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• Real-Time Strategy Gameplay

  - by Ahmad Alkhawaja

  I am working on building a HTML5 RTS game, and my current state is that I am building the Campaign mode of the game, and want to define the gameplay (The Scoring, Unit Behaviors/Attributes). I am searching for links/articles/books about how to define the gameplay, for me this: The scoring Figuring out levels of control (in any RTS game, there is units, individuals and squads) Unit action/attributes/properties point timing (how long it will take to play?) Achievements ..etc I want to see how they usually define these areas in RTS games, I expect to see general document discussing this concept that I can use to build the gameplay. Any idea? Is my question clear or I need to provide more details?

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• Arithmetic Coding Questions

  - by Xophmeister

  I have been reading up on arithmetic coding and, while I understand how it works, all the guides and instructions I've read start with something like: Set up your intervals based upon the frequency of symbols in your data; i.e., more likely symbols get proportionally larger intervals. My main query is, once I have encoded my data, presumably I also need to include this statistical model with the encoding, otherwise the compressed data can't be decoded. Is that correct? I don't see this mentioned anywhere -- the most I've seen is that you need to include the number of iterations (i.e., encoded symbols) -- but unless I'm missing something, this also seems necessary to me. If this is true, that will obviously add an overhead to the final output. At what point does this outweigh the benefits of compression (e.g., say if I'm trying to compress just a few thousand bits)? Will the choice of symbol size also make a significant difference (e.g., if I'm looking at 2-bit words, rather than full octets/whatever)?

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• GLSL Atmospheric Scattering Issue

  - by mtf1200

  I am attempting to use Sean O'Neil's shaders to accomplish atmospheric scattering. For now I am just using SkyFromSpace and GroundFromSpace. The atmosphere works fine but the planet itself is just a giant dark sphere with a white blotch that follows the camera. I think the problem might rest in the "v3Attenuation" variable as when this is removed the sphere is show (albeit without scattering). Here is the vertex shader. Thanks for the time! uniform mat4 g_WorldViewProjectionMatrix; uniform mat4 g_WorldMatrix; uniform vec3 m_v3CameraPos; // The camera's current position uniform vec3 m_v3LightPos; // The direction vector to the light source uniform vec3 m_v3InvWavelength; // 1 / pow(wavelength, 4) for the red, green, and blue channels uniform float m_fCameraHeight; // The camera's current height uniform float m_fCameraHeight2; // fCameraHeight^2 uniform float m_fOuterRadius; // The outer (atmosphere) radius uniform float m_fOuterRadius2; // fOuterRadius^2 uniform float m_fInnerRadius; // The inner (planetary) radius uniform float m_fInnerRadius2; // fInnerRadius^2 uniform float m_fKrESun; // Kr * ESun uniform float m_fKmESun; // Km * ESun uniform float m_fKr4PI; // Kr * 4 * PI uniform float m_fKm4PI; // Km * 4 * PI uniform float m_fScale; // 1 / (fOuterRadius - fInnerRadius) uniform float m_fScaleDepth; // The scale depth (i.e. the altitude at which the atmosphere's average density is found) uniform float m_fScaleOverScaleDepth; // fScale / fScaleDepth attribute vec4 inPosition; vec3 v3ELightPos = vec3(g_WorldMatrix * vec4(m_v3LightPos, 1.0)); vec3 v3ECameraPos= vec3(g_WorldMatrix * vec4(m_v3CameraPos, 1.0)); const int nSamples = 2; const float fSamples = 2.0; varying vec4 color; float scale(float fCos) { float x = 1.0 - fCos; return m_fScaleDepth * exp(-0.00287 + x*(0.459 + x*(3.83 + x*(-6.80 + x*5.25)))); } void main(void) { gl_Position = g_WorldViewProjectionMatrix * inPosition; // Get the ray from the camera to the vertex and its length (which is the far point of the ray passing through the atmosphere) vec3 v3Pos = vec3(g_WorldMatrix * inPosition); vec3 v3Ray = v3Pos - v3ECameraPos; float fFar = length(v3Ray); v3Ray /= fFar; // Calculate the closest intersection of the ray with the outer atmosphere (which is the near point of the ray passing through the atmosphere) float B = 2.0 * dot(m_v3CameraPos, v3Ray); float C = m_fCameraHeight2 - m_fOuterRadius2; float fDet = max(0.0, B*B - 4.0 * C); float fNear = 0.5 * (-B - sqrt(fDet)); // Calculate the ray's starting position, then calculate its scattering offset vec3 v3Start = m_v3CameraPos + v3Ray * fNear; fFar -= fNear; float fDepth = exp((m_fInnerRadius - m_fOuterRadius) / m_fScaleDepth); float fCameraAngle = dot(-v3Ray, v3Pos) / fFar; float fLightAngle = dot(v3ELightPos, v3Pos) / fFar; float fCameraScale = scale(fCameraAngle); float fLightScale = scale(fLightAngle); float fCameraOffset = fDepth*fCameraScale; float fTemp = (fLightScale + fCameraScale); // Initialize the scattering loop variables float fSampleLength = fFar / fSamples; float fScaledLength = fSampleLength * m_fScale; vec3 v3SampleRay = v3Ray * fSampleLength; vec3 v3SamplePoint = v3Start + v3SampleRay * 0.5; // Now loop through the sample rays vec3 v3FrontColor = vec3(0.0, 0.0, 0.0); vec3 v3Attenuate; for(int i=0; i<nSamples; i++) { float fHeight = length(v3SamplePoint); float fDepth = exp(m_fScaleOverScaleDepth * (m_fInnerRadius - fHeight)); float fScatter = fDepth*fTemp - fCameraOffset; v3Attenuate = exp(-fScatter * (m_v3InvWavelength * m_fKr4PI + m_fKm4PI)); v3FrontColor += v3Attenuate * (fDepth * fScaledLength); v3SamplePoint += v3SampleRay; } vec3 first = v3FrontColor * (m_v3InvWavelength * m_fKrESun + m_fKmESun); vec3 secondary = v3Attenuate; color = vec4((first + vec3(0.25,0.25,0.25) * secondary), 1.0); // ^^ that color is passed to the frag shader and is used as the gl_FragColor } Here is also an image of the problem image

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• SQL Saturday 43 in Redmond

  - by AjarnMark

  I attended my first SQLSaturday a couple of days ago, SQLSaturday #43 in Redmond (at Microsoft).  I got there really early, primarily because I forgot how fast I can get there from my home when nobody else is on the road.  On a weekday in rush hour traffic, that would have taken two hours to get there.  I gave myself 90 minutes, and actually got there in about 45.  Crazy! I made the mistake of going to the main Microsoft campus, but that’s not where the event was being held.  Instead it was in a big Microsoft conference center on the other side of the highway.  Fortunately, I had the address with me and quickly realized my mistake.  When I got back on track, I noticed that there were bright yellow signs out on the street corner that looked like they said they were for SOL Saturday, which actually was appropriate since it was the sunniest day around here in a long time. Since I was there so early, the registration was just getting setup, so I found Greg Larsen who was coordinating things and offered to help.  He put me to work with a group of people organizing the pre-printed raffle tickets and stuffing swag bags. I had never been to a SQLSaturday before this one, so I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect even though I have read about a few on some blogs.  It makes sense that each one will be a little bit different since they are almost completely volunteer driven, and the whole concept is still in its early stages.  I have been to the PASS Summit for the last several years, and was hoping for a smaller version of that.  Now, it’s not really fair to compare one free day of training run entirely by volunteers with a multi-day, $1,000+ event put on under the direction of a professional event management company.  But there are some parallels. At this SQLSaturday, there was no opening general session, just coffee and pastries in the common area / expo hallway and straight into the first group of sessions.  I don’t know if that was because there was no single room large enough to hold everyone, or for other reasons.  This worked out okay, but the organization guy in me would have preferred to have even a 15 minute welcome message from the organizers with a little overview of the day.  Even something as simple as, “Thanks to persons X, Y, and Z for helping put this together…Sessions will start in 20 minutes and are all in rooms down this hallway…the bathrooms are on the other side of the conference center…lunch today is pizza and we would like to thank sponsor Q for providing it.”  It doesn’t need to be much, certainly not a full-blown Keynote like at the PASS Summit, but something to use as a rallying point to pull everyone together and get the day off to an official start would be nice.  Again, there may have been logistical reasons why that was not feasible here.  I’m just putting out my thoughts for other SQLSaturday coordinators to consider. The event overall was great.  I believe that there were over 300 in attendance, and everything seemed to run smoothly.  At least from an attendee’s point of view where there was plenty of muffins in the morning and pizza in the afternoon, with plenty of pop to drink.  And hey, if you’ve got the food and drink covered, a lot of other stuff could go wrong and people will be very forgiving.  But as I said, everything appeared to run pretty smoothly, at least until Buck Woody showed up in his Oracle shirt.  Other than that, the volunteers did a great job! I was a little surprised by how few people in my own backyard that I know.  It makes sense if you really think about it, given how many companies must be using SQL Server around here.  I guess I just got spoiled coming into the PASS Summit with a few contacts that I already knew would be there.  Perhaps I have been spending too much time with too few people at the Summits and I need to step out and meet more folks.  Of course, it also is different since the Summit is the big national event and a number of the folks I know are spread out across the country, so the Summit is the only time we’re all in the same place at the same time.  I did make a few new contacts at SQLSaturday, and bumped into a couple of people that I knew (and a couple others that I only knew from Twitter, and didn’t even realize that they were here in the area). Other than the sheer entertainment value of Buck Woody’s session, the one that was probably the greatest value for me was a quick introduction to PowerShell.  I have not done anything with it yet, but I think it will be a good tool to use to implement my plans for automated database recovery testing.  I saw just enough at the session to take away some of the intimidation factor, and I am getting ready to jump in and see what I can put together in the next few weeks.  And that right there made the investment worthwhile.  So I encourage you, if you have the opportunity to go to a SQLSaturday event near you, go for it!

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• ASP.NET WebAPI Security 2: Identity Architecture

  - by Your DisplayName here!

  Pedro has beaten me to the punch with a detailed post (and diagram) about the WebAPI hosting architecture. So go read his post first, then come back so we can have a closer look at what that means for security. The first important takeaway is that WebAPI is hosting independent-  currently it ships with two host integration implementations – one for ASP.NET (aka web host) and WCF (aka self host). Pedro nicely shows the integration into the web host. Self hosting is not done yet so we will mainly focus on the web hosting case and I will point out security related differences when they exist. The interesting part for security (amongst other things of course) is the HttpControllerHandler (see Pedro’s diagram) – this is where the host specific representation of an HTTP request gets converted to the WebAPI abstraction (called HttpRequestMessage). The ConvertRequest method does the following: Create a new HttpRequestMessage. Copy URI, method and headers from the HttpContext. Copies HttpContext.User to the Properties<string, object> dictionary on the HttpRequestMessage. The key used for that can be found on HttpPropertyKeys.UserPrincipalKey (which resolves to “MS_UserPrincipal”). So the consequence is that WebAPI receives whatever IPrincipal has been set by the ASP.NET pipeline (in the web hosting case). Common questions are: Are there situations where is property does not get set? Not in ASP.NET – the DefaultAuthenticationModule in the HTTP pipeline makes sure HttpContext.User (and Thread.CurrentPrincipal – more on that later) are always set. Either to some authenticated user – or to an anonymous principal. This may be different in other hosting environments (again more on that later). Why so generic? Keep in mind that WebAPI is hosting independent and may run on a host that materializes identity completely different compared to ASP.NET (or .NET in general). This gives them a way to evolve the system in the future. How does WebAPI code retrieve the current client identity? HttpRequestMessage has an extension method called GetUserPrincipal() which returns the property as an IPrincipal. A quick look at self hosting shows that the moral equivalent of HttpControllerHandler.ConvertRequest() is HttpSelfHostServer.ProcessRequestContext(). Here the principal property gets only set when the host is configured for Windows authentication (inconsisteny). Do I like that? Well – yes and no. Here are my thoughts: I like that it is very straightforward to let WebAPI inherit the client identity context of the host. This might not always be what you want – think of an ASP.NET app that consists of UI and APIs – the UI might use Forms authentication, the APIs token based authentication. So it would be good if the two parts would live in a separate security world. It makes total sense to have this generic hand off point for identity between the host and WebAPI. It also makes total sense for WebAPI plumbing code (especially handlers) to use the WebAPI specific identity abstraction. But – c’mon we are running on .NET. And the way .NET represents identity is via IPrincipal/IIdentity. That’s what every .NET developer on this planet is used to. So I would like to see a User property of type IPrincipal on ApiController. I don’t like the fact that Thread.CurrentPrincipal is not populated. T.CP is a well established pattern as a one stop shop to retrieve client identity on .NET.  That makes a lot of sense – even if the name is misleading at best. There might be existing library code you want to call from WebAPI that makes use of T.CP (e.g. PrincipalPermission, or a simple .Name or .IsInRole()). Having the client identity as an ambient property is useful for code that does not have access to the current HTTP request (for calling GetUserPrincipal()). I don’t like the fact that that the client identity conversion from host to WebAPI is inconsistent. This makes writing security plumbing code harder. I think the logic should always be: If the host has a client identity representation, copy it. If not, set an anonymous principal on the request message. Btw – please don’t annoy me with the “but T.CP is static, and static is bad for testing” chant. T.CP is a getter/setter and, in fact I find it beneficial to be able to set different security contexts in unit tests before calling in some logic. And, in case you have wondered – T.CP is indeed thread static (and the name comes from a time where a logical operation was bound to a thread – which is not true anymore). But all thread creation APIs in .NET actually copy T.CP to the new thread they create. This is the case since .NET 2.0 and is certainly an improvement compared to how Win32 does things. So to sum it up: The host plumbing copies the host client identity to WebAPI (this is not perfect yet, but will surely be improved). or in other words: The current WebAPI bits don’t ship with any authentication plumbing, but solely use whatever authentication (and thus client identity) is set up by the host. WebAPI developers can retrieve the client identity from the HttpRequestMessage. Hopefully my proposed changes around T.CP and the User property on ApiController will be added. In the next post, I will detail how to add WebAPI specific authentication support, e.g. for Basic Authentication and tokens. This includes integrating the notion of claims based identity. After that we will look at the built-in authorization bits and how to improve them as well. Stay tuned.

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• List of Commonly Used Value Types in XNA Games

  - by Michael B. McLaughlin

  Most XNA programmers are concerned about generating garbage. More specifically about allocating GC-managed memory (GC stands for “garbage collector” and is both the name of the class that provides access to the garbage collector and an acronym for the garbage collector (as a concept) itself). Two of the major target platforms for XNA (Windows Phone 7 and Xbox 360) use variants of the .NET Compact Framework. On both variants, the GC runs under various circumstances (Windows Phone 7 and Xbox 360). Of concern to XNA programmers is the fact that it runs automatically after a fixed amount of GC-managed memory has been allocated (currently 1MB on both systems). Many beginning XNA programmers are unaware of what constitutes GC-managed memory, though. So here’s a quick overview. In .NET, there are two different “types” of types: value types and reference types. Only reference types are managed by the garbage collector. Value types are not managed by the garbage collector and are instead managed in other ways that are implementation dependent. For purposes of XNA programming, the important point is that they are not managed by the GC and thus do not, by themselves, increment that internal 1 MB allocation counter. (n.b. Structs are value types. If you have a struct that has a reference type as a member, then that reference type, when instantiated, will still be allocated in the GC-managed memory and will thus count against the 1 MB allocation counter. Putting it in a struct doesn’t change the fact that it gets allocated on the GC heap, but the struct itself is created outside of the GC’s purview). Both value types and reference types use the keyword ‘new’ to allocate a new instance of them. Sometimes this keyword is hidden by a method which creates new instances for you, e.g. XmlReader.Create. But the important thing to determine is whether or not you are dealing with a value types or a reference type. If it’s a value type, you can use the ‘new’ keyword to allocate new instances of that type without incrementing the GC allocation counter (except as above where it’s a struct with a reference type in it that is allocated by the constructor, but there are no .NET Framework or XNA Framework value types that do this so it would have to be a struct you created or that was in some third-party library you were using for that to even become an issue). The following is a list of most all of value types you are likely to use in a generic XNA game: AudioCategory (used with XACT; not available on WP7) AvatarExpression (Xbox 360 only, but exposed on Windows to ease Xbox development) bool BoundingBox BoundingSphere byte char Color DateTime decimal double any enum (System.Enum itself is a class, but all enums are value types such that there are no GC allocations for enums) float GamePadButtons GamePadCapabilities GamePadDPad GamePadState GamePadThumbSticks GamePadTriggers GestureSample int IntPtr (rarely but occasionally used in XNA) KeyboardState long Matrix MouseState nullable structs (anytime you see, e.g. int? something, that ‘?’ denotes a nullable struct, also called a nullable type) Plane Point Quaternion Ray Rectangle RenderTargetBinding sbyte (though I’ve never seen it used since most people would just use a short) short TimeSpan TouchCollection TouchLocation TouchPanelCapabilities uint ulong ushort Vector2 Vector3 Vector4 VertexBufferBinding VertexElement VertexPositionColor VertexPositionColorTexture VertexPositionNormalTexture VertexPositionTexture Viewport So there you have it. That’s not quite a complete list, mind you. For example: There are various structs in the .NET framework you might make use of. I left out everything from the Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Graphics.PackedVector namespace, since everything in there ventures into the realm of advanced XNA programming anyway (n.b. every single instantiable thing in that namespace is a struct and thus a value type; there are also two interfaces but interfaces cannot be instantiated at all and thus don’t figure in to this discussion). There are so many enums you’re likely to use (PlayerIndex, SpriteSortMode, SpriteEffects, SurfaceFormat, etc.) that including them would’ve flooded the list and reduced its utility. So I went with “any enum” and trust that you can figure out what the enums are (and it’s rare to use ‘new’ with an enum anyway). That list also doesn’t include any of the pre-defined static instances of some of the classes (e.g. BlendState.AlphaBlend, BlendState.Opaque, etc.) which are already allocated such that using them doesn’t cause any new allocations and therefore doesn’t increase that 1 MB counter. That list also has a few misleading things. VertexElement, VertexPositionColor, and all the other vertex types are structs. But you’re only likely to ever use them as an array (for use with VertexBuffer or DynamicVertexBuffer), and all arrays are reference types (even arrays of value types such as VertexPositionColor[ ] or int[ ]). * So that’s it for now. The note below may be a bit confusing (it deals with how the GC works and how arrays are managed in .NET). If so, you can probably safely ignore it for now but feel free to ask any questions regardless. * Arrays of value types (where the value type doesn’t contain any reference type members) are much faster for the GC to examine than arrays of reference types, so there is a definite benefit to using arrays of value types where it makes sense. But creating arrays of value types does cause the GC’s allocation counter to increase. Indeed, allocating a large array of a value type is one of the quickest ways to increment the allocation counter since a .NET array is a sequential block of memory. An array of reference types is just a sequential block of references (typically 4 bytes each) while an array of value types is a sequential block of instances of that type. So for an array of Vector3s it would be 12 bytes each since each float is 4 bytes and there are 3 in a Vector3; for an array of VertexPositionNormalTexture structs it would typically be 32 bytes each since it has two Vector3s and a Vector2. (Note that there are a few additional bytes taken up in the creation of an array, typically 12 but sometimes 16 or possibly even more, which depend on the implementation details of the array type on the particular platform the code is running on).

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• How to prevent Google Website Optimizer from making Google Analytics spike Direct Traffic and lower Bounce Rate?

  - by Scott

  I am using Google Website Optimizer (GWO) and Google Analytics. Whenever a person (Google Website Optimizer) does a javascript redirect, Google Analytics will change the referrer. When the referrer changes, the traffic source becomes yourself and is changed to Direct Traffic. For Example: A visitor goes to google: searches for my great service. Clicks the link that goes to website page: /home/ At this point, Google Analytics tracks the referrer as Google. However, /home/ has a GWO javacript redirect to a battery of A/B tests. /home-1/ or /home-2/ or /home-3/ When the redirect from /home/ occurs to /home-1/, google analytics on the /home-1/ page now thinks the referrer is yourself and converts the referrer to Direct Traffic since the Direct Traffic bucket is the unknown. I'm really surprised that GWO and GA do this when they both come from google. Now, How does one fix this to prevent the overwrite of the referrer using GWO?

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• SEO consequences for merging country sites in a .com

  - by Pekka

  I am in the process of refactoring a number of rental portals I've built for a company with locations in Austria, Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. Instead of the current setting of each country site running under its own domain name: www.companyname.de www.companyname.ch www.companyname.at I would love to merge them all in this way: www.companyname.com/de www.companyname.com/ch www.companyname.com/at with the country TLDs doing a 301 redirect to the respective .com address. However, I have been repeatedly told not to do this due to likely problems with SEO - the business is very SEO dependent, and being a rental chain, needs to be strong in local results. So the question is: Is there an unavoidable hit in Search Engine Optimization when redirecting to a central .com domain? What measures can be taken to soften the blow? What comes to my mind is explicitly specifying a lang attribute in the html tag. Are there any other ways to specifically point out geographical location for sub-directories?

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• Critical Patch Update for April 2010 Now Available

  - by Steven Chan

  The Critical Patch Update (CPU) for April 2010 was released on April 13, 2010. Oracle strongly recommends applying the patches as soon as possible.The Critical Patch Update Advisory is the starting point for relevant information. It includes a list of products affected, pointers to obtain the patches, a summary of the security vulnerabilities, and links to other important documents.Supported Products that are not listed in the "Supported Products and Components Affected" Section of the advisory do not require new patches to be applied.Also, it is essential to review the Critical Patch Update supporting documentation referenced in the Advisory before applying patches, as this is where you can find important pertinent information.The Critical Patch Update Advisory is available at the following location:Oracle Technology NetworkThe next four Critical Patch Update release dates are:July 13, 2010October 12, 2010January 18, 2011April 19, 2011

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• To maximize chances of functional programming employment

  - by Rob Agar

  Given that the future of programming is functional, at some point in the nearish future I want to be paid to code in a functional language, preferably Haskell. Assuming I have a firm grasp of the language, plus all the basic programmer attributes (good communication skills/sense of humour/hygiene etc), what should I concentrate on learning to maximize my chances? Are there any particularly sought after libraries I should know? Alternatively, would another language be a better bet, say F#? (I'm not too fussed about the kind of programming work, so long as it's reasonably interesting and reasonably well paid, and with nice people)

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• OWB 11gR2: Migration and Upgrade Paths from Previous Versions

  - by antonio romero

  Over the next several months, we expect widespread adoption of OWB 11gR2, both for its new features and because it is the only release of Warehouse Builder certified for use with database 11gR2. Customers seeking to move existing environments to OWB 11gR2 should review the new whitepaper, OWB 11.2: Upgrade and Migration Paths. This whitepaper covers the following topics: The difference between upgrade and migration, and how to choose between them An outline of how to perform each process When and where intermediate upgrade steps are required Tips for upgrading an existing environment to 11gR2 without having to regenerate and redeploy code to your production environment. Moving up from 10gR2 and 11gR1 is generally straightforward. For customers still using OWB 9 or 10.1, it is generally possible to move an entire environment forward complete with design and runtime audit metadata, but the upgrade process can be complex and may require intermediate processing using OWB 10.2 or OWB 11.1. Moving a design by itself is much simpler, though it requires regeneration and redeployment. Relevant details are provided in the whitepaper, so if you are planning an upgrade at some point soon, definitely start there.

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• Winners of Pete Brown's "Silverlight 5 In Action" Books

  - by Dave Campbell

  It's always a double-edged sword when I get to this point in a give-away... I want to give everyone something, but a deal is a deal :) It's also only through the benevolence of the folks at Manning Press that I can even do this, so thank you! The Winners Getting right to it, the winners are: Jaganadh G Stephen Owens Jan Hannemann Notice there are 3 names, not 2... I was told late last week to pick a 3rd name, so thanks again Manning! I've already received email from my contact, and they've been waiting for me to send them the email. You should be hearing from them shortly I think. For everyone else, keep your eyes on my blog... as I told Manning, I like giving away other people's stuff :) Have a great day, and if you're anywhere near Phoenix and interested in Silverlight, I'll see you tomorrow at the Scott Gu Event, and Stay in the 'Light!

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• How can I reorient the axes of an object?

  - by d3vid

  I spent some time in Unity yesterday trying to fire a sphere from a horizontal cylinder (like a ball from a cannon). I was using Vector3.forward, but the sphere kept coming out the top of the cylinder rather than the front. Someone suggested using Vector3.up instead, and sure enough it worked! The cylinder is vertical by default. So, it appears that when I rotated the cylinder by 90 degrees to lay it flat, the local axes remained the same. The relative front of the cylinder remained at the same point, so when I fired the sphere it shot out the new "top", not what looked to me like the "front". If I had happened to be facing the other way, I would have had to fire at Vector3.down instead. How can I reorient/reset the axes of an object so that they match my expectations? (And if I can't, how can I tell by looking which way an object is oriented?)

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• Billboarding + aligning with velocity direction

  - by roxlu

  I'm working on a particle system where I'm orientating the billboard using the inverted orientation matrix of my camera. This works quite well and my quad are rotated correctly towards the camera. But, now I want to to rotate the quads in such a way that they point towards the direction they are going to. In 2D this can be done by normalizing the velocity vector and using that vector for a rotation around the Z-axis (where vel.x = cos(a) and vel.y = sin(a)). But how does this work in 3D? Thanks roxlu

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• Is osTicket secure/private enough

  - by Andy

  I was going to use osTicket as my 'help desk' for my website, however I just got a little bit concerned when I realised that the clients' login details to see their support tickets are only their email address and a ticket ID. I am probably going over the top with security though, which is why I wanted to get some second opinions on how secure osTicket actually is and whether I should use it with my website. I run a software company, so chances are licence keys may be included in support tickets which are obviously sensitive information and valuable - so I want to ensure that the likelihood of a support ticket being hacked is very low. If there is any plugins/additions to make osTicket more 'secure', I would appreciate it if you could point me to them. Otherwise if there are any more free, more suited, help desk softwares out there please let me know. Thanks in advance

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• « Linux a échoué sur le Desktop » pour le créateur de GNOME, un avis tranché qui divise la communauté open source

  « Linux a échoué sur le Desktop » pour le créateur de GNOME un avis tranché qui divise la communauté open source Miguel De Icaza, l'un des créateurs et meneur du développement de l'environnement de bureau libre pour Linux GNOME estime dans un article que « Linux est un échec en tant qu'OS grand public ». Un point de vue qui n'a pas manqué de créer une grosse polémique dans le monde de l'open source, entrainant des critiques acerbes de la part de Linus Torvalds. Déjà connu pour son franc-parler et son gout pour la polémique, Miguel De Icaza dans un long billet de blog intitulé « ce qui a tué le noyau Linux », fustige la communauté Linux et les choix de développement de celle...

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• what are the benefits of closure, primarily for PHP?

  - by Patrick

  I am beginning the process of moving code over to PHP 5.3 and one of the most highly touted features of PHP 5.3 is the ability to use closures. My understanding of closures is that they allow anonymous functions, can be assigned to variable names, and have interesting scoping abilities. From my point of view the only seeming benefits in real world applications is the reduction of clutter in the namespace because closures are anonymous. Am I wrong in this? Should I be trying to put closures wherever I code? EDIT: I have already read this post on Javascript closures.

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• DBCC CHECKDB (BatmanDb, REPAIR_ALLOW_DATA_LOSS) &ndash; Are you Feeling Lucky?

  - by David Totzke

  I’m currently working for a client on a PowerBuilder to WPF migration.  It’s one of those “I could tell you, but I’d have to kill you” kind of clients and the quick-lime pits are currently occupied by the EMC tech…but I’ve said too much already. At approximately 3 or 4 pm that day users of the Batman[1] application here in Gotham[1] started to experience problems accessing the application.  Batman[2] is a document management system here that also integrates with the ERP system.  Very little goes on here that doesn’t involve Batman in some way.  The errors being received seemed to point to network issues (TCP protocol error, connection forcibly closed by the remote host etc…) but the real issue was much more insidious. Connecting to the database via SSMS and performing selects on certain tables underlying the application areas that were having problems started to reveal the issue.  You couldn’t do a SELECT * FROM MyTable without it bombing and giving the same error noted above.  A run of DBCC CHECKDB revealed 14 tables with corruption.  One of the tables with issues was the Document table.  Pretty central to a “document management” system.  Information was obtained from IT that a single drive in the SAN went bad in the night.  A new drive was in place and was working fine.  The partition that held the Batman database is configured for RAID Level 5 so a single drive failure shouldn’t have caused any trouble and yet, the database is corrupted.  They do hourly incremental backups here so the first thing done was to try a restore.  A restore of the most recent backup failed so they worked backwards until they hit a good point.  This successful restore was for a backup at 3AM – a full day behind.  This time also roughly corresponds with the time the SAN started to report the drive failure.  The plot thickens… I got my hands on the output from DBCC CHECKDB and noticed a pattern.  What’s sad is that nobody that should have noticed the pattern in the DBCC output did notice.  There was a rush to do things to try and recover the data before anybody really understood what was wrong with it in the first place.  Cooler heads must prevail in these circumstances and some investigation should be done and a plan of action laid out or you could end up making things worse[3].  DBCC CHECKDB also told us that: repair_allow_data_loss is the minimum repair level for the errors found by DBCC CHECKDB Yikes.  That means that the database is so messed up that you’re definitely going to lose some stuff when you repair it to get it back to a consistent state.  All the more reason to do a little more investigation into the problem.  Rescuing this database is preferable to having to export all of the data possible from this database into a new one.  This is a fifteen year old application with about seven hundred tables.  There are TRIGGERS everywhere not to mention the referential integrity constraints to deal with.  Only fourteen of the tables have an issue.  We have a good backup that is missing the last 24 hours of business which means we could have a “do-over” of yesterday but that’s not a very palatable option either. All of the affected tables had TEXT columns and all of the errors were about LOB data types and orphaned off-row data which basically means TEXT, IMAGE or NTEXT columns.  If we did a SELECT on an affected table and excluded those columns, we got all of the rows.  We exported that data into a separate database.  Things are looking up.  Working on a copy of the production database we then ran DBCC CHECKDB with REPAIR_ALLOW_DATA_LOSS and that “fixed” everything up.   The allow data loss option will delete the bad rows.  This isn’t too horrible as we have all of those rows minus the text fields from out earlier export.  Now I could LEFT JOIN to the exported data to find the missing rows and INSERT them minus the TEXT column data. We had the restored data from the good 3AM backup that we could now JOIN to and, with fingers crossed, recover the missing TEXT column information.  We got lucky in that all of the affected rows were old and in the end we didn’t lose anything.  :O  All of the row counts along the way worked out and it looks like we dodged a major bullet here. We’ve heard back from EMC and it turns out the SAN firmware that they were running here is apparently buggy.  This thing is only a couple of months old.  Grrr…. They dispatched a technician that night to come and update it .  That explains why RAID didn’t save us. All-in-all this could have been a lot worse.  Given the root cause here, they basically won the lottery in not losing anything. Here are a few links to some helpful posts on the SQL Server Engine blog.  I love the title of the first one: Which part of 'REPAIR_ALLOW_DATA_LOSS' isn't clear? CHECKDB (Part 8): Can repair fix everything? (in fact, read the whole series) Ta da! Emergency mode repair (we didn’t have to resort to this one thank goodness)   Dave Just because I can…   [1] Names have been changed to protect the guilty. [2] I'm Batman. [3] And if I'm the coolest head in the room, you've got even bigger problems...

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• Creating a dynamically updateable website using Adobe Flash CS6 [closed]

  - by Sidd

  I need some help finding the appropriate tutorials for what I need. I have tried looking hard with no avail. I have Adobe Flash CS6, and I want to make a website using that software. I want the content to be uploaded onto a server so that the flash program can just fetch the information from the server and dynamically update the website itself, instead of editing the content on the flash website and reuploading the whole flash file (as I have done before). I also want the ability to have a guestbook and a contact form. Also, if possible, I wanted an ability to add tabs to the navigation bar dynamically instead of having to edit the flash file. Can anyone point be to a good tutorial which can help me with this? I have tried looking, and most of the results I get are completely useless to me.

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• What do you do to get your software design robust, flexible and clear?

  - by Oscar

  I am still getting mature as a software engineering/designer/architect, as you may want to call. At this point in time, I am getting small projects, private projects and so on. What I noticed is that even though I think about the SW structure, design some diagrams, have they really clear in my mind when I start coding, at the end, my software is not flexible and clear as I would like to. I would like to ask you what kind of approaches, mechanisms or even tricks do you use, to get your software (and SW design) flexible, robust and clear (easy to understand and use). So.... Any ideas to give to a beginner?

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• Rapid prototyping and refactoring

  - by Puckl

  Sometimes when I start a small project (like an android app), I don´t know which approach will work out at the end, and I just go for one approach and give it a try. But if I never used this approach before (for a sort of application I´ve never programmed before) it is like stepping into unknown terrain. I don´t know which libraries to use (maybe I have to try out several libraries) and there are so many unkonwns (like: how to get raw audio data in android) So then my development process goes like this: Write a piece of code to see if the approach has a chance. (The more uncertain the approach is, the uglier the code gets) If it works, refactor a lot until it is beautiful I think it could be a waste of time if I planned my software design in detail at this point, it would be like planning a trip without a map. Is this part of aglie development? How do you deal with unknown terrain in software development?

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• Web framework for IPad and common desktop browsers?

  - by Chris

  We are developing a web-based, commercial point-of-sale application. We'd like the same web site to work well on an Ipad as well a desktop browsers. We're looking for a web framework that makes the site look good on an IPad, but also makes the site work well in a desktop browser such as Chrome, IE, or Firefox on Windows or a Mac. I found quite a few at 18 Mobile Frameworks and Development Tools for Creating iPhone Apps Most of them, such as JQTouch, help a web site look and act more like a native IPhone application but they don't emphasize the cross platform/browser experience. The exception seems to be Sproutcore, which seems to be a full-fledged javascript MVC application framework. I did have trouble getting some of the demos to work under Chrome, but what did work looks good. What framework(s) have you actually used to develop web sites to work on an Ipad and desktop browser? If you didn't use a framework, how did you get it to work well under both environments?

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• How do I install an older 2.6.37 Kernel Version?

  - by Seyed Mohammad

  I have a Sony VAIO P netbook and for several issues (graphics driver, audio driver and power management), I want to install an older version of the Linux kernel on Ubuntu 11.10 (actually its Xubuntu) that seems to be much more suitable. So I searched for Ubuntu kernels and found this link which includes all versions of the Linux kernel distributed by Ubuntu. I am looking for a version before 2.6.38 (to escape the known power management issue) and of course solve my many driver problems! I guess my best bet is 2.6.37 but there are several 2.6.37.x-x kernels! Can someone point me to the right choice? In each folder (for example: this one) there are several DEB packages. Which packages should I install? (Note: I have a 32-bit system) What is the installation process? sudo dpkg -i *.deb ? Is this fine or additional steps are required? Thanks.

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• How to make bash quit tab autocompleting hidden directories

  - by Kristopher Micinski

  Most of the time, I don't need autocompletes for my hidden directories. In fact, that's the point of them being hidden! However, annoyingly, bash takes these directories into account when considering tab autocompletion. This is particularly annoying when I have the following scenario: a .svn foler along with a single folder that I want to traverse into by simply pushing tab. (This typically comes up with deep Java packages...) Is there any way to change the default behavior? Worst case scenario I have to type '.' before tab, which seems like a no brainer for my usability.

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• Central Exception Handler

  - by J-unior

  Recently I've been thinking about a general ExceptionHandler, that I could initialize once in my app context and inject it everywhere. The idea that it will have quite simple interface with just public void handle(Exception ex), and then according to exception type it should decide what to do, maybe just log it, or show an alert message to the user, or maybe kill the whole app. The question is, what is the prettiest way to write such handler without lots of instanceofs? Unfortunately googling gives me only the default exception handler for RuntimeException that was introduced in Java 5. My first idea is to create an enum, that will have Class field for exception type and it will return the appropriate execution point, for example a concrete exception handler that also implements the interface public void handle(Exception ex), but with the required casting already.

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