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• Sweden Azure Group with Michele Laroux Bustamente &amp; Maartin Balliauw Thursday 22nd May

  - by Alan Smith

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/asmith/archive/2014/05/19/156418.aspxSweden Azure Group (SWAG) has the privilege of welcoming Michele Laroux Bustamente and Maartin Balliauw to present sessions at our meeting this Thursday. Michele and Maartin are two of the world’s leading experts in Cloud Computing and Azure, and will be taking time out from their busy schedules to share their ideas with us, and answer any questions. Knowit Stockholm are kindly hosting the event at their offices, and providing food and refreshments. It should be a great evening. You can register for the event here. Azure Q & A - Michele Leroux Bustamante In this interactive Q & A session Michele Leroux Bustamante will be on hand to share her wealth of experience on Azure related issues. If you are new to Azure and wanting some tips to get started, or an experienced developer needing to negotiate the legal and political protocols related to Cloud Computing Michele will have been there, done that, and be willing to share her experiences. This session will be entirely driven by that attendees, so please come prepared with questions. Reducing latency on the web with the Windows Azure CDN – Maarten Balliauw Serving up content on the Internet is something our web sites do daily. But are we doing this in the fastest way possible? How are users in faraway countries experiencing our apps? Why do we have three webservers serving the same content over and over again? In this session, we’ll explore the Windows Azure Content Delivery Network or CDN, a service which makes it easy to serve up blobs, videos and other content from servers close to our users. We’ll explore simple file serving as well as some more advanced, dynamic edge caching scenarios. Michele Leroux Bustamante Michele Leroux Bustamante is CIO at Solliance (solliance.net), cofounder of Snapboard (snapboard.com), and is recognized as a Microsoft Regional Director and MVP. Michele is a thought leader with over 20 years specializing in building scalable and secure end-to-end system design, identity and access management, and cloud computing technologies – for companies of all sizes. In recent years Michele has also helped launch several startup business ventures and has been a mentor to startups in several accelerator programs – providing both technical and business guidance. Michele shares her experiences through presentations and keynotes all over the world, and has been publishing regularly in technology journals. Maarten Balliauw Maarten Balliauw is a Technical Evangelist at JetBrains. His interests are all web: ASP.NET MVC, PHP and Windows Azure. He’s a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for Azure and an ASPInsider. He has published many articles in both PHP and .NET literature such as MSDN magazine and PHP architect. Maarten is a frequent speaker at various national and international events such as MIX (Las Vegas), TechDays, DPC, …

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• ASP.NET Web Forms is bad, or what am I missing?

  - by iveqy

  Being a PHP guy myself I recently had to write a spider to an asp.net site. I was really surprised by the different approach to ajax and form-handling. For example, in the PHP sites I've worked with, a deletion of a database entry would be something like: GET delete.php?id=&confirm=yes and get a "success" back in some form (in the ajax case, probably a json reply). In this asp.net application you would instead post a form, including all inputs on the page, with a huge __VIEWSTATE and __EVENTVALIDATION. This would be more than 10 times as big as above. The reply would be the complete side again, with a footer containing some structured data for javascript to parse and display the result. Again, the whole page is sent, and then throwed away(?) since it's already displayed. Why not just send the footer with the data to parse (it's not json nor xml but a | separated list). I really can't see why you would design a system that way. Usually you've a fast client, and a somewhat fast server but a really slow connection. Why not keep the datatransfer to a minimum? Why those huge __VIEWSTATE and __EVENTVALIDATION? It seems that everything is done way to chatty and way to complicated. I really can't see the point and that usually means that I'm missing something. So please tell me, what are the reasons for this design and what benefits (and weaknesses) does it have? (Yes I know that __VIEWSTATE is used to tell what type of form-konfiguration should be sent back to the server. But WHY is this needed?) Please keep this discussion strictly technical and avoid flamewars. Update: Please excuse the somewhat rantish question. I tried to explain my view to be able to get a better answer. I am not saying that asp.net is bad, I am saying that I don't understand the meaning of those concepts. Usually that means that I've things to learn instead of the concepts beeing wrong. I appreciate the explanations about that "you don't have to do this way in asp.net", I'll read up on MVC and other .net technologies. However, there most be a reason for this site (the one I referred to) to be written the way it is. It's written by professionals for a big organisation with far more experience than what I've. Any explanation about their (possible) design choice would be welcome.

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• What is the difference between development and R&D?

  - by MainMa

  I was asked by a colleague to explain clearly the difference between ordinary development and research and development (R&D) and was unable to do it. After reading Wikipedia, I still don't have the precise answer. According to Wikipedia (slightly modified): There are two primary models: In one model, the primary function is to develop new products; in the other model, the primary function is to discover and create new knowledge about scientific and technological topics for the purpose of uncovering and enabling development of valuable new products, processes, and services. The first model is confusing. Does it mean that development (not R&D) consists exclusively in adding new features to a product, solving bugs and doing maintenance? What if something which was previously developed as a new feature becomes a separate product? The second model is less confusing, but still, how to qualify whether something is new knowledge or existent knowledge which is just rediscovered? Later, Wikipedia adds that ordinary development is different from R&D because of its: nearly immediate profit or immediate improvement. It's still not clear enough. How to qualify "nearly immediate profit"? What if a task has an immediate profit but requires heavy research? Or if it is basic but has uncertain profit, like the enforcement of a common style over the codebase? For example, does it belong to development or R&D to: Develop an engine which abstracts the access to the database, simplifying and shortening enormously the code of other applications (existent or ones which will be written in future) which should access to the database? Establish a new service-oriented architecture for the entire organization of company resources, in order to move from a bunch of separate and autonomous applications to a set of well-organized, interconnected web services, like what is used by Amazon? Design a new communication protocol to allow faster replication of data between two data centers of the company? Conceive a new type of software testing while working on a specific product, knowing that this type of testing will improve/simplify the testing process? Prove that Functional programming is more appropriate than OOP for a specific application, based on evidence, logic and previous experience? Enhance the existent application by adding gestures on tactile screens, after doing studies and testing that shows that those gestures improve the productivity of the users by a ratio of at least 1.4 for a precise set of tasks? Find a way to strongly enhance the Power usage effectiveness (PUE) of a data center? Create a Domain-Specific Language (DSL)? In short, how could I determine whether I'm doing R&D while working on something?

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• Atheros AR928X wireless connection makes neighbourhood machine drop off line

  - by funicorn

  I have an Acer laptop with Atheros AR928X wireless card installed, supported by ath9k driver in the linux kernel. There are other 5 computers sharing wireless connection via a TPLink 150Mbit/s wireless router. At first I found the network is a little bit slower than it's in Windows7, which I accepted as it should be. However a very strange thing is, each time I connected to the router and downloaded stuff for a while, one of the computers running Windows7 in my local network dropped off from the router. And if I run my laptop under Windows7, everything is fine. What's even stranger is although the network becomes slower, only the certain computer drops and totally freezes in connection with the router. I'm not willing to conclude it's due to the unhealthy connection from my laptop to the router, however we have confirmed this for more than one times and there is no problem with the network when I'm running WIndows7. I'm extremely confused about what's going on. As a Linux user running Ubuntu over 5 years, I am awared that wireless driver in Linux is badly notorious of lack of stability and slow speed. But is it so bad that the unhealthy wireless connection can do damage to another computer in the same local network? I do see a lot of "Tx excessive retries" in iwconfig output. But how exactly does this happen ? Thanks for your help. I guess I have to use this answer box to show the outputs $ sudo iwconfig wlan0 IEEE 802.11bgn ESSID:"TP-LINK111" Mode:Managed Frequency:2.427 GHz Access Point: E0:05:C5:E8:A9:92 Bit Rate=121.5 Mb/s Tx-Power=16 dBm Retry long limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off Encryption key:off Power Management:off Link Quality=47/70 Signal level=-63 dBm Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0 Tx excessive retries:2 Invalid misc:23 Missed beacon:0 To show what's wrong with the wireless connection, I ran iwconfig again within 3 minutes, during which time I hardly did anything and the network was not much busy than being nearly idle $ sudo iwconfig wlan0 IEEE 802.11bgn ESSID:"TP-LINK111" Mode:Managed Frequency:2.427 GHz Access Point: E0:05:C5:E8:A9:92 Bit Rate=121.5 Mb/s Tx-Power=16 dBm Retry long limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off Encryption key:off Power Management:off Link Quality=48/70 Signal level=-62 dBm Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0 Tx excessive retries:9 Invalid misc:28 Missed beacon:0 You can see Tx excessive retires and Invalid misc increase very quickly. $ sudo iwlist wlan0 modu wlan0 unknown modulation information. $ sudo iwlist wlan0 channel wlan0 13 channels in total; available frequencies : Channel 01 : 2.412 GHz Channel 02 : 2.417 GHz Channel 03 : 2.422 GHz Channel 04 : 2.427 GHz Channel 05 : 2.432 GHz Channel 06 : 2.437 GHz Channel 07 : 2.442 GHz Channel 08 : 2.447 GHz Channel 09 : 2.452 GHz Channel 10 : 2.457 GHz Channel 11 : 2.462 GHz Channel 12 : 2.467 GHz Channel 13 : 2.472 GHz Current Frequency:2.427 GHz (Channel 4)

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• iTorque for a simple arcade game

  - by Herfus

  I have a basic understanding of programming, but I am no programmer. I've had a couple of a semesters with java programming, so we're talking pretty basic here. I have some scripting experience with game editors where I've created a few (simple) encounters, boss AI, abilities, events and so on. I've mostly done level design with UDK, Source and several other toolsets for a few years now, but I'd like to divert some of the focus to iphone-development. I've participated in a few development projects (source, udk, daot) where I've had a variety of roles (yet never beyond simple scripting). I have just finished prototyping an Iphone game (using game maker) and begun a bit more precise planning on what I'll have to do for the real version. The game is fairly simple, perhaps the best comparison in scope and complexity would be Doodlejump for iPhone. The reason I created the prototype was not just to answer a few questions about the gameplay, but to get some insight into what kind of problems I might face when trying to develop the real thing. I've been looking for engines that I can use for this. iTorque looks, so far, like the best option with a scripting language and WYSIWYG-editor. However the price is fairly steep and I'd like to prepare myself as much as possible before jumping into this, which is why I'm going to ask a few questions here. What kind of difficulties do you think I might run into, considering what you've read so far? Not just with torque, but development in general. I'm making this question mostly to have someone to reality check me. I usually achieve to do what I'm trying to do with scripting, but something tells me there's a very big difference between scripting an AI or an event and creating game logic. Will it be too much of a leap? Just how simple is it to use the Torque scripting language? Obviously I don't expect to be prepared, I expect it to be a learning process. However, I'd still like to be at least a bit confident on the time I'll have to dedicate to this first.

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• What does the Spring framework do? Should I use it? Why or why not?

  - by sangfroid

  So, I'm starting a brand-new project in Java, and am considering using Spring. Why am I considering Spring? Because lots of people tell me I should use Spring! Seriously, any time I've tried to get people to explain what exactly Spring is or what it does, they can never give me a straight answer. I've checked the intros on the SpringSource site, and they're either really complicated or really tutorial-focused, and none of them give me a good idea of why I should be using it, or how it will make my life easier. Sometimes people throw around the term "dependency injection", which just confuses me even more, because I think I have a different understanding of what that term means. Anyway, here's a little about my background and my app : Been developing in Java for a while, doing back-end web development. Yes, I do a ton of unit testing. To facilitate this, I typically make (at least) two versions of a method : one that uses instance variables, and one that only uses variables that are passed in to the method. The one that uses instance variables calls the other one, supplying the instance variables. When it comes time to unit test, I use Mockito to mock up the objects and then make calls to the method that doesn't use instance variables. This is what I've always understood "dependency injection" to be. My app is pretty simple, from a CS perspective. Small project, 1-2 developers to start with. Mostly CRUD-type operations with a a bunch of search thrown in. Basically a bunch of RESTful web services, plus a web front-end and then eventually some mobile clients. I'm thinking of doing the front-end in straight HTML/CSS/JS/JQuery, so no real plans to use JSP. Using Hibernate as an ORM, and Jersey to implement the webservices. I've already started coding, and am really eager to get a demo out there that I can shop around and see if anyone wants to invest. So obviously time is of the essence. I understand Spring has quite the learning curve, plus it looks like it necessitates a whole bunch of XML configuration, which I typically try to avoid like the plague. But if it can make my life easier and (especially) if make it can make development and testing faster, I'm willing to bite the bullet and learn Spring. So please. Educate me. Should I use Spring? Why or why not?

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• #SSAS #Tabular Workshop and Community Events in Netherlands and Denmark

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  Next week I will finally start the roadshow of the SSAS Tabular Workshop, a 2-day seminar about the new BISM Tabular model for Analysis Services that has been introduced in SQL Server 2012. During these roadshows, we always try to arrange some speeches at local community events in the evening - we already defined for Copenhagen, we have some logistic issue in Amsterdam that we're trying to solve. Here is the timetable: Netherlands SSAS Workshop in Amsterdam, NL – April 16-17, 2012 2-day seminar, I and Alberto will be the trainers for this event, register here We're trying to manage a Community event but we still don't have a confirmation, stay tuned        Denmark SSAS Workshop in Copenhagen, DK – April 26-27, 2012 2-day seminar, I and Alberto will be the trainers for this event, register here Community event on April 26, 2012 This event will run in Hellerup, at Microsoft venue All details available here: http://msbip.dk/events/26/msbip-mode-nr-5/ People from Sweden are welcome! Just register to this private group on LinkedIn in order to announce your presence, so we’ll know how many people will attend In community events we’ll deliver two speeches – here are the descriptions: Inside xVelocity (VertiPaq) PowerPivot and BISM Tabular models in Analysis Services share a great columnar-based database engine called xVelocity in-memory analytics engine (VertiPaq). If you want to improve performance and optimize memory used, you have to understand some basic principles about how this engine works, how data is compressed, and how you can design a data model for better optimization. Prepare yourself to change your mind. xVelocity optimization techniques might seem counterintuitive and are absolutely different than OLAP and SQL ones! Choosing between Tabular and Multidimensional You have a new project and you have to make an important decision upfront. Should you use Tabular or Multidimensional? It is not easy to answer, because sometime there is a clear choice, but most of the times both decisions might be correct, at least at the beginning. In this session we’ll help you making an informed decision, correctly evaluating pros and cons of each one according to common scenarios, considering both short-term and long-term consequences of your choice. I hope to meet many people in this first dates. We have many other events coming in May and June, including an online event (for US time zones), and you can also attend our PreCon Day at TechEd US in Orland (PRC06) or TechEd Europe in Amsterdam. I’ll be a good customer for airline companies in the next three months! I’m just sorry that I hadn’t time to write other articles in the last month, but I’m accumulating material that I will need to write down during some flight – stay tuned…

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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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• Push-Based Events in a Services Oriented Architecture

  - by Colin Morelli

  I have come to a point, in building a services oriented architecture (on top of Thrift), that I need to expose events and allow listeners. My initial thought was, "create an EventService" to handle publishing and subscribing to events. That EventService can use whatever implementation it desires to actually distribute the events. My client automatically round-robins service requests to available service hosts which are determined using Zookeeper-based service discovery. So, I'd probably use JMS inside of EventService mainly for the purpose of persisting messages (in the event that a service host for EventService goes down before it can distribute the message to all of the available listeners). When I started considering this, I began looking into the differences between Queues and Topics. Topics unfortunately won't work for me, because (at least for now), all listeners must receive the message (even if they were down at the time the event was pushed, or hadn't made a subscription yet because they haven't completed startup (during deployment, for example) - messages should be queued until the service is available). However, I don't want EventService to be responsible for handling all of the events. I don't think it should have the code to react to events inside of it. Each of the services should do what it needs with a given event. This would indicate that each service would need a JMS connection, which questions the value of having EventService at all (as the services could individually publish and subscribe to JMS directly). However, it also couples all of the services to JMS (when I'd rather that there be a single service that's responsible for determining how to distribute events). What I had thought was to publish an event to EventService, which pulls a configuration of listeners from some configuration source (database, flat file, irrelevant for now). It replicates the message and pushes each one back into a queue with information specific to that listener (so, if there are 3 listeners, 1 event would become 3 events in JMS). Then, another thread in EventService (which is replicated, running on multiple hots) would be pulling from the queue, attempting to make the service call to the "listener", and returning the message to the queue (if the service is down), or discarding the message (if the listener completed successfully). tl;dr If I have an EventService that is responsible for receiving events and delegating service calls to "event listeners," (which are really just endpoints on other services), how should it know how to craft the service call? Should I create a generic "Event" object that is shared among all services? Then, the EventService can just construct this object and pass it to the service call. Or is there a better answer to this problem entirely?

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• Server-infrastructure recommendations

  - by Tim van Elsloo

  Here's the thing: I need a cheap, fast, reliable infrastructure that can dynamically scale (like Amazon S3: cloud-storage). I'm thinking of 3 different type of 'servers'. Application-server Should be able to run CentOS (or another light Linux-distr.) Should be able to run Apache Should be able to run PHP Should be able to run GD (so it does rely on it's cpu). Should be extremely reliable and fast. Database-server Should be able to run MySQL Should be able to... well, do nothing else :P. Should be extremely reliable and fast. Storage-server Should be able to run some kind of file-transfer-deamon (like FTP, CouchDB, etc.) Should be able to do nothing else. Should be extremely reliable and fast. So technically, by transferring all static data to 2 different servers/services, the application-server can totally focus on the webpages. My questions: What services do you recommend? Which is cheaper, faster and more reliable: using my own server, or using some cloud-storage/cloud-computing-service (like Amazon S3, CloudFiles, etc.)? How can I prevent bandwidth abuse (such as dos-attacks causing the bill to be extremely high)? What's the difference between "including CDN" and "excluding CDN"? It seems the price doesn't differ at CloudFiles? Do you have to pay "including CDN" + "excluding CDN" when you decide to enable the delivery-network? Or have you only got to pay "including CDN"? Should I use my own nameserver too or can I use my domain-hoster's nameservers? What are the minimum software specifications of a nameserver. Can I write some software myself? Does anyone have a good protocol-description? I hope you can answer my questions. Answers I shouldn't write my own nameserver-software. Instead, I should use something like bind. (http://osspro.com/2010/05/04/linux-create-your-own-domain-name-server-dns/).

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• External hard drive not recognized

  - by sr71

  Installed Ubuntu 10.10 on a hard drive by itself (no windows). All updates are up to date. Everything`works fine except when I plug in a 320 gig Toshiba external hard drive....it is not recognized. When I plug in an 8 gig flash drive it is recognized no problem. What do I mean by "not recognized"? I mean: how do you know it was not recognized. You can check the command "cat /proc/partitions" in a terminal with and without the hdd attached. If you see some difference, it's ok. If the difference is something like "sda1" (sd+letter+number) then you have partition on it, maybe it can't be handled in Ubuntu (no filesystem on it or so). If there is only "sda" in the difference for example (sd+letter, but no number after it) then the drive itself is detected, just no partition is created on it. Also you can check out the messages of the kernel, with the "dmesg" command in the terminal. If there is no disk/partition/anything in /proc/partitions, there can be an USB level problem, you can issue command "lsusb" as it was suggested before my answer. It's really matter of what do you mean about "not recognized". @Marco Ceppi @Oli @Pitto By "not recognized" I meant that when I plug in a 8 gig flash drive an icon immediately appears on the desktop imdicating that there is a flash drive plugged in and I can click on it and view the files on the flash drive. It also shows up on the "Nautilus" default file manager. When I plug in the 320 gig Toshiba external hard drive, I get no indication on the desktop or the file manager (thus "not recogized"). When I run the command cat/proc/partitions/ I get an error message Could not open location 'file:///home/bob/cat/proc/partitions' with or without the external hard drive installed. With the dmeg command I get about 10 pages of info with no mention of disk/partition/anything in /proc/partitions. When I run lsusb command I get the following: bob@bob-desktop:~$ lsusb Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 003 Device 003: ID 04b3:3003 IBM Corp. Rapid Access III Keyboard Bus 003 Device 002: ID 04b3:3004 IBM Corp. Media Access Pro Keyboard Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub

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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 can I fix broken i915 drivers for Intel GPUs?

  - by Alen Mujezinovic

  I've got troubles getting the i915 drivers to work correctly on my laptop (HP Pavilion DM4 2101ea). Specifically, the laptop screen goes black and stays black after the splash graphic when booting both from USB key and from harddrive. To get anything on to the display after the splash screen I have to boot either with acpi=off nomodeset i915.modeset=0 I'd rather not turn ACPI off because I like my fans spinning and nomodeset is a bit overkill, so for now I'm booting with i915.modeset=0. Unfortunately, this turns off KMS and my current maximum resolution on the laptop screen is fixed to 1024x768 instead of its real capability. When not setting any of the above boot flags and I plug in an external monitor, the external monitor works fine. When booting with the flags, the external monitor works fine too, but can only do 1024x768 and can't do anything else than mirroring the laptop display. I did upgrade the i915 drivers from 2.17 that ship with Precise to 2.19 which are the most recent ones but without luck of getting anything to display. Here's my lspci output: 00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 2nd Generation Core Processor Family DRAM Controller (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.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 3 (rev b5) 00:1c.4 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 5 (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 HM65 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) 01:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4313 802.11b/g/n Wireless LAN Controller (rev 01) 02:00.0 Unassigned class [ff00]: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTS5116 PCI Express Card Reader (rev 01) 08:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR8151 v2.0 Gigabit Ethernet (rev c0) Here's lshw -C video *-display UNCLAIMED description: VGA compatible controller product: 2nd Generation Core Processor Family Integrated Graphics Controller vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 2 bus info: pci@0000:00:02.0 version: 09 width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: msi pm vga_controller bus_master cap_list configuration: latency=0 resources: memory:c0000000-c03fffff memory:b0000000-bfffffff ioport:4000(size=64) Both outputs are generated after booting with i915.modeset=0. Here's a complete Xorg.log file from a boot into a black screen: https://gist.github.com/479ce06454e47d6123e1 The graphics card is a Intel HD 3000 integrated GPU. I've never had problems with Intel hardware on Ubuntu before so this is very surprising. If you could provide a method to make i915 work, suggest alternative drivers a way to boot with i915.modeset=0 but higher resolutions and KMS on or explain what is happening and how to fix it I'll give you an answer badge. :) Thanks

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• What to use C++ for?

  - by futlib

  I really love C++. However, I'm struggling to find good uses for it lately. It is still the language to use if you're building huge systems with huge performance requirements. Like backend/infrastructure code at Google and Facebook, or high-end games. But I don't get to do stuff like that. It's also a good choice for code that runs close to the hardware. I'd like to do more low-level stuff, but it isn't part of my job, and I can't think of useful private projects that would involve that. Traditionally, C++ was also a good choice for rich client applications, but those are mostly written in C# and Obj-C lately - and aren't really that important anymore, with everything being a web app. Or a mobile app, which are mostly written in Obj-C and Java. And of course, web-based desktop and mobile apps are quite prominent, too. At my job, I work mostly on web applications, using Java, JavaScript and Groovy. Java is a good/popular choice for non-Google-scale backends, Groovy (or Python, or Ruby or Node.js) is pretty good for the server-side of web apps and JavaScript is the only real choice for the client-side. Even the little games I'm writing in my spare time are lately mostly written in JavaScript, so they can run in the browser. So what would you suggest I could use C++ for? I'm aware that this question is very similar. However, I don't want to learn C++, I was a professional C++ programmer for years. I want to keep doing it and find good new use cases for it. I know that I can use C++ for web apps/games. I could even compile C++ to JavaScript with Emscripten. However, it doesn't seem like a good idea. I'm looking for something C++ is really good at to stay competent in the language. If your answer is: Just give up and forget C++, you'll probably never need it again, so be it.

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• Would someone please explain Octree Collisions to me?

  - by A-Type

  I've been reading everything I can find on the subject and I feel like the pieces are just about to fall into place, but I just can't quite get it. I'm making a space game, where collisions will occur between planets, ships, asteroids, and the sun. Each of these objects can be subdivided into 'chunks', which I have implemented to speed up rendering (the vertices can and will change often at runtime, so I've separated the buffers). These subdivisions also have bounding primitives to test for collision. All of these objects are made of blocks (yeah, it's that kind of game). Blocks can also be tested for rough collisions, though they do not have individual bounding primitives for memory reasons. I think the rough testing seems to be sufficient, though. So, collision needs to be fairly precise; at block resolution. Some functions rely on two blocks colliding. And, of course, attacking specific blocks is important. Now what I am struggling with is filtering my collision pairs. As I said, I've read a lot about Octrees, but I'm having trouble applying it to my situation as many tutorials are vague with very little code. My main issues are: Are Octrees recalculated each frame, or are they stored in memory and objects are shuffled into different divisions as they move? Despite all my reading I still am not clear on this... the vagueness of it all has been frustrating. How far do Octrees subdivide? Planets in my game are quite large, while asteroids are smaller. Do I subdivide to the size of the planet, or asteroid (where planet is in multiple divisions)? Or is the limit something else entirely, like number of elements in the division? Should I load objects into the octrees as 'chunks' or in the whole, then break into chunks later? This could be specific to my implementation, I suppose. I was going to ask about how big my root needed to be, but I did manage to find this question, and the second answer seems sufficient for me. I'm afraid I don't really get what he means by adding new nodes and doing subdivisions upon adding new objects, probably because I'm confused about whether the tree is maintained in memory or recalculated per-frame.

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• SQL: empty string vs NULL value

  - by Jacek Prucia

  I know this subject is a bit controversial and there are a lot of various articles/opinions floating around the internet. Unfortunatelly, most of them assume the person doesn't know what the difference between NULL and empty string is. So they tell stories about surprising results with joins/aggregates and generally do a bit more advanced SQL lessons. By doing this, they absolutely miss the whole point and are therefore useless for me. So hopefully this question and all answers will move subject a bit forward. Let's suppose I have a table with personal information (name, birth, etc) where one of the columns is an email address with varchar type. We assume that for some reason some people might not want to provide an email address. When inserting such data (without email) into the table, there are two available choices: set cell to NULL or set it to empty string (''). Let's assume that I'm aware of all the technical implications of choosing one solution over another and I can create correct SQL queries for either scenario. The problem is even when both values differ on the technical level, they are exactly the same on logical level. After looking at NULL and '' I came to a single conclusion: I don't know email address of the guy. Also no matter how hard i tried, I was not able to sent an e-mail using either NULL or empty string, so apparently most SMTP servers out there agree with my logic. So i tend to use NULL where i don't know the value and consider empty string a bad thing. After some intense discussions with colleagues i came with two questions: am I right in assuming that using empty string for an unknown value is causing a database to "lie" about the facts? To be more precise: using SQL's idea of what is value and what is not, I might come to conclusion: we have e-mail address, just by finding out it is not null. But then later on, when trying to send e-mail I'll come to contradictory conclusion: no, we don't have e-mail address, that @!#$ Database must have been lying! Is there any logical scenario in which an empty string '' could be such a good carrier of important information (besides value and no value), which would be troublesome/inefficient to store by any other way (like additional column). I've seen many posts claiming that sometimes it's good to use empty string along with real values and NULLs, but so far haven't seen a scenario that would be logical (in terms of SQL/DB design). P.S. Some people will be tempted to answer, that it is just a matter of personal taste. I don't agree. To me it is a design decision with important consequences. So i'd like to see answers where opion about this is backed by some logical and/or technical reasons.

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• How to resolve concurrent ramp collisions in 2d platformer?

  - by Shaun Inman

  A bit about the physics engine: Bodies are all rectangles. Bodies are sorted at the beginning of every update loop based on the body-in-motion's horizontal and vertical velocity (to avoid sticky walls/floors). Solid bodies are resolved by testing the body-in-motion's new X with the old Y and adjusting if necessary before testing the new X with the new Y, again adjusting if necessary. Works great. Ramps (rectangles with a flag set indicating bottom-left, bottom-right, etc) are resolved by calculating the ratio of penetration along the x-axis and setting a new Y accordingly (with some checks to make sure the body-in-motion isn't attacking from the tall or flat side, in which case the ramp is treated as a normal rectangle). This also works great. Side-by-side ramps, eg. \/ and /\, work fine but things get jittery and unpredictable when a top-down ramp is directly above a bottom-up ramp, eg. < or > or when a bottom-up ramp runs right up to the ceiling/top-down ramp runs right down to the floor. I've been able to lock it down somewhat by detecting whether the body-in-motion hadFloor when also colliding with a top-down ramp or hadCeiling when also colliding with a bottom-up ramp then resolving by calculating the ratio of penetration along the y-axis and setting the new X accordingly (the opposite of the normal behavior). But as soon as the body-in-motion jumps the hasFloor flag becomes false, the first ramp resolution pushes the body into collision with the second ramp and collision resolution becomes jittery again for a few frames. I'm sure I'm making this more complicated than it needs to be. Can anyone recommend a good resource that outlines the best way to address this problem? (Please don't recommend I use something like Box2d or Chipmunk. Also, "redesign your levels" isn't an answer; the body-in-motion may at times be riding another body-in-motion, eg. a platform, that pushes it into a ramp so I'd like to be able to resolve this properly.) Thanks!

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• How to discriminate from two nodes with identical frequencies in a Huffman's tree?

  - by Omega

  Still on my quest to compress/decompress files with a Java implementation of Huffman's coding (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huffman_coding) for a school assignment. From the Wikipedia page, I quote: Create a leaf node for each symbol and add it to the priority queue. While there is more than one node in the queue: Remove the two nodes of highest priority (lowest probability) from the queue Create a new internal node with these two nodes as children and with probability equal to the sum of the two nodes' probabilities. Add the new node to the queue. The remaining node is the root node and the tree is complete. Now, emphasis: Remove the two nodes of highest priority (lowest probability) from the queue Create a new internal node with these two nodes as children and with probability equal to the sum of the two nodes' probabilities. So I have to take two nodes with the lowest frequency. What if there are multiple nodes with the same low frequency? How do I discriminate which one to use? The reason I ask this is because Wikipedia has this image: And I wanted to see if my Huffman's tree was the same. I created a file with the following content: aaaaeeee nnttmmiihhssfffouxprl And this was the result: Doesn't look so bad. But there clearly are some differences when multiple nodes have the same frequency. My questions are the following: What is Wikipedia's image doing to discriminate the nodes with the same frequency? Is my tree wrong? (Is Wikipedia's image method the one and only answer?) I guess there is one specific and strict way to do this, because for our school assignment, files that have been compressed by my program should be able to be decompressed by other classmate's programs - so there must be a "standard" or "unique" way to do it. But I'm a bit lost with that. My code is rather straightforward. It literally just follows Wikipedia's listed steps. The way my code extracts the two nodes with the lowest frequency from the queue is to iterate all nodes and if the current node has a lower frequency than any of the two "smallest" known nodes so far, then it replaces the highest one. Just like that.

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• Ubuntu 10.10 not recognizing external hard drive

  - by sr71

  Installed Ubuntu 10.10 on a hard drive by itself (no windows). All updates are up to date. Everything`works fine except when I plug in a 320 gig Toshiba external hard drive....it is not recognized. When I plug in an 8 gig flash drive it is recognized no problem. What do I mean by "not recognized"? I mean: how do you know it was not recognized. You can check the command "cat /proc/partitions" in a terminal with and without the hdd attached. If you see some difference, it's ok. If the difference is something like "sda1" (sd+letter+number) then you have partition on it, maybe it can't be handled in Ubuntu (no filesystem on it or so). If there is only "sda" in the difference for example (sd+letter, but no number after it) then the drive itself is detected, just no partition is created on it. Also you can check out the messages of the kernel, with the "dmesg" command in the terminal. If there is no disk/partition/anything in /proc/partitions, there can be an USB level problem, you can issue command "lsusb" as it was suggested before my answer. It's really matter of what do you mean about "not recognized". @Marco Ceppi @Oli @Pitto By "not recognized" I meant that when I plug in a 8 gig flash drive an icon immediately appears on the desktop imdicating that there is a flash drive plugged in and I can click on it and view the files on the flash drive. It also shows up on the "Nautilus" default file manager. When I plug in the 320 gig Toshiba external hard drive, I get no indication on the desktop or the file manager (thus "not recogized"). When I run the command "cat/proc/partitions/" I get an error message Could not open location 'file:///home/bob/cat/proc/partitions' with or without the external hard drive installed. With the "dmeg" command I get about 10 pages of info with no mention of disk/partition/anything in /proc/partitions. When I run "lsub" command I get the following: bob@bob-desktop:~$ lsusb Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 003 Device 003: ID 04b3:3003 IBM Corp. Rapid Access III Keyboard Bus 003 Device 002: ID 04b3:3004 IBM Corp. Media Access Pro Keyboard Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub bob@bob-desktop:~$

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• No network connectivity (not wired or wireless) - RT5390

  - by Ben Udy

  I am starting to think I simply need to accept a small loss and sell my new ASUS K73E. Because I really don't enjoy computing when I have to deal with Windough$ and this windows 7 64 bit on my new ASUS is even worse than the old machines with XP. I have written to ASUS and they simply say "We don't support Linux" and while Ralink's website says they do support Linux I can't get anyone to tell me what model Ralink card might be in my machine. Is anyone out there who might be able to give me some useful advice???? Here is the answer to command lspci nn && lsusb && lsmod && rfkill list all: di,snd_seq snd 54244 16 snd_hda_codec_realtek,snd_hda_intel,snd_hda_codec,snd_hwdep,snd_pcm_oss,snd_mixer_oss,snd_pcm,snd_seq_oss,snd_rawmidi,snd_seq,snd_timer,snd_seq_device uvcvideo 57374 0 videodev 34361 1 uvcvideo v4l1_compat 13251 2 uvcvideo,videodev soundcore 6620 1 snd snd_page_alloc 7076 2 snd_hda_intel,snd_pcm psmouse 63677 0 serio_raw 3978 0 lp 7028 0 parport 32635 2 ppdev,lp fbcon 35102 71 tileblit 1999 1 fbcon font 7557 1 fbcon bitblit 4707 1 fbcon softcursor 1189 1 bitblit video 17375 0 output 1871 1 video vga16fb 11385 1 vgastate 8961 1 vga16fb ahci 32360 2 di,snd_seq snd 54244 16 snd_hda_codec_realtek,snd_hda_intel,snd_hda_codec,snd_hwdep,snd_pcm_oss,snd_mixer_oss,snd_pcm,snd_seq_oss,snd_rawmidi,snd_seq,snd_timer,snd_seq_device uvcvideo 57374 0 videodev 34361 1 uvcvideo v4l1_compat 13251 2 uvcvideo,videodev soundcore 6620 1 snd snd_page_alloc 7076 2 snd_hda_intel,snd_pcm psmouse 63677 0 serio_raw 3978 0 lp 7028 0 parport 32635 2 ppdev,lp fbcon 35102 71 tileblit 1999 1 fbcon font 7557 1 fbcon bitblit 4707 1 fbcon softcursor 1189 1 bitblit video 17375 0 output 1871 1 video vga16fb 11385 1 vgastate 8961 1 vga16fb ahci 32360 2 Edit #2 lspci 00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Device 0104 (rev 09) 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Device 0116 (rev 09) 00:16.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation Cougar Point HECI Controller #1 (rev 04) 00:1a.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation Cougar Point USB Enhanced Host Controller #2 (rev 05) 00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation Cougar Point High Definition Audio Controller (rev 05) 00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Cougar Point PCI Express Root Port 1 (rev b5) 00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Cougar Point PCI Express Root Port 2 (rev b5) 00:1c.5 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Cougar Point PCI Express Root Port 6 (rev b5) 00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation Cougar Point USB Enhanced Host Controller #1 (rev 05) 00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation Device 1c49 (rev 05) 00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation Cougar Point 6 port SATA AHCI Controller (rev 05) 00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation Cougar Point SMBus Controller (rev 05) 02:00.0 Network controller: RaLink Device 5390 03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Device 1083 (rev c0) lsusb Bus 002 Device 002: ID 8087:0024 Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 001 Device 003: ID 13d3:5710 IMC Networks Bus 001 Device 002: ID 8087:0024 Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Thanks for the suggestion because this gave me a model for Ralink RT5390. I have now gone to Ralink.com and downloaded (via Windows 7) the driver package (it is a bz2 file). I hope I can figure out how to install it. And FYI - I was not able to run su (not authorized?) and dmidecode didn't exist (probably needs to be downloaded BUT no internet yet in Ubuntu)

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• Using HBase or Cassandra for a token server

  - by crippy

  I've been trying to figure out how to use HBase/Cassandra for a token system we're re-implementing. I can probably squeeze quite a lot more from MySQL, but it just seems it has come to clinging on to the wrong tool for the task just because we know it well. Eventually will hit a wall (like happened to us in other areas). Naturally I started looking into possible NoSQL solutions. The prominent ones (at least in terms of buzz) are HBase and Cassandra. The story is more or less like this: A user can send a gift other users. Each gift has a list of recipients or is public in which case limited by number or expiration date For each gift sent we generate some token that uniquely identifies that gift. For each gift we track the list of potential recipients and their current status relating to that gift (accepted, declinded etc). A user can request to see all his currently pending gifts A can request a list of users he has sent a gift to today (used to limit number of gifts sent) Required the ability to "dump" or "ignore" expired gifts (x day old gifts are considered expired) There are some other requirements but I believe the above covers the essentials. How would I go and model that using HBase or Cassandra? Well, the wall was performance. A few 10s of millions of records per day over 2 tables kept for 2 weeks (wish I could have kept it for more but there was no way). The response times kept getting slower and slower until eventually we had to start cutting down number of days we kept data. Caching helps here but it's not an ideal solution since a big part of the ops are updates. Also, as I hinted in my original post. We use MySQL extensively. We know exactly what it can and can't do both in naive implementations followed by native partitioning and finally by horizontally sharding our dataset on the application level to reside on multiple DB nodes. It can be done, but that's not really what I'm trying to get from this. I asked a very specific question about designing a solution using a NoSQL solution since it's very hard to find examples for designs out there. Brainlag, not trying to come off as rude. I actually appreciate it a lot that you are the only one who even bothered to respond. but I see it over and over again. People ask questions and others assume they have no idea what they're talking about and give an irrelevant answer. Ignore RDBMS please. The question is about nosql.

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• 2D Animation Smoothness - Delta time vs. Kinematics

  - by viperld002

  I'm animating a sprite in 2D with key frames of rotation and xy-positions. I've recently had a discussion with someone saying that when the device (happens to be an iPad using cocos2D) hits a performance bump due to whatever else the user may be doing, lag will arise and that the best way to fight it is to not use actual positions, but velocities, accelerations and torques with kinematics. His message is to evaluate the positions and rotations from these speeds at the current point in time. I've never experienced a situation where I've heard of using kinematics to stem lag in 2D animations and am not sure of how effective it could be. Also, it seems to be overkill. The application is not networked so it's all running on a local device. The desired effect is that the animation always plays as closely as it can to the target frame rate. Wouldn't the technique suffer the same problems as just using the time since the last frame or a fixed time step since the kinematics would also require some time value to perform the calculation? What techniques could you suggest to best achieve the desired effect? EDIT 1 Thank you for your responses, they are very illuminating. I want to clarify my question before choosing an answer however, to make sure that this post really serves it's purpose. I have a sprite of a ball, and a text file with 3 arrays worth of information (rotation,translations x, translations y) with each unit of information existing as a key frame to be stepped through (0 to 49 and back to 0 to replay it again). I have this playing by interpolating from the current key frame to the next, every n-units of time. The animation is visibly correct when compared to a video I was given of it, and it is smooth because of the interpolations between the key frames. This is the existing state of the project. There are no physics simulated, only a static animation of a ball moving in a way an artist specifically designed. Should I, instead of rotation in degrees and translations by positions in space, derive velocities, accelerations and torques to express this static animation as a function of time? As in, position now = foo(time now), where foo uses kinematics.

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• Should a server "be lenient" in what it accepts and "discard faulty input silently"?

  - by romkyns

  I was under the impression that by now everyone agrees this maxim was a mistake. But I recently saw this answer which has a "be lenient" comment upvoted 137 times (as of today). In my opinion, the leniency in what browsers accept was the direct cause of the utter mess that HTML and some other web standards were a few years ago, and have only recently begun to properly crystallize out of that mess. The way I see it, being lenient in what you accept will lead to this. The second part of the maxim is "discard faulty input silently, without returning an error message unless this is required by the specification", and this feels borderline offensive. Any programmer who has banged their head on the wall when something fails silently will know what I mean. So, am I completely wrong about this? Should my program be lenient in what it accepts and swallow errors silently? Or am I mis-interpreting what this is supposed to mean? The original question said "program", and I take everyone's point about that. It can make sense for programs to be lenient. What I really meant, however, is APIs: interfaces exposed to other programs, rather than people. HTTP is an example. The protocol is an interface that only other programs use. People never directly provide the dates that go into headers like "If-Modified-Since". So, the question is: should the server implementing a standard be lenient and allow dates in several other formats, in addition to the one that's actually required by the standard? I believe the "be lenient" is supposed to apply to this situation, rather than human interfaces. If the server is lenient, it might seem like an overall improvement, but I think in practice it only leads to client implementations that end up relying on the leniency and thus failing to work with another server that's lenient in slightly different ways. So, should a server exposing some API be lenient or is that a very bad idea? Now onto lenient handling of user input. Consider YouTrack (a bug tracking software). It uses a language for text entry that is reminiscent of Markdown. Except that it's "lenient". For example, writing - foo - bar - baz is not a documented way of creating a bulleted list, and yet it worked. Consequently, it ended up being used a lot throughout our internal bugtracker. Next version comes out, and this lenient feature starts working slightly differently, breaking a bunch of lists that (mis)used this (non)feature. The documented way to create bulleted lists still works, of course. So, should my software be lenient in what user inputs it accepts?

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• MatheMagics - Guess My Age Method 1

  - by PointsToShare

  © 2011 By: Dov Trietsch. All rights reserved MatheMagic – Guess My Age – Method 1 The Mathemagician stands on the stage and asks an adult to do the following: ·         Do the next few steps on your calculator, or the calculator in your phone, or even on a piece of paper. ·         Do it silently! Don’t tell me the results until I ask for them directly ·         Compute a single digit multiple of 9 – any one of 9, 18, 27, … all the way to 81, will do. ·         Now multiply your age by 10 ·         Subtract the 9 multiple from this number. ·         Tell me the result. Notice that I don’t know which multiple of 9 you subtracted from 10 times your age. I will nonetheless immediately tell you what your age is. How do I do this? Let’s do the algebra. 10X – 9Y = 10X – 10Y + Y = 10(X – Y) + Y Now remember, you asked an adult, so his/her age is a two digit number (maybe even 3 digits), thus reducing it by the single digit multiplied by nine is still positive – the lowest is can be is 100 – 81 which yields 19. Now make two numbers out of the result. The last digit and the number before it. This number is X – Y or the age minus the single digit you selected. The last digit is this very single digit. This is always so regardless of the digit you selected. So… Add tis digit to the other number and you get back the age! Q.E.D Example: I am 76 years old and here is what happens when I do the steps 76 x 10 = 760 760 – 18 = 742 made of 74 and 2. My age is 74 + 2 760 – 81 = 679 made of 67 and 9. My age is 67 + 9 A note to the socially aware mathemagician – it is safer to do it with a man. The chances of a veracious answer are much, much higher! The trick may be accomplished on any 2 or 3 digit number, not just one’s age, but if you want to know your date’s age, it’s a good way to elicit it. That’s All Folks PS for more Ageless “Age” mathemagics go to www.mgsltns.com/games.htm and also here: http://geekswithblogs.net/PointsToShare/archive/2011/11/15/mathemagics---guess-my-age---method-2.aspx

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• How are you coping with Ubuntu's Unity app launcher? (It auto-hides, can't minimize apps)

  - by Bad Learner

  [Firstly, let me tell you that this cannot be subjective in anyway, as I think at least Ubuntu beginners will have these questions boggling in their mind; and yes, this is a question that has a definite answer - - so, I am completely within the rules.] Okay, coming to the point, I see that Ubuntu uses Unity since v10.xx (netbook edition?) and carried the same to v11.04 & v11.10. As someone who's stuck to Windows for all these years, it's somewhat difficult to cope with Ubuntu's Unity, for the following reasons: [1] The Unity app launcher (to the screen's left) auto-hides when a window is maximized. [2]- And once launched, apps cannot be minimized by clicking the app's icon in the launcher. I have to go to the top-left of the screen and click the "_" button. I do know I can fix these issues by installing some configuration tool. But the thing is, if that's how it's meant to work, Canonical/Ubuntu would have designed it that way. But they didn't. Why? w.r.t above points [1], [2]: [1] EDITED: So, does it mean, it's good to work without maximizing the windows? Because if I maximize the window, the app launcher hides. And I need to hover the mouse to the left of the screen, wait a bit (even if it's a sec or even less, I can still feel the lag), and then click on the next app icon in the launcher to switch to it. I do know, I can use Alt+TAB to switch, but I am not sure which window comes next. This, I feel, isn't productive. Also, this makes me feel, Ubuntu is designed for large screens (it's nice on my 1920x1080p screen), because I can have two windows side-by-side or something like that on a large screen. This is not possible on smaller screens. [2]- Being able to minimize an application's window by clicking on its icon in the launcher (just like it works on Windows & probably elsewhere) would have been great, rather than having to go to the top-left and clicking the _ (minimize) button which brings up the app launcher itself (from hiding) most of the time. It's too tiring to have these small issues in the UI. I really would like to know how you are coping with these issues the way they are?

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