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• Windows8, JavaScript and HTML5 - A good thing?

  - by Albers

  Most of us have seen the Windows 8 news regarding support for native HTML5/JavaScript applications. The press has pushed this as a potential threat to the .NET developer community because JavaScript and HTML5 were called "our new developer platform". The press release refers to "Web-connected and Web-powered apps built using HTML5 and JavaScript that have access to the full power of the PC.".Microsoft has also been hush on details related to these comments. Before we buy the hype and start worrying about a world where we drop our Visual Studio licenses and buy DreamWeaver - let's think about how Windows 8 HTML/JavaScript applications would be implemented. The HTML5 spec offers support for offline applications, but this won't offer the OS-integrated experience the press release refers to. MS has to be planning a way to extend access beyond the traditional JavaScript feature set. Microsoft has a similar option today: HTML Applications or HTAs. They come close to required features, but HTAs need ActiveX or Java integration to provide the promised OS-level access. I'm guessing that Microsoft's future OS strategy isn't built on developers cranking out ActiveX controls or Java applets. So where is Microsoft headed? One possibility is that MS builds a new JavaScript framework from the ground up outside their current APIs. Another idea would be for Microsoft to add support for JavaScript as a first class .NET language using the Dynamic Language Runtime. A solution based on the DLR could be integrated into an HTA-like model to provide the promised access, along with the full range of features in .NET Framework. Security comes included in the Framework. And the work necessary to support this integration would tie in nicely with the effort MS has recently made providing better JavaScript and HTML5 support in Visual Studio 2010. As a bonus, a full-fledged JavaScript DLR implementation would allow single language web solutions across client and server (think node.js) and would appeal to developers who are familiar with JavaScript but have less experience with the Microsoft tech stack. We will all get a better picture after the Build conference in September. But in the mean time we know that Microsoft has a reputation for providing strong developer support. We might want to reserve our harshest judgement and consider that the press release could hint at new opportunities for .NET development.

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• 24HOP gets off to a good start

  - by Rob Farley

  Session 11 is on as I write this – Ami Levin presenting about Primary Keys. It’s a good session. But actually, they’ve all been excellent so far, not just Ami’s. I’ve heard only good things about the content. So if you’re reading this and 24HOP is still on, then tune in and take part. If it’s finished, get yourself over to http://sqlpass.org/24hours and see if the sessions have been made available on-demand. Yes – you should be able to watch the sessions when you want to for a year. Watching live is best, because you can ask questions and have them answered during the session, but if there are ones you just couldn’t make, then watching them on-demand is a good option. Numbers have been “not bad”. At the moment it’s still the middle of the night for most Americans – about 6:30am in New York, and yet we’ve had well over a hundred at all the sessions so far, getting up to well over 300 for some sessions. And when I look through the list of names, I see a bunch of names that suggest we’re reaching people from all around the world. I’m seriously looking forward to seeing the stats about which countries have been represented in the audiences. There have been a few comments about the platform. Everyone seems to consider IBTalk an improvement on LiveMeeting, but the closed captioning has met a mixed reception. Some people are loving it, whereas other people are finding the translations leave quite a bit of space for improvement. If you have feedback on this, please feel free to drop me an email (my name with an underscore at hotmail.com, or with a dot at sqlpass.org should reach me just fine, or Twitter, etc). I don’t know how many of the sessions I’ll get to watch overnight – but I’m looking forward to seeing how things go as the day progresses. Big thanks to everyone who’s involved – the sponsors, PASS HQ team and the IBTalk folk who have stayed up overnight to facilitate, plus the moderators, the people doing the live captioning, and of course the speakers and attendees. I love how the SQL Community gets behind things like this. Earlier, the Adelaide SQL Server User Group gathered and watched Denny Lee’s session on BigData, and everyone in the group agreed that it worked really well. I took a picture of our cinema room, although you could only see a small section of the audience. @rob_farley

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• XNA - Moving Background Calculations

  - by Jesse Emond

  Hi, My question is relatively hard to explain(for me, at least), so I'll go one step at a time and just tell me in the comments if it's not clear enough. So I'm making a "Defend Your Castle" type 2D game, where two players own a castle and create units that will move horizontally to try to destroy the opponent's base. Here's a screenshot of the game: The distance between both castles is much bigger in a real game though, bigger than the screen's width actually. Because the distance is bigger than the screen's width, I had to implement a simple 2D camera: Camera2D, which only holds a Location Vector2 (and I always make sure this camera is within the field area). Then, I just move all the game elements(castles, units, health bars) by that location, so that if a unit is at (5, 0), and the camera's location is (5, 0), then the unit's position will be moved by 5 units to the left, making it (0, 0) on the screen. At first, I simply used a static background with mountains and clouds(yeah, those are supposed to be mountains and clouds). Obviously, this looked awful: when you moved the camera, the background would stay immobile. Instead, I'd like to make a moving background, kind of a "scrolling" one. But rather than making a background with the same width as the distance between the castles, I'd like to make one that is a little bit smaller(but still bigger than the screen's width). I thought this would create an effect of "distance" with the background(but it might just look awful, too). Here's the background I'm testing with: I tried different ways, but none of them seems to work. I tried this: float backgroundFieldRatio = BackgroundTexture.Width / fieldWidth;//find the ratio between the background and the field. float backgroundPositionX = -cam.Location.X * backgroundFieldRatio;//move the background to the left When I run this with fieldWith = 1600, BackgroundTexture.Width = 1500 and while looking at the rightmost area, the background is offset to the left by a too big amount, and we can see the black clear color in the back, as you can see here: I hope I explained properly what I'm trying to achieve. Thank you for your time. Note: I didn't know what to look for on Google, so I thought I'd ask here.

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• Diving into Scala with Cay Horstmann

  - by Janice J. Heiss

  A new interview with Java Champion Cay Horstmann, now up on otn/java, titled  "Diving into Scala: A Conversation with Java Champion Cay Horstmann," explores Horstmann's ideas about Scala as reflected in his much lauded new book,  Scala for the Impatient.  None other than Martin Odersky, the inventor of Scala, called it "a joy to read" and the "best introduction to Scala". Odersky was so enthused by the book that he asked Horstmann if the first section could be made available as a free download on the Typesafe Website, something Horstmann graciously assented to. Horstmann acknowledges that some aspects of Scala are very complex, but he encourages developers to simply stay away from those parts of the language. He points to several ways Java developers can benefit from Scala: "For example," he says, " you can write classes with less boilerplate, file and XML handling is more concise, and you can replace tedious loops over collections with more elegant constructs. Typically, programmers at this level report that they write about half the number of lines of code in Scala that they would in Java, and that's nothing to sneeze at. Another entry point can be if you want to use a Scala-based framework such as Akka or Play; you can use these with Java, but the Scala API is more enjoyable. " Horstmann observes that developers can do fine with Scala without grasping the theory behind it. He argues that most of us learn best through examples and not through trying to comprehend abstract theories. He also believes that Scala is the most attractive choice for developers who want to move beyond Java and C++.  When asked about other choices, he comments: "Clojure is pretty nice, but I found its Lisp syntax a bit off-putting, and it seems very focused on software transactional memory, which isn't all that useful to me. And it's not statically typed. I wanted to like Groovy, but it really bothers me that the semantics seems under-defined and in flux. And it's not statically typed. Yes, there is Groovy++, but that's in even sketchier shape. There are a couple of contenders such as Kotlin and Ceylon, but so far they aren't real. So, if you want to do work with a statically typed language on the JVM that exists today, Scala is simply the pragmatic choice. It's a good thing that it's such a nice choice." Learn more about Scala by going to the interview here.

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• App_Offline.htm, taking site down for maintenance

  - by Vipin

  There is much simpler and graceful way to shut down a site while doing upgrade to avoid the problem of people accessing site in the middle of a content update.   Basically, if you place file with name 'app_offline.htm' with below contents in the root of a web application directory, ASP.NET will shut-down the application,  and stop processing any new incoming requests for that application.  ASP.NET will also then respond to all requests for dynamic pages in the application by sending back the content of the app_offline.htm file (for example: you might want to have a “site under construction” or “down for maintenance” message).   Then after upgrade, just rename/delete app_offline.htm file…and the site would be back to normal. Just remember that the size of the file should be greater than 512 bytes, doesn't matter even if you add some comments to it to push the byte size as long as it's of the size greater than 512 - it'll work fine.     <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"><html http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" ><head>    <title>Maintenance Mode - Outage Message</title></head><body>    <h1>Maintenance Mode</h1>     <p>We're currently undergoing scheduled maintenance. We will come back very shortly.</p>     <p>Sorry for the inconvenience!</p>     <!--            Adding additional hidden content so that IE Friendly Errors don't prevent    this message from displaying (note: it will show a "friendly" 404    error if the content isn't of a certain size).        <h2>Site under maintenance...</h2>      <h2>Site under maintenance...</h2>      <h2>Site under maintenance...</h2>      <h2>Site under maintenance...</h2>      <h2>Site under maintenance...</h2>      <h2>Site under maintenance...</h2>      <h2>Site under maintenance...</h2>      <h2>Site under maintenance...</h2>         --></body></html>

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• Ubuntu 10.10 forgets desktop theme.

  - by Marcelo Cantos

  (I posed this question on superuser.com and haven't received any answers or comments, then I came across this site, so my apologies to anyone who has seen this already.) I am running Ubuntu in VirtualBox (on a Windows 7 host). Several times now, the top-level menu bar, the task bar — and seemingly every system dialog — have forgotten the out-of-the-box "Ambiance" theme they conform to when I first installed the system. Window captions still preserve the theme, but pretty much nothing else does. I have searched high and low on Google for assistance with this problem. Everything I've found suggests either running some gconf reset or deleting .gconf* .gnome* and other similar directories. I have followed all this advice and nothing works. I still get a boring Windows-95-style gray 3D look and feel. On previous occasions, after much messing around I've given up and rebooted the VM instance, and been pleasantly suprised to see the original "Ambience" theme restored throughout the UI, but invariably it disappears again some time later, usually after a reboot, so I can never figure out what I did that broke it. Here's a sample from Ubuntu's site of what I want it to look like. And here's a screenshot of my system as it currently looks. Also note that my GNOME Terminals normally have a nice purple semi-translucent look, and as can be seen from the screenshot, they are now just a solid matt white. This last time (just yesterday), trying numerous combinations all the usual tricks and rebooting several times hasn't fixed it, so here I am on SU wondering: How do I recover the out-of-the-box theme for my Gnome/Ubuntu desktop, noting that blowing away all config files — as suggested in many places online — fails to achieve this? It might help to know that it seems to fail either after I resize the VM instance, forcing the Ubuntu desktop to resize itself, or after I play around with Compiz settings. I haven't been able to figure out which of these it is, and it could be neither. Given the amount of pain I have had to go through to get things back to normal (and given that I am at a loss as to how to do so), it has proven difficult to definitively isolate the cause.

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• Is there any good hosting for asp.net and MySQL

  - by HAJJAJ

  HI every one ,I have account with one of the hosting company, and i did my project in asp.net and I used MySQL for the database. the hosting company is not giving me the full privileges to create new user or to create new stored procedure!!! this is what they said for me: Due to the shared nature of our environment we had to make some modifications to your procedure (namely the definer). We also had to review your procedure to determine if it would be compatible with our environment. While your procedures will work (via phpMyAdmin or some other interface), it is unlikely they will be accessible via the Connector/.NET (ADO.NET) that your application is likely using. This is due to a security restriction with how that connector works in shared environments. http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/connector-net-programming-stored.html "Note When you call a stored procedure, the command object makes an additional SELECT call to determine the parameters of the stored procedure. You must ensure that the user calling the procedure has the SELECT privilege on the mysql.proc table to enable them to verify the parameters. Failure to do this will result in an error when calling the procedure." Unfortunately, giving read privileges on the mysql.proc table will give you access to the data of our other customers and that is not an acceptable risk. If your application can only work using stored procedures, then MSSQL will probably be the better option for your site. I apologize for the inconvenience and the wait to have this ticket completed. So is there any good hosting that any body already used it to publish his asp.net and mysql project ??? this is one of my stored procedure and i think it's sample and it will not harm any other uses!!: -- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- Routine DDL -- Note: comments before and after the routine body will not be stored by the server -- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- DELIMITER $$ CREATE DEFINER=`root`@`localhost` PROCEDURE `SpcategoriesRead`( IN PaRactioncode VARCHAR(5), IN PaRCatID BIGINT, IN PaRSearchText TEXT ) BEGIN -- CREATING TEMPORARY TABLE TO SAVE DATA FROM THE ACTIONCODE SELECTS -- DROP TEMPORARY TABLE IF EXISTS TEMP; CREATE temporary table tmp ( CatID BIGINT primary key not null, CatTitle TEXT, CatDescription TEXT, CatTitleAr TEXT, CatDescriptionAr TEXT, PictureID BIGINT, Published BOOLEAN, DisplayOrder BIGINT, CreatedOn DATE ); IF PaRactioncode = 1 THEN -- Retrive all DATA from the database -- INSERT INTO tmp SELECT CatID,CatTitle,CatDescription,CatTitleAr,CatDescriptionAr,PictureID,Published,DisplayOrder,CreatedOn FROM tbcategories; ELSEIF PaRactioncode = 2 THEN -- Retrive all from the database By ID -- INSERT INTO tmp SELECT CatID,CatTitle,CatDescription,CatTitleAr,CatDescriptionAr,PictureID,Published,DisplayOrder,CreatedOn FROM tbcategories WHERE CatID=PaRCatID; ELSEIF PaRactioncode = 3 THEN -- NOSET YET -- INSERT INTO tmp SELECT CatID,CatTitle,CatDescription,CatTitleAr,CatDescriptionAr,PictureID,Published,DisplayOrder,CreatedOn FROM tbcategories WHERE Published=1 ORDER BY DisplayOrder; END IF; IF PaRSearchText IS NOT NULL THEN set PaRSearchText=concat('%', PaRSearchText ,'%'); SELECT CatID,CatTitle,CatDescription,CatTitleAr,CatDescriptionAr,PictureID,Published,DisplayOrder,CreatedOn FROM tmp WHERE Concat(CatTitle, CatDescription, CatTitleAr, CatDescriptionAr) LIKE PaRSearchText; ELSE SELECT CatID,CatTitle,CatDescription,CatTitleAr,CatDescriptionAr,PictureID,Published,DisplayOrder,CreatedOn FROM tmp; END IF; DROP TEMPORARY TABLE IF EXISTS tmp; END

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• Strange rendering in XNA/Monogame

  - by Gerhman

  I am trying to render G-Code generated for a 3d-printer as the printed product by reading the file as line segments and the drawing cylinders with the diameter of the filament around the segment. I think I have managed to do this part right because the vertex I am sending to the graphics device appear to have been processed correctly. My problem I think lies somewhere in the rendering. What basically happens is that when I start rotating my model in the X or Y axis then it renders perfectly for half of the rotation but then for the other half it has this weird effect where you start seeing through the outer filament into some of the shapes inside. This effect is the strongest with X rotations though. Here is a picture of the part of the rotation that looks correct: And here is one that looks horrible: I am still quite new to XNA and/Monogame and 3d programming as a whole. I have no idea what could possibly be causing this and even less of an idea of what this type of behavior is called. I am guessing this has something to do with rendering so have added the code for that part: protected override void Draw(GameTime gameTime) { GraphicsDevice.Clear(Color.Black); basicEffect.World = world; basicEffect.View = view; basicEffect.Projection = projection; basicEffect.VertexColorEnabled = true; basicEffect.EnableDefaultLighting(); GraphicsDevice.SetVertexBuffer(vertexBuffer); RasterizerState rasterizerState = new RasterizerState(); rasterizerState.CullMode = CullMode.CullClockwiseFace; rasterizerState.ScissorTestEnable = true; GraphicsDevice.RasterizerState = rasterizerState; foreach (EffectPass pass in basicEffect.CurrentTechnique.Passes) { pass.Apply(); GraphicsDevice.DrawPrimitives(PrimitiveType.TriangleList, 0, vertexBuffer.VertexCount); } base.Draw(gameTime); } I don't know if it could be because I am shading something that does not really have a texture. I am using this custom vertex declaration I found on some tutorial that allows me to store a vertex with a position, color and normal: public struct VertexPositionColorNormal { public Vector3 Position; public Color Color; public Vector3 Normal; public readonly static VertexDeclaration VertexDeclaration = new VertexDeclaration ( new VertexElement(0, VertexElementFormat.Vector3, VertexElementUsage.Position, 0), new VertexElement(sizeof(float) * 3, VertexElementFormat.Color, VertexElementUsage.Color, 0), new VertexElement(sizeof(float) * 3 + 4, VertexElementFormat.Vector3, VertexElementUsage.Normal, 0) ); } If any of you have ever seen this type of thing please help. Also, if you think that the problem might lay somewhere else in my code then please just request what part you would like to see in the comments section.

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• C++ Accelerated Massive Parallelism

  - by Daniel Moth

  At AMD's Fusion conference Herb Sutter announced in his keynote session a technology that our team has been working on that we call C++ Accelerated Massive Parallelism (C++ AMP) and during the keynote I showed a brief demo of an app built with our technology. After the keynote, I go deeper into the technology in my breakout session. If you read both those abstracts, you'll get some information about what C++ AMP is, without being too explicit since we published the abstracts before the technology was announced. You can find the official online announcement at Soma's blog post. Here, I just wanted to capture the key points about C++ AMP that can serve as an introduction and an FAQ. So, in no particular order… C++ AMP lowers the barrier to entry for heterogeneous hardware programmability and brings performance to the mainstream, without sacrificing developer productivity or solution portability. is designed not only to help you address today's massively parallel hardware (i.e. GPUs and APUs), but it also future proofs your code investments with a forward looking design. is part of Visual C++. You don't need to use a different compiler or learn different syntax. is modern C++. Not C or some other derivative. is integrated and supported fully in Visual Studio vNext. Editing, building, debugging, profiling and all the other goodness of Visual Studio work well with C++ AMP. provides an STL-like library as part of the existing concurrency namespace and delivered in the new amp.h header file. makes it extremely easy to work with large multi-dimensional data on heterogeneous hardware; in a manner that exposes parallelization. introduces only one core C++ language extension. builds on DirectX (and DirectCompute in particular) which offers a great hardware abstraction layer that is ubiquitous and reliable. The architecture is such, that this point can be thought of as an implementation detail that does not surface to the API layer. Stay tuned on my blog for more over the coming months where I will switch from just talking about C++ AMP to showing you how to use the API with code examples… Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

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• What can a Service do on Windows?

  - by Akemi Iwaya

  If you open up Task Manager or Process Explorer on your system, you will see many services running. But how much of an impact can a service have on your system, especially if it is ‘corrupted’ by malware? Today’s SuperUser Q&A post has the answers to a curious reader’s questions. Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites. The Question SuperUser reader Forivin wants to know how much impact a service can have on a Windows system, especially if it is ‘corrupted’ by malware: What kind malware/spyware could someone put into a service that does not have its own process on Windows? I mean services that use svchost.exe for example, like this: Could a service spy on my keyboard input? Take screenshots? Send and/or receive data over the internet? Infect other processes or files? Delete files? Kill processes? How much impact could a service have on a Windows installation? Are there any limits to what a malware ‘corrupted’ service could do? The Answer SuperUser contributor Keltari has the answer for us: What is a service? A service is an application, no more, no less. The advantage is that a service can run without a user session. This allows things like databases, backups, the ability to login, etc. to run when needed and without a user logged in. What is svchost? According to Microsoft: “svchost.exe is a generic host process name for services that run from dynamic-link libraries”. Could we have that in English please? Some time ago, Microsoft started moving all of the functionality from internal Windows services into .dll files instead of .exe files. From a programming perspective, this makes more sense for reusability…but the problem is that you can not launch a .dll file directly from Windows, it has to be loaded up from a running executable (exe). Thus the svchost.exe process was born. So, essentially a service which uses svchost is just calling a .dll and can do pretty much anything with the right credentials and/or permissions. If I remember correctly, there are viruses and other malware that do hide behind the svchost process, or name the executable svchost.exe to avoid detection. Have something to add to the explanation? Sound off in the comments. Want to read more answers from other tech-savvy Stack Exchange users? Check out the full discussion thread here.

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• SharePoint Designer 2010 Workflow Email Link To Item

  - by Brian Jackett

  In this post I’ll walk you through the process of sending an email that contains a link to the current item from a SharePoint Designer 2010 workflow.  This is a process that has been published on many other forums and blogs, but many that I have seen are more complex than seems necessary. Problem     A common request from SharePoint users is to get an email which contains a link to review/approve/edit the workflow item.  SharePoint list items contain an automatic property for Url Path, but unfortunately that Url is not properly formatted to retrieve the item if you include it directly on the message body.  I tried a few solutions suggested from other blogs or forums that took a substring of the Url Path property, concatenated the display form view Url, and mixed in some other strings.  While I was able to get this working in some scenarios I still had issues in general. Solution     My solution involved adding a hyperlink to the message body.  This ended up being far easier than I had expected and fairly intuitive once I found the correct property to use.  Follow these steps to see what I did.     First add a “Send an Email” action to your workflow.  Edit the action to pull up the email configuration dialog.  Click the “Add hyperlink” button seen below. When prompted for the address of the link click the fx button to perform a lookup.  Choose Workflow Context from the “data source” dropdown.  Choose Current Item URL from the “field from source” dropdown.  Click OK. Your Edit Hyperlink dialog should now look something like this. The end result will be a hyperlink added to your email pointing to the current workflow item.  Note: this link points to the non-modal dialog display form (display form similar to what you had in 2007). Conclusion     In this post I walked you through the steps to create a SharePoint Designer 2010 workflow with an email that contains a link to the current item.  While there are many other options for accomplishing this out on the web I found this to be a more concise process and easy to understand.  Hopefully you found this helpful as well.  Feel free to leave any comments or feedback if you’ve found other ways that were helpful to you.         -Frog Out

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• Games at Work Part 2: Gamification and Enterprise Applications

  - by ultan o'broin

  Gamification and Enterprise Applications In part 1 of this article, we explored why people are motivated to play games so much. Now, let's think about what that means for Oracle applications user experience. (Even the coffee is gamified. Acknowledgement @noelruane. Check out the Guardian article Dublin's Frothing with Tech Fever. Game development is big business in Ireland too.) Applying game dynamics (gamification) effectively in the enterprise applications space to reflect business objectives is now a hot user experience topic. Consider, for example, how such dynamics could solve applications users’ problems such as: Becoming familiar or expert with an application or process Building loyalty, customer satisfaction, and branding relationships Collaborating effectively and populating content in the community Completing tasks or solving problems on time Encouraging teamwork to achieve goals Improving data accuracy and completeness of entry Locating and managing the correct resources or information Managing changes and exceptions Setting and reaching targets, quotas, or objectives Games’ Incentives, Motivation, and Behavior I asked Julian Orr, Senior Usability Engineer, in the Oracle Fusion Applications CRM User Experience (UX) team for his thoughts on what potential gamification might offer Oracle Fusion Applications. Julian pointed to the powerful incentives offered by games as the starting place: “The biggest potential for gamification in enterprise apps is as an intrinsic motivator. Mechanisms include fun, social interaction, teamwork, primal wiring, adrenaline, financial, closed-loop feedback, locus of control, flow state, and so on. But we need to know what works best for a given work situation.” For example, in CRM service applications, we might look at the motivations of typical service applications users (see figure 1) and then determine how we can 'gamify' these motivations with techniques to optimize the desired work behavior for the role (see figure 2). Description of Figure 1 Description of Figure 2 Involving Our Users Online game players are skilled collaborators as well as problem solvers. Erika Webb (@erikanollwebb), Oracle Fusion Applications UX Manager, has run gamification events for Oracle, including one on collaboration and gamification in Oracle online communities that involved Oracle customers and partners. Read more... However, let’s be clear: gamifying a user interface that’s poorly designed is merely putting the lipstick of gamification on the pig of work. Gamification cannot replace good design and killer content based on understanding how applications users really work and what motivates them. So, Let the Games Begin! Gamification has tremendous potential for the enterprise application user experience. The Oracle Fusion Applications UX team is innovating fast and hard in this area, researching with our users how gamification can make work more satisfying and enterprises more productive. If you’re interested in knowing more about our gamification research, sign up for more information or check out how your company can get involved through the Oracle Usability Advisory Board. Your thoughts? Find those comments.

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• Help needed with pyparsing [closed]

  - by Zearin

  Overview So, I’m in the middle of refactoring a project, and I’m separating out a bunch of parsing code. The code I’m concerned with is pyparsing. I have a very poor understanding of pyparsing, even after spending a lot of time reading through the official documentation. I’m having trouble because (1) pyparsing takes a (deliberately) unorthodox approach to parsing, and (2) I’m working on code I didn’t write, with poor comments, and a non-elementary set of existing grammars. (I can’t get in touch with the original author, either.) Failing Test I’m using PyVows to test my code. One of my tests is as follows (I think this is clear even if you’re unfamiliar with PyVows; let me know if it isn’t): def test_multiline_command_ends(self, topic): output = parsed_input('multiline command ends\n\n',topic) expect(output).to_equal( r'''['multiline', 'command ends', '\n', '\n'] - args: command ends - multiline_command: multiline - statement: ['multiline', 'command ends', '\n', '\n'] - args: command ends - multiline_command: multiline - terminator: ['\n', '\n'] - terminator: ['\n', '\n']''') But when I run the test, I get the following in the terminal: Failed Test Results Expected topic("['multiline', 'command ends']\n- args: command ends\n- command: multiline\n- statement: ['multiline', 'command ends']\n - args: command ends\n - command: multiline") to equal "['multiline', 'command ends', '\\n', '\\n']\n- args: command ends\n- multiline_command: multiline\n- statement: ['multiline', 'command ends', '\\n', '\\n']\n - args: command ends\n - multiline_command: multiline\n - terminator: ['\\n', '\\n']\n- terminator: ['\\n', '\\n']" Note: Since the output is to a Terminal, the expected output (the second one) has extra backslashes. This is normal. The test ran without issue before this piece of refactoring began. Expected Behavior The first line of output should match the second, but it doesn’t. Specifically, it’s not including the two newline characters in that first list object. So I’m getting this: "['multiline', 'command ends']\n- args: command ends\n- command: multiline\n- statement: ['multiline', 'command ends']\n - args: command ends\n - command: multiline" When I should be getting this: "['multiline', 'command ends', '\\n', '\\n']\n- args: command ends\n- multiline_command: multiline\n- statement: ['multiline', 'command ends', '\\n', '\\n']\n - args: command ends\n - multiline_command: multiline\n - terminator: ['\\n', '\\n']\n- terminator: ['\\n', '\\n']" Earlier in the code, there is also this statement: pyparsing.ParserElement.setDefaultWhitespaceChars(' \t') …Which I think should prevent exactly this kind of error. But I’m not sure. Even if the problem can’t be identified with certainty, simply narrowing down where the problem is would be a HUGE help. Please let me know how I might take a step or two towards fixing this.

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• Upstart: How does rc job work / order of (contradicting) "start on ..." and "stop on ..." stanzas

  - by Binarus

  Hi, I just can't understand how Upstart's rc job definition in Natty 11.04 works. To illustrate the problem, here is the definition (empty lines and comments are left out): start on runlevel [0123456] stop on runlevel [!$RUNLEVEL] export RUNLEVEL export PREVLEVEL console output env INIT_VERBOSE task exec /etc/init.d/rc $RUNLEVEL Let's suppose we currently are in runlevel 2 and the rc job is stopped (that is exactly the situation after booting my box and logging in via SSH). Now, let's assume that the system switches to runlevel 3, for example due to a command like "telinit 3" given by root. What will happen to the rc job? Obviously, the rc job will be started since it is currently stopped and the event runlevel 3 is matching the start events. But from now on, things are unclear to me: According to the manual $RUNLEVEL evaluates to the new runlevel when the job is started (that means 3 in our example). Therefore, the next stanza "stop on runlevel [!$RUNLEVEL]" translates to "stop on runlevel [!3]"; that means we have a first stanza which will trigger the job, but the second stanza will never stop the job and seems to be useless. Since I know that the Ubuntu / Upstart people won't do useless things, I must be heavily misunderstanding something. I would be grateful for any explanation. While trying to understand this, an additional question came to my mind. If I had contradicting start and stop triggers, for example start on foo stop on foo what would happen? I swear I never will do that, but I am nevertheless very interested in how Upstart handles that on the theoretical level. Thank you very much! Editing the question as a reaction on geekosaur's first answer: I can see the parallelism, but it is not that easy (at least, not to me). Let's assume the job aurrently is still running, and a new runlevel event comes in (of course, the new runlevel is different from the current one). Then, the following should happen: 1) The job is single instance. That means that "start on ..." won't be triggered since the job is currently running; $RUNLEVEL is not touched. 2) "stop on ..." will be triggered since the new runlevel is different from $RUNLEVEL, so the job will be aborted. 3) Now, the job is stopped and waiting. I can't see how it is restarted with the new runlevel. AFAIK, initctl emits events only once, so "start on ..." won't be triggered and the new runlevel won't be entered. I know that I still misunderstanding something, and I am grateful for explanations. Thank you very much!

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• apt-get upgrade stuck at the same package

  - by decibyte

  Current status I've started to suspect this is not an Ubuntu issue, but related to the internet connection here at my work. Until I'm sure, Im leaving my question below: Original question I'm stuck, can't upgrade my system. Running sudo apt-get upgrade gives me the following: mmm@alalunga:~$ sudo apt-get upgrade Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following packages have been kept back: ginn libgrip0 linux-generic-pae linux-headers-generic-pae linux-image-generic-pae The following packages will be upgraded: apport apport-gtk bind9-host build-essential dhcp3-client dhcp3-common dnsutils eog evince evince-common firefox firefox-branding firefox-dbg firefox-globalmenu firefox-gnome-support firefox-locale-en gimp gimp-data gir1.2-totem-1.0 glib-networking glib-networking-common glib-networking-services gnupg gpgv icedtea-6-jre-cacao icedtea-6-jre-jamvm icedtea-6-plugin icedtea-netx icedtea-netx-common icedtea-plugin isc-dhcp-client isc-dhcp-common libapache2-mod-php5 libart-2.0-2 libbind9-80 libdns81 libevince3-3 libgimp2.0 libisc83 libisccc80 libisccfg82 liblwres80 libssl-dev libssl-doc libssl1.0.0 libtotem0 linux-firmware linux-libc-dev openjdk-6-jre openjdk-6-jre-headless openjdk-6-jre-lib openssl php-pear php5-cli php5-common php5-curl php5-dev php5-gd php5-mysql php5-xsl policykit-1-gnome python-apport python-django python-gst0.10 python-problem-report resolvconf thunderbird thunderbird-globalmenu thunderbird-gnome-support totem totem-common totem-mozilla totem-plugins xserver-xorg-input-synaptics 74 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 5 not upgraded. Need to get 317 MB/327 MB of archives. After this operation, 1.481 kB of additional disk space will be used. Do you want to continue [Y/n]? Get:1 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-updates/main openjdk-6-jre-headless i386 6b24-1.11.4-1ubuntu0.12.04.1 [27,3 MB] Get:2 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-updates/main openjdk-6-jre-headless i386 6b24-1.11.4-1ubuntu0.12.04.1 [27,3 MB] Get:3 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-updates/main openjdk-6-jre-headless i386 6b24-1.11.4-1ubuntu0.12.04.1 [27,3 MB] Get:4 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-updates/main openjdk-6-jre-headless i386 6b24-1.11.4-1ubuntu0.12.04.1 [27,3 MB] Get:5 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-updates/main openjdk-6-jre-headless i386 6b24-1.11.4-1ubuntu0.12.04.1 [27,3 MB] Get:6 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-updates/main openjdk-6-jre-headless i386 6b24-1.11.4-1ubuntu0.12.04.1 [27,3 MB] Get:7 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-updates/main openjdk-6-jre-headless i386 6b24-1.11.4-1ubuntu0.12.04.1 [27,3 MB] 9% [7 openjdk-6-jre-headless 27,3 MB/27,3 MB 100%] It keeps downloading the package openjdk-6-jre-headless, then does nothing for a while (hanging on what's the last line above), then download the package again. It's at its 13th download attempt at the moment of writing. The actual downloads seem to be done just fine, but whatever it does after downloading seems to be failing. I tried removing openjdk-6, but then it wanted to install openjdk-7 instead, with the same result, hanging at openjdk-7-jre-headless instead. I also tried changing servers from my local (Danish) to the main server. No luck. It's also keeping me from upgrading alle the other packages. What to do? Update After following instructions in the answer by @lpanebr, it is now stuck at the linux-firmware package. So, maybe it's a more general problem than being related to specific package(s)? Although it did download some packages without problems before getting stuck at linux-firmware.

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• How does rc job work / order of (contradicting) "start on ..." and "stop on ..." stanzas

  - by Binarus

  Hi, I just can't understand how Upstart's rc job definition in Natty 11.04 works. To illustrate the problem, here is the definition (empty lines and comments are left out): start on runlevel [0123456] stop on runlevel [!$RUNLEVEL] export RUNLEVEL export PREVLEVEL console output env INIT_VERBOSE task exec /etc/init.d/rc $RUNLEVEL Let's suppose we currently are in runlevel 2 and the rc job is stopped (that is exactly the situation after booting my box and logging in via SSH). Now, let's assume that the system switches to runlevel 3, for example due to a command like "telinit 3" given by root. What will happen to the rc job? Obviously, the rc job will be started since it is currently stopped and the event runlevel 3 is matching the start events. But from now on, things are unclear to me: According to the manual $RUNLEVEL evaluates to the new runlevel when the job is started (that means 3 in our example). Therefore, the next stanza "stop on runlevel [!$RUNLEVEL]" translates to "stop on runlevel [!3]"; that means we have a first stanza which will trigger the job, but the second stanza will never stop the job and seems to be useless. Since I know that the Ubuntu / Upstart people won't do useless things, I must be heavily misunderstanding something. I would be grateful for any explanation. While trying to understand this, an additional question came to my mind. If I had contradicting start and stop triggers, for example start on foo stop on foo what would happen? I swear I never will do that, but I am nevertheless very interested in how Upstart handles that on the theoretical level. Thank you very much! Editing the question as a reaction on geekosaur's first answer: I can see the parallelism, but it is not that easy (at least, not to me). Let's assume the job aurrently is still running, and a new runlevel event comes in (of course, the new runlevel is different from the current one). Then, the following should happen: 1) The job is single instance. That means that "start on ..." won't be triggered since the job is currently running; $RUNLEVEL is not touched. 2) "stop on ..." will be triggered since the new runlevel is different from $RUNLEVEL, so the job will be aborted. 3) Now, the job is stopped and waiting. I can't see how it is restarted with the new runlevel. AFAIK, initctl emits events only once, so "start on ..." won't be triggered and the new runlevel won't be entered. I know that I still misunderstanding something, and I am grateful for explanations. Thank you very much!

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• June 23, 1983: First Successful Test of the Domain Name System [Geek History]

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  Nearly 30 years ago the first Domain Name System (DNS) was tested and it changed the way we interacted with the internet. Nearly impossible to remember number addresses became easy to remember names. Without DNS you’d be browsing a web where numbered addresses pointed to numbered addresses. Google, for example, would look like http://209.85.148.105/ in your browser window. That’s assuming, of course, that a numbers-based web every gained enough traction to be popular enough to spawn a search giant like Google. How did this shift occur and what did we have before DNS? From Wikipedia: The practice of using a name as a simpler, more memorable abstraction of a host’s numerical address on a network dates back to the ARPANET era. Before the DNS was invented in 1983, each computer on the network retrieved a file called HOSTS.TXT from a computer at SRI. The HOSTS.TXT file mapped names to numerical addresses. A hosts file still exists on most modern operating systems by default and generally contains a mapping of the IP address 127.0.0.1 to “localhost”. Many operating systems use name resolution logic that allows the administrator to configure selection priorities for available name resolution methods. The rapid growth of the network made a centrally maintained, hand-crafted HOSTS.TXT file unsustainable; it became necessary to implement a more scalable system capable of automatically disseminating the requisite information. At the request of Jon Postel, Paul Mockapetris invented the Domain Name System in 1983 and wrote the first implementation. The original specifications were published by the Internet Engineering Task Force in RFC 882 and RFC 883, which were superseded in November 1987 by RFC 1034 and RFC 1035.Several additional Request for Comments have proposed various extensions to the core DNS protocols. Over the years it has been refined but the core of the system is essentially the same. When you type “google.com” into your web browser a DNS server is used to resolve that host name to the IP address of 209.85.148.105–making the web human-friendly in the process. Domain Name System History [Wikipedia via Wired] What is a Histogram, and How Can I Use it to Improve My Photos?How To Easily Access Your Home Network From Anywhere With DDNSHow To Recover After Your Email Password Is Compromised

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• Configuring keyboard input to eliminate unused diacritics

  - by David Cesarino

  I'd like to change the way diacritics work under Xubuntu. My problem My native language is pt-BR and my notebook has an american keyboard. Thus, I use ' and " followed by keys like u and c to achieve things like ú, ç and ü. It all works well. However, in the case of apostrophes and quotes, that creates a problem when I use ' followed by: letters that won't accept the acute accent ( ´ , ACUTE ACCENT -- 0x00B4) at all, like t; and letters that won't accept the acute in pt-BR, like r. In 1, ' with t does absolutely nothing. In 2, ' with r creates r (LATIN SMALL LETTER R WITH ACUTE -- 0x0155), which is used, afaik, for some eastern european languages like slovak. It isn't used in portuguese, just like ?, s, z, ?, ?, ?, n and all consonants (portuguese do not take diacritics in consonants). Question That said, is there a way to better support the portuguese-brazilian language using an american keyboard? It is very common here --- I actually prefer the american keyboard to our own, known as “ABNT”. Desired solution I'd like to deactivate unused diacritics, so case 2 would behave just like case 1. Additionally, if possible, I'd like case 1 to behave like it does under Windows. As an example, typing ' followed by t should write 't (acute followed by T) instead of doing nothing. About 2, in my humble opinion, doing nothing is counterproductive. I realize the behavior is reasonable according to logic ("there isn't t-acute, so please tell the computer to typeset apostrophe --- ', SPACE --- instead of acute). But from a human, practical point of view, I think it makes more sense (to me, at least). Additional comments I believe this also applies to spanish, french, italian and other western european latin languages. On the console (Ctrl+Alt+F?), case 1 is not a problem. I don't need to press space as apostrophes are automatically added. However, there, I'm unable to access cedilla (ç). Two completely different behaviors. If it's just a matter of customizing text config files (possibly creating a custom layout or whatever), I'd be glad to share my efforts. I just need guide on the "howto" part. Somehow Google only points me to the "enough" people (those who cope with the situation and think that it works "well enough"). And since I have definitely migrated to Linux/Xubuntu after years, I'd like to leave just as I like it (and I'm sure others as well). For example, if there is some kind of scripting or definition to tell the computer to do what I described, so be it.

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• The Buzz at the JavaOne Bookstore

  - by Janice J. Heiss

  I found my way to the JavaOne bookstore, a hub of activity. Who says brick and mortar bookstores are dead? I asked what was hot and got two answers: Hadoop in Practice by Alex Holmes was doing well. And Scala for the Impatient by noted Java Champion Cay Horstmann also seemed to be a fast seller. Hadoop in PracticeHadoop is a framework that organizes large clusters of computers around a problem. It is touted as especially effective for large amounts of data, and is use such companies as  Facebook, Yahoo, Apple, eBay and LinkedIn. Hadoop in Practice collects nearly 100 Hadoop examples and presents them in a problem/solution format with step by step explanations of solutions and designs. It’s very much a participatory book intended to make developers more at home with Hadoop.The author, Alex Holmes, is a senior software engineer with more than 15 years of experience developing large-scale distributed Java systems. For the last four years, he has gained expertise in Hadoop solving Big Data problems across a number of projects. He has presented at JavaOne and Jazoon and is currently a technical lead at VeriSign.At this year’s JavaOne, he is presenting a session with VeriSign colleague, Karthik Shyamsunder called “Java: A Perfect Platform for Data Science” where they will explain how the Java platform has emerged as a perfect platform for practicing data science, and also talk about such technologies as Hadoop, Hive, Pig, HBase, Cassandra, and Mahout. Scala for the ImpatientSan Jose State University computer science professor and Java Champion Cay Horstmann is the principal author of the highly regarded Core Java. Scala for the Impatient is a basic, practical introduction to Scala for experienced programmers. Horstmann has a presentation summarizing the themes of his book on at his website. On the final page he offers an enticing summary of his conclusions:* Widespread dissatisfaction with Java + XML + IDEs               --Don't make me eat Elephant again * A separate language for every problem domain is not efficient               --It takes time to master the idioms* ”JavaScript Everywhere” isn't going to scale* Trend is towards languages with more expressive power, less boilerplate* Will Scala be the “one ring to rule them”?* Maybe              --If it succeeds in industry             --If student-friendly subsets and tools are created The popularity of both books echoed comments by IBM Distinguished Engineer Jason McGee who closed his part of the Sunday JavaOne keynote by pointing out that the use of Java in complex applications is increasingly being augmented by a host of other languages with strong communities around them – JavaScript, JRuby, Scala, Python and so forth. Java developers increasingly must know the strengths and weaknesses of such languages going forward.

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• Software monetization that is not evil

  - by t0x1n

  I have a free open-source project with around 800K downloads to date. I've been contacted by some monetization companies from time to time and turned them down, since I didn't want toolbar malware associated with my software. I was wondering however, is there a non-evil way to monetize software ? Here are the options as I know them: Add a donation button. I don't feel comfortable with that as I really don't need "donations" - I'm paid quite well. Donating users may feel entitled to support etc. (see the second to last bullet) Add ads inside your application. In the web that may be acceptable, but in a desktop program it looks incredibly lame. Charge a small amount for each download. This model works well in the mobile world, but I suspect no one will go for it on the desktop. It doesn't mix well with open source, though I suppose I could charge only for the binaries (most users won't go to the hassle of compiling the sources). People may expect support etc. after having explicitly paid (see next bullet). Make money off a service / community / support associated with the program. This is one route I definitely don't want to take, I don't want any sort of hassle beyond coding. I assure you, the program is top notch (albeit simple) and I'm not aware of any bugs as of yet (there are support forums and blog comments where users may report them). It is also very simple, documented, and discoverable so I do think I have a case for supplying it "as is". Add affiliate suggestions to your installer. If you use a monetization company, you lose control over what they propose. Unless you can establish some sort of strong trust with the company to supply quality suggestions (I sincerely doubt it), I can't have that. Choosing your own affiliate (e.g. directly suggesting Google Toolbar) is possibly the only viable solution to my mind. Problem is, where do I find a solid affiliate that could actually give value to the user rather than infect his computer with crapware? I thought maybe Babylon (not the toolbar of course, I hate toolbars)?

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• Reporting on common code smells : A POC

  - by Dave Ballantyne

  Over the past few blog entries, I’ve been looking at parsing TSQL scripts in a variety of ways for a variety of tasks.  In my last entry ‘How to prevent ‘Select *’ : The elegant way’, I looked at parsing SQL to report upon uses of SELECT *.  The obvious question leading on from this is, “Great, what about other code smells ?”  Well, using the language service parser to do that was turning out to be a bit of a hard job,  sure I was getting tokens but no real context.  I wasn't even being told when an end of statement had been reached. One of the other parsing options available from Microsoft is exposed in the assembly ‘Microsoft.SqlServer.TransactSql.ScriptDom’,  this is ,I believe, installed with the client development tools with SQLServer.  It is much more feature rich than the original parser I had used and breaks a TSQL script into intuitive classes for analysis. So, what sort of smells can I now find using it ?  Well, for an opening gambit quite a nice little list. Use of NOLOCK Set of READ UNCOMMITTED Use of SELECT * Insert without column references Explicit datatype conversion on Sargs Cross server selects Non use of two-part naming convention Table and Query hint usage Changes in set options Use of single line comments Use of ordinal column positions in ORDER BY clause Now, lets not argue the point that “It depends” as smells on some of these, but as an academic exercise it is quite interesting.  The code is available from this link :https://www.dropbox.com/s/rfk32sou4fzl2cw/TSQLDomTest.zip  All the usual disclaimers apply to this code, I cannot be held responsible for anything ranging from mild annoyance through to universe destruction due to the use of this code or examples. The zip file contains a powershell script and my test cases.  The assembly used requires .Net 4 to run, which means that you will need powershell 3 ( though im running through PowerGUI and all works ok ) .  The code searches for all .sql files in the folder hierarchy for the workingpath,  you can override this if you want by simply changing the $Folder variable, and processes each in turn for the smells.  Feedback is not great at the moment, all it does is output to an xml file (Smells.xml) the offset position and a description of the smell found. Right now, I am interested in your feedback.  What do you think ?  Is this (or should it be) more than an academic exercise ?  Can tooling such as this be used as some form of code quality measure ?  Does it Work ? Do you have a case listed above which is not being reported ? Do you have a case that you would love to be reported ? Let me know , please mailto: [email protected]. Thanks

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• VS2010 Launch Presentations

  Last week I was in Vegas to present at the DevConnections / VS2010 Launch event.  The show was well-attended and everybody I spoke to agreed it was educational and enjoyable.  My three talks were all on Wednesday, 14 April 2010, including one at 8am for which I was impressed to see a large turnout in attendance.   Pragmatic ASP.NET Tips, Tricks, and Tools My first session was on tips, tricks, and tools for ASP.NET developers.  This is a talk Ive given in past years, but which I refine every time.  I usually like to have a full session to devote to tools, and a separate talk just for Tips and Tricks, but for this show I was only given the one 75-minute slot, so I had to cut some materials to make things fit.  The talk went well, all the demos work, and the attendees seemed to enjoy it, and I like giving it, so hopefully I can continue to present on this topic in future DevConnections shows. Download the ASP.NET Tips, Tricks, and Tools slides and demos.   Whats New in ASP.NET MVC 2 My second talk of the day followed immediately after the Tips and Tricks talk, and was a brand new talk for me.  I have to throw out a thank-you to Phil for letting me see his MIX slide deck before he gave his talk, as that was a big help.  The official whats new document online is also worth checking out if youre interested in this subject.  Download the Whats New in ASP.NET MVC 2 slides and demos.   SOLIDify Your ASP.NET MVC 2 Application Just because youre using a ASP.NET MVC doesnt mean your code cant still end up being a big ball of mud.  This session describes a number of principles of software design that can help ensure applications remain loosely-coupled and malleable even as they age and increase in features and complexity.  This was my last talk of the day and did have one minor demo failure involving a database constraint.  Ive given this talk many times before, and in this case I had to fit it into a 60-minute timeslot, so Im not sure I had quite enough time to drive home all of the concepts to everyone in the audience.  That said, I did hear a number of positive comments on how the talk went, so thats encouraging. Download the SOLIDify Your ASP.NET MVC 2 Application slides and demos.   In my sessions, I promised to have these posted by the end of the weekend theyre going up at 10pm Sunday night (my time) 2 hours to spare!  Enjoy! Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Calling home, receiving calls and smartphone data from the US

  - by Rob Farley

  I got asked about calling home from the US, by someone going to the PASS Summit. I found myself thinking “there should be a blog post about this”... The easiest way to phone home is Skype - no question. Use WiFi, and if you’re calling someone who has Skype on their phone at the other end, it’s free. Even if they don’t, it’s still pretty good price-wise. The PASS Summit conference centre has good WiFI, as do the hotels, and plenty of other places (like Starbucks). But if you’re used to having data all the time, particularly when you’re walking from one place to another, then you’ll want a sim card. This also lets you receive calls more easily, not just solving your data problem. You’ll need to make sure your phone isn’t locked to your local network – get that sorted before you leave. It’s no trouble to drop by a T-mobile or AT&T store and getting a prepaid sim. You can’t get one from the airport, but if the PASS Summit is your first stop, there’s a T-mobile store on 6th in Seattle between Pine & Pike, so you can see it from the Sheraton hotel if that’s where you’re staying. AT&T isn’t far away either. But – there’s an extra step that you should be aware of. If you talk to one of these US telcos, you’ll probably (hopefully I’m wrong, but this is how it was for me recently) be told that their prepaid sims don’t work in smartphones. And they’re right – the APN gets detected and stops the data from working. But luckily, Apple (and others) have provided information about how to change the APN, which has been used by a company based in New Zealand to let you get your phone working. Basically, you send your phone browser to http://unlockit.co.nz and follow the prompts. But do this from a WiFi place somewhere, because you won’t have data access until after you’ve sorted this out... Oh, and if you get a prepaid sim with “unlimited data”, you will still need to get a Data Feature for it. And just for the record – this is WAY easier if you’re going to the UK. I dropped into a T-mobile shop there, and bought a prepaid sim card for five quid, which gave me 250MB data and some (but not much) call credit. In Australia it’s even easier, because you can buy data-enabled sim cards that work in smartphones from the airport when you arrive. I think having access to data really helps you feel at home in a different place. It means you can pull up maps, see what your friends are doing, and more. Hopefully this post helps, but feel free to post comments with extra information if you have it. @rob_farley

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• 2D water with dynamic waves

  - by user1103457

  New Super Mario Bros has really cool 2D water that I'd like to learn how to create. Here's a video showing it. When something hits the water, it creates a wave. There are also constant "background" waves. You can get a good look at the constant waves just after 00:50 when the camera isn't moving. I assume the splashes in NSMB work as in the first part of this tutorial. But in NSMB the water also has constant waves on the surface, and the splashes look very different. Another difference is that in the tutorial, if you create a splash, it first creates a deep "hole" in the water at the origin of the splash. In new super mario bros this hole is absent or much smaller. I am referring to the splashes that the player creates when jumping in and out of the water. How do they create the constant waves and the splashes? I am especially interested in the splashes, and how they work together with the constant waves. I am programming in XNA. I've tried this myself, but couldn't really get it all to work well together. Bonus questions: How do they create the light spots just under the surface of the waves and how do they texture the deeper parts of the water? This is the first time I try to create water like this. EDIT: I assume the constant waves are created using a sine function. The splashes are probably created in a way like in the tutorial. (But they are not the same, so I am still interested in how to make this kind of splashes) But I have a lot of trouble combining those things. I know I can use the sine function to set the height of a specific watercolumn but the splashes are using the speed, to determine the new height. I can't figure out how to combine those. Not that I am not asking how the developers of new super mario bros did this exactly. I am just interested in ways to recreate an effect like it. This week I have an examweek so I don't have time to work on the code. After this week I will spend a lot of time on it. But I am constantly thinking about it, so that's why I will be checking comments etc. I just won't be looking at the code since it might be too time-consuming.

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• Advice for how to handle company pride

  - by user17971

  We have this "amazing" little product using the latest development methodologies, components with all the bells and whistles. I took over this product maybe 6 months ago and struggled with it from day one. Even though it is supposedly is state of the art because of all its amazing structure, using dependency injections, inversion of control from the unity framework, hibernation and is domain driven in a .net mvvm xaml application to make it streamlined and modular. I knew from the moment I saw the monolith that it was going to be an uphill struggle for me. A lot of little code-bits scattered all around in neatly organized paradigms. Debugging is difficult, tracing the code is difficult, making new code is difficult, although some modifications is surprisinly easy but it doesn't out weight the problems I have with the code by a long shot. When I took over the project I was told that the new management console was ready for delivery and all I had to do was compile it and drop it. This was the beginning of a uphill struggle, our customer didn't agree at all that this was the functionality they had asked for so I had to do modifications to the program to their specifications. Since the project pretty much has been overdue since I took over it it has always been important that we didn't add or change much to the original system. I could modify the existing bits. fast forward until today where I finally completed all their comments and issues with the program but now I think that the users has opened their eyes (even though they saw this program many times) that they will be going backwards with this new system, that it will be much worse than the tool they got today (for a long time due to the fact that I'm the only resource on the project, project manager, tester, developer, integration specialist etc) My problem is that I lost faith in this system quite early due to the nature of the program. Although I made many changes and improvements to the system I wholeheartedly sympathize with the poor users who are going to start using this system. Its not nearly doing all the things it should do. I had this conversation internally with my boss where I told him what I thought about it, that if I were the customer I wouldn't have spent money developing it. So what do I do now? The system in ready, on a staging system and nobody likes it, its too slow and boring and does maybe do 50% of what they need it to do. Despite how much energy and working around the clock I've done to this project: I won't mind scrapping the system but we've spent much money (well my salaries) developing it and my company wants us to be proud of everything we do and advocate it. How will I tackle the contractor when he asks for advice? Surely I can tell him, this is what we agreed upon based on your use case scenarios, and be done with it? How will I inform my boss about this progress? He knows what I feel about it but I always get the feeling he let my criticism pass him by as just hot air, gone tomorrow,.

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