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• Friday Fun: Vehicles

  - by Mysticgeek

  Friday has finally arrived and it’s time to ignore spreadsheets and TPS reports and waste time playing a flash game. Today we take a look at the fun puzzle game called Vehicles. Vehicles This is a fun game with cartoon style graphics where you navigate vehicles to solve different puzzles. You navigate the vehicles through different puzzle situations by clicking on them with your mouse. You’re given basic instructions on how to complete each level. You’ll need to strategically place the vehicles so you can knock the black vehicles off the screen. As you progress up the levels, they become more challenging and if you need to, you can restart it at any time. Since it’s Friday, and you’re sick of your job, Vehicles is a fun puzzle game to keep your mind of the boringness of work until it’s time for weekend freedom. Play Vehicles at FreeWebArcade Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Friday Fun: Relieve Workweek Frustration Playing Mad MondayFriday Fun: Uphill RushFriday Fun: Battlefield HeroesFriday Fun: Portal, the Flash VersionFriday Fun: Play 3D Rally Racing in Google Chrome TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips VMware Workstation 7 Acronis Online Backup DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro FetchMp3 Can Download Videos & Convert Them to Mp3 Use Flixtime To Create Video Slideshows Creating a Password Reset Disk in Windows Bypass Waiting Time On Customer Service Calls With Lucyphone MELTUP – "The Beginning Of US Currency Crisis And Hyperinflation" Enable or Disable the Task Manager Using TaskMgrED

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• [MINI HOW-TO] Create Keyboard Shortcuts to Applications in Windows

  - by Asian Angel

  Do you need just one or a few special keyboard shortcuts for your favorite program(s)? A quick modification to program shortcuts will get you up and running without installing additional software. Creating New Keyboard Shortcuts Go to the start menu shortcut for the program, right-click on it, and select properties. When the properties window opens click in the shortcut key text area. All that you need to do is choose an appropriate letter for the program (i.e. O for Opera, E for Editra, etc.) and type it in the blank. You will not need to type any other keys or combination in…the “Ctrl + Alt +” will be automatically entered for you as soon as you type the letter in. Click OK to finish creating the new keyboard shortcut. Those new keyboard shortcuts will speed up access to your favorite software. Another example from our system using “I” for Iron Browser. Certainly much quicker than using the start menu. Conclusion If you only need one or just a few special keyboard shortcuts then this method provides a quick and simple solution. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Show Keyboard Shortcut Access Keys in Windows VistaUse the Windows Key for the "Start" Menu in Ubuntu LinuxCreate Custom Windows Key Keyboard Shortcuts in WindowsHow-To Geek on Lifehacker: Control Your Computer with Shortcuts & Speed Up Vista SetupKeyboard Ninja: 21 Keyboard Shortcut Articles TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 VMware Workstation 7 Acronis Online Backup Windows Firewall with Advanced Security – How To Guides Sculptris 1.0, 3D Drawing app AceStock, a Tiny Desktop Quote Monitor Gmail Button Addon (Firefox) Hyperwords addon (Firefox) Backup Outlook 2010

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• Performance Optimization &ndash; It Is Faster When You Can Measure It

  - by Alois Kraus

  Performance optimization in bigger systems is hard because the measured numbers can vary greatly depending on the measurement method of your choice. To measure execution timing of specific methods in your application you usually use Time Measurement Method Potential Pitfalls Stopwatch Most accurate method on recent processors. Internally it uses the RDTSC instruction. Since the counter is processor specific you can get greatly different values when your thread is scheduled to another core or the core goes into a power saving mode. But things do change luckily: Intel's Designer's vol3b, section 16.11.1 "16.11.1 Invariant TSC The time stamp counter in newer processors may support an enhancement, referred to as invariant TSC. Processor's support for invariant TSC is indicated by CPUID.80000007H:EDX[8]. The invariant TSC will run at a constant rate in all ACPI P-, C-. and T-states. This is the architectural behavior moving forward. On processors with invariant TSC support, the OS may use the TSC for wall clock timer services (instead of ACPI or HPET timers). TSC reads are much more efficient and do not incur the overhead associated with a ring transition or access to a platform resource." DateTime.Now Good but it has only a resolution of 16ms which can be not enough if you want more accuracy.   Reporting Method Potential Pitfalls Console.WriteLine Ok if not called too often. Debug.Print Are you really measuring performance with Debug Builds? Shame on you. Trace.WriteLine Better but you need to plug in some good output listener like a trace file. But be aware that the first time you call this method it will read your app.config and deserialize your system.diagnostics section which does also take time.   In general it is a good idea to use some tracing library which does measure the timing for you and you only need to decorate some methods with tracing so you can later verify if something has changed for the better or worse. In my previous article I did compare measuring performance with quantum mechanics. This analogy does work surprising well. When you measure a quantum system there is a lower limit how accurately you can measure something. The Heisenberg uncertainty relation does tell us that you cannot measure of a quantum system the impulse and location of a particle at the same time with infinite accuracy. For programmers the two variables are execution time and memory allocations. If you try to measure the timings of all methods in your application you will need to store them somewhere. The fastest storage space besides the CPU cache is the memory. But if your timing values do consume all available memory there is no memory left for the actual application to run. On the other hand if you try to record all memory allocations of your application you will also need to store the data somewhere. This will cost you memory and execution time. These constraints are always there and regardless how good the marketing of tool vendors for performance and memory profilers are: Any measurement will disturb the system in a non predictable way. Commercial tool vendors will tell you they do calculate this overhead and subtract it from the measured values to give you the most accurate values but in reality it is not entirely true. After falling into the trap to trust the profiler timings several times I have got into the habit to Measure with a profiler to get an idea where potential bottlenecks are. Measure again with tracing only the specific methods to check if this method is really worth optimizing. Optimize it Measure again. Be surprised that your optimization has made things worse. Think harder Implement something that really works. Measure again Finished! - Or look for the next bottleneck. Recently I have looked into issues with serialization performance. For serialization DataContractSerializer was used and I was not sure if XML is really the most optimal wire format. After looking around I have found protobuf-net which uses Googles Protocol Buffer format which is a compact binary serialization format. What is good for Google should be good for us. A small sample app to check out performance was a matter of minutes: using ProtoBuf; using System; using System.Diagnostics; using System.IO; using System.Reflection; using System.Runtime.Serialization; [DataContract, Serializable] class Data { [DataMember(Order=1)] public int IntValue { get; set; } [DataMember(Order = 2)] public string StringValue { get; set; } [DataMember(Order = 3)] public bool IsActivated { get; set; } [DataMember(Order = 4)] public BindingFlags Flags { get; set; } } class Program { static MemoryStream _Stream = new MemoryStream(); static MemoryStream Stream { get { _Stream.Position = 0; _Stream.SetLength(0); return _Stream; } } static void Main(string[] args) { DataContractSerializer ser = new DataContractSerializer(typeof(Data)); Data data = new Data { IntValue = 100, IsActivated = true, StringValue = "Hi this is a small string value to check if serialization does work as expected" }; var sw = Stopwatch.StartNew(); int Runs = 1000 * 1000; for (int i = 0; i < Runs; i++) { //ser.WriteObject(Stream, data); Serializer.Serialize<Data>(Stream, data); } sw.Stop(); Console.WriteLine("Did take {0:N0}ms for {1:N0} objects", sw.Elapsed.TotalMilliseconds, Runs); Console.ReadLine(); } } The results are indeed promising: Serializer Time in ms N objects protobuf-net   807 1000000 DataContract 4402 1000000 Nearly a factor 5 faster and a much more compact wire format. Lets use it! After switching over to protbuf-net the transfered wire data has dropped by a factor two (good) and the performance has worsened by nearly a factor two. How is that possible? We have measured it? Protobuf-net is much faster! As it turns out protobuf-net is faster but it has a cost: For the first time a type is de/serialized it does use some very smart code-gen which does not come for free. Lets try to measure this one by setting of our performance test app the Runs value not to one million but to 1. Serializer Time in ms N objects protobuf-net 85 1 DataContract 24 1 The code-gen overhead is significant and can take up to 200ms for more complex types. The break even point where the code-gen cost is amortized by its faster serialization performance is (assuming small objects) somewhere between 20.000-40.000 serialized objects. As it turned out my specific scenario involved about 100 types and 1000 serializations in total. That explains why the good old DataContractSerializer is not so easy to take out of business. The final approach I ended up was to reduce the number of types and to serialize primitive types via BinaryWriter directly which turned out to be a pretty good alternative. It sounded good until I measured again and found that my optimizations so far do not help much. After looking more deeper at the profiling data I did found that one of the 1000 calls did take 50% of the time. So how do I find out which call it was? Normal profilers do fail short at this discipline. A (totally undeserved) relatively unknown profiler is SpeedTrace which does unlike normal profilers create traces of your applications by instrumenting your IL code at runtime. This way you can look at the full call stack of the one slow serializer call to find out if this stack was something special. Unfortunately the call stack showed nothing special. But luckily I have my own tracing as well and I could see that the slow serializer call did happen during the serialization of a bool value. When you encounter after much analysis something unreasonable you cannot explain it then the chances are good that your thread was suspended by the garbage collector. If there is a problem with excessive GCs remains to be investigated but so far the serialization performance seems to be mostly ok.  When you do profile a complex system with many interconnected processes you can never be sure that the timings you just did measure are accurate at all. Some process might be hitting the disc slowing things down for all other processes for some seconds as well. There is a big difference between warm and cold startup. If you restart all processes you can basically forget the first run because of the OS disc cache, JIT and GCs make the measured timings very flexible. When you are in need of a random number generator you should measure cold startup times of a sufficiently complex system. After the first run you can try again getting different and much lower numbers. Now try again at least two times to get some feeling how stable the numbers are. Oh and try to do the same thing the next day. It might be that the bottleneck you found yesterday is gone today. Thanks to GC and other random stuff it can become pretty hard to find stuff worth optimizing if no big bottlenecks except bloatloads of code are left anymore. When I have found a spot worth optimizing I do make the code changes and do measure again to check if something has changed. If it has got slower and I am certain that my change should have made it faster I can blame the GC again. The thing is that if you optimize stuff and you allocate less objects the GC times will shift to some other location. If you are unlucky it will make your faster working code slower because you see now GCs at times where none were before. This is where the stuff does get really tricky. A safe escape hatch is to create a repro of the slow code in an isolated application so you can change things fast in a reliable manner. Then the normal profilers do also start working again. As Vance Morrison does point out it is much more complex to profile a system against the wall clock compared to optimize for CPU time. The reason is that for wall clock time analysis you need to understand how your system does work and which threads (if you have not one but perhaps 20) are causing a visible delay to the end user and which threads can wait a long time without affecting the user experience at all. Next time: Commercial profiler shootout.

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• Desktop Fun: Beaches Theme Wallpapers

  - by Asian Angel

  Is your vacation still a few weeks or months away? Make the waiting a little easier by adding some of that vacation scenery to your desktop with our Beaches Theme Wallpapers collection. Note: Click on the picture to see the full-size image—these wallpapers vary in size so you may need to crop, stretch, or place them on a colored background in order to best match them to your screen’s resolution.                       For more fun wallpapers be certain to visit our new Desktop Fun section. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Windows 7 Welcome Screen Taking Forever? Here’s the Fix (Maybe)Desktop Fun: Starship Theme WallpapersDesktop Fun: Underwater Theme WallpapersDesktop Fun: Forest Theme WallpapersDesktop Fun: Fantasy Theme Wallpapers TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Run Command Missing in Windows 7? Share High Res Photos using Divvyshot Draw Online using Harmony How to Browse Privately in Firefox Kill Processes Quickly with Process Assassin Need to Come Up with a Good Name? Try Wordoid

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• Set Firefox to Be On Top of Other Windows

  - by Asian Angel

  Sometimes you need to keep a close watch on a website and have Firefox remain in view regardless of the other apps running. See how you can keep Firefox in constant view with the Always on Top extension. Before If you have a webpage that you like to watch throughout the day but have a very busy desktop then Firefox can get lost in all of the clutter. Note: You can read about the ReloadEvery extension here. Even with a widescreen monitor sometimes there is just not enough room to keep everything in easy view while you are working on something. Always on Top in Action Once you have installed the extension you will notice that a new Toolbar Button has automatically been added to your Navigation Toolbar. At the moment this is the only on/off switch for the extension. Clicking on the Toolbar Button will enable Always on Top and the button will change to a blue color to indicate its’ active status. Click on it again to disable it. Do anything that you like in the other windows…Firefox will still be the topmost window and easy to view. Conclusion The Always on Top extension was made to do just one thing and it does it very well…keeping your Firefox window on top. Being able to turn it on or off without digging through a bunch of menus adds that extra level of convenience. Links Download the Always on Top extension (Mozilla Add-ons) Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Quick Hits: 11 Firefox Tab How-TosQuick Tip: Save Windows and Tabs When Restarting FirefoxInstalling Windows Media Player Plugin for FirefoxDisable Web Site Window Resizing in FirefoxFix for Firefox memory leak on Windows TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 VMware Workstation 7 Acronis Online Backup The iPod Revolution Ultimate Boot CD can help when disaster strikes Windows Firewall with Advanced Security – How To Guides Sculptris 1.0, 3D Drawing app AceStock, a Tiny Desktop Quote Monitor Gmail Button Addon (Firefox)

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• links for 2010-04-12

  - by Bob Rhubart

  Andy Mulholland: We need innovation! What does that mean? "The most common response would seem to be ‘I will know it when I see it’, which suggests business success is based on ‘getting lucky’. As you might expect business schools don’t agree with this and as A G Lafley, author of several works on the topic comments: 'Innovation is risky, but it’s not random. Innovators have a disciplined invention process.'" Capgemini CTO blogger Andy Mulholland. (tags: entarch enterprisearchitecture innovation) @eelzinga: lEAI/Oracle Service Bus testing with Citrus Framework, part2 IT-Eye's Eric Elzinga continues his series with a test of a scenario that is part of a customer's middleware architecture. (tags: oracle otn ESB soa citrus) @fteter: Collaborate 10 - What Looks Good To Me Oracle ACE Director Floyd Teter from NASA's JPL shares quick previews of his Collaborate 10 presentations, along with a list of some sessions he plans to attend. (tags: oracle otn oracleace collaborate2010) Mark Rittman: OWB11gR2 for Windows Now Available Oracle ACE Director Mark Rittman of Rittman Mead shares insight on the recent Oracle Warehouse Builder release, along with a list of articles on the new features in Oracle Database 11gR2. (tags: oracle otn datewarehousing businessintelligence 11gr2)

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• Best of "The Moth" 2012

  - by Daniel Moth

  As with previous years (2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011) I’d like to wish you a Happy New Year and share a quick review of my blog posts from 2012 (plus speculate on my 2013 blog focus). 1. Like 2011, my professional energy in 2012 was dominated by C++ AMP including articles, blog posts, demos, slides, and screencasts. I summarized that over two posts on the official team blog that I linked to from my blog post here titled: “The last word on C++ AMP”, which also subtly hinted at my change of role which I confirmed in my other post titled “Visual Studio Continued Excitement”. 2. Even before I moved to the Visual Studio Diagnostics team in September, earlier in the year I had started sharing blog posts with my thoughts on that space, something I expect to continue in the new year. You can read some of that in these posts: The way I think about Diagnostic tools, Live Debugging, Attach to Process in Visual Studio, Start Debugging in Visual Studio, Visual Studio Exceptions dialogs. 3. What you should also expect to see more of is thoughts, tips, checklists, etc around Professional Communication and on how to be more efficient and effective with that, e.g. Link instead of Attaching, Sending Outlook Invites, Responding to Invites, and OOF checklist. 4. As always, I sometimes share random information, and noteworthy from 2012 is the one where I outlined the Visual Studio versioning story (“Visual Studio 11 not 2011”, and after that post VS 11 was officially baptized VS2012) and the one on “How I Record Screencasts”. Looking back, unlike 2011 there were no posts in 2012 related to device development, e.g. for Windows Phone. Expect that to be rectified in 2013 as I hope to find more time for such coding… stay tuned by subscribing using the link on the left. Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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• Oracle’s Java Community Outreach Plan

  - by Yolande Poirier

  As the steward of Java, Oracle recognizes the importance and value of the Java community, and the relevant role it plays in keeping Java the largest, most vibrant developer community in the world.   In order to increase Oracle’s touch with Java developers worldwide, we are shifting our focus from a flagship JavaOne event followed by several regional JavaOne conferences, to a new outreach model which continues with the JavaOne flagship event, as well as a mix of online content, regional Java Tours, and regional 3rd party event participation.  1. JavaOne JavaOne continues to remain the premier hub for Java developers where you are given the opportunity to improve your Java technical skills, and interact with other members of the Java community. JavaOne is centered on open collaboration and sharing, and Oracle will continue to invest in JavaOne as a unique stand-alone event for the Java community. Oracle recognizes that many developers cannot attend JavaOne in person, therefore Oracle will share the wealth of the unique event material to those developers through a new and easy-to-access online Java program. While online JavaOne content cannot address the importance of actual face-to-face community/developer engagements and networking, online content does aide in extending the Java technical learning opportunity to a broader collection of developers. 2. Java Developer Day Tours Oracle will execute regional Java Developer Days with recognized Java User Groups (JUGs) with participation from Java Evangelist and Java Champions. This allows local, regional specific Java topics to be addressed both by Oracle and the Java community. In addition, Oracle will deliver more virtual technical content programs to reach developers where an existing JUG may not have a presence. 3. Sponsorship of Community-Driven Regional Events/Conferences Oracle also recognizes that improved community dialog and relations are achievable by continued Oracle sponsorship and onsite participation at both established/well-recognized 3rd party events and new emerging/growing 3rd party events. Oracle’s ultimate goal is to be an even better steward for Java by reaching more of the Java ecosystem with face-to-face and online community engagements. We look forward to planning tours and events with you, members of the Java community.

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• Flash Technology Can Revolutionize your IT Infrastructure

  - by kimberly.billings

  A recent article in the Data Center Journal written by Mark Teter outlines how flash is becoming a disruptive technology in the data center and how it will soon replace HDDs in the storage hierarchy. As Teter explains, the drivers behind this trend are lower cost/performance and power savings; flash is over 100x faster for reads than the fastest HDD, and while it is expensive, it can produce dramatic reductions in the cost of performance as measured in Input/Outputs per second (IOPS). What's more, flash consumes 1/5th the power of HDD, so it's faster AND greener. Teter writes, "when appropriately used, flash turns the current economics of IT performance on its head. That's disruptive." Exadata Smart Flash Cache in the Sun Oracle Database Machine makes intelligent use of flash storage to deliver extreme performance for OLTP and mixed workloads. It intelligently caches data from the Oracle Database replacing slow mechanical I/O operations to disk with very rapid flash memory operations. Exadata Smart Flash Cache is the fundamental technology of the Sun Oracle Database Machine that enables the processing of up to 1 million random I/O operations per second (IOPS), and the scanning of data within Exadata storage at up to 50 GB/second. Are you incorporating flash into your storage strategy? Let us know! Read more: "Flash technology can revolutionize your IT infrastructure", The Data Center Journal, March 30, 2010. Exadata Smart Flash Cache and the Sun Oracle Database Machine white paper var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www."); document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E")); try { var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-13185312-1"); pageTracker._trackPageview(); } catch(err) {}

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• Fix Firefox Not Scrolling with Up/Down Arrow Keys or Home/End Keys

  - by The Geek

  If you’ve encountered a problem where your Firefox installation no longer scrolls when you use the up or down arrow keys, and even the Home or End keys don’t work anymore, there’s an easy fix. When this problem happens, you’ll notice that moving the arrow keys around just moves the cursor around the page. Annoying! The problem is because you tripped the Caret Browsing feature at some point, and accidentally hit Yes. To fix this, you can just hit the F7 key again. Or, if you want to do it the about:config way, filter by accessibility.browsewithcaret and make sure it’s set to false. Remember, you can double-click on any boolean value to toggle between true and false. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Keyboard Ninja: Scrolling the Windows Command Prompt With Only the KeyboardShow Shortcut Keys in ScreenTips in Visual Studio 2003Show Shortcut Keys in ScreenTips in Visual Studio 2005Future Date a Post in Windows Live WriterDisable the Irritating Sticky / Filter Keys Popup Dialogs TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Need Help with Your Home Network? Awesome Lyrics Finder for Winamp & Windows Media Player Download Videos from Hulu Pixels invade Manhattan Convert PDF files to ePub to read on your iPad Hide Your Confidential Files Inside Images

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• Object model design: collections on classes

  - by Luke Puplett

  Hi all, Consider Train.Passengers, what type would you use for Passengers where passengers are not supposed to be added or removed by the consuming code? I'm using .NET Framework, so this discussion would suit .NET, but it could apply to a number of modern languages/frameworks. In the .NET Framework, the List is not supposed to be publicly exposed. There's Collection and ICollection and guidance, which I tend to agree with, is to return the closest concrete type down the inheritance tree, so that'd be Collection since it is already an ICollection. But Collection has read/write semantics and so possibly it should be a ReadOnlyCollection, but its arguably common sense not to alter the contents of a collection that you don't have intimate knowledge about so is it necessary? And it requires extra work internally and can be a pain with (de)serialization. At the extreme ends I could just return Person[] (since LINQ now provides much of the benefits that previously would have been afforded by a more specified collection) or even build a strongly-typed PersonCollection or ReadOnlyPersonCollection! What do you do? Thanks for your time. Luke

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• CIC 2010 - Ghost Stories and Model Based Design

  - by warren.baird

  I was lucky enough to attend the collaboration and interoperability congress recently. The location was very beautiful and interesting, it was held in the mountains about two hours outside Denver, at the Stanley hotel, famous both for inspiring Steven King's novel "The Shining" and for attracting a lot of attention from the "Ghost Hunters" TV show. My visit was prosaic - I didn't get to experience the ghosts the locals promised - but interesting, with some very informative sessions. I noticed one main theme - a lot of people were talking about Model Based Design (MBD), which is moving design and manufacturing away from 2d drawings and towards 3d models. 2d has some pretty deep roots in industrial manufacturing and there have been a lot of challenges encountered in making the leap to 3d. One of the challenges discussed in several sessions was how to get model information out to the non-engineers in the company, which is a topic near and dear to my heart. In the 2D space, people without access to CAD software (for example, people assembling a product on the shop floor) can be given printouts of the design - it's not particularly efficient, and it definitely isn't very green, but it tends to work. There's no direct equivalent in the 3D space. One of the ways that AutoVue is used in industrial manufacturing is to provide non-CAD users with an easy to use, interactive 3D view of their products - in some cases it's directly used by people on the shop floor, but in cases where paper is really ingrained in the process, AutoVue can be used by a technical publications person to create illustrative 2D views that can be printed that show all of the details necessary to complete the work. Are you making the move to model based design? Is AutoVue helping you with your challenges? Let us know in the comments below.

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• Who practices, or is likely to practice, the IEEE Software Engineering? [closed]

  - by user72757

  There is an interesting issue in Software Engineering which I'd like to explore. The issue is firstly what is and what is not software engineering. Secondly, if software engineering is what the IEEE defines it to be, what are good examples of companies which practice the SE? Detailed question: Software engineering (SE) is the application of a systematic, disciplined, quantifiable approach to the design, development, operation, and maintenance of software, and the study of these approaches; that is, the application of engineering to software. [updated definition, originating in 610.12-1990 - IEEE Standard Glossary of Software Engineering Terminology] If we consider as SE only those approaches that 100% match the above definition, we naturally get to SWEBOK (Software Engineering Body of Knowledge) which is created by the IEEE and the ACM. I'm seeking the answer to this: How can I find a company outside the defence industry which practices the SE as defined by IEEE? Clues: SE originates in 1968 NATO conference. The Software Engineering Institute (SEI) is based in the US at Carnegie Mellon University. Funding of the SEI is largely done by the US DoD. Defence industry uses the SE and sometimes has a partnership with the IEEE (as in case of Boeing). Possible decomposition of my big question into smaller chunks: a) Where is anyone who acknowledges the IEEE Software Engineering standards at work and perhaps even uses some of them? http://cs.hbg.psu.edu/cmpsc487/IEEEStds_List.htm b) Where can I find a person or a company building around SWEBOK? http://www.computer.org/portal/web/swebok/html/contents c) What is an example of a company professionally using CSDP (apart from those at IEEE website)? Does anyone have any possible contribution to this question?

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• Add a Search Box to the Drop-Down Tab List in Firefox

  - by Asian Angel

  Do you have a lot of tabs open no matter what time of day it is and find sorting through the tabs list frustrating? Then get control back with the List All Tabs Menu extension for Firefox. Before If you have a large number of tabs open using the “Tab List Menu” can start to become a little awkward. You can use your mouse’s middle button to scroll through the list or the tiny arrow button at the bottom but there needs to be a better way to deal with this. After Once you have installed the extension you will notice two differences in the “Tab List Menu”. There will be a search box available and a nice scrollbar for those really long lists. A closer look at the search box and scrollbar setup… Depending on your style you can use the scrollbar to look for a particular page or enter a search term and watch that list become extremely manageable. A closer look at our much shorter list after conducting a search. Definitely not hard to find what we were looking for at all. Conclusion If you are someone who has lots of tabs open at once throughout the day then the List All Tabs Menu extension might be the perfect tool to help you sort and manage those tabs. Links Download the List All Tabs Menu extension (Mozilla Add-ons) Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Organize Your Firefox Search Engines Into FoldersAdd Search Forms to the Firefox Search BarGain Access to a Search Box in Google ChromeWhy Doesn’t Tab Work for Drop-down Controls in Firefox on OS X?Quick Tip: Spell Check Firefox Text Input Fields TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Stormpulse provides slick, real time weather data Geek Parents – Did you try Parental Controls in Windows 7? Change DNS servers on the fly with DNS Jumper Live PDF Searches PDF Files and Ebooks Converting Mp4 to Mp3 Easily Use Quick Translator to Translate Text in 50 Languages (Firefox)

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• Ask the Readers: Which Search Engine Do You Use?

  - by Mysticgeek

  While Google dominates the search engine market, there are certainly other alternatives out there such as Bing and Yahoo. Today we’re curious about which one you use, and would you ever consider another one? Believe it or not…not everyone uses Google (surprising indeed), there are several other alternatives out there that some of you may be using and we’re interested in hearing about it. One of the more unique and interesting ones we previously covered is ixquick, which doesn’t save your IP or any information and can be customized quite nicely if you’re the paranoid type. We’re interested in hearing about which search engine you currently use. Would you ever switch to a different one? Have you ever tried to experiment and not use Google (or your favorite engine) for a week? Leave a comment below and join in the discussion! Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips A Few Things I’ve Learned from Writing at How-To GeekModify Firefox’s Search Bar Behavior with SearchLoad OptionsGain Access to a Search Box in Google ChromeSearch Alternative Search Engines from within Bing’s Search PageCombine the Address & Search Bars in Firefox TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Download Wallpapers From National Geographic Site Spyware Blaster v4.3 Yes, it’s Patch Tuesday Generate Stunning Tag Clouds With Tagxedo Install, Remove and HIDE Fonts in Windows 7 Need Help with Your Home Network?

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• Morph a sphere to a cube and a cube to a sphere with GLSL

  - by nkint

  I'm getting started with GLSL with quartz composer. I have a patch with a particle system in which each particle is mapped into a sphere with a blend value. With blend=0 particles are in random positions, blend=1 particles are in the sphere. The code is here: vec3 sphere(vec2 domain) { vec3 range; range.x = radius * cos(domain.y) * sin(domain.x); range.y = radius * sin(domain.y) * sin(domain.x); range.z = radius * cos(domain.x); return range; } // in main: vec2 p0 = gl_Vertex.xy * twopi; vec3 normal = sphere(p0);; vec3 r0 = radius * normal; vec3 vertex = r0; normal = normal * blend + gl_Normal * (1.0 - blend); vertex = vertex * blend + gl_Vertex.xyz * (1.0 - blend); I'd like the particle to be on a cube if blend=0 I've tried to find but I can't figure out some parametric equation for the cube. Maybe it is not the right way?

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• Copy Excel Formatting the Easy Way with Format Painter

  - by DigitalGeekery

  The Format Painter in Excel makes it easy to copy the formatting of a cell and apply it to another. With just a few clicks you can reproduce formatting such as fonts, alignment, text size, border, and background color. On any Excel worksheet, click on the cell with the formatting you’d like to copy.  You will see dashed lines around the selected cell. Then select the Home tab and click on the Format Painter.   You’ll see your cursor now includes a paintbrush graphic. Move to the cell where you’d like to apply the formatting and click on it. Your target cell will now have the new formatting.   If you double-clicking on Format Painter you can then click on multiple individual files to which to apply the format. Or, you can click and drag across a group of cells. When you are finished applying formats, click on Format Painter again, or on the Esc key, to turn it off. The Format Painter is a very simple, but extremely useful and time saving tool when creating complex worksheets. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Use Conditional Formatting to Find Duplicate Data in Excel 2007Remove Text Formatting in Firefox the Easy WayMake Excel 2007 Always Save in Excel 2003 FormatUsing Conditional Cell Formatting in Excel 2007Make Word 2007 Always Save in Word 2003 Format TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 New Firefox release 3.6.3 fixes 1 Critical bug Dark Side of the Moon (8-bit) Norwegian Life If Web Browsers Were Modes of Transportation Google Translate (for animals) Roadkill’s Scan Port scans for open ports

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• Growing mobile developers inside a web development org

  - by Arkaaito

  I work for a "mature web startup" as a web developer (mainly using PHP). Our main site has about 8 million registered members at the moment. However, the site is basically impossible to use on anything that's not a real computer. One of our most-requested features, if not the most requested, is a mobile app or mobile version of the site. I think we need to do it. Management thinks we need to do it. In fact, everyone in the company thinks we need to do it. But it's nigh impossible to hire someone with iPhone/Android skills in the present market. I'm the only person at the company with any level of mobile development experience currently, and I'm not that good (yet), so I'm seeking comments on how to bootstrap a capacity for mobile development. Anything from general tips (should I focus on developing my personal skills first or try to pick up a more experienced mobile dev?) to specific recommendations on training, etc., may be helpful, as long as it doesn't reduce to "sucks to be you." :-)

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• Desktop Fun: Music Icon Packs

  - by Asian Angel

  If you really love music and want to liven up your desktop then get ready to create a desktop concert with our Music Icon Packs collection. Note: To customize the icon setup on your Windows 7 & Vista systems see our article here. Using Windows XP? We have you covered here. Sneak Preview For our desktop example we decided to go with a touch of anime musical fun. The icons used are from the Guitar Icons set shown below. Note: Wallpaper can be found here. An up close look at the icons that we used… Notes icon set 1 *.png format only Download Notes icon set 2 *.png format only Download Notes icon set 3 *.png format only Download Notes icon set 4 *.png format only Download Big Band Set 1 *.ico format only Download Big Band Set 2 *.ico format only Download Acoustic Guitars *.ico and .png format Download Acoustic Guitar *.ico format only Download Guitar Icons *.ico format only Download Guiter Skulll *.ico format only Download Dented Music *.ico format only Download Music Icons *.ico format only Download Ipod Mini *.ico format only Download MP3 Players Icons *.ico format only Download MusicPhones icon *.ico and .png format Download Wanting more great icon sets to look through? Be certain to visit our Desktop Fun section for more icon goodness! Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Desktop Fun: Video Game Icon PacksDesktop Fun: Sci-Fi Icons Packs Series 2Why Did Windows Vista’s Music Folder Icon Turn Yellow?Restore Missing Desktop Icons in Windows 7 or VistaAdd Home Directory Icon to the Desktop in Windows 7 or Vista TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips HippoRemote Pro 2.2 Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Download Songs From MySpace Steve Jobs’ iPhone 4 Keynote Video Watch World Cup Online On These Sites Speed Up Windows With ReadyBoost Awesome World Cup Soccer Calendar Nice Websites To Watch TV Shows Online

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• Ur/Web new purely functional language for web programming?

  - by Phuc Nguyen

  I came across the Ur/Web project during my search for web frameworks for Haskell-like languages. It looks like a very interesting project done by one person. Basically, it is a domain-specific purely functional language for web programming, taking the best of ML and Haskell. The syntax is ML, but there are type classes and monad from Haskell, and it's strictly evaluated. Server-side is compiled to native code, client to Javascript. See the slides and FAQ page for other advertised advantages. Looking at the demos and their source code, I think the project is very promising. The latest version is something 20110123, so it seems to be under active development at this time. My question: Has anybody here had any further experience with it? Are there problems/annoyances compared to Haskell, apart from ML's slightly more verbose syntax? Even if it's not well known yet, I hope more people will know of it. OMG this looks very cool to me. I don't want this project to die!!

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• Create a Shortcut To Group Policy Editor in Windows 7

  - by Mysticgeek

  If you’re a system administrator and find yourself making changes in Group Policy Editor, you might want to make a shortcut to it. Here we look at creating a shortcut, pinning it to the Taskbar, and adding it to Control Panel. Note: Local Group Policy Editor is not available in Home versions of Windows 7. Typing gpedit.msc into the search box in the Start menu to access Group Policy Editor can get old fast. To create a shortcut, right-click on the desktop and select New \ Shortcut. Next type or copy the following path into the location field and click Next. c:\windows\system32\gpedit.msc Then give your shortcut a name…something like Group Policy, or whatever you want it to be and click Finish. Now you have your Group Policy shortcut… If you want it on the Taskbar just drag it there to pin it. And that’s all there is to it!   If you want to change the icon, you can use one of the following guides… Customize Icons in Windows 7 Change a File Type Icon in Windows 7 Add Group Policy to Control Panel If you’re using non Home versions of XP, Vista, or Windows 7, check out The Geek’s article on how to Add Group Policy Editor to Control Panel. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Add Group Policy Editor to Control PanelQuick Tip: Disable Search History Display in Windows 7Remove Shutdown and Restart Buttons In Windows 7How To Disable Control Panel in Windows 7Allow Users To Run Only Specified Programs in Windows 7 TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Acronis Online Backup DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows Fun with 47 charts and graphs Tomorrow is Mother’s Day Check the Average Speed of YouTube Videos You’ve Watched OutlookStatView Scans and Displays General Usage Statistics How to Add Exceptions to the Windows Firewall Office 2010 reviewed in depth by Ed Bott

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• 2D Procedural Terrain with box2d Assets

  - by Alex

  I'm making a game that invloves a tire moving through terrain that is generated randomly over 1000 points. The terrain is always a downwards incline like so: The actual box2d terrain extends one screen width behind and infront of the circular character. I'm now at a stage where I need to add gameplay elements to the terrain such as chasms or physical objects (like the demo polygon in the picture) and am not sure of the best way to structure the procedural generation of the terrain and objects. I currently have a very simple for loop like so: for(int i = 0; i < kMaxHillPoints; i++) { hillKeyPoints[i] = CGPointMake(terrainX, terrainY); if(i%50 == 0) { i += [self generateCasmAtIndex:i]; } terrainX += winsize.width/20; terrainY -= random() % ((int) winsize.height/20); } With the generateCasmAtIndex function add points to the hillKeyPoints array and incrementing the for loop by the required amount. If I want to generate box2d objects as well for specific terrain elements, I'll also have to keep track of the current position of the player and have some sort of array of box2d objects that need to be created at certain locations. I am not sure of an efficient way to accomplish this procedural generation of terrain elements with accompanying box2d objects. My thoughts are: 1) Have many functions for each terrain element (chasm, jump etc.) which add elements to be drawn to an array that is check on each game step - similar to what I've shown above. 2) Create an array of terrain element objects that string together and are looped over to create the terrain and generate the box2d objects. Each object would hold an array of points to be drawn and and array of accompanying box2d objects. Any help on this is much appreciated as I cannot see a 'clean' solution.

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• It&rsquo;s About You: Tell Microsoft How They&rsquo;re Doing!

  - by juanlarios

  Every fall and spring, a survey goes out to a few hundred thousand IT folk in Canada asking what they think of Microsoft as a company. The information they get from this survey helps them understand what problems and issues you’re facing and how they can do better. The team at Microsoft Canada takes the input they get from this survey very seriously. Now I don’t know who of you will get the survey and who won’t but if you do find an email in your inbox from "Microsoft Feedback” with an email address of “ [email protected] ” and a subject line “Help Microsoft Focus on Customers and Partners” from now until April 13th — it’s not a hoax or phishing email. Please open it and take a few minutes to tell them what you think. This is your chance to get your voice heard: If they’re doing well, feel free to pile on the kudos (they love positive feedback!) and if you see areas they can improve, please point them out so they can make adjustments (they also love constructive criticism!). The Microsoft team would like to thank you for all your feedback in the past — to those of you who have filled out the survey and sent them emails. Thank you to all who engage with them in so many different ways through events, the blogs, online and in person. You are why they do what they do and they feel lucky to work with such a great community! One last thing - even if you don’t get the survey you can always give the team feedback by emailing us directly through the Microsoft Canada IT Pro Feedback email address . They want to make sure they are serving you in the best possible way. Tell them what you want more of. What should they do less of or stop altogether? How can they help? Do you want more cowbell ? Let them know through the survey or the email alias. They love hearing from you!

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• Killer content for my Kindle - The Economist with no need for an iPad - yipeee!

  - by Liam Westley

  I admin it, I was jealous of someone's iPad. They were reading The Economist, for free, as they were a print subscriber. I'm a print subscriber too. However, I don't have an iPad or an iPhone, just an Android phone and a Kindle. As soon as I got the Kindle, I looked up how to get The Economist on it. £9.99 per month. Hmmm, twice as much again as a my print subscription and I wanted to maintain the print subscription. No way Amazon. Fortunately some nice person wrote similar comments on The Economist subscription for Kindle, but added a very important additional nugget of information; and there is no need, as a print subscriber you can just use the free Calibre e-book creation tool anyway. So I downloaded it, searched for The Economist online 'recipe', entered my login name and password (part of my print subscription) and off went Calibre to screen scrape every single article from the Christmas 2010 issue into a .mobi file, complete with front cover image and full indexing. It's wonderful. Truely wonderful. Every section individually indexed, with each article separated and all inline images preserved. It even feels wonderfully retro, back to the days when The Economist only used black and white images. So many thanks the guys behind Calibre and The Economist recipe creators. Finally, I have my essential Kindle content that I've been waiting for.

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• 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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