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  • Friday Fun: Games that Look Like Productivity Apps

    - by Mysticgeek
    We’ve been showing you fun flash games to play during company time on a Friday afternoon. Hopefully while playing them, you haven’t received a “talking to”. Today we show you some cool games to play that look like productivity apps, so the boss will be none the wiser. The website cantyouseeimbusy.com has developed some very neat little games that look like productivity apps like Word and Excel. These apps look exactly like some project you would be working on, but are really neat little games. Here we take a look at three cool ones on the site called Breakdown, Leadership, and Cost Cutter. Leadership Leadership is a cool game that looks like something you would be working in Excel and is a spin off of the classic game Moon Lander. You navigate your ship through a variety of challenging line graphs. Breakdown This one is a knock off of the classic game Break Out. Use your mouse to scroll the racket at the bottom and bounce the ball off of the text in the document. Press the space bar to pause the game and the elements will disappear…good for when the boss comes around. Cost Cutter This one is a puzzle game where it looks like your working on some bar charts in Excel. You need to click combinations of two or more blocks that are the same color. Again, hit the spacebar and the game elements will disappear. If you’re looking for a way to goof off with some simple games without the boss knowing, these will definitely do the trick. Another cool game along these lines is Excit! which we covered previously. Play Cost Cutter, Breakdown, and Leadership at cantyouseeimbusy.com Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Friday Fun: Get Your Mario OnFriday Fun: Bricks Breaking & Cube CrashFriday Fun: Fancy Pants AdventuresFriday Fun: GemCraft is a Totally Addictive Tower Defense GameFriday Fun: Five More Time Wasting Online Games 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 Download Microsoft Office Help tab The Growth of Citibank Quickly Switch between Tabs in IE Windows Media Player 12: Tweak Video & Sound with Playback Enhancements Own a cell phone, or does a cell phone own you? Make your Joomla & Drupal Sites Mobile with OSMOBI

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  • How To show document directory save image in thumbnail in cocos2d class

    - by Anil gupta
    I have just implemented multiple photo selection from iphone photo library and i am saving all selected photo in document directory every time as a array, now i want to show all saved images in my class from document directory as a thumbnail, i have tried some logic but my game getting crashing, My code is below. Any help will be appreciate. Thanks in advance. -(id) init { // always call "super" init // Apple recommends to re-assign "self" with the "super" return value if( (self=[super init])) { CCSprite *photoalbumbg = [CCSprite spriteWithFile:@"photoalbumbg.png"]; photoalbumbg.anchorPoint = ccp(0,0); [self addChild:photoalbumbg z:0]; //Background Sound // [[SimpleAudioEngine sharedEngine]playBackgroundMusic:@"Background Music.wav" loop:YES]; CCSprite *photoalbumframe = [CCSprite spriteWithFile:@"photoalbumframe.png"]; photoalbumframe.position = ccp(160,240); [self addChild:photoalbumframe z:2]; CCSprite *frame = [CCSprite spriteWithFile:@"Photo-Frames.png"]; frame.position = ccp(160,270); [self addChild:frame z:1]; /*_____________________________________________________________________________________*/ CCMenuItemImage * upgradebtn = [CCMenuItemImage itemFromNormalImage:@"AlbumUpgrade.png" selectedImage:@"AlbumUpgrade.png" target:self selector:@selector(Upgrade:)]; CCMenu * fMenu = [CCMenu menuWithItems:upgradebtn,nil]; fMenu.position = ccp(200,110); [self addChild:fMenu z:3]; NSError *error; NSFileManager *fM = [NSFileManager defaultManager]; NSString *documentsDirectory = [NSHomeDirectory() stringByAppendingPathComponent:@"Documents"]; NSLog(@"Documents directory: %@", [fM contentsOfDirectoryAtPath:documentsDirectory error:&error]); NSArray *allfiles = [fM contentsOfDirectoryAtPath :documentsDirectory error:&error]; directoryList = [[NSMutableArray alloc] init]; for(NSString *file in allfiles) { NSString *path = [documentsDirectory stringByAppendingPathComponent:file]; [directoryList addObject:file]; } NSLog(@"array file name value ==== %@", directoryList); CCSprite *temp = [CCSprite spriteWithFile:[directoryList objectAtIndex:0]]; [temp setTextureRect:CGRectMake(160.0f, 240.0f, 50,50)]; // temp.anchorPoint = ccp(0,0); [self addChild:temp z:10]; for(UIImage *file in directoryList) { // NSData *pngData = [NSData dataWithContentsOfFile:file]; // image = [UIImage imageWithData:pngData]; NSLog(@"uiimage = %@",image); // UIImage *image = [UIImage imageWithContentsOfFile:file]; for (int i=1; i<=3; i++) { for (int j=1;j<=3; j++) { CCTexture2D *tex = [[[CCTexture2D alloc] initWithImage:file] autorelease]; CCSprite *selectedimage = [CCSprite spriteWithTexture:tex rect:CGRectMake(0, 0, 67, 66)]; selectedimage.position = ccp(100*i,350*j); [self addChild:selectedimage]; } } } } return self; }

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  • Is there a better term than "smoothness" or "granularity" to describe this language feature?

    - by Chris Stevens
    One of the best things about programming is the abundance of different languages. There are general purpose languages like C++ and Java, as well as little languages like XSLT and AWK. When comparing languages, people often use things like speed, power, expressiveness, and portability as the important distinguishing features. There is one characteristic of languages I consider to be important that, so far, I haven't heard [or been able to come up with] a good term for: how well a language scales from writing tiny programs to writing huge programs. Some languages make it easy and painless to write programs that only require a few lines of code, e.g. task automation. But those languages often don't have enough power to solve large problems, e.g. GUI programming. Conversely, languages that are powerful enough for big problems often require far too much overhead for small problems. This characteristic is important because problems that look small at first frequently grow in scope in unexpected ways. If a programmer chooses a language appropriate only for small tasks, scope changes can require rewriting code from scratch in a new language. And if the programmer chooses a language with lots of overhead and friction to solve a problem that stays small, it will be harder for other people to use and understand than necessary. Rewriting code that works fine is the single most wasteful thing a programmer can do with their time, but using a bazooka to kill a mosquito instead of a flyswatter isn't good either. Here are some of the ways this characteristic presents itself. Can be used interactively - there is some environment where programmers can enter commands one by one Requires no more than one file - neither project files nor makefiles are required for running in batch mode Can easily split code across multiple files - files can refeence each other, or there is some support for modules Has good support for data structures - supports structures like arrays, lists, and especially classes Supports a wide variety of features - features like networking, serialization, XML, and database connectivity are supported by standard libraries Here's my take on how C#, Python, and shell scripting measure up. Python scores highest. Feature C# Python shell scripting --------------- --------- --------- --------------- Interactive poor strong strong One file poor strong strong Multiple files strong strong moderate Data structures strong strong poor Features strong strong strong Is there a term that captures this idea? If not, what term should I use? Here are some candidates. Scalability - already used to decribe language performance, so it's not a good idea to overload it in the context of language syntax Granularity - expresses the idea of being good just for big tasks versus being good for big and small tasks, but doesn't express anything about data structures Smoothness - expresses the idea of low friction, but doesn't express anything about strength of data structures or features Note: Some of these properties are more correctly described as belonging to a compiler or IDE than the language itself. Please consider these tools collectively as the language environment. My question is about how easy or difficult languages are to use, which depends on the environment as well as the language.

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  • A few questions about integrating AudioKinetic Wwise and Unity

    - by SaldaVonSchwartz
    I'm new to Wwise and to using it with Unity, and though I have gotten the integration to work, I'm still dealing with some loose ends and have a few questions: (I'm on Unity 4.3 as of now but I think it shouldn't make any difference) The base path: The Wwise documentation implies you set this in the AkGlobalSoundEngineInitializer basePath public ivar, which is exposed to the editor. However, I found that this variable is not really used. Instead, the path is hardcoded to /Audio/GeneratedSoundBanks in AkBankPath. I had to modify both scripts to actually look in the path that I set in the editor property. What's the deal with this? Just sloppyness or am I missing something? Also about paths: since I'm on Mac, I'm using Unity natively under OS X and in tadem, the Wwise authoring tool via VMWare and I share the OS X Unity project folder so I can generate the soundbanks into the assets folder. However, the authoring tool (downloaded the latest one for Windows) doesn't automatically generate any "platform-specific" subfolders for my wwise files. That is, again, the Unity integration scripts assume the path to be /Audio/GeneratedSoundBanks/<my-platform>/ which in my case would be Mac (I set the authoring tool to generate for Mac). The documentation says wwise will automatically generate the platform-specific folders but it just dumps all the stuff in GeneratedSoundBanks. Am I missing some setting? cause right now I just manually create the /Mac folder. The C# methods AkSoundEngine.PostEvent and AkSoundEngine.LoadBank for instance, have a few overloads, including ones where I can refer to the soundbanks or events by their ID. However, if I try to use these, for instance: AkSoundEngine.LoadBank(, AkSoundEngine.AK_DEFAULT_POOL_ID) where the int I got from the .h header, I get Ak_Fail. If I use the overloads that reference the objects by string name then it works. What gives? Converting the ID header to C#: The integration comes with a C# script that seems to fork a process to call Python in turn to covert the C++ header into a C# script. This always fails unless I manually execute the Python script myself from outside Unity. Might be a permissions thing, but has anyone experienced this? The Profiler: I set up the Unity player to run in the background and am using the "Profile" version of the plugin. However, when I start the Unity OS X standalone app, the profiler in VMWare does not see it. This I'm thinking might just be that I'm trying to see a running instance of the sound engine inside an OS X binary from a Windows virtual machine. But I'm just wondering if anyone has gotten the Windows profiler to see an OS X Unity binary. Different versions of the integration plugin: It's not clear to me from the documentation whether I have to manually (or write a script to do it) remove the "Profile" version and install the "Release" version when I'm going to do a Release build or if I should install both version in Unity and it'll select the right one. Thanks!

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  • Infinite detail inside Perlin noise procedural mapping

    - by Dave Jellison
    I am very new to game development but I was able to scour the internet to figure out Perlin noise enough to implement a very simple 2D tile infinite procedural world. Here's the question and it's more conceptual than code-based in answer, I think. I understand the concept of "I plug in (x, y) and get back from Perlin noise p" (I'll call it p). P will always be the same value for the same (x, y) (as long as the Perlin algorithm parameters haven't changed, like altering number of octaves, et cetera). What I want to do is be able to zoom into a square and be able to generate smaller squares inside of the already generated overhead tile of terrain. Let's say I have a jungle tile for overhead terrain but I want to zoom in and maybe see a small river tile that would only be a creek and not large enough to be a full "big tile" of water in the overhead. Of course, I want the same net effect as a Perlin equation inside a Perlin equation if that makes sense? (aka. I want two people playing the game with the same settings to get the same terrain and details every time). I can conceptually wrap my head around the large tile being based on an "zoomed out" coordinate leaving enough room to drill into but this approach doesn't make sense in my head (maybe I'm wrong). I'm guessing with this approach my overhead terrain would lose all of the cohesiveness delivered by the Perlin. Imagine I calculate (0, 0) as overhead tile 1 and then to the east of that I plug in (50, 0). OK, great, I now have 49 pixels of detail I could then "drill down" into. The issue I have in my head with this approach (without attempting it) is that there's no guarantee from my Perlin noise that (0,0) would be a good neighbor to (50,0) as they could have wildly different "elevations" or p/resultant values returning from the Perlin equation when I generate the overhead map. I think I can conceive of using the Perlin noise for the overhead tile to then reuse the p value as a seed for the "detail" level of noise once I zoom in. That would ensure my detail Perlin is always the same configuration for (0,0), (1,0), etc. ad nauseam but I'm not sure if there are better approaches out there or if this is a sound approach at all.

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  • Listen to Local FM Radio in Windows 7 Media Center

    - by DigitalGeekery
    If you have a supported tuner card and connected FM antenna, you can listen to your favorite local over-the-air FM stations in Windows 7 Media Center. Before the FM radio option will be available in Windows Media Center, you’ll need to have a TV or Radio tuner card installed and configured. If you have a TV tuner card installed, you may already have a Radio tuner as well. Many TV tuner cards also have built in FM tuners. Open Windows Media Center, scroll the “Music” and over to “Radio.” Click on “FM Radio.”   The radio will turn on and you’ll see the current station number listed in the white box. Just below are standard “Seek” and “Tune” buttons, as well as “Preset” options. Tuning works just like a typical FM radio. Click on the (-) or (+) buttons to “Tune” or “Seek” up and down the dial. If you already know the frequency of the station, enter the numbers using the numeric keypad on the remote control or keyboard. To save the current station you’re listening to as a preset, click on the “Save as Preset” button. Type in a custom name for your preset station and click “Save.”   Once you set your presets, they will also be available on the main FM Radio screen. The transport controls at the bottom of the screen also allow you to control Volume, Pause, Play, Skip back, and Skip forward. Fast Forward and Rewind, however, are not supported.   This is a nice option if you’d like to listen to your local FM favorites on your computer, especially if those stations aren’t available online. If you don’t have an FM tuner and want to listen to thousands of online radio streams, check out our article on RadioTime in WMC. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Listen to Over 100,000 Radio Stations in Windows Media CenterListen To XM Radio with Windows Media Center in Windows 7Using Netflix Watchnow in Windows Vista Media Center (Gmedia)Schedule Updates for Windows Media CenterIntegrate Hulu Desktop and Windows Media Center 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 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional The Growth of Citibank Quickly Switch between Tabs in IE Windows Media Player 12: Tweak Video & Sound with Playback Enhancements Own a cell phone, or does a cell phone own you? Make your Joomla & Drupal Sites Mobile with OSMOBI Integrate Twitter and Delicious and Make Life Easier

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  • New SQL Code Deployment Book and Damn I Need to Blog More

    - by Rodney
    Select datediff(d,'02/19/2009',getdate()) This value returned from the above SELECT statement  is 398 and that is the number of days since my last blog post.  As I was formulating my apology for this hiatus from blogging, it dawned on me that I also do not twitter (sorry tweet) and as apologies beget apologies, I then realized that instead of catching up on the backlog of blogs, I should write a book about what I have been most focused on in the past year, one month and 3 days.  That focus is my day job, which of course, most of us have. And that day job we share is why most of us read blogs, tweets, articles and even books in the first place. So my focus for the past year has been SQL code deployments and all of that entails. I am fortunate that Redgate has agreed to entertain my crazy notion of writing an entire book about this subject, which I have tentatively titled, "The Sound and the Fury". Wait..that is not right. Oh yes, a title more befiting a techical tome but with as much profundity, "Standardizing SQL Server Code Deployements - A Redgate Guide". The great American novel must wait a few more years. As I begin this journey, I am inviting you to assist me in the discovery process and even be interviewed and included in the book itself. How do you do deployments in your company? Do you have a documented process or no process? Do you do code review or cross your fingers? Do you work for a small company or a Fortune 100 company? Government regulations or  garage? It does not  matter to me. I am not here to judge. I worked for both companies myself and have seen many things that you can relate to.  If you would like to participate and are one of the 3 people still reading this blog after 398 days, please fill out my survey and let's get started.  http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/RRG86RH  

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  • Set Custom Reload Times for Individual Webpages in Chrome

    - by Asian Angel
    Do you have a webpage that needs to be reloaded every so often or perhaps you have multiple webpages that each need their own individual reload time? Now you can have the best of both with the AutoReloader extension for Google Chrome. Using AutoReloader When you first look at the drop-down window everything will be in a neutral “waiting” state. You can start using the extension immediately by simply entering the desired “time frame” for reloading a webpage. Notice for the “Repeat Option” that “0 = Continuous”… You may want to have a quick look through the “Options” to see if there are any “operational changes” that you would like to make. Once you enter a time click on the “Set Link” to start the timer. Notice that you can view the time remaining on the “Toolbar Button” unless you disabled the feature in the “Options”. Clicking on the “Toolbar Button” will show a larger version of the timer in the drop-down window along with a “Cancel Current Timer Link”. Here is the best part of all with AutoReloader…you can set up your own customized list of “Reload Times” and then access them through the drop-down window. Using the two times shown here we were able to set the “Productive Geek Webpage” up for 30 second reloads and the “TinyHacker Webpage” up for 1 minute reloads at the same time. There was no conflict whatsoever in running both “reload times” simultaneously. This is a really terrific feature! Conclusion Whether you have only one webpage or multiple pages that need periodic reloading (such as tracking a Woot-Off or an Ebay auction) the AutoReloader extension is the perfect tool for the job. Running custom reload times simultaneously have never been easier. Links Download the AutoReloader extension (Google Chrome Extensions) Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Set Up Automatic Timed Page Reloading on Your Webpages in FirefoxRemove Custom about:config Entries the Easy WayEnable Vista Black Style Theme for Google Chrome in XPActivate the Redesigned New-Tab Interface in Google ChromeModify Tab Ordering 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 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional The Growth of Citibank Quickly Switch between Tabs in IE Windows Media Player 12: Tweak Video & Sound with Playback Enhancements Own a cell phone, or does a cell phone own you? Make your Joomla & Drupal Sites Mobile with OSMOBI Integrate Twitter and Delicious and Make Life Easier

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  • Forced Learning

    - by Ben Griswold
    If you ask me, it can be a little intimidating to stand in front of a group and walkthrough anything remotely technical. Even if you know “Technical Thingy #52” inside and out, public speaking can be unsettling.  And if you don’t have your stuff together, well, it can be downright horrifying. With that said, if given the choice, I still like to schedule myself to present on unfamiliar topics. Over the past few months, I’ve talked about Aspect-Oriented Programming, Functional Programming, Lean Software Development and Kanban Systems, Domain-Driven Design and Behavior Driven Development.  What do these topics have in common? You guessed it: I was truly interested in them. I had only a superficial understanding of each. Huh?  Why in the world would I ever want to to put myself in that intimidating situation? Actually, I rarely want to put myself into that situation but I often do as I like the results.  There’s nothing remotely clever going on here.  All I’m doing is putting myself into a compromising situation knowing that I’ll likely work myself out of it by learning the topic prior to the presentation.  I’m simply time-boxing myself to learn something new while knowing there are negative repercussions if I fall short. So, I end up doing tons of research and I learn bunches to ensure I have my head firmly wrap around the material before my talk. I’m not saying I become an expert overnight (or over a couple of weeks) but I’ll definitely know enough to be confident and comfortable and I’ll know more than enough to ensure the audience will learn a thing or two from me. It’s forced learning and though it might sound a little scary to some, it works for me. Now I could very easily rename this post to something like Fear Is My Motivator because, in a sense, fear of failure and embarrassment is what’s driving my learning. However, I’m the guy signing up for the presentation and since the entire process is self-imposed I’m not sure Fear deserves too much credit.  Anyway…

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  • How to design a scalable notification system?

    - by Trent
    I need to write a notification system manager. Here is my requirements: I need to be able to send a Notification on different platforms, which may be totally different (for exemple, I need to be able to send either an SMS or an E-mail). Sometimes the notification may be the same for all recipients for a given platform, but sometimes it may be a notification per recipients (or several) per platform. Each notification can contain platform specific payload (for exemple an MMS can contains a sound or an image). The system need to be scalable, I need to be able to send a very large amount of notification without crashing either the application or the server. It is a two step process, first a customer may type a message and choose a platform to send to, and the notification(s) should be created to be processed either real-time either later. Then the system needs to send the notification to the platform provider. For now, I end up with some though but I don't know how scalable it will be or if it is a good design. I've though of the following objects (in a pseudo language): a generic Notification object: class Notification { String $message; Payload $payload; Collection<Recipient> $recipients; } The problem with the following objects is what if I've 1.000.000 recipients ? Even if the Recipient object is very small, it'll take too much memory. I could also create one Notification per recipient, but some platform providers requires me to send it in batch, meaning I need to define one Notification with several Recipients. Each created notification could be stored in a persistent storage like a DB or Redis. Would it be a good it to aggregate this later to make sure it is scalable? On the second step, I need to process this notification. But how could I distinguish the notification to the right platform provider? Should I use an object like MMSNotification extending an abstract Notification? or something like Notification.setType('MMS')? To allow to process a lot of notification at the same time, I think a messaging queue system like RabbitMQ may be the right tool. Is it? It would allow me to queue a lot of notification and have several worker to pop notification and process them. But what if I need to batch the recipients as seen above? Then I imagine a NotificationProcessor object for which I could I add NotificationHandler each NotificationHandler would be in charge to connect the platform provider and perform notification. I can also use an EventManager to allow pluggable behavior. Any feedbacks or ideas? Thanks for giving your time. Note: I'm used to work in PHP and it is likely the language of my choice.

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  • links for 2010-04-22

    - by Bob Rhubart
    Barry N. Perkins: Unique Business Value vs. Unique IT "Some solutions may look good today, solving a budget challenge by reducing cost, or solving a specific tactical challenge, but result in highly complex environments, that may be difficult to manage and maintain and limit the future potential of your business. Put differently, some solutions might push today's challenge into the future, resulting in a more complex and expensive solution." -- Barry N. Perkins, VP Oracle Modernization & Oracle Integrated Solutions (tags: oracle otn enterprisearchitecture modernization) Paul Homchick: The Information Driven Value Chain - Part 2 Paul Homchick continues his series with a look "at the way investments have been made in enterprise software in an effort to create and manage value, and how systems are moving from a controlled-process approach design towards gathering and using dynamically using information." (tags: oracle otn enterprisearchitecture) @vambenepe: The battle of the Cloud Frameworks: Application Servers redux? "The battle of the Cloud Frameworks has started," says William Vambenepe, "and it will look a lot like the battle of the Application Servers which played out over the last decade and a half." (tags: oracle otn cloud frameworks appserver) @ORACLENERD: COLLABORATE: Day 4 Wrap Up Oraclenerd feesses up: "The day started out with the realization that I pulled off the best (COLLABORATE - self annointed) prank ever. Twitter was...all atwitter about the fact that Mark Rittman was Oracle's Person of the Year. Of course it wasn't true. If you look at the picture, you'll realize that he's wearing exactly the same clothes in the magazine cover as he is in real life." (tags: collaborate2010 oracleace) Oracle's Hal Stern at Cloud Expo: "We've Moved from 'What' to 'How'" | Cloud Computing Journal "Hal also spoke a bit about building 'a sustainable IT model.' By this, he said he didn't mean the various Green IT and similar efforts that 'are all about data center efficiency. I think the operational model is just as important. Many enterprises are managing a tremendous amount of complexity, and it's hard to make this sustainable.'" -- Cloud News Desk (tags: oracle cloud cloudexpo halstern) @ORACLENERD: COLLABORATE: The Beach Party "Then tiki statues somehow were incorporated into various dances" -- Oracle ACE Chet "oraclenerd" Justice (tags: 0racle otn oracleace collaborate2010 oaug ioug lasvegas) David Andrews: Collaborate Day Two "Collaborate 2010 has focused on helping attendees understand what is already available and how to make more effective use of it. This does not sound exciting but it is extremely valuable. Most customers use only a small fraction of the capability of the products they already own. Helping them understand all the additional things they could be doing without buying anything more is very valuable." -- David Andrews (tags: oracle oaug collaborate2010 ioug)

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  • Cross-platform independent development

    - by Joe Wreschnig
    Some years ago, if you wrote in C and some subset of C++ and used a sufficient number of platform abstractions (via SDL or whatever), you could run on every platform an indie could get on - Linux, Windows, Mac OS of various versions, obscure stuff like BeOS, and the open consoles like the GP2X and post-death Dreamcast. If you got a contract for a closed platform at some point, you could port your game to that platform with "minimal" code changes as well. Today, indie developers must use XNA to get on the Xbox 360 (and upcoming Windows phone); must not use XNA to work anywhere else but Windows; until recently had to use Java on Android; Flash doesn't run on phones, HTML5 doesn't work on IE. Unlike e.g. DirectX vs. OpenGL or Windows vs. Unix, these are changes to the core language you write your code in and can't be papered over without, basically, writing a compiler. You can move some game logic into scripts and include an interpreter - except when you can't, because the iPhone SDK doesn't allow it, and performance suffers because no one allows JIT. So what can you do if you want a really cross-platform portable game, or even just a significant body of engine and logic code? Is this not a problem because the platforms have fundamentally diverged - it's just plain not worthwhile to try to target both an iPhone and the Xbox 360 with any shared code because such a game would be bad? (I find this very unlikely. I can easily see wanting to share a game between a Windows Mobile phone and an Android, or an Xbox 360 and an iPad.) Are interfaces so high-level now that porting time is negligible? (I might believe this for business applications, but not for games with strict performance requirements.) Is this going to become more pronounced in the future? Is the split going to be, somewhat scarily, still down vendor lines? Will we all rely on high-level middleware like Flash or Unity to get anything cross-platform done? tl;dr - Is porting a problem, is it going to be a bigger problem in the future, and if so how do we solve it?

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  • How to implement an email unsubscribe system for a site with many kinds of emails?

    - by Mike Liu
    I'm working on a website that features many different types of emails. Users have accounts, and when logged in they have access to a setting page that they can use to customize what types of emails they receive. However, I'd like to also give users an easy way to unsubscribe directly in the emails they receive. I've looked into list unsubscribe headers as well as creating some type of one click link that would unsubscribe a user from that type of email without requiring login or further action. The later would probably require me to break convention and make changes to the database in response to a GET on the link. However, am I incorrect in thinking that either of these would require me to generate and permanently store a unique identifier in my database for every email I ever send, really complicating email delivery? Without that, I'm not sure how I would be able to uniquely identify a user and a type of email in order to change their email preferences, and this identifier would need to be stored forever as a user could have an email sitting in their inbox for a long time before they decide to act on it. Alternatively, I was considering having a no-login page for managing email preferences. In contrast to above where I would need one of these identifiers for each email, this would only need one identifier per user, with no generation or other action required on sending an email. All of these raise security issues, and they could potentially be used by people to tamper with others' email preferences. This could be mitigated somewhat by ensuring that the identifier is really difficult to guess. For the once per user identifier approach, I was considering generating the identifier by passing a user's ID through some type of encryption algorithm, is this a sound approach? For the per-email identifiers, perhaps I could use a user's ID appended to the time. However, even this would not eliminate the problem entirely, as this would really just be security through obscurity, and anyone with the URL could tamper, and in the end the main defense would have to be that most people aren't so bored as to tamper with other people's email preferences. Are there any other alternatives I've missed, or issues or solutions with these that anyone can provide insight on? What are best practices in this area?

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  • Interviews: Going Beyond the Technical Quiz

    - by Tony Davis
    All developers will be familiar with the basic format of a technical interview. After a bout of CV-trawling to gauge basic experience, strengths and weaknesses, the interview turns technical. The whiteboard takes center stage and the challenge is set to design a function or query, or solve what on the face of it might seem a disarmingly simple programming puzzle. Most developers will have experienced those few panic-stricken moments, when one’s mind goes as blank as the whiteboard, before un-popping the marker pen, and hopefully one’s mental functions, to work through the problem. It is a way to probe the candidate’s knowledge of basic programming structures and techniques and to challenge their critical thinking. However, these challenges or puzzles, often devised by some of the smartest brains in the development team, have a tendency to become unnecessarily ‘tricksy’. They often seem somewhat academic in nature. While the candidate straight out of IT school might breeze through the construction of a Markov chain, a candidate with bags of practical experience but less in the way of formal training could become nonplussed. Also, a whiteboard and a marker pen make up only a very small part of the toolkit that a programmer will use in everyday work. I remember vividly my first job interview, for a position as technical editor. It went well, but after the usual CV grilling and technical questions, I was only halfway there. Later, they sat me alongside a team of editors, in front of a computer loaded with MS Word and copy of SQL Server Query Analyzer, and my task was to edit a real chapter for a real SQL Server book that they planned to publish, including validating and testing all the code. It was a tough challenge but I came away with a sound knowledge of the sort of work I’d do, and its context. It makes perfect sense, yet my impression is that many organizations don’t do this. Indeed, it is only relatively recently that Red Gate started to move over to this model for developer interviews. Now, instead of, or perhaps in addition to, the whiteboard challenges, the candidate can expect to sit with their prospective team, in front of Visual Studio, loaded with all the useful tools in the developer’s kit (ReSharper and so on) and asked to, for example, analyze and improve a real piece of software. The same principles should apply when interviewing for a database positon. In addition to the usual questions challenging the candidate’s knowledge of such things as b-trees, object permissions, database recovery models, and so on, sit the candidate down with the other database developers or DBAs. Arm them with a copy of Management Studio, and a few other tools, then challenge them to discover the flaws in a stored procedure, and improve its performance. Or present them with a corrupt database and ask them to get the database back online, and discover the cause of the corruption.

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  • Binary on the Coat of Arms of the Governor General of Canada

    - by user132636
    Can you help me further this investigation? Here is about 10% of the work I have done on it. I present it only to see if there are any truly curious people among you. I made a video a few weeks ago showing some strange things about the Governor General's Coat of Arms and the binary on it. Today, I noticed something kinda cool and thought I would share. Here is the binary as it appears on the COA: 110010111001001010100100111010011 As DEC: 6830770643 (this is easily found on the web) Take a close look at that number. What do you notice about it? It has a few interesting features, but here is the one no one has pointed out... Split it down the middle and you have 68307 70643. The first digit is double the value of the last digit. The second digit is double the second last digit. The third digit is half of the third to last digit. And the middle ones are even or neutral. At first, I thought of it as energy. ++-nnnn+-- But actually you can create something else with it using the values. 221000211. See how that works. You may be asking why that is significant. Bare with me. I know 99% are rolling their eyes. 221000211 as base3 gives you this as binary: 100011101000111 100011101000111 as HEX is 4747, which converts to "GG". Initials of Governor General. GG.ca is his website. When you convert to base 33 (there are 33 digits in the original code) you get "GOV" Interesting? :D There is a lot more to it. I'll continue to show some strange coincidences if anyone is interested. Sorry if I am not explaining this correctly. By now you have probably figured out that I have no background in this. Which is why I am here. Thank you.

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  • Enhance Your Browsing with Hyperwords in Firefox

    - by Asian Angel
    While browsing it is easy to find information that you would like to know more about, convert, or translate. The Hyperwords extension provides access to these types of resources and more in Firefox. Using Hyperwords Once the extension has finished installing you will be presented with a demo video that will let you learn more about how Hyperwords works. For our first example we chose to look for more information concerning “WASP-12b” using Wikipedia. Notice the small bluish circle on the lower right of the highlighted term…it is the default access for the Hyperwords menu (access by hovering mouse over it). If you hover over the the Wikipedia (or other) link you can access the information in a scrollable popup window. Or if you prefer click on the link to view the information in a new tab. Choose the style that best suits your needs. Hyperwords is extremely useful for quick unit conversions. Suppose you want to share a news story that you have found while browsing. Highlight the title, access Hyperwords, and choose your preferred sharing source. You may need to authorize access for Hyperwords to post to your account. Once you have authorized access you can start sharing those links very easily. This is just a small sampling of Hyperwords many useful features. Preferences Hyperwords has a nice set of preferences available to help you customize it. Alter the menu popup style, add or remove menu entries, and modify other functions for Hyperwords. Conclusion Hyperwords makes a nice addition to Firefox for anyone needing quick access to search, reference, translation, and other services while browsing. Links Download the Hyperwords extension (Mozilla Add-ons) Download the Hyperwords extension (Extension Homepage) Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Switch to Private Browsing Mode Easily with Toggle Private BrowsingPreview Tabs in Firefox with Tab Preview 0.3You Really Want to Completely Disable Tabs in Firefox?Quick Hits: 11 Firefox Tab How-TosWhen to Use Protect Tab vs Lock Tab 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 Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 Outlook Tools, one stop tweaking for any Outlook version Zoofs, find the most popular tweeted YouTube videos Video preview of new Windows Live Essentials 21 Cursor Packs for XP, Vista & 7 Map the Stars with Stellarium Use ILovePDF To Split and Merge PDF Files

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  • permanently load module

    - by Radu
    I have a Compaq Presario CQ-61 320SQ, I am using Ubuntu 10.04 because after update to 10.10 my mouse and touchpad won't work, network won't work, sound won't work ... (I managed to fix most of them after almost a month of googling, but not all, my 2 Desktops have no problem with 10.10) so I decided to switch back to 10.04, where I have a problem: My broadband speed is very low beacause of the kernel module r8169, I downloaded the good module r8101 and every time the computer boots have a rc.local entry to fix this. Question: Can I load the modul permanently from a specific location. I heard about /etc/modules but there I need the module name, but I have to load it from a specific path (where is the default path for that) Thank you. So I studied the script: It creates the file r8101.ko in /lib/modules/uname -r/kernel/drivers/net so I think as long as nobody will delete that file, and I don't update the kernel, maybe adding r8108 to /etc/modules will work, and add r8169 to blacklist ... I will give it a try. EDIT2: So I added r8101 to /etc/modules and blacklist r8169 to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf It still uses the old module, lsmod prints: radu@adu:~$ lsmod | grep r8 r8101 67626 0 r8169 34108 0 mii 4381 1 r8169 EDIT: the module is loaded using this script that came with it: #!/bin/sh # invoke insmod with all arguments we got # and use a pathname, as insmod doesn't look in . by default TARGET_PATH=/lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/net echo echo "Check old driver and unload it." check=`lsmod | grep r8169` if [ "$check" != "" ]; then echo "rmmod r8169" /sbin/rmmod r8169 fi check=`lsmod | grep r8101` if [ "$check" != "" ]; then echo "rmmod r8101" /sbin/rmmod r8101 fi echo "Build the module and install" echo "-------------------------------" >> log.txt date 1>>log.txt make all 1>>log.txt || exit 1 module=`ls src/*.ko` module=${module#src/} module=${module%.ko} if [ "$module" == "" ]; then echo "No driver exists!!!" exit 1 elif [ "$module" != "r8169" ]; then if test -e $TARGET_PATH/r8169.ko ; then echo "Backup r8169.ko" if test -e $TARGET_PATH/r8169.bak ; then i=0 while test -e $TARGET_PATH/r8169.bak$i do i=$(($i+1)) done echo "rename r8169.ko to r8169.bak$i" mv $TARGET_PATH/r8169.ko $TARGET_PATH/r8169.bak$i else echo "rename r8169.ko to r8169.bak" mv $TARGET_PATH/r8169.ko $TARGET_PATH/r8169.bak fi fi fi echo "Depending module. Please wait." depmod -a echo "load module $module" modprobe $module echo "Completed." exit 0

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  • Play Thousands of Online Radio Stations with Shoutcast in VLC

    - by DigitalGeekery
    Are you looking for more variety from your radio stations? Today we’ll take a look at how to easily stream thousands of radio stations to your desktop with VLC media player. Getting Started Select Media from the menu, go to Services Discovery, and click Shoutcast radio listings.   Next, select View from the menu and click Playlist.   Or, click on the Show Playlist button In the Playlist window, click on Shoutcast radio listings in the left pane. You should then see a very long list of Titles displayed on the right. Scroll though the list to find a music genre or topic that interests you. Double-click to expand the list of station options. Select one of the channel listings from the list and double click to begin playing.   Looking for a specific station? Type a search term into the search filter box to see if it is available.   That’s it. Sit back and enjoy listening to your favorite Internet radio programming. If you are a music or talk radio fan, you aren’t likely to run out of listening options in VLC. Want to find some more uses for VLC? Check out our articles on how to copy a DVD, convert video files to MP3, and how to set a video as your desktop wallpaper. Download VLC Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Listen to Over 100,000 Radio Stations in Windows Media CenterListen to Local FM Radio in Windows 7 Media CenterListen and Record Over 12,000 Online Radio Stations with RadioSureGeek Reviews: Play And Record Internet Radio With Screamer RadioWeekend Fun: Watch Television on Your PC with AnyTV 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 Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 Zoofs, find the most popular tweeted YouTube videos Video preview of new Windows Live Essentials 21 Cursor Packs for XP, Vista & 7 Map the Stars with Stellarium Use ILovePDF To Split and Merge PDF Files TimeToMeet is a Simple Online Meeting Planning Tool

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  • A Slice of Raspberry Pi

    - by Phil Factor
    Guest editorial for the ITPro/SysAdmin newsletter The Raspberry Pi Foundation has done a superb design job on their new $35 network-enabled Linux computer. This tiny machine, incorporating an ARM processor on a Broadcom BCM2835 multimedia chip, aims to put the fun back into learning computing. The public response has been overwhelmingly positive.Note that aim: "…to put the fun back". Education in Information Technology is in dire straits. It always has been, but seems to have deteriorated further still, even in the face of improved provision of equipment.In many countries, the government controls the curriculum. It predicted a shortage in office-based IT skills, and so geared the ICT curriculum toward mind-numbing training in word-processing and spreadsheet skills. Instead, the shortage has turned out to be in people with an engineering-mindset, who can solve problems with whatever technologies are available and learn new techniques quickly, in a rapidly-changing field.In retrospect, the assumption that specific training was required rather than an education was an idiotic response to the arrival of mainstream information technology. As a result, ICT became a disaster area, which discouraged a generation of youngsters from a career in IT, and thereby led directly to the shortage of people with the skills that are required to exploit the potential of Information Technology..Raspberry Pi aims to reverse the trend. This is a rig that is geared to fast graphics in high resolution. It is no toy. It should be a superb games machine. However, the use of Fedora, Debian, or Arch Linux ARM shows the more serious educational intent behind the Foundation's work. It looks like it will even do some office work too!So, get hold of any power supply that provides a 5VDC source at the required 700mA; an old Blackberry charger will do or, alternatively, it will run off four AA cells. You'll need a USB hub to support the mouse and keyboard, and maybe a hard drive. You'll want a DVI monitor (with audio out) or TV (sound and video). You'll also need to be able to cope with wired Ethernet 10/100, if you want networking.With this lot assembled, stick the paraphernalia on the back of the HDTV with Blu Tack, get a nice keyboard, and you have a classy Linux-based home computer. The major cost is in the T.V and the keyboard. If you're not already writing software for this platform, then maybe, at a time when some countries are talking of orders in the millions, you should consider it.

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  • NYC Silverlight FireStarter - June 5th 2010 at the NYC Microsoft Office

    - by Sam Abraham
    On Saturday June 5th, 2010, I spent my Saturday morning at the NYC Silverlight FireStarter. Presenting was Peter Laudati from Microsoft and Jason Beres, Matt Van Horn and Todd Snyder from Infragistics. I watched the Simulcast for the morning sessions as I was tied up with some work, but ended up finally making it to the Microsoft Office and had the opportunity to attend the last hour of the event in person.   For me, the quality of the Simulcast was as good as in-person attendance so far as sound/video quality and the interaction with speakers. In the background was a screen with tweets from remote attendees asking questions or commenting on the presentations. Presenters did periodically stop to answer the tweeted questions as well as questions from attendees. Only thing I missed was getting my hands on some of that swag that was (literally) flying in the air at the event floor.   Upon my arrival at the Microsoft Office Location in NYC, I spoke with Rachel Appel and Peter Laudati asking for permission to take a few photos to record the outstanding effort that took place in putting this event together. Both agreed and I started with putting my photography skills to work.   You can always gauge the quality of an event with the number of its attendees who opt to stay till the last minute as well as the level of interaction of the audience with the speaker. With most of the FireStarter attendees remaining till the very end of the talk, and with the many questions that were asked, one can simply judge the event as a success as per my aforementioned criteria.   Evaluation forms were passed around and Peter strongly encouraged the audience to openly speak their mind as they record their comments. I didn't get to submit my evaluation as I was busy recording the event in photos, so here it goes: I believe that lots of hard work was put into making this event a reality. Quality of speakers, topics and level of Geekiness at the event was outstanding.  Overall, aside from a minor issue with Lunch delivery time, this event was of high quality and I am very sure everyone's evaluation will be in line with my analysis of it being a great success. Below are a few photos of the event.   --Sam Abraham Site Director - West Palm Beach .Net User Group www.Fladotnet.com     NYC Silverlight FireStarter Speakers - From Left to right: Peter Laudati, Todd Snyder, Matt Van Horn & Jason Beres   As jason wasn't quiet visible in the above photo, a closeup was taken (It was Jason's birthday and he had to leave a bit early, so the Infagisticts team thought outside the box...)     Full Room - That was at the last hour of the event   Another view of full room   Discussions during the break   End-of-event Raffle

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  • National Give Camp Weekend - January 14-16, 2011

    - by MOSSLover
    What is a Give Camp?  I get asked this question constantly in the SharePoint Community.  About 3 years ago there was an event called "We Are Microsoft" in Dallas, TX.  A lady named, Toi Wright, gathered up a bunch of charities and gathered up a bunch of IT Professionals in the community.  They met for an entire weekend devising better ways to help these charities with 3 days projects.  None of these charities had in house IT staff or they were lacking.  The time these projects would save would help out other people in the long run.  The first give camp was really popular that a couple guys from Kansas City decided to come up with a give camp in the Kansas City regiona.  The event was called Coders 4 Charity.  I read Jeff Julian's post on the "We Are Microsoft" event that it inspired me to get involved.  i showed up to this event and we were split into teams.  On that team I met a couple really awsome guys: Blake Theiss, Lee Brandt, Tim Wright, and Joe Loux.  We created a SharePoint site for a boyscout troup.  It was my first exposure to Silverlight 1.1.  I had so much fun that I attended the event the next year and the St. Louis Coders 4 Charity.  Last year in 2010 when I moved i searched high and low.  Sure enough they had an event in Philadelphia.  I helped out with two SharePoint Projects for a team of firefighters and another charity.  This year there are a series of give camps around the U.S.  They have consolidated most of the give camps.  The first ever New York City Give Camp is on National Give Camp Day.  If you guys are interested I see there is a give camp in Philadelphia, St. Louis, Northwest Arkansas, Seattle, Atlanta, Houston, and more...Here is a link to the site I would definitely encourage you to get involved: http://givecamp.org/national-givecamp/.  Also, if you feel like it's only developer focused that's entirely wrong.  They need DBAs, Project Leads, Architects, and many other roles fulfilled aside from development.  It is a great experience to meet good people and help out a charity doing what we all love to do.  I strongle encourage getting involved in a give camp.  if you are coming to the NYC Give Camp I would love to meet you.  i will be there on Saturday somewhere in the morning until around dinner time.

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  • How to shoot yourself in the foot (DO NOT Read in the office)

    - by TATWORTH
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/TATWORTH/archive/2013/06/21/how-to-shoot-yourself-in-the-foot-do-not-read.aspxLet me make it absolutely clear - the following is:merely collated by your Geek from http://www.codeproject.com/Lounge.aspx?msg=3917012#xx3917012xxvery, very very funny so you read it in the presence of others at your own riskso here is the list - you have been warned!C You shoot yourself in the foot.   C++ You accidently create a dozen instances of yourself and shoot them all in the foot. Providing emergency medical assistance is impossible since you can't tell which are bitwise copies and which are just pointing at others and saying "That's me, over there."   FORTRAN You shoot yourself in each toe, iteratively, until you run out of toes, then you read in the next foot and repeat. If you run out of bullets, you continue anyway because you have no exception-handling facility.   Modula-2 After realizing that you can't actually accomplish anything in this language, you shoot yourself in the head.   COBOL USEing a COLT 45 HANDGUN, AIM gun at LEG.FOOT, THEN place ARM.HAND.FINGER on HANDGUN.TRIGGER and SQUEEZE. THEN return HANDGUN to HOLSTER. CHECK whether shoelace needs to be retied.   Lisp You shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds...   BASIC Shoot yourself in the foot with a water pistol. On big systems, continue until entire lower body is waterlogged.   Forth Foot yourself in the shoot.   APL You shoot yourself in the foot; then spend all day figuring out how to do it in fewer characters.   Pascal The compiler won't let you shoot yourself in the foot.   Snobol If you succeed, shoot yourself in the left foot. If you fail, shoot yourself in the right foot.   HyperTalk Put the first bullet of the gun into foot left of leg of you. Answer the result.   Prolog You tell your program you want to be shot in the foot. The program figures out how to do it, but the syntax doesn't allow it to explain.   370 JCL You send your foot down to MIS with a 4000-page document explaining how you want it to be shot. Three years later, your foot comes back deep-fried.   FORTRAN-77 You shoot yourself in each toe, iteratively, until you run out of toes, then you read in the next foot and repeat. If you run out of bullets, you continue anyway because you still can't do exception-processing.   Modula-2 (alternative) You perform a shooting on what might be currently a foot with what might be currently a bullet shot by what might currently be a gun.   BASIC (compiled) You shoot yourself in the foot with a BB using a SCUD missile launcher.   Visual Basic You'll really only appear to have shot yourself in the foot, but you'll have so much fun doing it that you won't care.   Forth (alternative) BULLET DUP3 * GUN LOAD FOOT AIM TRIGGER PULL BANG! EMIT DEAD IF DROP ROT THEN (This takes about five bytes of memory, executes in two to ten clock cycles on any processor and can be used to replace any existing function of the language as well as in any future words). (Welcome to bottom up programming - where you, too, can perform compiler pre-processing instead of writing code)   APL (alternative) You hear a gunshot and there's a hole in your foot, but you don't remember enough linear algebra to understand what happened. or @#&^$%&%^ foot   Pascal (alternative) Same as Modula-2 except that the bullet is not the right type for the gun and your hand is blown off.   Snobol (alternative) You grab your foot with your hand, then rewrite your hand to be a bullet. The act of shooting the original foot then changes your hand/bullet into yet another foot (a left foot).   Prolog (alternative) You attempt to shoot yourself in the foot, but the bullet, failing to find its mark, backtracks to the gun, which then explodes in your face.   COMAL You attempt to shoot yourself in the foot with a water pistol, but the bore is clogged, and the pressure build-up blows apart both the pistol and your hand. or draw_pistol aim_at_foot(left) pull_trigger hop(swearing)   Scheme As Lisp, but none of the other appendages are aware of this happening.   Algol You shoot yourself in the foot with a musket. The musket is aesthetically fascinating and the wound baffles the adolescent medic in the emergency room.   Ada If you are dumb enough to actually use this language, the United States Department of Defense will kidnap you, stand you up in front of a firing squad and tell the soldiers, "Shoot at the feet." or The Department of Defense shoots you in the foot after offering you a blindfold and a last cigarette. or After correctly packaging your foot, you attempt to concurrently load the gun, pull the trigger, scream and shoot yourself in the foot. When you try, however, you discover that your foot is of the wrong type. or After correctly packing your foot, you attempt to concurrently load the gun, pull the trigger, scream, and confidently aim at your foot knowing it is safe. However the cordite in the round does an Unchecked Conversion, fires and shoots you in the foot anyway.   Eiffel   You create a GUN object, two FOOT objects and a BULLET object. The GUN passes both the FOOT objects a reference to the BULLET. The FOOT objects increment their hole counts and forget about the BULLET. A little demon then drives a garbage truck over your feet and grabs the bullet (both of it) on the way. Smalltalk You spend so much time playing with the graphics and windowing system that your boss shoots you in the foot, takes away your workstation and makes you develop in COBOL on a character terminal. or You send the message shoot to gun, with selectors bullet and myFoot. A window pops up saying Gunpowder doesNotUnderstand: spark. After several fruitless hours spent browsing the methods for Trigger, FiringPin and IdealGas, you take the easy way out and create ShotFoot, a subclass of Foot with an additional instance variable bulletHole. Object Oriented Pascal You perform a shooting on what might currently be a foot with what might currently be a bullet fired from what might currently be a gun.   PL/I You consume all available system resources, including all the offline bullets. The Data Processing & Payroll Department doubles its size, triples its budget, acquires four new mainframes and drops the original one on your foot. Postscript foot bullets 6 locate loadgun aim gun shoot showpage or It takes the bullet ten minutes to travel from the gun to your foot, by which time you're long since gone out to lunch. The text comes out great, though.   PERL You stab yourself in the foot repeatedly with an incredibly large and very heavy Swiss Army knife. or You pick up the gun and begin to load it. The gun and your foot begin to grow to huge proportions and the world around you slows down, until the gun fires. It makes a tiny hole, which you don't feel. Assembly Language You crash the OS and overwrite the root disk. The system administrator arrives and shoots you in the foot. After a moment of contemplation, the administrator shoots himself in the foot and then hops around the room rabidly shooting at everyone in sight. or You try to shoot yourself in the foot only to discover you must first reinvent the gun, the bullet, and your foot.or The bullet travels to your foot instantly, but it took you three weeks to load the round and aim the gun.   BCPL You shoot yourself somewhere in the leg -- you can't get any finer resolution than that. Concurrent Euclid You shoot yourself in somebody else's foot.   Motif You spend days writing a UIL description of your foot, the trajectory, the bullet and the intricate scrollwork on the ivory handles of the gun. When you finally get around to pulling the trigger, the gun jams.   Powerbuilder While attempting to load the gun you discover that the LoadGun system function is buggy; as a work around you tape the bullet to the outside of the gun and unsuccessfully attempt to fire it with a nail. In frustration you club your foot with the butt of the gun and explain to your client that this approximates the functionality of shooting yourself in the foot and that the next version of Powerbuilder will fix it.   Standard ML By the time you get your code to typecheck, you're using a shoot to foot yourself in the gun.   MUMPS You shoot 583149 AK-47 teflon-tipped, hollow-point, armour-piercing bullets into even-numbered toes on odd-numbered feet of everyone in the building -- with one line of code. Three weeks later you shoot yourself in the head rather than try to modify that line.   Java You locate the Gun class, but discover that the Bullet class is abstract, so you extend it and write the missing part of the implementation. Then you implement the ShootAble interface for your foot, and recompile the Foot class. The interface lets the bullet call the doDamage method on the Foot, so the Foot can damage itself in the most effective way. Now you run the program, and call the doShoot method on the instance of the Gun class. First the Gun creates an instance of Bullet, which calls the doFire method on the Gun. The Gun calls the hit(Bullet) method on the Foot, and the instance of Bullet is passed to the Foot. But this causes an IllegalHitByBullet exception to be thrown, and you die.   Unix You shoot yourself in the foot or % ls foot.c foot.h foot.o toe.c toe.o % rm * .o rm: .o: No such file or directory % ls %   370 JCL (alternative) You shoot yourself in the head just thinking about it.   DOS JCL You first find the building you're in in the phone book, then find your office number in the corporate phone book. Then you have to write this down, then describe, in cubits, your exact location, in relation to the door (right hand side thereof). Then you need to write down the location of the gun (loading it is a proprietary utility), then you load it, and the COBOL program, and run them, and, with luck, it may be run tonight.   VMS   $ MOUNT/DENSITY=.45/LABEL=BULLET/MESSAGE="BYE" BULLET::BULLET$GUN SYS$BULLET $ SET GUN/LOAD/SAFETY=OFF/SIGHT=NONE/HAND=LEFT/CHAMBER=1/ACTION=AUTOMATIC/ LOG/ALL/FULL SYS$GUN_3$DUA3:[000000]GUN.GNU $ SHOOT/LOG/AUTO SYS$GUN SYS$SYSTEM:[FOOT]FOOT.FOOT   %DCL-W-ACTIMAGE, error activating image GUN -CLI-E-IMGNAME, image file $3$DUA240:[GUN]GUN.EXE;1 -IMGACT-F-NOTNATIVE, image is not an OpenVMS Alpha AXP image or %SYS-F-FTSHT, foot shot (fifty lines of traceback omitted) sh,csh, etc You can't remember the syntax for anything, so you spend five hours reading manual pages, then your foot falls asleep. You shoot the computer and switch to C.   Apple System 7 Double click the gun icon and a window giving a selection for guns, target areas, plus balloon help with medical remedies, and assorted sound effects. Click "shoot" button and a small bomb appears with note "Error of Type 1 has occurred."   Windows 3.1 Double click the gun icon and wait. Eventually a window opens giving a selection for guns, target areas, plus balloon help with medical remedies, and assorted sound effects. Click "shoot" button and a small box appears with note "Unable to open Shoot.dll, check that path is correct."   Windows 95 Your gun is not compatible with this OS and you must buy an upgrade and install it before you can continue. Then you will be informed that you don't have enough memory.   CP/M I remember when shooting yourself in the foot with a BB gun was a big deal.   DOS You finally found the gun, but can't locate the file with the foot for the life of you.   MSDOS You shoot yourself in the foot, but can unshoot yourself with add-on software.   Access You try to point the gun at your foot, but it shoots holes in all your Borland distribution diskettes instead.   Paradox Not only can you shoot yourself in the foot, your users can too.   dBase You squeeze the trigger, but the bullet moves so slowly that by the time your foot feels the pain, you've forgotten why you shot yourself anyway. or You buy a gun. Bullets are only available from another company and are promised to work so you buy them. Then you find out that the next version of the gun is the one scheduled to actually shoot bullets.   DBase IV, V1.0 You pull the trigger, but it turns out that the gun was a poorly designed hand grenade and the whole building blows up.   SQL You cut your foot off, send it out to a service bureau and when it returns, it has a hole in it but will no longer fit the attachment at the end of your leg. or Insert into Foot Select Bullet >From Gun.Hand Where Chamber = 'LOADED' And Trigger = 'PULLED'   Clipper You grab a bullet, get ready to insert it in the gun so that you can shoot yourself in the foot and discover that the gun that the bullets fits has not yet been built, but should be arriving in the mail _REAL_SOON_NOW_. Oracle The menus for coding foot_shooting have not been implemented yet and you can't do foot shooting in SQL.   English You put your foot in your mouth, then bite it off. (For those who don't know, English is a McDonnell Douglas/PICK query language which allegedly requires 110% of system resources to run happily.) Revelation [an implementation of the PICK Operating System] You'll be able to shoot yourself in the foot just as soon as you figure out what all these bullets are for.   FlagShip Starting at the top of your head, you aim the gun at yourself repeatedly until, half an hour later, the gun is finally pointing at your foot and you pull the trigger. A new foot with a hole in it appears but you can't work out how to get rid of the old one and your gun doesn't work anymore.   FidoNet You put your foot in your mouth, then echo it internationally.   PicoSpan [a UNIX-based computer conferencing system] You can't shoot yourself in the foot because you're not a host. or (host variation) Whenever you shoot yourself in the foot, someone opens a topic in policy about it.   Internet You put your foot in your mouth, shoot it, then spam the bullet so that everybody gets shot in the foot.   troff rmtroff -ms -Hdrwp | lpr -Pwp2 & .*place bullet in footer .B .NR FT +3i .in 4 .bu Shoot! .br .sp .in -4 .br .bp NR HD -2i .*   Genetic Algorithms You create 10,000 strings describing the best way to shoot yourself in the foot. By the time the program produces the optimal solution, humans have evolved wings and the problem is moot.   CSP (Communicating Sequential Processes) You only fail to shoot everything that isn't your foot.   MS-SQL Server MS-SQL Server’s gun comes pre-loaded with an unlimited supply of Teflon coated bullets, and it only has two discernible features: the muzzle and the trigger. If that wasn't enough, MS-SQL Server also puts the gun in your hand, applies local anesthetic to the skin of your forefinger and stitches it to the gun's trigger. Meanwhile, another process has set up a spinal block to numb your lower body. It will then proceeded to surgically remove your foot, cryogenically freeze it for preservation, and attach it to the muzzle of the gun so that no matter where you aim, you will shoot your foot. In order to avoid shooting yourself in the foot, you need to unstitch your trigger finger, remove your foot from the muzzle of the gun, and have it surgically reattached. Then you probably want to get some crutches and go out to buy a book on SQL Server Performance Tuning.   Sybase Sybase's gun requires assembly, and you need to go out and purchase your own clip and bullets to load the gun. Assembly is complicated by the fact that Sybase has hidden the gun behind a big stack of reference manuals, but it hasn't told you where that stack is. While you were off finding the gun, assembling it, buying bullets, etc., Sybase was also busy surgically removing your foot and cryogenically freezing it for preservation. Instead of attaching it to the muzzle of the gun, though, it packed your foot on dry ice and sent it UPS-Ground to an unnamed hookah bar somewhere in the middle east. In order to shoot your foot, you must modify your gun with a GPS system for targeting and hire some guy named "Indy" to find the hookah bar and wire the coordinates back to you. By this time, you've probably become so daunted at the tasks stand between you and shooting your foot that you hire a guy who's read all the books on Sybase to help you shoot your foot. If you're lucky, he'll be smart enough both to find your foot and to stop you from shooting it.   Magic software You spend 1 week looking up the correct syntax for GUN. When you find it, you realise that GUN will not let you shoot in your own foot. It will allow you to shoot almost anything but your foot. You then decide to build your own gun. You can't use the standard barrel since this will only allow for standard bullets, which will not fire if the barrel is pointed at your foot. After four weeks, you have created your own custom gun. It blows up in your hand without warning, because you failed to initialise the safety catch and it doesn't know whether the initial state is "0", 0, NULL, "ZERO", 0.0, 0,0, "0.0", or "0,00". You fix the problem with your remaining hand by nesting 12 safety catches, and then decide to build the gun without safety catch. You then shoot the management and retire to a happy life where you code in languages that will allow you to shoot your foot in under 10 days.FirefoxLets you shoot yourself in as many feet as you'd like, while using multiple great addons! IEA moving target in terms of standard ammunition size and doesn't always work properly with non-Microsoft ammunition, so sometimes you shoot something other than your foot. However, it's the corporate world's standard foot-shooting apparatus. Hackers seem to enjoy rigging websites up to trigger cascading foot-shooting failures. Windows 98 About the same as Windows 95 in terms of overall bullet capacity and triggering mechanisms. Includes updated DirectShot API. A new version was released later on to support USB guns, Windows 98 SE.WPF:You get your baseball glove and a ball and you head out to your backyard, where you throw balls to your pitchback. Then your unkempt-haired-cargo-shorts-and-sandals-with-white-socks-wearing neighbor uses XAML to sculpt your arm into a gun, the ball into a bullet and the pitchback into your foot. By now, however, only the neighbor can get it to work and he's only around from 6:30 PM - 3:30 AM. LOGO: You very carefully lay out the trajectory of the bullet. Then you start the gun, which fires very slowly. You walk precisely to the point where the bullet will travel and wait, but just before it gets to you, your class time is up and one of the other kids has already used the system to hack into Sony's PS3 network. Flash: Someone has designed a beautiful-looking gun that anyone can shoot their feet with for free. It weighs six hundred pounds. All kinds of people are shooting themselves in the feet, and sending the link to everyone else so that they can too. That is, except for the criminals, who are all stealing iOS devices that the gun won't work with.APL: Its (mostly) all greek to me. Lisp: Place ((gun in ((hand sight (foot then shoot))))) (Lots of Insipid Stupid Parentheses)Apple OS/X and iOS Once a year, Steve Jobs returns from sick leave to tell millions of unwavering fans how they will be able to shoot themselves in the foot differently this year. They retweet and blog about it ad nauseam, and wait in line to be the first to experience "shoot different".Windows ME Usually fails, even at shooting you in the foot. Yo dawg, I heard you like shooting yourself in the foot. So I put a gun in your gun, so you can shoot yourself in the foot while you shoot yourself in the foot. (Okay, I'm not especially proud of this joke.) Windows 2000 Now you really do have to log in, before you are allowed to shoot yourself in the foot.Windows XPYou thought you learned your lesson: Don't use Windows ME. Then, along came this new creature, built on top of Windows NT! So you spend the next couple days installing antivirus software, patches and service packs, just so you can get that driver to install, and then proceed to shoot yourself in the foot. Windows Vista Newer! Glossier! Shootier! Windows 7 The bullets come out a lot smoother. Active Directory Each bullet now has an attached Bullet Identifier, and can be uniquely identified. Policies can be applied to dictate fragmentation, and the gun will occasionally have a confusing delay after the trigger has been pulled. PythonYou try to use import foot; foot.shoot() only to realize that's only available in 3.0, to which you can't yet upgrade from 2.7 because of all those extension libs lacking support. Solaris Shoots best when used on SPARC hardware, but still runs the trigger GUI under Java. After weeks of learning the appropriate STOP command to prevent the trigger from automatically being pressed on boot, you think you've got it under control. Then the one time you ever use dtrace, it hits a bug that fires the gun. MySQL The feature that allows you to shoot yourself in the foot has been in development for about 6 years, and they are adding it into the next version, which is coming out REAL SOON NOW, promise! But you can always check it out of source control and try it yourself (just not in any environment where data integrity is important because it will probably explode.) PostgreSQLAllows you to have a smug look on your face while you shoot yourself in the foot, because those MySQL guys STILL don't have that feature. NoSQL Barrel? Who needs a barrel? Just put the bullet on your foot, and strike it with a hammer. See? It's so much simpler and more efficient that way. You can even strike multiple bullets in one swing if you swing with a good enough arc, because hammers are easy to use. Getting them to synchronize is a little difficult, though.Eclipse There are about a dozen different packages for shooting yourself in the foot, with weird interdependencies on outdated components. Once you finally navigate the morass and get one installed, you then have something to look at while you shoot yourself in the foot with that package: You can watch the screen redraw.Outlook Makes it really easy to let everyone know you shot yourself in the foot!Shooting yourself in the foot using delegates.You really need to shoot yourself in the foot but you hate firearms (you don't want any dependency on the specifics of shooting) so you delegate it to somebody else. You don't care how it is done as long is shooting your foot. You can do it asynchronously in case you know you may faint so you are called back/slapped in the face by your shooter/friend (or background worker) when everything is done.C#You prepare the gun and the bullet, carefully modeling all of the physics of a bullet traveling through a foot. Just before you're about to pull the trigger, you stumble on System.Windows.BodyParts.Foot.ShootAt(System.Windows.Firearms.IGun gun) in the extended framework, realize you just wasted the entire afternoon, and shoot yourself in the head.PHP<?phprequire("foot_safety_check.php");?><!DOCTYPE HTML><html><head> <!--Lower!--><title>Shooting me in the foot</title></head> <body> <!--LOWER!!!--><leg> <!--OK, I made this one up...--><footer><?php echo (dungSift($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], "ie"))?("Your foot is safe, but you might want to wear a hard hat!"):("<div class=\"shot\">BANG!</div>"); ?></footer></leg> </body> </html>

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  • Commit Review Questions

    - by Wes McClure
    Note: in this article when I refer to a commit, I mean the commit you plan to share with the rest of the team, if you have local commits that you plan to amend/combine, I am referring to the final result. In time you will find these easier to do as you develop, however, all of these are valuable before checking in!  The pre commit review is a nice time to polish what might have been several hours of intense work, during which these things were the last things on your mind!  If you are concerned about losing your work in the process of responding to these questions, first do a check-in and amend it as you go (assuming you are using a tool such as git that supports this), rolling the result into one nice commit for everyone else.  Did you review your commit, change by change, with a diff utility? If not, this is a list of reasons why you might want to start! Did you test your changes? If the test is valuable to be automated, is it? If it’s a manual testing scenario, did you at least try the basics manually? Are the additions/changes formatted consistently with the rest of the project? Lots of automated tools can help here, don’t try to manually format the code, that’s a waste of time and as a human you will fail repeatedly. Are these consistent: tabs versus spaces, indentation, spacing, braces, line breaks, etc Resharper is a great example of a tool that can automate this for you (.net) Are naming conventions respected? Did you accidently use abbreviations, unless you have a good reason to use them? Does capitalization match the conventions in the project/language? Are files partitioned? Sometimes we add new code in existing files in a pinch, it’s a good idea to split these out if they don’t belong ie: are new classes defined in new files, if this is something your project values? Is there commented out code? If you are removing an existing feature, get rid of it, that is why we have VCS If it’s not done yet, then why are you checking it in? Perhaps a stash commit (git)? Did you leave debug or unnecessary changes? Do you understand all of the changes? http://geekswithblogs.net/wesm/archive/2012/04/11/programming-doesnrsquot-have-to-be-magic.aspx Are there spelling mistakes? Including your commit message! Is your commit message concise? Is there follow up work? Are there tasks you didn’t write down that you need to follow up with? Are readability or reorganization changes needed? This might be amended into the final commit, or it might be future work that needs added to the backlog. Are there other things your team values that you should review?

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  • Subterranean IL: Exception handler semantics

    - by Simon Cooper
    In my blog posts on fault and filter exception handlers, I said that the same behaviour could be replicated using normal catch blocks. Well, that isn't entirely true... Changing the handler semantics Consider the following: .try { .try { .try { newobj instance void [mscorlib]System.Exception::.ctor() // IL for: // e.Data.Add("DictKey", true) throw } fault { ldstr "1: Fault handler" call void [mscorlib]System.Console::WriteLine(string) endfault } } filter { ldstr "2a: Filter logic" call void [mscorlib]System.Console::WriteLine(string) // IL for: // (bool)((Exception)e).Data["DictKey"] endfilter }{ ldstr "2b: Filter handler" call void [mscorlib]System.Console::WriteLine(string) leave.s Return } } catch object { ldstr "3: Catch handler" call void [mscorlib]System.Console::WriteLine(string) leave.s Return } Return: // rest of method If the filter handler is engaged (true is inserted into the exception dictionary) then the filter handler gets engaged, and the following gets printed to the console: 2a: Filter logic 1: Fault handler 2b: Filter handler and if the filter handler isn't engaged, then the following is printed: 2a:Filter logic 1: Fault handler 3: Catch handler Filter handler execution The filter handler is executed first. Hmm, ok. Well, what happens if we replaced the fault block with the C# equivalent (with the exception dictionary value set to false)? .try { // throw exception } catch object { ldstr "1: Fault handler" call void [mscorlib]System.Console::WriteLine(string) rethrow } we get this: 1: Fault handler 2a: Filter logic 3: Catch handler The fault handler is executed first, instead of the filter block. Eh? This change in behaviour is due to the way the CLR searches for exception handlers. When an exception is thrown, the CLR stops execution of the thread, and searches up the stack for an exception handler that can handle the exception and stop it propagating further - catch or filter handlers. It checks the type clause of catch clauses, and executes the code in filter blocks to see if the filter can handle the exception. When the CLR finds a valid handler, it saves the handler's location, then goes back to where the exception was thrown and executes fault and finally blocks between there and the handler location, discarding stack frames in the process, until it reaches the handler. So? By replacing a fault with a catch, we have changed the semantics of when the filter code is executed; by using a rethrow instruction, we've split up the exception handler search into two - one search to find the first catch, then a second when the rethrow instruction is encountered. This is only really obvious when mixing C# exception handlers with fault or filter handlers, so this doesn't affect code written only in C#. However it could cause some subtle and hard-to-debug effects with object initialization and ordering when using and calling code written in a language that can compile fault and filter handlers.

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  • Customize the Background in Boxee

    - by DigitalGeekery
    Are you a Boxee user who thinks the default background is little boring? Today we’ll take a look at how to freshen up the look of Boxee by changing the background. Boxee Background When you log into Boxee, select the Settings button at the upper left corner of the Home page.   Select General on the Settings screen. When you select or hover your mouse over the Background Image button, you’ll see options to set a background image or set a background image folder. You’ll have the option of settings a single static image as your background, or choosing an images folder.   If you choose a folder, Boxee will rotate through the images in the folder. To set Background images folder, select that option. Browse for your image folder.. And then select OK.   Boxee will rotate through the images in the folder.   Images will change every ten seconds.   If you prefer a single static image, select Set background image   Choose a image and select OK. Now just enjoy you nice new backgrounds.   If you ever wish to revert back to the default Boxee background, simply select Reset Images on the Settings \ General screen. Adding your own backgrounds is a nice way to customize your Boxee experience. Ideally, you’ll want to choose high resolution images and images oriented as landscape rather than portrait. If you are unfamiliar with Boxee, check out our article on getting started with Boxee.  Looking for a Boxee remote? Read how to use your iPhone or iPod Touch as a Boxee remote. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Integrate Boxee with Media Center in Windows 7Using Pandora in BoxeeWatch Netflix Instant Movies in BoxeeUse your iPhone or iPod Touch as a Boxee RemoteCustomize the Windows 7 Logon Screen 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 Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 Use ILovePDF To Split and Merge PDF Files TimeToMeet is a Simple Online Meeting Planning Tool Easily Create More Bookmark Toolbars in Firefox Filevo is a Cool File Hosting & Sharing Site Get a free copy of WinUtilities Pro 2010 World Cup Schedule

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