." So far, I've run DBAN (Darik's Boot and Nuke) on my HDD once, to make absolutely sure that everything on it had been erased. Then, I simply put in the LiveCD, and let it run the automated install. I get the above error directly after I tell it to automatically partition the HDD (it will work for a second or so, then this will pop up), forcing me back to the screen that lets me choose whether I want to automatically or manually partition the HDD. Well, after failing to install the software manually, I did a little research and learned enough about partitioning Linux to use the 'Manual partitioning' option. I partitioned the HDD as follows (it's a 1TB drive): /home - (the rest)- ext2, / - 20GB - ext2, /boot - 100MB - ext2, /swap - 8GB /EFIboot - 40MB The only difference when I tried this method was that I got THIS message: "Failed to create Swap space The creation of swap space in partition #2 of SCSI5 (0,0,0)(sda) failed." Basically, the only difference was that there was now a '2' instead of a '3'. If I may ask, what exactly am I doing wrong? I've tried looking around the internet (that's basically all I've done for the last two days), but no one seems to have the same problem that I have, and I've tried most of the solutions for similar problems (DBAN, formatting partitions in ext2 format, etc). The only thing I haven't tried is using the terminal to manually partition the HDD...and I actually DID try to do this, but I wasn't able to get past 'su' 's password demand, so I wasn't able to use the terminal. Thank you for your help in advance. ~Welsh

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• Troubleshooting Your Network with Oracle Linux

  - by rickramsey

  Are you afraid of network problems? I was. Whenever somebody said "it's probably the network," I went to lunch. And hoped that it was fixed by the time I got back. Turns out it wasn't that hard to do a little basic troubleshooting Tech Article: Troubleshooting Your Network with Oracle Linux by Robert Chase You're no doubt already familiar with ping. Even I knew how to use ping. Turns out there's another command that can show you not just whether a system can respond over the network, but the path the packets to that system take. Our blogging platform won't allow me to write the name down, but I can tell you that if you replace the x in this word with an e, you'll have the right command: tracxroute Once you get used to those, you can venture into the realms of mtr, nmap, and netcap. Robert Chase explains how each one can help you troubleshoot the network, and provides examples for how to use them. Robert is not only a solid writer, he is also a brilliant motorcyclist and rides an MV Augusta F4 750. About the Photograph Photo of flowers in San Simeon, California, taken by Rick Ramsey on a ride home from the Sun Reunion in May 2014. - Rick Follow me on: Personal Blog | Personal Twitter   Follow OTN Garage on: Web | Facebook | Twitter | YouTube

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• Is there a canonical book for learning Java as an experienced developer?

  - by Steven Elliott Jr

  I have been a .NET developer now for about the past 5/6 years give or take. I have never done any professional Java development and the last time I really touched it was probably back in college. I have been toying with the Scala language a little bit but nothing serious. Recently, I've been offered an opportunity to do some pretty cool work, but using Java instead of .NET. I think I can get by alright with my current skill set, meaning I already know how to program well and am familiar with languages such as C# and C++, etc. So, the syntax and all that language stuff are really not a problem. What I need is a really good reference book and a book about how to think in Java. Each language/Framework/Stack tries to address things a certain way and I'm sure Java is no different. What are some great Java books that you simply can't live without? Are there any books that talk about the most important parts of Java that must be understood before all else? As a side note, I will be doing mostly Java web development. Not really 100% on what types of stuff they are using for persistence, framework, server, etc.

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• a young intellect asks: Python or Ruby for freelance?

  - by Sophia

  Hello, I'm Sophia. I have an interest in self-learning either Python, or Ruby. The primary reason for my interest is to make my life more stable by having freelance work = $. It seems that programming offers a way for me to escape my condition of poverty (I'm on the edge of homelessness right now) while at the same time making it possible for me to go to uni. I intend on being a math/philosophy major. I have messed with Python a little bit in the past, but it didn't click super well. The people who say I should choose Python say as much because it is considered a good first language/teaching language, and that it is general-purpose. The people who say I should choose Ruby point out that I'm a very right-brained thinker, and having multiple ways to do something will make it much easier for me to write good code. So, basically, I'm starting this thread as a dialog with people who know more than I do, as an attempt to make the decision. :-) I've thought about asking this in stackoverflow, but they're much more strict about closing threads than here, and I'm sort of worried my thread will be closed. :/ TL;DR Python or Ruby for freelance work opportunities ($) as a first language? Additional question (if anyone cares to answer): I have a personal feeling that if I devote myself to learning, I'd be worth hiring for a project in about 8 weeks of work. I base this on a conservative estimate of my intellectual capacities, as well as possessing motivation to improve my life. Is my estimate necessarily inaccurate? random tidbit: I'm in Portland, OR I'll answer questions that are asked of me, if I can help the accuracy and insight contained within the dialog.

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• Thick models Vs. Business Logic, Where do you draw the distinction?

  - by TokenMacGuy

  Today I got into a heated debate with another developer at my organization about where and how to add methods to database mapped classes. We use sqlalchemy, and a major part of the existing code base in our database models is little more than a bag of mapped properties with a class name, a nearly mechanical translation from database tables to python objects. In the argument, my position was that that the primary value of using an ORM was that you can attach low level behaviors and algorithms to the mapped classes. Models are classes first, and secondarily persistent (they could be persistent using xml in a filesystem, you don't need to care). His view was that any behavior at all is "business logic", and necessarily belongs anywhere but in the persistent model, which are to be used for database persistence only. I certainly do think that there is a distinction between what is business logic, and should be separated, since it has some isolation from the lower level of how that gets implemented, and domain logic, which I believe is the abstraction provided by the model classes argued about in the previous paragraph, but I'm having a hard time putting my finger on what that is. I have a better sense of what might be the API (which, in our case, is HTTP "ReSTful"), in that users invoke the API with what they want to do, distinct from what they are allowed to do, and how it gets done. tl;dr: What kinds of things can or should go in a method in a mapped class when using an ORM, and what should be left out, to live in another layer of abstraction?

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• What is an elegant way to install non-repository software in 12.04?

  - by Tomas

  Perhaps I missed something when Canonical removed the "Create launcher" option from the right click menu, because I've really been missing that little guy. For me, it was the preferred way to install software that comes not in a .deb, but in a tar.gz, for example. (Note: in that tar.gz I have a folder with the compiled files, I'm NOT compiling from source) I just downloaded the new Eclipse IDE and extracted the tar.gz to my /usr folder. Now, I'd like to add it to my desktop and dash so it can be started easily. Intuitively I would right click the desktop and create a launcher. After this I'd copy the .desktop to /usr/share/applications. However, creating a launcher is not possible. My question: How would you install an already compiled tar.gz that you have downloaded from the internet? Below are a few things I've seen, but these are all more time-consuming than the right click option. If you have any better ideas, please let me know. Thanks! Manual copy & create a .desktop file: manually Simply extract the archive to /usr. Create a new text file, adding something along the lines of the code block below: [Desktop Entry] Version=1.0 Type=Application Terminal=false Exec="/usr/local/eclipse42/eclipse" Name="Eclipse 4.2" Icon=/home/tomas/icons/eclipse.svg Rename this file to eclipse42.desktop and make it executable. Then copy this to /usr/share/applications. Manually copy & create a .desktop file: GUI fossfreedom has elaborated on this in How can I create launchers on my desktop? Basically it involves the command: gnome-desktop-item-edit --create-new ~/Desktop After creating the launcher, copy it to /usr/share/applications.

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• SSIS Dashboard v0.4

  - by Davide Mauri

  Following the post on SSISDB script on Gist, I’ve been working on a HTML5 SSIS Dashboard, in order to have a nice looking, user friendly and, most of all, useful, SSIS Dashboard. Since this is a “spare-time” project, I’ve decided to develop it using Python since it’s THE data language (R aside), it’s a beautiful & powerful, well established and well documented and with a rich ecosystem around. Plus it has full support in Visual Studio, through the amazing Python Tools For Visual Studio plugin, I decided also to use Flask, a very good micro-framework to create websites, and use the SB Admin 2.0 Bootstrap admin template, since I’m all but a Web Designer. The result is here: https://github.com/yorek/ssis-dashboard and I can say I’m pretty satisfied with the work done so far (I’ve worked on it for probably less than 24 hours). Though there’s some features I’d like to add in t future (historical execution time, some charts, connection with AzureML to do prediction on expected execution times) it’s already usable. Of course I’ve tested it only on my development machine, so check twice before putting it in production but, give the fact that, virtually, there is not installation needed (you only need to install Python), and that all queries are based on standard SSISDB objects, I expect no big problems. If you want to test, contribute and/or give feedback please fell free to do it…I would really love to see this little project become a community project! Enjoy!

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• Legal Web Fonts & Licensing

  - by Phill

  So I'm a little confused in regards to legality of using fonts for web. Often from designers I get a PSD file and it uses a special font, and the font is supplied. However attempting to convert the font using: http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fontface/generator Ends up with a message saying it's blocked by Adobe. Not only that sometimes if the font can be converted, it often looks like crap when viewed in a browser. I assume that the generator is primarily for people to convert their own fonts, but if you purchase the use of a font then you can only use it for Web if the terms allows you to? The fonts used in PSD's are often Adobe Fonts, I can't find anything that suggests I can convert those and use them on the web. So I'm wondering if anyone knows the legal rights around using Photoshop supplied fonts on the web? In addition I'm wondering what resources are available (free/paid) that provide fonts that can be used on the web. Free: http://www.fontsquirrel.com http://www.google.com/webfonts Paid: http://www.fontshop.com This is the only one's I've found so far that aren't cartoon type fonts like what's primarily on www.dafont.com

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• SSDT gotcha – Moving a file erases code analysis suppressions

  - by jamiet

  I discovered a little wrinkle in SSDT today that is worth knowing about if you are managing your database schemas using SSDT. In short, if a file is moved to a different folder in the project then any code analysis suppressions that reference that file will disappear from the suppression file. This makes sense if you think about it because the paths stored in the suppression file are no longer valid, but you probably won’t be aware of it until it happens to you. If you don’t know what code analysis is or you don’t know what the suppression file is then you can probably stop reading now, otherwise read on for a simple short demo. Let’s create a new project and add a stored procedure to it called sp_dummy. Naming stored procedures with a sp_ prefix is generally frowned upon and hence SSDT static code analysis will look for occurrences of this and flag them. So, the next thing we need to do is turn on static code analysis in the project properties: A subsequent build causes a code analysis warning as we might expect: Let’s suppose we actually don’t mind stored procedures with sp_ prefixes, we can just right-click on the message to suppress and get rid of it: That causes a suppression file to get created in our project: Notice that the suppression file contains a relative path to the file that has had the suppression placed upon it. Now if we simply move the file within our project to a new folder notice that the suppression that we just created gets removed from the suppression file: As I alluded above this behaviour is intuitive because the path originally stored in the suppression file is no longer relevant but you’re probably not going to be aware of it until it happens to you and messages that you thought you had suppressed start appearing again. Definitely one to be aware of. @Jamiet   

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• How do I mashup Google Maps with geolocated photos from one or more social networks?

  - by PureCognition

  I'm working on a proof of concept for a project, and I need to pin random photos to a Google Map. These photos can come from another social network, but need to be non-porn. I've done some research so far, Google's Image Search API is deprecated. So, one has to use the Custom Search API. A lot of the images aren't photos, and I'm not sure how well it handles geolocation yet. Twitter seems a little more well suited, except for the fact that people can post pictures of pretty much anything. I was also going to look into the API's for other networks such as Flickr, Picasa, Pinterest and Instagram. I know there are some aggregate services out there that might have done some of this mash-up work for me as well. If there is anyone out there that has a handle on social APIs and where I should look for this type of solution, I would really appreciate the help. Also, in cases where server-side implementation matters, I'm a .NET developer by experience.

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• Creating a retro-style palette swapping effect in OpenGL

  - by Zack The Human

  I'm working on a Megaman-like game where I need to change the color of certain pixels at runtime. For reference: in Megaman when you change your selected weapon then main character's palette changes to reflect the selected weapon. Not all of the sprite's colors change, only certain ones do. This kind of effect was common and quite easy to do on the NES since the programmer had access to the palette and the logical mapping between pixels and palette indices. On modern hardware, though, this is a bit more challenging because the concept of palettes is not the same. All of my textures are 32-bit and do not use palettes. There are two ways I know of to achieve the effect I want, but I'm curious if there are better ways to achieve this effect easily. The two options I know of are: Use a shader and write some GLSL to perform the "palette swapping" behavior. If shaders are not available (say, because the graphics card doesn't support them) then it is possible to clone the "original" textures and generate different versions with the color changes pre-applied. Ideally I would like to use a shader since it seems straightforward and requires little additional work opposed to the duplicated-texture method. I worry that duplicating textures just to change a color in them is wasting VRAM -- should I not worry about that?

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• How to check Early Z efficiency on AMD GPU with Windows 7

  - by Suma

  I have a game using DirectX 9, and a development station using Win 7 x64. I am still able to get access to another station with Vista x64 / dual booted with WinXP x86. I wanted to check early Z efficiency in the game and to my sadness all tools I have tried seem to be unable to perform this task: AMD PerfStudio AMD GPUPerfStudio 2 does not support DirectX 9 at all AMD GPUPerfStudio 1.2 does not install correctly on Windows 7. When I have tweaked the MSI package (a simple OS version check adjustment was needed), it complained the drivers I have do not provide needed instrumentation. The drivers old enough to support the GPUPerfStudio would most likely not be able to operate with my Radeon 5750 card (though this is something I am not 100 % sure, I did not attempt to try any older drivers, not knowing which I should look for) PIX PIX does not seem to contain any counters like this. It offers some ATI specific counters, but when I try to activate them, the PIX reports "PIX encountered a problem while attaching to the target program." I do not want to upgrade to DX 10/11 just to be able to profile the game, but it seems without the step I am somewhat locked with a toolset which is no longer supported. I see only one obvious options which would probably work, and that is using WinXP (or with a little bit of luck even Vista) station, perhaps with some older AMD card, to make sure GPUPerfStudio 1.2 works. Other than that, can anyone recommend other options how to check GPU HW counters (HiZ / EarlyZ in particular, but if others would be enabled as well, it would be a nice bonus) for a DirectX 9 game on Windows 7, preferably on AMD GPU? (If that is not possible, I would definitely prefer switching GPU to switching the OS, but before I do so I would like to know if I will not hit the same problem with nVidia again)

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• LWJGL Determining whether or not a polygon is on-screen.

  - by Brandon oubiub

  Not sure whether this is an LWJGL or math question. I want to check whether a shape is on-screen, so that I don't have to render it if it isn't. First of all, is there any simple way to do this that I am overlooking? Like some method or something that I haven't found? I'm going to assume there isn't. I tried using my trigonometry skills, but it is hard to do this because of how glRotate also distorts the image a little for perspective and realism. Or, is there any way to easily determine if a ray starting from the camera, and going outward in a straight line intersects a shape? (I can probably do it with my math skillz, but is there an easier way?) By the way, I can easily determine the angle at which the camera is facing around the x and y axis. EDIT: Or, possibly, I could get the angles of a vector from the camera to the object, and compare those angles to my camera angles. But I have a feeling that the distorts from glRotate and glTranslate would be an issue. I'll try it though.

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• Free Team Foundation Service a Boon for Play Projects

  - by Ken Cox [MVP]

  My ‘jump in and sink or swim’ learning style leads me to create dozens of unbillable ‘play’ projects in Visual Studio 2012.  For example, I’m currently learning to customize the powerful auction/fixed price/classifieds software called AuctionWorx Enterprise.  I make stupid mistakes as I grasp a new API and configure projects. It’s frustrating to go down a rat hole and discover the VS IDE’s Undo doesn’t reach back to a working build from the previous weekend. Enter Visual Studio’s Free Team Foundation Service.  Put your play projects into the free source control and check in (or shelve) a snapshot before embarking on something risky. (I already use Discount ASP.NET’s Team Foundation Server hosting for client projects so there’s zero TFS/VS learning curve for me and first class GUI support.) TFS is free right now for teams of five or fewer. I’m not naive enough to expect ‘free’ to last forever. So, it’ll be interesting to see how much Microsoft intends to charge in 2013 for TFS. In the meantime, why not grab some free source code storage? BTW, it’s weird to realize that Microsoft is backing up my junky little playtime code on three physically-distinct servers every day - and taking incremental backups every hour.

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• How do graphics programmers deal with rendering vertices that don't change the image?

  - by canisrufus

  So, the title is a little awkward. I'll give some background, and then ask my question. Background: I work as a web GIS application developer, but in my spare time I've been playing with map rendering and improving data interchange formats. I work only in 2D space. One interesting issue I've encountered is that when you're rendering a polygon at a small scale (zoomed way out), many of the vertices are redundant. An extreme case would be that you have a polygon with 500,000 vertices that only takes up a single pixel. If you're sending this data to the browser, it would make sense to omit ~499,999 of those vertices. One way we achieve that is by rendering an image on a server and and sending it as a PNG: voila, it's a point. Sometimes, though, we want data sent to the browser where it can be rendered with SVG (or canvas, or webgl) so that it can be interactive. The problem: It turns out that, using modern geographic data sets, it's very easy to overload SVG's rendering abilities. In an effort to cope with those limitations, I'm trying to figure out how to visually losslessly reduce a data set for a given scale and map extent (and, if necessary, for a known map pixel width and height). I got a great reduction in data size just using the Douglas-Peucker algorithm, and I believe I was able to get it to keep the polygons true to within one pixel. Unfortunately, Douglas-Peucker doesn't preserve topology, so it changed how borders between polygons got rendered. I couldn't readily find other algorithms to try out and adapt to the purpose, but I don't have much CS/algorithm background and might not recognize them if I saw them.

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