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• ArchBeat Link-o-Rama for 2012-10-11

  - by Bob Rhubart

  Whiteboards, not red carpets. OTN Architect Day Los Angeles. Oct 25. Free event. Yes, it's TinselTown, but the stars at this event are experts in the use of Oracle technologies in today's architectures. This free event includes a full slate of technical sessions and peer interaction covering cloud computing, SOA, and engineered systems—and lunch is on us. Register now. Thursday October 25, 2012, 8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. Sofitel Los Angeles, 8555 Beverly Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90048 JDeveloper extensions where? | Peter Paul van de Beek "Where does the downloaded stuff go after you installed JDeveloper extensions, like SOA Composite Editor, Oracle BPM Studio, or AIA Service Constructor?" Peter Paul van de Beek has the answer. Using Apache Derby Database with WebLogic (the express way) | Frank Munz Another technical how-to video from Dr. Frank Munz. Compensation Hello World | Ronald van Luttikhuizen Oracle ACE Director Ronald van Luttikhuizen's post addresses several question that came up during the "Effective Fault Handling in SOA Suite 11g" session that he and fellow Oracle ACE Guido Schmutz presented at Oracle OpenWorld. Oracle Fusion Middleware Security: OAM and OIM 11g Academies Looking for technical how-to content covering Oracle Access Manager and Oracle Identity Manager? The people behind the Oracle Middleware Security blog have indexed relevant blog posts into what they call "Academies." "These indexes," the blog explains, "contain the articles we've written that we believe provide long lasting guidance on OAM and OIM. Posts covered in these series include articles on key aspects of OAM and OIM 11g, best practice architectural guidance, integrations, and customizations." Maximum Availability Whitepaper for IDM 11gR2 | Oracle Fusion Middleware Security The Oracle Fusion Middelware A-Team shares an overview of and a link to a new white paper: "Identity Management 11.1.2 Enterprise Deployment Blueprint." Thought for the Day "The trouble with the world is that the stupid are sure and the intelligent are full of doubt." — Bertrand Russell (May 18, 1872 – February 2, 1970) Source: SoftwareQuotes.com

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• What do you think of the EntLib 5.0 configuration tool?

  Hello again! Its been a while, I know. Ive been busy over the last few months with several projects, some of them software related, and one of them human my son Jesse was born on 26 February 2010. Fun times! Meanwhile, back in Redmond, the p&p team has been busy working on Enterprise Library 5.0 see Grigoris announcement for details on the beta. Theres a ton of new stuff in this release, but theres one big new feature that hasnt received a lot of attention that Im keen to hear your perspectives on. The change is the biggest overhaul to the configuration tool since Enterprise Library was launched. If you havent yet grabbed the EntLib 5.0 beta, heres a before and after shot of the config tool: Enterprise Library 4.1 config tool Enterprise Library 5.0 (beta 1) config tool The tool has been rebuilt from the ground up in response to some feedback and usability studies from the previous version of the tool. But is this a step in the right direction? Id love to hear what you think. If youve downloaded EntLib 5.0 and tried out the tool, please share your thoughts on: First impressions. Is the tool easy to understand? Easy to find what youre looking for? Easy to read existing configuration? Pretty? Ease of use for real life tasks. Rather than make up your own tasks, here are a few sample scenarios you might want to try: Configure the data access block with a SQL Server connection called Audit that points to a database called Audit on a server called DB Configure the logging block so that any log entries in the Audit category are written to both the Event Log and the Audit database (see above) Configure the validation block with a ruleset called Email Address that uses an appropriate regular expression for e-mail addresses Configure the policy injection block such that any calls to classes in the MyCompany.Security namespace are logged before and after the call using the Audit category (see above) Comparison with the old config tool. What do you like better in the new tool? What did you like better in the old tool? How do you rate your level of expertise using the old tool? Keep in mind that I no longer work in the p&p team, so I cant say how any of this feedback will be used (although Im sure the team is listening!). However since Ive invested so much time in Enterprise Library, both in leading the team and using the product on real projects Im very interested to hear what you all think of the tools new direction.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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• Recovering an Ubuntu installation - Ubuntu eats itself after 'sudo apt-get install -f'

  - by Tony Martin

  Updater (I assume) put a no entry style alert icon on the panel which informed me that certain package dependencies were not up to snuff. Upgrades were thereafter only partial. The dialogue advised that I sudo apt-get install -f. I did this hoping that app-get would fulfil dependencies and replace corrupted files and watched it systematically remove every component of linux, both the stuff I had installed and the core ubuntu packages. I could only assume at this stage that this was in preparation for a fresh install but, of course, I know better now - if you find yourself with apt-get warning you that you are about to remove several hundred packages and asking you to type an involved confirmation string seek advice before proceeding. I digress. This was a 64 bit install of 12.04. All that is left is grub pointing to a couple of windows recovery partitions on the hard drive. Thankfully the Ext4 partition is reachable from a stick boot. EDIT: I've logged onto the machine with a 64 bit stick and can see the file structure left behind by apt-get after {ahem} fixing. My first instinct was to run install from the stick but it seemed to want to do another install rather than a repair. My question then: is there a way to recover the current installation so that if I reinstall the packages I had they will pick up the original settings? I'm particularly worried about losing email from evolution - the rest I could probably lash back together. As for the use of PPA I'm not sure what you're driving at. I generally use Ubuntu Software Centre to install software, though I have used terminal scripts to add new repositories and software successfully following guidance on various websites. The most recent change I made was a downgrade of Wine in an attempt to install and run excel2007 (a necessity, I think, as I have VBA work to do). The installer had stalled and had to be killed. I wonder if that corrupted whatever database holds a model of the package installation structure. I would also be interested to know how this disaster came about. I see people in the know recommending the sudo apt-get install -f as a fairly innocuous cure in similar circumstances. Thanks for your attention, Tony Martin p.s. Do please forgive the rant aspects of the original post. It's hard to write rationally with a large hole in the pit of your stomach.

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• Introducing Agile development after traditional project inception

  - by Riggy

  About a year and a half ago, I entered a workplace that claimed to do Agile development. What I learned was that this place has adopted several agile practices (such as daily standups, sprint plannings and sprint reviews) but none of the principles (just in time / just good enough mentality, exposing failure early, rich communication). I've now been tasked with making the team more agile and I've been assured that I have complete buy-in from the devs and the business team. As a pilot program, they've given me a project that just completed 15 months of requirements gathering, has a 110 page Analysis & Design document (to be considered as "written in stone"), and where I have no access to the end users (only to the committee made up of the users' managers who won't actually be using the product). I started small, giving them a list of expected deliverables for the first 5 sprints (leaving the future sprints undefined), a list of goals for the first sprint, and I dissected the A&D doc to get enough user stories to meet the first sprint's goals. Since then, they've asked why we don't have all the requirements for all the sprints, why I haven't started working on stuff for the third sprint (which they consider more important but is based off of the deliverables of the first 2 sprints) and are pressing for even more documentation that my entire IT team considers busy-work or un-related to us (such as writing the user manual up-front, documenting all the data fields from all the sprints up front, and more "up-front" work). This has been pretty rough for me as a new project manager, but there are improvements I have effectively implemented such as scrumban for story management, pair programming, and having the business give us customer acceptance tests up front (as part of the requirements documentation). So my questions are: What can I do to more effectively introduce change to a resistant business? Are there other practices that I can introduce on the IT side to help show the business the benefits of agile? The burden of documentation is strangling us - the business still sees it as a risk management strategy instead of as a risk. What can we do to alleviate their documentation concerns and demands (specifically the quantity of documentation and their need for all of it up front)? We are in a separate building from our business, about 3 blocks away and they refuse to have their people on the project co-habitate b/c that person "won't be able to work on their other projects while they're at our building." They expect us to always go over there and to bundle our questions so that we can ask them all at once and not waste that person's time with "constant interruptions." What can we do to get richer communication from them? Any additional advice would also be appreciated. Thanks!

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• Skyrim Creation Kit with Xbox 360

  - by funseiki

  I posted this on stackoverflow but was advised to post here (here is a link to the stackoverflow question). I'm hoping for constructive feedback on its plausibility. Update on progress: It looks like there are ways to stuff files back onto the console (horizon, modio, xplorer360, etc) and they do require some form of signing. As of now, though, I've had no luck. I was hoping I could get away with just placing the ".esp" into the directory containing marketplace downloads for Skyrim, along with the signed ".bsa" file (basically a zipped up file containing any extra content the .esp will need to refer that doesn't exist in the basic game). This doesn't work, at least not in the ways I've tried, so next I'm going to try install the entire game to my flash drive (if possible) and attempt to traverse through the game's directory (this is probably unlikely). If anyone else has suggestions or luck or wants more detail on my failures comment/answer away. Here is the question: I'm thinking about buying the PC version of Skyrim to get the Creation Kit (I already own a copy for the Xbox). I have read the faq and scoured plenty of forums to see if there was some way to mod Skyrim for a console (Xbox 360, in particular), but they are generally coming up negative. I realize the CreationKit is on the PC, but I was wondering if there was a way to set up the '.esp' (hopefully I'm interpreting this correctly) files to be placed on the Xbox 360 file system in a similar manner to how game add-ons are downloaded from the Xbox Live Marketplace. I believe it is possible to transfer saves between the console and the PC (e.g. google: 'skyrim mod xbox360'), but these are referencing items that already exist in the game (e.g. a console command for maximum carry weight does not require reference to new animations or models). It would probably be easier if one could navigate through the xbox's file system to see where the games' files are placed, but with the current setup, the file system is abstracted away. Any help or insight on the matter would be much appreciated. I would love to work on a project that would make it possible to let console gamers experience and enjoy all the great mods available to the PC community.

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• How Can I Safely Destroy Sensitive Data CDs/DVDs?

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  You have a pile of DVDs with sensitive information on them and you need to safely and effectively dispose of them so no data recovery is possible. What’s the most safe and efficient way to get the job done? 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 HaLaBi wants to know how he can safely destroy CDs and DVDs with personal data on them: I have old CDs/DVDs which have some backups, these backups have some work and personal files. I always had problems when I needed to physically destroy them to make sure no one will reuse them. Breaking them is dangerous, pieces could fly fast and may cause harm. Scratching them badly is what I always do but it takes long time and I managed to read some of the data in the scratched CDs/DVDs. What’s the way to physically destroy a CD/DVD safely? How should he approach the problem? The Answer SuperUser contributor Journeyman Geek offers a practical solution coupled with a slightly mad-scientist solution: The proper way is to get yourself a shredder that also handles cds – look online for cd shredders. This is the right option if you end up doing this routinely. I don’t do this very often – For small scale destruction I favour a pair of tin snips – they have enough force to cut through a cd, yet are blunt enough to cause small cracks along the sheer line. Kitchen shears with one serrated side work well too. You want to damage the data layer along with shearing along the plastic, and these work magnificently. Do it in a bag, cause this generates sparkly bits. There’s also the fun, and probably dangerous way – find yourself an old microwave, and microwave them. I would suggest doing this in a well ventilated area of course, and not using your mother’s good microwave. There’s a lot of videos of this on YouTube – such as this (who’s done this in a kitchen… and using his mom’s microwave). This results in a very much destroyed cd in every respect. If I was an evil hacker mastermind, this is what I’d do. The other options are better for the rest of us. Another contributor, Keltari, notes that the only safe (and DoD approved) way to dispose of data is total destruction: The answer by Journeyman Geek is good enough for almost everything. But oddly, that common phrase “Good enough for government work” does not apply – depending on which part of the government. It is technically possible to recover data from shredded/broken/etc CDs and DVDs. If you have a microscope handy, put the disc in it and you can see the pits. The disc can be reassembled and the data can be reconstructed — minus the data that was physically destroyed. So why not just pulverize the disc into dust? Or burn it to a crisp? While technically, that would completely eliminate the data, it leaves no record of the disc having existed. And in some places, like DoD and other secure facilities, the data needs to be destroyed, but the disc needs to exist. If there is a security audit, the disc can be pulled to show it has been destroyed. So how can a disc exist, yet be destroyed? Well, the most common method is grinding the disc down to destroy the data, yet keep the label surface of the disc intact. Basically, it’s no different than using sandpaper on the writable side, till the data is gone. Have something to add to the explanation? Sound off in the 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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• Virtual Lab part 2&ndash;Templates, Patterns, Baselines

  - by Geoff N. Hiten

  Once you have a good virtualization platform chosen, whether it is a desktop, server or laptop environment, the temptation is to build “X”.  “X” may be a SharePoint lab, a Virtual Cluster, an AD test environment or some other cool project that you really need RIGHT NOW.  That would be doing it wrong. My grandfather taught woodworking and cabinetmaking for twenty-seven years at a trade school in Alabama.  He was the first instructor hired at that school and the only teacher for the first two years.  His students built tables, chairs, and workbenches so the school could start its HVAC courses.   Visiting as a child, I also noticed many extra “helper” stands, benches, holders, and gadgets all built from wood.  What does that have to do with a virtual lab, you ask?  Well, that is the same approach you should take.  Build stuff that you will use.  Not for solving a particular problem, but to let the Virtual Lab be part of your normal troubleshooting toolkit. Start with basic copies of various Operating Systems.  Load and patch server and desktop OS environments.  This also helps build your collection of ISO files, another essential element of a virtual Lab.  Once you have these “baseline” images, you can use your Virtualization software’s snapshot capability to freeze the image.  Clone the snapshot and you have a brand new fully patched machine in mere moments.  You may have to sysprep some of the Microsoft OS environments if you are going to create a domain environment or experiment with clustering.  That is still much faster than loading and patching from scratch. So once you have a stock of raw materials (baseline images in this case) where should you start.  Again, my grandfather’s workshop gives us the answer.  In the shop it was workbenches and tables to hold large workpieces that made the equipment more useful.  In a Windows environment the same role falls to the fundamental network services:  DHCP, DNS, Active Directory, Routing, File Services, and Storage services.  Plan your internal network setup.  Build out an AD controller with all the features listed.  Make the actual domain an isolated domain so it will not care about where you take it.  Add the Microsoft iSCSI target.  Once you have this single system, you can leverage it for almost any network environment beyond a simple stand-alone system. Having these templates and fundamental infrastructure elements ready to run means I can build a quick lab in minutes instead of hours.  My solutions are well-tested, my processes fully documented with screenshots, and my plans validated well before I have to make any changes to client systems.  the work I put in is easily returned in increased value and client satisfaction.

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• Software Architecture and MEF composition location

  - by Leonardo

  Introduction My software (a bunch of webapi's) consist of 4 projects: Core, FrontWebApi, Library and Administration. Library is a code library project that consists of only interfaces and enumerators. All my classes in other projects inherit from at least one interface, and this interface is in the library. Generally speaking, my interfaces define either Entities, Repositories or Controllers. This project references no other project or any special dlls... just the regular .Net stuff... Core is a class-library project where concrete implementation of Entities and Repositories. In some cases i have more than 1 implementation for a Repository (ex: one for azure table storage and one for regular Sql). This project handles the intelligence (business rules mostly) and persistence, and it references only the Library. FrontWebApi is a ASP.NET MVC 4 WebApi project that implements the controllers interfaces to handle web-requests (from a mobile native app)... It references the Core and the Library. Administration is a code-library project that represents a "optional-module", meaning: if it is present, it provides extra-features (such as Access Control Lists) to the application, but if its not, no problem. Administration is also only referencing the Library and implementing concrete classes of a few interfaces such as "IAccessControlEntry"... I intend to make this available with a "setup" that will create any required database table or anything like that. But it is important to notice that the Core has no reference to this project... Development Now, in order to have a decoupled code I decide to use IoC and because this is a small project, I decided to do it using MEF, specially because of its advertised "composition" capabilities. I arranged all the imports/exports and constructors and everything, but something is quite not perfect in my "mental-visualisation": Main Question Where should I "Compose" the objects? I mean: Technically, the only place where real implementation access is required is in the Repositories, because in order to retrieve data from wherever, entities instances will be necessary, and in all other places. The repositories could also provide a public "GetCleanInstanceOf()" right? Then all other places will be just fine working with the interfaces instead of concrete classes... Secondary Question Should "Administration" implement the concrete object for "IAccessControlGeneralRepository" or the Core should?

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• NVIDIA 550M Drivers

  - by DOOM

  First to say, I am newbie, to the linux world and in situation where i have to get used to using ubuntu. My system is: i7-2630QM 8GB Ram with 750GB HD + NVIDIa 550M (1GB) Since i was facing problems with wubi - "slow Ubuntu", i installed it on a separate partition, of 80GB (10GB Swap, 40GB HOME, 30GB ROOT). The system was running fine, before I started using some "CFD" (Graphics Dependent) application. I needed to use "paraview" a graphics software, to design some engineering stuff. Following the installation problems, i installed something called "messa" on my system. The software works but, now my system is "dead-slow". Even with the computer at an idle state, the laptop, is pretty slow, and with huge annoying fan noise. I was tried running some similar applications with windows, and it turns out that its not a hardware, but has to do with the GPU drivers. Following some forums, I installed the "nvidia-current" and now everything is the same. I know, there are many solutions on this forum for nvidia-driver updates, but as you see, nothings working my way. Please someone, tell me what is that I am doing wrong :( This is the output from my terminal for the command lspci | grep 'intel' 00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 2nd Generation Core Processor Family DRAM Controller (rev 09) 00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200/2nd Generation Core Processor Family PCI Express Root Port (rev 09) 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 2nd Generation Core Processor Family Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 09) 00:16.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family MEI Controller #1 (rev 04) 00:1a.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family USB Enhanced Host Controller #2 (rev 05) 00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family High Definition Audio Controller (rev 05) 00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 1 (rev b5) 00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 2 (rev b5) 00:1c.3 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 4 (rev b5) 00:1c.4 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 5 (rev b5) 00:1c.5 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 6 (rev b5) 00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family USB Enhanced Host Controller #1 (rev 05) 00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation HM67 Express Chipset Family LPC Controller (rev 05) 00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family 6 port SATA AHCI Controller (rev 05) 00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family SMBus Controller (rev 05) 03:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation Centrino Wireless-N 1030 (rev 34)

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• Book review: Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

  - by DigiMortal

     Peopleware by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister is golden classic book that can be considered as mandatory reading for software project managers, team leads, higher level management and board members of software companies. If you make decisions about people then you cannot miss this book. If you are already good on managing developers then this book can make you even better – you will learn new stuff about successful development teams for sure. Why peopleware? Peopleware gives you very good hints about how to build up working environment for project teams where people can really do their work. Book also covers team building topics that are also important reading. As software developer I found practically all points in this book to be accurate and valid. Many times I have found my self thinking about same things and Peopleware made me more confident about my opinions. Peopleware covers also time management and planning topics that help you do way better job on using developers time effectively by minimizing the amount of interruptions by phone calls, pointless meetings and i-want-to-know-what-are-you-doing-right-now questions by managers who doesn’t write code anyway. I think if you follow suggestions given by Peopleware your developers are very happy. I suggest you to also read another great book – Death March by Edward Yourdon. Death March describes you effectively what happens when good advices given by Peopleware are totally ignored or worse yet – people are treated exactly opposite way. I consider also Death March as golden classics and I strongly recommend you to read this book too. Table of Contents Acknowledgments Preface to the Second Edition Preface to the First Edition Part 1: Managing the Human Resource Chapter 1: Somewhere Today, a Project Is Failing Chapter 2: Make a Cheeseburger, Sell a Cheeseburger Chapter 3: Vienna Waits for You Chapter 4: Quality-If Time Permits Chapter 5: Parkinson's Law Revisited Chapter 6: Laetrile Part II: The Office Environment Chapter 7: The Furniture Police Chapter 8: "You Never Get Anything Done Around Here Between 9 and 5" Chapter 9: Saving Money on Space Intermezzo: Productivity Measurement and Unidentified Flying Objects Chapter 10: Brain Time Versus Body Time Chapter 11: The Telephone Chapter 12: Bring Back the Door Chapter 13: Taking Umbrella Steps Part III: The Right People Chapter 14: The Hornblower Factor Chapter 15: Hiring a Juggler Chapter 16: Happy to Be Here Chapter 17: The Self-Healing System Part IV: Growing Productive Teams Chapter 18: The Whole Is Greater Than the Sum of the Parts Chapter 19: The Black Team Chapter 20: Teamicide Chapter 21: A Spaghetti Dinner Chapter 22: Open Kimono Chapter 23: Chemistry for Team Formation Part V: It't Supposed to Be Fun to Work Here Chapter 24: Chaos and Order Chapter 25: Free Electrons Chapter 26: Holgar Dansk Part VI: Son of Peopleware Chapter 27: Teamicide, Revisited Chapter 28: Competition Chapter 29: Process Improvement Programs Chapter 30: Making Change Possible Chapter 31: Human Capital Chapter 32:Organizational Learning Chapter 33: The Ultimate Management Sin Is Chapter 34: The Making of Community Notes Bibliography Index About the Authors

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• Gamification at OOW

  - by erikanollwebb

  Last week was Oracle OpenWorld, and for those of you not in tech or downtown San Francisco, that might not mean a whole lot.  However, if you are familiar with it, Oracle OpenWorld is our premier customer event.  This year, more than 50,000 people attended.  It's not a good week to visit San Francisco on vacation because Oracle customers take over all the hotels in town!  It was crazy, but a lot of fun and it's a great opportunity for the Apps UX group to do customer research with a range of customers.  This year, more than 100+ customers and partners took the time to team up with our UX experts and provide feedback on new designs and ideas. Over three days,  UX teams conducted 8  one-on-one user feedback sessions, 4 focus groups and 7 surveys. In addition, we conducted a voice capture activity and were able to collect close to 70 speech samples at the lab and DEMOgrounds. This was a great opportunity for us to do some testing on some specific gamification concepts with a set of business analysts.  We pulled in 8 folks for a focus group on gamification concepts and whether they thought those would work for their teams. To get ready for this, my designer extraordinaire, Andrea Cantú, flew into town and we spent almost a week locked in a room together brainstorming design ideas.  We killed a few trees trying to get all of our concepts and other examples together in the process, but in the end, we put together a whole series of examples of how you might gamify an Oracle app (in this case, CRM).  Andrea is a genius for this kind of thing and the comps she created looked great.  Here's a picture of her hard at work!  We also had the good fortune to have my boss, Laurie Pattison and my usability contractor, Shobana Subramanian there to note take and observe as well.  Here's a few shots of us, hard at work preparing for the day (or checking out something on Laurie's iPhone...) To start things off, we gave an overview of gamification and I talked about what it's used for.  Then we gave the participants a scenario about our sales person and what we were trying to get her to do. It was a great opportunity to highlight what our business goals might be and why we might want to add game mechanics.  It was also a good way to get them thinking about how that might work for them in their environments and workplaces. There were some surprises for the day.  We asked how many of them were already familiar with the concept of gamification--only two people had heard of it and only one was using game mechanics in his work.  That's in contrast to a survey we just ran internally with folks in a dev org where almost 50% of about 450 respondents had heard of gamification.  As we discussed the ways game mechanics could be used, it became clear that many of the folks had seen some game mechanics in action but didn't know that's what they were.  We also noticed that the folks in this group felt that if they were trying to sell the concept in their orgs, they wouldn't call it gamification.  That's not a huge surprise to me--they said what we've heard in the past, that gamification does not seem like a serious term for enterprise software.  They said they'd sell it with the goals--as a means to increase behaviors by rewarding users for activities.  It's a funny problem.  The word puts some folks off, but at the same time, I haven't seen another one word description that quite captures the range of things that "gamification" can cover.  My guess is that the more mainstream the term becomes, the more desensitized we'll become to the idea the it's trivializing enterprise software in some way.  Still, it was interesting to note that this group still felt that they would not take this concept to their bosses or teams and call it "gamification".  They focused on the goals, and how we could incentivize desired behaviors with game mechanics.  As I have already stated in other posts, I feel like my org is more receptive to discussing how this is just a more transparent type of usability and user experience methods than talking about gamification.  That's the argument they said they would use. All in all, it was a good session.  I love getting to talk to customers, present ideas and concepts, and get their feedback and input.  It's the type of thing that really helps drive our designs and keeps us grounded in what our customers need/want.  We're already planning where to get more feedback opportunities in the coming months. 

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• Do I need to create my own or use a commercial server for the features and matchmaking options I want my game to support?

  - by baptzmoffire

  So I'm developing an indie turn-based game for iOS and, in coding up a Game Center matchmaking class, I'm starting to question whether Game Center is even the best choice for what I want this game to do. I need to figure out whether I need to create my own server, invest in a preexisting client or server service, or if I even need to use a server at all. If I do need to use a ready-made service other than Game Center, which server would accomodate my game's needs best? I have limited resources and funds. Here is the list of features I want my game to support, ideally: Turn-based gameplay (a la "with Friends" and "with Buddies" games) Smart matchmaking (matching users up with other players of comparable skill/achievements) Random matchmaking Facebook matchmaking Specific username matchmaking Contact list matchmaking A way to select what "type" of match you want to challenge an opponent to. (In random, smart, and Facebook matchmaking, there will be different "wagers" the player can make. [e.g. "I wanna play a random opponent for 1000 points. Now, I wanna play my Facebook buddy for 1,000,000 points."] There will be a predetermined range of amounts you can play for. It won't be customizable.) Buddies list capability (Game-buddies, as opposed to contacts and Facebook) A higher concurrent game cap than Game Center offers (which I still can't really find a straight answer on) Scalability (it should support 2 or 20,000,000 players) Objective-C compatibility Flexibility (for all the stuff I haven't thought of yet) Am I dreaming, here? Is there even a service that can handle all of these features? Do I need to invest months in learning a networking language to build my own? If so, how much would I need to spend on hardware? I've been looking around all morning and, so far, the only seemingly viable option is SmartFox. Under "Everything and the kitchen sink" section here, it says they support "virtual world with Zones, Rooms and RoomGroups, create complex game challenges, send invitations, manage buddy lists, create custom permission profiles, oversee the security aspects and tons more." http://www.smartfoxserver.com/overview/platform Is there an option that Im just overlooking? Thanks for any help anyone can provide. Sorry for the long poast. One last question: Does anyone know which server Dice with Buddies uses? I was experimenting with how many concurrent games I could get going and my ADHD kicked in at about 80 games. 80 concurrent games would be great for my game, but again, I need the other features I mentioned too. Thanks again.

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• Meaning of Crawl errors

  - by com

  My question is about definition of Crawl errors in Google Webmaster Tools. Crawl errors is devided into few sections. Let's first consider HTTP section. I assume that all broken links in this section was somehow found by crawler, this is not the links from sitemap. If all this links was found by scanning pages from sitemap for links, why it doesn't mention what was the source page, like in sitemap section with column Linked From. Please correct me if I am wrong. Sitemap section. Looks like all those links came from my sitemap. But there is Linked From column, I already know, that all those broken links is from sitemap, so in order to fix the error, I should revise my sitemap. Am I wrong? Not followed section. I don't know what does it mean. Looks like it accumulates all links that caused redirect, but for some reason Google considers all those redirect as wrong redirect. Do you know if there are any set of rules how to determine wrong redirect. Actually I found were was my mistake, I tried to normalize URL and redirect it to the right URL, but I did normalization in a wrong way. Not found section. This section like HTTP section but with 404 errors. This section has Linked From column. But very often Linked From has unavailable. What does it mean, Google can not say me how it found this non existing page. How this section related to sitemap section. Does this section contains all 404 links from sitemap too. But there is too many 404 links, much more than in sitemap. I tried to take a look what we have in Linked From, and I saw that this link came from sitemap two month ago. But why Google keeps it indexed, the link is already dead, new sitemap doesn't have it. If there is any expire date for old links? Unreachable section. Looks like this section for 500 errors. This section doesn't contain Linked From column. There are too many completely meaningless links, I really don't know where this stuff came from, and without Linked From I am not able to figure out how to deal with it. Sorry for such a big topic, but I just want to make it clear, what every section stands for, because it's extremely crucial in order to deal with all those problems. Hopefully it will be useful not just for me. Thanks!

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• How to use TFS as a query tracking system?

  - by deostroll

  We already use tfs for managing defects in code etc, etc. We additionally need a way to "understand the domain & requirements of the products". Normally, without tfs we exchange emails with the consultants and have the questions/queries answered. If it is a feature implementation we sometimes "find" conflicts in the implementation itself. And when that happens the userstory is modified and the enhancement/bug as per that is raised in TFS. Sometimes it is critical we come back to decisions we made or questions we wanted answers to. Hence we need to be able to track how that "requirement idea" or that "query in concern" evolved. Hence how is it that we can use TFS to track all of this? Do we raise an "issue" item for this? Or do we raise a "bug" item? The main things we'd ideally look in a query tracking system are as follows: Area: Can be a module, submodule, domain. Sometimes this may be "General" - to address domain related stuff, or, event more granular to address modules, sub-modules. Take the case for the latter, if we were tracking this in excel sheets, we'd just write module1,submodule2; i.e. in a comma separated fashion. The things I would like here is to be able search for all queries relating to submodule2 sometime in the future. Responses: This is a record of conversations between the consultant and any other stakeholder. For a simple case, it would just be paragraphs. Each para would start with a name and date enclosed in brackets and the response following that...each para would be like a thread - much like a forum thread Action taken: We'd want to know how the query was closed, what was the input given, what were the changes that took place because of that, etc etc. These are fields I think I would need in such a system apart from some obvious ones like status, address to, resovled by, etc. I am open for any other fields which are sort of important. To summarise my question: how can we manage "queries" in the system? Where should we ideally store data pertaining to those three fields I have mentioned above (for e.g. is it wise to store responses in the history tag assuming we are opening a bug for the query)?

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• How to wrap console utils in webserver

  - by Alex Brown

  I have a big dataset (100Mbs/day) and a bunch of console a TCL/TK tools to view it - I want to turn it into a web app that I can build, and others can maintain. In long: my group runs simulations yielding 100s of Mbs of data daily, in multiple (mostly but not only) text forms. We have a bunch of scripts and tools, mostly old school 1990's style stuff requiring a 5-button mouse, as well as lots of ad-hoc scripts that engineers build out of frustration every month or so. These produces UIs, graphs, spreadsheets (various sizes), logs, event histories etc. I want to replace (or at least supplement) the xwindows / console style UI with a web-based one, so I need the following properties: pleasant to program can wrap existing command-line tools in separate views (I don't need to scrape GUIs or anything) as I port logic from the existing scripts I can create a modularised and pleasant codebase to replace it I can attach a web-ui to navigate between views - each view is likely to contain keys which might make sense to view in another I am new to building systems that have logic on the back-end and front-end of a web-server. from that point of view, they do this: backend wraps old-school executables, constructs calls into them and them takes the output and wraps it up, niceifies it and delivers it to the web client. For instance the tool might generate a number of indexed images (per invocation) which I might deliver all at once or on-demand. May (probably) need to to heavy stats on some sources. frontend provides navigation connecting multiple views, performs requests from one view for data from another (or self to self), etc. Probably will have some views with a lot of interactivity. Can people please point me towards viable solutions for this? I know it's a bit of an open question so as answers come in I hope to refine the spec until we have a good match. I guess I expect to see answers like "RoR!" "beans!" "Scala!" but please give an indication of why those are a good fit; I know nothing! I got bumped off SO for asking an open-ended question, so sorry if its OT here too (let me know). I take the policy that I use the best/closest matched language for a project but most of my team are extremely low level (ie pipeline stages and CDyn) so I don't have the peer group to know where to start.

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• box2d resize bodies arround point

  - by philipp

  I have a compound object, consisting of a b2Body, vector-graphics and a list polygons which describe the b2body's shapes. This object has its own transformation matrix to centralize the storage of transformations. So far everything is working quiet fine, even scaling works, but not if i scale around a point. In the initialization phase of the object it is scaled around a point. This happens in this order: transform the main matrix transform the vector graphics and the polygons recreate the b2Body After this function ran, the shapes and all the graphics are exactly where they should be, BUT: after the first steps of the b2World the graphical stuff moves away from the body. When I ran the debugger I found out that the position of the body is 0/0 the red dot shows the center of scaling. the first image shows the basic setup and the second the final position of the graphics. This distance stays constant for the rest of the simulation. If I set the position via myBody.SetPosition( sx, sy ); the whole scenario just plays a bit more distant for the origin. Any Idea how to fix this? EDIT:: I came deeper down to the problem and it lies in the fact that i must not scale the transform matrix for the b2body shapes around the center, but set the b2body's position back to the point after scaling. But how can I calculate that point? EDIT 2 :: I came ever deeper down to it, even solved it, but this is a slow solution and i hope that there is somebody who understands what formula I need. assuming to have a set polygons relative to an origin as basis shapes for a b2body: scaling the whole object around a certain point is done in the following steps: i scale everything around the center except the polygons i create a clone of the polygons matrix i scale this clone around the point i calculate dx, dy as difference of clone.tx - original.tx and clone.ty - original.ty i scale the original polygon matrix NOT around the point i recreate the body i create the fixture i set the position of the body to dx and dy done! So what i an interested in is a formula for dx and dy without cloning matrices, scaling the clone around a point, getting dx and dy and finally scale the vertex matrix.

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• Am I deluding myself? Business analyst transition to programmer

  - by Ryan

  Current job: Working as the lead business analyst for a Big 4 firm, leading a team of developers and testers working on a large scale re-platforming project (4 onshore dev, 4 offshore devs, several onshore/offshore testers). Also work in a similar capacity on other smaller scale projects. Extent of my role: Gathering/writing out requirements, creating functional specifications, designing the UI (basically mapping out all front-end aspects of the system), working closely with devs to communicate/clarify requirements and come up with solutions when we hit roadblocks, writing test cases (and doing much of the testing), working with senior management and key stakeholders, managing beta testers, creating user guides and leading training sessions, providing key technical support. I also write quite a few macros in Excel using VBA (several of my macros are now used across the entire firm, so there are maybe around 1000 people using them) and use SQL on a daily basis, both on the SQL compact files the program relies on, our SQL Server data and any Access databases I create. The developers feel that I am quite good in this role because I understand a lot about programming, inherent system limitations, structure of the databases, etc so it's easier for me to communicate ideas and come up with suggestions when we face problems. What really interests me is developing software. I do a fair amount of programming in VBA and have been wanting to learn C# for awhile (the dev team uses C# - I review code occasionally for my own sake but have not had any practical experience using it). I'm interested in not just the business process but also the technical side of things, so the traditional BA role doesn't really whet my appetite for the kind of stuff I want to do. Right now I have a few small projects that managers have given me and I'm finding new ways to do them (like building custom Access applications), so there's a bit here and there to keep me interested. My question is this: what I would like to do is create custom Excel or Access applications for small businesses as a freelance business (working as a one-man shop; maybe having an occasional contractor depending on a project's complexity). This would obviously start out as a part-time venture while I have a day job, but eventually become a full-time job. Am I deluding myself to thinking I can go from BA/part-time VBA programmer to making a full-time go of a freelance business (where I would be starting out just writing custom Excel/Access apps in VBA)? Or is this type of thing not usually attempted until someone gains years of full-time programming experience? And is there even a market for these types of applications amongst small businesses (and maybe medium-sized) businesses?

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• OpenGL position from depth is wrong

  - by CoffeeandCode

  My engine is currently implemented using a deferred rendering technique, and today I decided to change it up a bit. First I was storing 5 textures as so: DEPTH24_STENCIL8 - Depth and stencil RGBA32F - Position RGBA10_A2 - Normals RGBA8 x 2 - Specular & Diffuse I decided to minimize it and reconstruct positions from the depth buffer. Trying to figure out what is wrong with my method currently has not been fun :/ Currently I get this: which changes whenever I move the camera... weird Vertex shader really simple #version 150 layout(location = 0) in vec3 position; layout(location = 1) in vec2 uv; out vec2 uv_f; void main(){ uv_f = uv; gl_Position = vec4(position, 1.0); } Fragment shader Where the fun (and not so fun) stuff happens #version 150 uniform sampler2D depth_tex; uniform sampler2D normal_tex; uniform sampler2D diffuse_tex; uniform sampler2D specular_tex; uniform mat4 inv_proj_mat; uniform vec2 nearz_farz; in vec2 uv_f; ... other uniforms and such ... layout(location = 3) out vec4 PostProcess; vec3 reconstruct_pos(){ float z = texture(depth_tex, uv_f).x; vec4 sPos = vec4(uv_f * 2.0 - 1.0, z, 1.0); sPos = inv_proj_mat * sPos; return (sPos.xyz / sPos.w); } void main(){ vec3 pos = reconstruct_pos(); vec3 normal = texture(normal_tex, uv_f).rgb; vec3 diffuse = texture(diffuse_tex, uv_f).rgb; vec4 specular = texture(specular_tex, uv_f); ... do lighting ... PostProcess = vec4(pos, 1.0); // Just for testing } Rendering code probably nothing wrong here, seeing as though it always worked before this->gbuffer->bind(); gl::Clear(gl::COLOR_BUFFER_BIT | gl::DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT); gl::Enable(gl::DEPTH_TEST); gl::Enable(gl::CULL_FACE); ... bind geometry shader and draw models and shiz ... gl::Disable(gl::DEPTH_TEST); gl::Disable(gl::CULL_FACE); gl::Enable(gl::BLEND); ... bind textures and lighting shaders shown above then draw each light ... gl::BindFramebuffer(gl::FRAMEBUFFER, 0); gl::Clear(gl::COLOR_BUFFER_BIT | gl::DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT); gl::Disable(gl::BLEND); ... bind screen shaders and draw quad with PostProcess texture ... Rinse_and_repeat(); // not actually a function ;) Why are my positions being output like they are?

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• Booting Ubuntu on HP Pavilion g7 - 13.04 [duplicate]

  - by death2040

  This question already has an answer here: My computer boots to a black screen, what options do I have to fix it? 24 answers I have a HP Pavilion G7 with an AMD A4 processor and Radeon graphics. I want to install Ubuntu on my laptop but whenever I put the Ubuntu live CD in it and boot to it, the screen shows the Ubuntu logo and the four little dots then after about a minute or two the screen goes black. I can tell the screen is still on but it doesn't have anything on it. I'm beginning to wonder if its a driver problem but I can't really install the drivers when I cant even get Ubuntu to show anything except a loading screen. I've already tried using 12.04 and 12.10 and all the others down to Ubuntu 10. none of them worked. All the other versions don't even show the Ubuntu logo. I'd prefer to have Ubuntu 13.04 on it if its possible but I haven't had any luck finding a solution. I've also tried using WUBI installer in Windows 7 but all that did was make my computer slower for windows and it does the same with the screen when i boot it to Ubuntu. I'm trying to use Ubuntu alongside Windows 7. I cant find any solution on Google. It wont load anything and I know that there is a program called grub on Ubuntu that I used on my desktop computer when it had graphics trouble but the trouble with my desktop was minor things like the screen would flash and then show weird patterns on the screen. But I can't find anything on what to do with the HP laptop. Please help. I use this laptop a lot for games on Windows 7 and I just want to use Ubuntu for when I take my laptop to school and for school stuff. Edit: I just tried booting it in nomodeset and some other things and still didn't work. It did boot up but now when it goes to install alongside windows it crashes and says Ubuntu is forcing reboot or something like that Also, this question is different from the black screen at boot issue because when I do use nomodeset on my computer and select install Ubuntu it will go as far as the screen where you can choose to replace Windows or run alongside Windows. Then after I click continue it ejects the live CD and turns off my computer without installing anything. The error message it shows when it ejects the disk says signal 15, shutting down - modem manager [1675]: <info> Caught nm-dispatcher.action: Caught signal 15, shutting down... *Deconfiguring network interfaces... Please remove installation media and close the tray (if any) then press ENTER *Deactivating swap... *Stopping remaining crypto disks... *stopping early crypto disks... unmount: /run/lock: not mounted unmount: /run/shm: not mounted

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• How is programming affected by spatial aptitude?

  - by natli

  The longer I work on a project, the less clear it becomes. It's like I cannot seperate various classes/objects anymore in my head. Everything starts mixing up, and it's extremely hard to take it all apart again. I start putting functions in classes where they really don't belong, and make silly mistakes such as writing code that I later find was 100% obsolete; things are no longer clearly mappable in my head. It isn't until I take a step back for several hours (or days somtimes!) that I can actually see what's going on again, and be productive. I usually try to fight through this, I am so passionate about coding that I wouldn't for the life of me know what else I could be doing. This is when stuff can get really weird, I get so up in my head that I sort of lose touch with reality (to some extent) in that various actions, such as pouring a glass of water, no longer happen on a concious level. It happens on auto pilot, during which pretty much all of my concious concentration (is that even a thing?) is devoted to borderline pointless problem solving (trying to seperate elements of code). It feels like a losing battle. So I took an IQ test a while ago (Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale I believe it was) and it turned out my Spatial Aptitude was quite low. I still got a decent score, just above average, so I won't have to poke things with a stick for a living, but I am a little worried that this is such a handicap when writing/engineering computer programs that I won't ever be able to do it seriously or professionally. I am very much interested in what other people think of this.. could a low spatial aptitude be the cause of the above described problems? Maybe I should be looking more along the lines of ADD or something similar, because I did get diagnosed with ADD at the age of 17 (5 years ago) but the medicine I received didn't seem to affect me that much so I never took it all that serious. Sorry if I got a little off topic there, I know this is not a mental help board, the question should be clear; How is programming affected by spatial aptitude? As far as I know people are born with low/med/high spatial aptitude, so I think it's interesting to find out if the more fortunate are better programmers by birth right.

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• Data structures for a 2D multi-layered and multi-region map?

  - by DevilWithin

  I am working on a 2D world editor and a world format subsequently. If I were to handle the game "world" being created just as a layered set of structures, either in top or side views, it would be considerably simple to do most things. But, since this editor is meant for 3rd parties, I have no clue how big worlds one will want to make and I need to keep in mind that eventually it will become simply too much to check, handling and comparing stuff that are happening completely away from the player position. I know the solution for this is to subdivide my world into sub regions and stream them on the fly, loading and unloading resources and other data. This way I know a virtually infinite game area is achievable. But, while I know theoretically what to do, I really have a few questions I'd hoped to get answered for some hints about the topic. The logic way to handle the regions is some kind of grid, would you pick evenly distributed blocks with equal sizes or would you let the user subdivide areas by taste with irregular sized rectangles? In case of even grids, would you use some kind of block/chunk neighbouring system to check when the player transposes the limit or just put all those in a simple array? Being a region a different data structure than its owner "game world", when streaming a region, would you deliver the objects to the parent structures and track them for unloading later, or retain the objects in each region for a more "hard-limit" approach? Introducing the subdivision approach to the project, and already having a multi layered scene graph structure on place, how would i make it support the new concept? Would you have the parent node have the layers as children, and replicate in each layer node, a node per region? Or the opposite, parent node owns all the regions possible, and each region has multiple layers as children? Or would you just put the region logic outside the graph completely(compatible with the first suggestion in Q.3) When I say virtually infinite worlds, I mean it of course under the contraints of the variable sizes and so on. Using float positions, a HUGE world can already be made. Do you think its sane to think beyond that? Because I think its ok to stick to this limit since it will never be reached so easily.. As for when to stream a region, I'm implementing it as a collection of watcher cameras, which the streaming system works with to know what to load/unload. The problem here is, i will be needing some kind of warps/teleports built in for my game, and there is a chance i will be teleporting a player to a unloaded region far away. How would you approach something like this? Is it sane to load any region to memory which can be teleported to by a warp within a radius from the player? Sorry for the huge question, any answers are helpful!

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• How to suggest using an ORM instead of stored procedures?

  - by Wayne M

  I work at a company that only uses stored procedures for all data access, which makes it very annoying to keep our local databases in sync as every commit we have to run new procs. I have used some basic ORMs in the past and I find the experience much better and cleaner. I'd like to suggest to the development manager and rest of the team that we look into using an ORM Of some kind for future development (the rest of the team are only familiar with stored procedures and have never used anything else). The current architecture is .NET 3.5 written like .NET 1.1, with "god classes" that use a strange implementation of ActiveRecord and return untyped DataSets which are looped over in code-behind files - the classes work something like this: class Foo { public bool LoadFoo() { bool blnResult = false; if (this.FooID == 0) { throw new Exception("FooID must be set before calling this method."); } DataSet ds = // ... call to Sproc if (ds.Tables[0].Rows.Count > 0) { foo.FooName = ds.Tables[0].Rows[0]["FooName"].ToString(); // other properties set blnResult = true; } return blnResult; } } // Consumer Foo foo = new Foo(); foo.FooID = 1234; foo.LoadFoo(); // do stuff with foo... There is pretty much no application of any design patterns. There are no tests whatsoever (nobody else knows how to write unit tests, and testing is done through manually loading up the website and poking around). Looking through our database we have: 199 tables, 13 views, a whopping 926 stored procedures and 93 functions. About 30 or so tables are used for batch jobs or external things, the remainder are used in our core application. Is it even worth pursuing a different approach in this scenario? I'm talking about moving forward only since we aren't allowed to refactor the existing code since "it works" so we cannot change the existing classes to use an ORM, but I don't know how often we add brand new modules instead of adding to/fixing current modules so I'm not sure if an ORM is the right approach (too much invested in stored procedures and DataSets). If it is the right choice, how should I present the case for using one? Off the top of my head the only benefits I can think of is having cleaner code (although it might not be, since the current architecture isn't built with ORMs in mind so we would basically be jury-rigging ORMs on to future modules but the old ones would still be using the DataSets) and less hassle to have to remember what procedure scripts have been run and which need to be run, etc. but that's it, and I don't know how compelling an argument that would be. Maintainability is another concern but one that nobody except me seems to be concerned about.

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• Understanding clojure keywords

  - by tjb1982

  I'm taking my first steps with Clojure. Otherwise, I'm somewhat competent with JavaScript, Python, Java, and a little C. I was reading this artical that describes destructuring vectors and maps. E.g. => (def point [0 0]) => (let [[x y] point] => (println "the coordinates are:" x y)) the coordinates are: 0 0 but I'm having a difficult time understanding keywords. At first glance, they seem really simple, as they just evaluate to themselves: => :test :test But they seem to be used is so many different ways and I don't understand how to think about them. E.g., you can also do stuff like this: => (defn full-name [& {first :first last :last}] => (println first last)) => (full-name :first "Tom" :last "Brennan") Tom Brennan nil This doesn't seem intuitive to me. I would have guessed the arguments should have been something more like: (full-name {:first "Tom" :last "Brennan"}) because it looks like in the function definition that you're saying "no required arguments, but a variable number of arguments comes in the form of a single map". But it seems more like you're saying "no required arguments, but a variable number of arguments comes which should be a list of alternating keywords and values... ?" I'm not really sure how to wrap my brain around this. Also, things like this confuse me too: => (def population {:humans 5 :zombies 1000}) => (:zombies population) 1000 => (population :zombies) 1000 How do maps and keywords suddenly become functions? If I could get some clarification on the use of keywords in these two examples, that would be really helpful. Update I've also seen http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3337888/clojure-named-arguments and while the accepted answer is a great demonstration of how to use keywords with destructuring and named arguments, I'm really looking more for understanding how to think about them--why the language is designed this way and how I can best internalize their use.

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• Particle System in XNA - cannot draw particle

  - by Dave Voyles

  I'm trying to implement a simple particle system in my XNA project. I'm going by RB Whitaker's tutorial, and it seems simple enough. I'm trying to draw particles within my menu screen. Below I've included the code which I think is applicable. I'm coming up with one error in my build, and it is stating that I need to create a new instance of the EmitterLocation from the particleEngine. When I hover over particleEngine.EmitterLocation = new Vector2(Mouse.GetState().X, Mouse.GetState().Y); it states that particleEngine is returning a null value. What could be causing this? /// <summary> /// Base class for screens that contain a menu of options. The user can /// move up and down to select an entry, or cancel to back out of the screen. /// </summary> abstract class MenuScreen : GameScreen ParticleEngine particleEngine; public void LoadContent(ContentManager content) { if (content == null) { content = new ContentManager(ScreenManager.Game.Services, "Content"); } base.LoadContent(); List<Texture2D> textures = new List<Texture2D>(); textures.Add(content.Load<Texture2D>(@"gfx/circle")); textures.Add(content.Load<Texture2D>(@"gfx/star")); textures.Add(content.Load<Texture2D>(@"gfx/diamond")); particleEngine = new ParticleEngine(textures, new Vector2(400, 240)); } public override void Update(GameTime gameTime, bool otherScreenHasFocus, bool coveredByOtherScreen) { base.Update(gameTime, otherScreenHasFocus, coveredByOtherScreen); // Update each nested MenuEntry object. for (int i = 0; i < menuEntries.Count; i++) { bool isSelected = IsActive && (i == selectedEntry); menuEntries[i].Update(this, isSelected, gameTime); } particleEngine.EmitterLocation = new Vector2(Mouse.GetState().X, Mouse.GetState().Y); particleEngine.Update(); } public override void Draw(GameTime gameTime) { // make sure our entries are in the right place before we draw them UpdateMenuEntryLocations(); GraphicsDevice graphics = ScreenManager.GraphicsDevice; SpriteBatch spriteBatch = ScreenManager.SpriteBatch; SpriteFont font = ScreenManager.Font; spriteBatch.Begin(); // Draw stuff logic spriteBatch.End(); particleEngine.Draw(spriteBatch); }

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• Are You an IT Geek? Why Not Write for How-To Geek?

  - by The Geek

  Are you a geek in the IT field that wants to share your skills with the world? We’re looking for an experienced Sysadmin / IT Admin / Webmaster geek with writing skills that wants to join our team on a part-time basis. Please apply if you have the following qualities: You must be a geek at heart, willing to try and make the boring world of IT sound glamorous and sexy. If that’s not possible, at least be willing to share your wisdom and skills to help other IT geeks save time and become better at what they do. You must be able to write articles that are easy to understand. Either Windows or Linux writers are welcome to apply. You must be able to follow our style guide. You must be creative. You must generate ideas for articles on your own, and take suggestions like a pro. You’re ambitious, looking to build your skills and your name, and are prepared to work hard. If you aren’t willing to work hard, put some dedication and pride into your work, or aren’t really interested in the topic, this job might not be for you. We’re looking for serious individuals that want to grow with us, and as we grow, you’ll grow as well. How To Apply If you think this job is a good fit for you, send an email to [email protected] and include some background information about yourself, why you’d be a good fit, some topic areas you are familiar with, and hopefully some examples of your work. Bonus points if you have a ninja costume and a keyboard strapped to your back. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips What Topics Should The How-To Geek Write About?Got Awesome Skills? Why Not Write for How-To Geek?Got Awesome Geek Skills? The How-To Geek is Looking for WritersAbout the GeekThe How-To Geek Bounty Program TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 QuicklyCode Provides Cheatsheets & Other Programming Stuff Download Free MP3s from Amazon Awe inspiring, inter-galactic theme (Win 7) Case Study – How to Optimize Popular Wordpress Sites Restore Hidden Updates in Windows 7 & Vista Iceland an Insurance Job?

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