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Review–Build Android and iOS apps in Visual Studio with Nomad

- by Bill Osuch

Nomad is a Visual Studio extension that allows you build apps for both Android and iOS platforms in Visual Studio using HTML5. There is no need to switch between .Net, Java and Objective-C to target different platforms - write your code once in HTML5 and build for all common mobile platforms and tablets. You have access to the native hardware functions (such as camera and GPS) through the PhoneGap library, UI libraries such as jQuery mobile allow you to create an impressive UI with minimal work. Nomad is still in an early access beta stage, so the documentation is a bit sparse. In fact, the only documentation is a simple series of steps on how to install the plug-in, set up a project, build and deploy it. You're going to want to be a least a little familiar with the PhoneGap library and jQuery mobile to really tap into the power of this. The sample project included with the download shows you just how simple it is to create projects in Visual Studio. The sample solution comes with an index.html file containing the HTML5 code, the Cordova (PhoneGap) library, jQuery libraries, and a JQuery style sheet: The html file is pretty straightforward. If you haven't experimented with JQuery mobile before, some of the attributes (such as data-role) might be new to you, but some quick Googling will fill in everything you need to know. The first part of the file builds a simple (but attractive) list with some links in it: The second part of the file is where things get interesting and it taps into the PhoneGap library. For instance, it gets the geolocation position by calling position.coords.latitude and position.coords.longitude: ...and then displays it in a simple span: Building is pretty simple, at least for Android (I'm not an iOS developer so I didn't look at that feature) - just configure the display name, version number, and package ID. There's no need to specify Android version; Nomad supports 2.2 and later. Enter these bits of information, click the new "Build for Android" button (not the regular Visual Studio Build link...) and you get a dialog box saying that your code is being built by their cloud build service (so no building while away from a WiFi signal apparently). After a couple minutes you wind up with a .apk file that can be copied over to your device. Applications built with Nomad for Android currently use a temporary certificate, so you can test the app on your devices but you cannot publish them in the Google Play Store (yet). And I love the "success" dialog box: Since Nomad is still in Beta, no pricing plans have been announced yet, so I'll be curious to see if this becomes a cost-effective solution to mobile app development. If it is, I may even be tempted to spring for the $99 iOS membership fee! In the meantime, I plan to work on porting some of my apps over to it and seeing how they work. My only quibble at this time is the lack of a centralized documentation location - I'd like to at least see which (if any) features of JQuery and PhoneGap are limited or not supported. Also, some notes on targeting different Android screen sizes would be nice, but it's relatively easy to find jQuery examples out on the InterWebs. Oh well, trial and error! You can download the Nomad extension for Visual Studio by going to their web site: www.vsnomad.com. Technorati Tags: Android, Nomad

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How Can I Start an Incognito/Private Browsing Window from a Shortcut?

- by Jason Fitzpatrick

Sometimes you just want to pop the browser open for a quick web search without reloading all your saved tabs; read on as we show a fellow reader how to make a quick private-browsing shortcut. Dear How-To Geek, I came up with a solution to my problem, but I need your help implementing it. I typically have a ton of tabs open in my web browser and, when I need to free up system resources when gaming or using a resource intense application, I shut down the web browser. The problem arises when I find myself needing to do quick web search while the browser is shut down. I don’t want to open it up, load all the tabs, and waste the resources in doing so all for a quick Google search. The perfect solution, it would seem, is to open up one of Chrome’s Incognito windows: it loads separate, it won’t open up all the old tabs, and it’s perfect for a quick Google search. Is there a way to launch Chrome with a single Incognito window open without having to open the browser in the normal mode (and load the bazillion tabs I have sitting there)? Sincerely, Tab Crazy That’s a rather clever work around to your problem. Since you’ve already done the hard work of figuring out the solution you need, we’re more than happy to help you across the finish line. The magic you seek is available via what are known as “command line options” which allow you to add additional parameters and switches onto a command. By appending the command the Chrome shortcut uses, we can easily tell it to launch in Incognito mode. (And, for other readers following along at home, we can do the same thing with other browsers like Firefox). First, let’s look at Chrome’s default shortcut: If you right click on it and select the properties menu, you’ll see where the shortcut points: "C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" If you run that shortcut, you’ll open up normal browsing mode in Chrome and your saved tabs will all load. What we need to do is use the command line switches available for Chrome and tell it that we want it to launch an Incognito window instead. Doing so is as simple as appending the end of the “Target” box’s command line entry with -incognito, like so: "C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" -incognito We’d also recommend changing the icon to it’s easy to tell the default Chrome shortcut apart from your new Incognito shortcut. When you’re done, make sure to hit OK/Apply at the button to save the changes. You can recreate the same private-browsing-shortcut effect with other major web browsers too. Repeat shortcut editing steps we highlighted above, but change out the -incognito with -private (for Firefox and Internet Explorer) and -newprivatetab (for Opera). With just a simple command line switch applied, you can now launch a lightweight single browser window for those quick web searches without having to stop your game and load up all your saved tabs. Have a pressing tech question? Email us at [email protected] and we’ll do our best to answer it.

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MVC Portable Areas – Static Files as Embedded Resources

- by Steve Michelotti

This is the third post in a series related to build and deployment considerations as I’ve been exploring MVC Portable Areas: #1 – Using Web Application Project to build portable areas #2 – Conventions for deploying portable area static files #3 – Portable area static files as embedded resources In the last post, I walked through a convention for managing static files. In this post I’ll discuss another approach to manage static files (e.g., images, css, js, etc.). With this approach, you *also* compile the static files as embedded resources into the assembly similar to the *.aspx pages. Once again, you can set this to happen automatically by simply modifying your *.csproj file to include the desired extensions so you don’t have to remember every time you add a file: 1: <Target Name="BeforeBuild"> 2: <ItemGroup> 3: <EmbeddedResource Include="**\*.aspx;**\*.ascx;**\*.gif;**\*.css;**\*.js" /> 4: </ItemGroup> 5: </Target> We now need a reliable way to serve up these static files that are embedded in the assembly. There are a couple of ways to do this but one way is to simply create a Resource controller whose job is dedicated to doing this. 1: public class ResourceController : Controller 2: { 3: public ActionResult Index(string resourceName) 4: { 5: var contentType = GetContentType(resourceName); 6: var resourceStream = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().GetManifestResourceStream(resourceName); 7: 8: return this.File(resourceStream, contentType); 9: return View(); 10: } 11: 12: private static string GetContentType(string resourceName) 13: { 14: var extention = resourceName.Substring(resourceName.LastIndexOf('.')).ToLower(); 15: switch (extention) 16: { 17: case ".gif": 18: return "image/gif"; 19: case ".js": 20: return "text/javascript"; 21: case ".css": 22: return "text/css"; 23: default: 24: return "text/html"; 25: } 26: } 27: } In order to use this controller, we need to make sure we’ve registered the route in our portable area registration (shown in lines 5-6): 1: public class WidgetAreaRegistration : PortableAreaRegistration 2: { 3: public override void RegisterArea(System.Web.Mvc.AreaRegistrationContext context, IApplicationBus bus) 4: { 5: context.MapRoute("ResourceRoute", "widget1/resource/{resourceName}", 6: new { controller = "Resource", action = "Index" }); 7: 8: context.MapRoute("Widget1", "widget1/{controller}/{action}", new 9: { 10: controller = "Home", 11: action = "Index" 12: }); 13: 14: RegisterTheViewsInTheEmbeddedViewEngine(GetType()); 15: } 16: 17: public override string AreaName 18: { 19: get { return "Widget1"; } 20: } 21: } In my previous post, we relied on a custom Url helper method to find the actual physical path to the static file like this: 1: <img src="<%: Url.AreaContent("/images/arrow.gif") %>" /> Hello World! However, since we are now embedding the files inside the assembly, we no longer have to worry about the physical path. We can change this line of code to this: 1: <img src="<%: Url.Resource("Widget1.images.arrow.gif") %>" /> Hello World! Note that I had to fully quality the resource name (with namespace and physical location) since that is how .NET assemblies store embedded resources. I also created my own Url helper method called Resource which looks like this: 1: public static string Resource(this UrlHelper urlHelper, string resourceName) 2: { 3: var areaName = (string)urlHelper.RequestContext.RouteData.DataTokens["area"]; 4: return urlHelper.Action("Index", "Resource", new { resourceName = resourceName, area = areaName }); 5: } This method gives us the convenience of not having to know how to construct the URL – but just allowing us to refer to the resource name. The resulting html for the image tag is: 1: <img src="/widget1/resource/Widget1.images.arrow.gif" /> so we can always request any image from the browser directly. This is almost analogous to the WebResource.axd file but for MVC. What is interesting though is that we can encapsulate each one of these so that each area can have it’s own set of resources and they are easily distinguished because the area name is the first segment of the route. This makes me wonder if something like this ResourceController should be baked into portable areas itself. I’m definitely interested in anyone has any opinions on it or have taken alternative approaches.

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How to prepare for a programming competition? Graphs, Stacks, Trees, oh my! [closed]

- by Simucal

Last semester I attended ACM's (Association for Computing Machinery) bi-annual programming competition at a local University. My University sent 2 teams of 3 people and we competed amongst other schools in the mid-west. We got our butts kicked. You are given a packet with about 11 problems (1 problem per page) and you have 4 hours to solve as many as you can. They'll run your program you submit against a set of data and your output must match theirs exactly. In fact, the judging is automated for the most part. In any case.. I went there fairly confident in my programming skills and I left there feeling drained and weak. It was a terribly humbling experience. In 4 hours my team of 3 people completed only one of the problems. The top team completed 4 of them and took 1st place. The problems they asked were like no problems I have ever had to answer before. I later learned that in order to solve them some of them effectively you have to use graphs/graph algorithms, trees, stacks. Some of them were simply "greedy" algo's. My question is, how can I better prepare for this semesters programming competition so I don't leave there feeling like a complete moron? What tips do you have for me to be able to answer these problems that involve graphs, trees, various "well known" algorithms? How can I easily identify the algorithm we should implement for a given problem? I have yet to take Algorithm Design in school so I just feel a little out of my element. Here are some examples of the questions asked at the competitions: ACM Problem Sets Update: Just wanted to update this since the latest competition is over. My team placed 1st for our small region (about 6-7 universities with between 1-5 teams each school) and ~15th for the midwest! So, it is a marked improvement over last years performance for sure. We also had no graduate students on our team and after reviewing the rules we found out that many teams had several! So, that would be a pretty big advantage in my own opinion. Problems this semester ranged from about 1-2 "easy" problems (ie bit manipulation, string manipulation) to hard (graph problems involving fairly complex math and network flow problems). We were able to solve 4 problems in our 5 hours. Just wanted to thank everyone for the resources they provided here, we used them for our weekly team practices and it definitely helped! Some quick tips that I have that aren't suggested below: When you are seated at your computer before the competition starts, quickly type out various data structures that you might need that you won't have access to in your languages libraries. I typed out a Graph data-structure complete with floyd-warshall and dijkstra's algorithm before the competition began. We ended up using it in our 2nd problem that we solved and this is the main reason why we solved this problem before anyone else in the midwest. We had it ready to go from the beginning. Similarly, type out the code to read in a file since this will be required for every problem. Save this answer "template" someplace so you can quickly copy/paste it to your IDE at the beginning of each problem. There are no rules on programming anything before the competition starts so get any boilerplate code out the way. We found it useful to have one person who is on permanent whiteboard duty. This is usually the person who is best at math and at working out solutions to get a head start on future problems you will be doing. One person is on permanent programming duty. Your fastest/most skilled "programmer" (most familiar with the language). This will save debugging time also. The last person has several roles between assessing the packet of problems for the next "easiest" problem, helping the person on the whiteboard work out solutions and helping the person programming work out bugs/issues. This person needs to be flexible and be able to switch between roles easily.

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Flow-Design Cheat Sheet – Part II, Translation

- by Ralf Westphal

In my previous post I summarized the notation for Flow-Design (FD) diagrams. Now is the time to show you how to translate those diagrams into code. Hopefully you feel how different this is from UML. UML leaves you alone with your sequence diagram or component diagram or activity diagram. They leave it to you how to translate your elaborate design into code. Or maybe UML thinks it´s so easy no further explanations are needed? I don´t know. I just know that, as soon as people stop designing with UML and start coding, things end up to be very different from the design. And that´s bad. That degrades graphical designs to just time waste on paper (or some designer). I even believe that´s the reason why most programmers view textual source code as the only and single source of truth. Design and code usually do not match. FD is trying to change that. It wants to make true design a first class method in every developers toolchest. For that the first prerequisite is to be able to easily translate any design into code. Mechanically, without thinking. Even a compiler could do it :-) (More of that in some other article.) Translating to Methods The first translation I want to show you is for small designs. When you start using FD you should translate your diagrams like this. Functional units become methods. That´s it. An input-pin becomes a method parameter, an output-pin becomes a return value: The above is a part. But a board can be translated likewise and calls the nested FUs in order: In any case be sure to keep the board method clear of any and all business logic. It should not contain any control structures like if, switch, or a loop. Boards do just one thing: calling nested functional units in proper sequence. What about multiple input-pins? Try to avoid them. Replace them with a join returning a tuple: What about multiple output-pins? Try to avoid them. Or return a tuple. Or use out-parameters: But as I said, this simple translation is for simple designs only. Splits and joins are easily done with method translation: All pretty straightforward, isn´t it. But what about wires, named pins, entry points, explicit dependencies? I suggest you don´t use this kind of translation when your designs need these features. Translating to methods is for small scale designs like you might do once you´re working on the implementation of a part of a larger design. Or maybe for a code kata you´re doing in your local coding dojo. Instead of doing TDD try doing FD and translate your design into methods. You´ll see that way it´s much easier to work collaboratively on designs, remember them more easily, keep them clean, and lessen the need for refactoring. Translating to Events [coming soon]

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Isis Finally Rolls Out

- by David Dorf

Google has rolled their wallet out for several chains; I see the NFC readers in Walgreen's when I'm sent their for milk. But Isis has been relatively quiet until now. As of last week they have finally launched in their two test cities: Austin, and Salt Lake City. Below are the supported carriers and phones as of now, but more phones will be added later. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} AT&T supports: HTC One™ X, LG Escape™, Samsung Galaxy Exhilarate™, Samsung Galaxy S® III, Samsung Galaxy Rugby Pro™ T-Mobile supports: Samsung Galaxy S® II, Samsung Galaxy S® III, Samsung Galaxy S® Relay 4G Verizon supports: Droid Incredible 4G LTE. Of course iPhone owners have no wallet since Apple didn't included an NFC chip. To start using Isis, you have to take your NFC-capable phone to your carrier's store to get the SIM replaced with a more sophisticated one that has a secure element configured for Isis. The "secure element" is the cryptographic logic that secures mobile payments. Carriers like the secure element in the SIM while non-carriers (like Google) prefer the secure element in the phone's electronics. (I'm not entirely sure if you could support both Isis and Google Wallet on the same phone. Anybody know?) Then you can download the Isis app from Google Play and load your cards. Most credit cards are supported, and there's a process to verify the credit cards are valid. Then you can select from the list of participating retailers to "follow." Selecting a retailer allows that retailer to give you offers via the app. The app is well done and easy to use. You can select a default payment type and also switch between them easily. When the phone is tapped on the reader, there are two exchanges of information. The payment information is transferred, and then the Isis "SmartTap" information which includes optional loyalty number and digital coupons. Of course the value of mobile wallets comes from the ease of handling all three data types (i.e. payment, loyalty, offers). There are several advertisements for Isis running now, and my favorite is below.

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Converting a PV vm back into an HVM vm

- by wim.coekaerts

I have been doing some Oracle VM benchmark stuff in the last week or 2 in my off hours and yesterday I wanted to convert one of my VMs that was based on a paravirt kernel into a vm that just boots as a regular hardware virt VM with a standard x86-64 kernel. It took me a little while to figure out the fastest way so now that I have it pretty much down I wanted to share the steps. A PV kernel uses pygrub and a paravirt kernel image that lives on the vm image virtual disk. since this disk image does not have to be bootable it doesn't contain a boot sector and if you just restart the VM in hvm mode the virtual bios will just not do much as it can't start the boot process from disk The first thing I do is make a backup of my vm.cfg file :-) and then edit it as follows : the original file contains : bootloader = '/usr/bin/pygrub' I replace that with : acpi = 1 apic = 1 builder = 'hvm' device_model = '/usr/lib/xen/bin/qemu-dm' kernel = '/usr/lib/xen/boot/hvmloader' then changing the disk files. I change my xvd disks to hd disks and I copy over the iso image of my instal lDVD. In the case of my VM template it was based on OL5U4 So I downloaded Enterprise-R5-U4-Server-x86_64-dvd.iso and added it as a cd device. disk = ['file:/ovs/OVM_EL5U4_X86_64_11202RAC_PVM/System.img,xvda,w', 'file:/ovs/OVM_EL5U4_X86_64_11202RAC_PVM/Oracle11202RAC_x86_64-xvdb.img,xvdb,w', ] to disk = ['file:/ovs/OVM_EL5U4_X86_64_11202RAC_PVM/System.img,hda,w', 'file:/ovs/OVM_EL5U4_X86_64_11202RAC_PVM/Oracle11202RAC_x86_64-xvdb.img,hdb,w', 'file:/ovs/OVM_EL5U4_X86_64_11202RAC_PVM/Enterprise-R5-U4-Server-x86_64-dvd.iso, hdc:cdrom,r', ] boot='d' for the network devices (vifs) I change : vif = ['bridge=xenbr2,type=netfront'] to vif = ['bridge=xenbr2,type=ioemu'] That should do it. Next, inside the VM, I copy over the regular kernel rpm that I want to end up running in hvm mode. In this example case it was : kernel-2.6.18-164.0.0.0.1.el5.x8664.rpm. I will use that later on in the process. I put this kernel simply in /root At this point I just start the vm with xm create vm.cfg and start my vnc console to the vm console. Oracle Linux will boot from the iso image, I just go through the install steps and click on UPgrade existing (not re-install). Because the VM is the same as the ISO the install won't actually do anything and it will run through instantly. When the "Reboot" button pops up, don't reboot. Switch to the command prompt console. hi alt-f2 to go to the shell prompt. Now it's easy : umount /mnt/sysimage/boot cd /mnt/sysimage chroot . mount /dev/hda1 (if that was your /boot partition) export PATH=/sbin:$PATH (just to clean that up) edit /etc/modprobe.conf and comment out the xen modules (just put a # in front) Install grub. if your /boot is hda1 then that is (hd0,0) $ grub root (hd0,0) setup (hd0) exit grub now you have a good bootsector, grub installed and you have your grub.conf file Install the new kernel cd root (this is your old /root in your pv image) rpm -ivh remove (or comment out) boot='d' in your vm.cfg restart the VM and you should be good to go, regular grub should start and load your environment. Caveats : this assumes you used labels for your filesystems. if /etc/fstab were to have devices listed then you would have to rename these device before rebooting as well. If you had a /dev/xvda disk then this would be /dev/hda or /dev/sda. All in all it is a relatively short and simple process.

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Converting a PV vm back into an HVM vm

- by wim.coekaerts

I have been doing some Oracle VM benchmark stuff in the last week or 2 in my off hours and yesterday I wanted to convert one of my VMs that was based on a paravirt kernel into a vm that just boots as a regular hardware virt VM with a standard x86-64 kernel. It took me a little while to figure out the fastest way so now that I have it pretty much down I wanted to share the steps. A PV kernel uses pygrub and a paravirt kernel image that lives on the vm image virtual disk. since this disk image does not have to be bootable it doesn't contain a boot sector and if you just restart the VM in hvm mode the virtual bios will just not do much as it can't start the boot process from disk The first thing I do is make a backup of my vm.cfg file :-) and then edit it as follows : the original file contains : bootloader = '/usr/bin/pygrub' I replace that with : acpi = 1 apic = 1 builder = 'hvm' device_model = '/usr/lib/xen/bin/qemu-dm' kernel = '/usr/lib/xen/boot/hvmloader' then changing the disk files. I change my xvd disks to hd disks and I copy over the iso image of my instal lDVD. In the case of my VM template it was based on OL5U4 So I downloaded Enterprise-R5-U4-Server-x86_64-dvd.iso and added it as a cd device. disk = ['file:/ovs/OVM_EL5U4_X86_64_11202RAC_PVM/System.img,xvda,w', 'file:/ovs/OVM_EL5U4_X86_64_11202RAC_PVM/Oracle11202RAC_x86_64-xvdb.img,xvdb,w', ] to disk = ['file:/ovs/OVM_EL5U4_X86_64_11202RAC_PVM/System.img,hda,w', 'file:/ovs/OVM_EL5U4_X86_64_11202RAC_PVM/Oracle11202RAC_x86_64-xvdb.img,hdb,w', 'file:/ovs/OVM_EL5U4_X86_64_11202RAC_PVM/Enterprise-R5-U4-Server-x86_64-dvd.iso, hdc:cdrom,r', ] boot='d' for the network devices (vifs) I change : vif = ['bridge=xenbr2,type=netfront'] to vif = ['bridge=xenbr2,type=ioemu'] That should do it. Next, inside the VM, I copy over the regular kernel rpm that I want to end up running in hvm mode. In this example case it was : kernel-2.6.18-164.0.0.0.1.el5.x8664.rpm. I will use that later on in the process. I put this kernel simply in /root At this point I just start the vm with xm create vm.cfg and start my vnc console to the vm console. Oracle Linux will boot from the iso image, I just go through the install steps and click on UPgrade existing (not re-install). Because the VM is the same as the ISO the install won't actually do anything and it will run through instantly. When the "Reboot" button pops up, don't reboot. Switch to the command prompt console. hi alt-f2 to go to the shell prompt. Now it's easy : umount /mnt/sysimage/boot cd /mnt/sysimage chroot . mount /dev/hda1 (if that was your /boot partition) export PATH=/sbin:$PATH (just to clean that up) edit /etc/modprobe.conf and comment out the xen modules (just put a # in front) Install grub. if your /boot is hda1 then that is (hd0,0) $ grub root (hd0,0) setup (hd0) exit grub now you have a good bootsector, grub installed and you have your grub.conf file Install the new kernel cd root (this is your old /root in your pv image) rpm -ivh remove (or comment out) boot='d' in your vm.cfg restart the VM and you should be good to go, regular grub should start and load your environment. Caveats : this assumes you used labels for your filesystems. if /etc/fstab were to have devices listed then you would have to rename these device before rebooting as well. If you had a /dev/xvda disk then this would be /dev/hda or /dev/sda. All in all it is a relatively short and simple process.

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Communication between state machines with hidden transitions

- by slartibartfast

The question emerged for me in embedded programming but I think it can be applied to quite a number of general networking situations e.g. when a communication partner fails. Assume we have an application logic (a program) running on a computer and a gadget connected to that computer via e.g. a serial interface like RS232. The gadget has a red/green/blue LED and a button which disables the LED. The LEDs color can be driven by software commands over the serial interface and the state (red/green/blue/off) is read back and causes a reaction in the application logic. Asynchronous behaviour of the application logic with regard to the LED color down to a certain delay (depending on the execution cycle of the application) is tolerated. What we essentially have is a resource (the LED) which can not be reserved and handled atomically by software because the (organic) user can at any time press the button to interfere/break the software attempt to switch the LED color. Stripping this example from its physical outfit I dare to say that we have two communicating state machines A (application logic) and G (gadget) where G executes state changes unbeknownst to A (and also the other way round, but this is not significant in our example) and only A can be modified at a reasonable price. A needs to see the reaction and state of G in one piece of information which may be (slightly) outdated but not inconsistent with respect to the short time window when this information was generated on the side of G. What I am looking for is a concise method to handle such a situation in embedded software (i.e. no layer/framework like CORBA etc. available). A programming technique which is able to map the complete behaviour of both participants on classical interfaces of a classical programming language (C in this case). To complicate matters (or rather, to generalize), a simple high frequency communication cycle of A to G and back (IOW: A is rapidly polling G) is out of focus because of technical restrictions (delay of serial com, A not always active, etc.). What I currently see as a general solution is: the application logic A as one thread of execution an adapter object (proxy) PG (presenting G inside the computer), together with the serial driver as another thread a communication object between the two (A and PG) which is transactionally safe to exchange The two execution contexts (threads) on the computer may be multi-core or just interrupt driven or tasks in an RTOS. The com object contains the following data: suspected state (written by A): effectively a member of the power set of states in G (in our case: red, green, blue, off, red_or_green, red_or_blue, red_or_off...etc.) command data (written by A): test_if_off, switch_to_red, switch_to_green, switch_to_blue operation status (written by PG): operation_pending, success, wrong_state, link_broken new state (written by PG): red, green, blue, off The idea of the com object is that A writes whichever (set of) state it thinks G is in, together with a command. (Example: suspected state="red_or_green", command: "switch_to_blue") Notice that the commands issued by A will not work if the user has switched off the LED and A needs to know this. PG will pick up such a com object and try to send the command to G, receive its answer (or a timeout) and set the operation status and new state accordingly. A will take back the oject once it is no longer at operation_pending and can react to the outcome. The com object could be separated of course (into two objects, one for each direction) but I think it is convenient in nearly all instances to have the command close to the result. I would like to have major flaws pointed out or hear an entirely different view on such a situation.

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How would I handle input with a Game Component?

- by Aufziehvogel

I am currently having problems from finding my way into the component-oriented XNA design. I read an overview over the general design pattern and googled a lot of XNA examples. However, they seem to be right on the opposite site. In the general design pattern, an object (my current player) is passed to InputComponent::update(Player). This means the class will know what to do and how this will affect the game (e.g. move person vs. scroll text in a menu). Yet, in XNA GameComponent::update(GameTime) is called automatically without a reference to the current player. The only XNA examples I found built some sort of higher-level Keyboard engine into the game component like this: class InputComponent: GameComponent { public void keyReleased(Keys); public void keyPressed(Keys); public bool keyDown(Keys); public void override update(GameTime gameTime) { // compare previous state with current state and // determine if released, pressed, down or nothing } } Some others went a bit further making it possible to use a Service Locator by a design like this: interface IInputComponent { public void downwardsMovement(Keys); public void upwardsMovement(Keys); public bool pausedGame(Keys); // determine which keys pressed and what that means // can be done for different inputs in different implementations public void override update(GameTime); } Yet, then I am wondering if it is possible to design an input class to resolve all possible situations. Like in a menu a mouse click can mean "click that button", but in game play it can mean "shoot that weapon". So if I am using such a modular design with game components for input, how much logic is to be put into the InputComponent / KeyboardComponent / GamepadComponent and where is the rest handled? What I had in mind, when I heard about Game Components and Service Locator in XNA was something like this: use Game Components to run the InputHandler automatically in the loop use Service Locator to be able to switch input at runtime (i.e. let player choose if he wants to use a gamepad or a keyboard; or which shall be player 1 and which player 2). However, now I cannot see how this can be done. First code example does not seem flexible enough, as on a game pad you could require some combination of buttons for something that is possible on keyboard with only one button or with the mouse) The second code example seems really hard to implement, because the InputComponent has to know in which context we are currently. Moreover, you could imagine your application to be multi-layered and let the key-stroke go through all layers to the bottom-layer which requires a different behaviour than the InputComponent would have guessed from the top-layer. The general design pattern with passing the Player to update() does not have a representation in XNA and I also cannot see how and where to decide which class should be passed to update(). At most time of course the player, but sometimes there could be menu items you have to or can click I see that the question in general is already dealt with here, but probably from a more elobate point-of-view. At least, I am not smart enough in game development to understand it. I am searching for a rather code-based example directly for XNA. And the answer there leaves (a noob like) me still alone in how the object that should receive the detected event is chosen. Like if I have a key-up event, should it go to the text box or to the player?

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Indentify Codecs & Technical Information About Video Files

- by DigitalGeekery

Have you ever wanted to play an audio or video file but didn’t have the proper codec installed? Today we’ll show how to determine codecs, along with a host of other technical details about your media files with MediaInfo. Installation Download and install MediaInfo. You can find the download link at the bottom of the page. Note: When installing MediaInfo there is a recommended software bundle which you can opt out of by selecting Do not install option. Each recommended software choice may be different, like in this example it offers Spyware Terminator. The cool thing though is they use Open Candy which opts you out of the install. Just double check to make sure you’re not installing extra crapware. Using MediaInfo The first time you run MediaInfo it will display the Preferences window. There are various option such as language, output format, and whether or not you want MediaInfo to check for new versions. Click OK. Select a file or folder to analyze by clicking on the File or Folder icons on the left of the application window or by selecting File > Open from the menu. You can also drag and drop a file directly onto the application. MediaInfo will display details of your media file. In Basic view, you’ll see basic information. Notice in the example below the video and audio codecs, along with file size, running time of the media file, and even the application used to create the video file (Writing application). You can switch to some of the other views by selecting View from the Menu and choosing form the dropdown list. Sheet View will present the information a bit more clearly. You can see in the example below that the video and audio codec are listing in clearly identified columns. (AVC is often more commonly referred to H.264.) Tree View is perhaps the most detailed. You can see from the example below the codec used for this AVI file is XviD. Scrolling down even further you’ll see additional information like video and audio bit rates, frame rate, aspect ratio, and more. In Basic View (and also in Sheet view) you can click to find a player for your file. In this instance with an MP4 file, it took me to the download page for Quicktime. This is by no means the only media player for this file, but if you are stuck for how to play a media file, this will forward you to a solution that works. You can do the same thing with Video codec. Click Go to the web site of this video codec to find a download. MediaInfo is a simple but powerful tool that can be used to discover the details of a media file, or just to find a compatible codec. It works with most any video file type and is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Some Mac and Linux versions, however, are currently command line only. Download MediaInfo Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips How to Convert Videos to 3GP for Mobile PhonesFix for VLC Skipping and Lagging Playing High-Def Video FilesUsing VLC Player Under VistaUse Your Mac Mini as a Media Server Part 2How to Play .OGM Video Files in Windows Vista TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 2010 World Cup Schedule Boot Snooze – Reboot and then Standby or Hibernate Customize Everything Related to Dates, Times, Currency and Measurement in Windows 7 Google Earth replacement Icon (Icons we like) Build Great Charts in Excel with Chart Advisor tinysong gives a shortened URL for you to post on Twitter (or anywhere)

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Why Is Hibernation Still Used?

- by Jason Fitzpatrick

With the increased prevalence of fast solid-state hard drives, why do we still have system hibernation? 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 Moses wants to know why he should use hibernate on a desktop machine: I’ve never quite understood the original purpose of the Hibernation power state in Windows. I understand how it works, what processes take place, and what happens when you boot back up from Hibernate, but I’ve never truly understood why it’s used. With today’s technology, most notably with SSDs, RAM and CPUs becoming faster and faster, a cold boot on a clean/efficient Windows installation can be pretty fast (for some people, mere seconds from pushing the power button). Standby is even faster, sometimes instantaneous. Even SATA drives from 5-6 years ago can accomplish these fast boot times. Hibernation seems pointless to me [on desktop computers] when modern technology is considered, but perhaps there are applications that I’m not considering. What was the original purpose behind hibernation, and why do people still use it? Quite a few people use hibernate, so what is Moses missing in the big picture? The Answer SuperUser contributor Vignesh4304 writes: Normally hibernate mode saves your computer’s memory, this includes for example open documents and running applications, to your hard disk and shuts down the computer, it uses zero power. Once the computer is powered back on, it will resume everything where you left off. You can use this mode if you won’t be using the laptop/desktop for an extended period of time, and you don’t want to close your documents. Simple Usage And Purpose: Save electric power and resuming of documents. In simple terms this comment serves nice e.g (i.e. you will sleep but your memories are still present). Why it’s used: Let me describe one sample scenario. Imagine your battery is low on power in your laptop, and you are working on important projects on your machine. You can switch to hibernate mode – it will result your documents being saved, and when you power on, the actual state of application gets restored. Its main usage is like an emergency shutdown with an auto-resume of your documents. MagicAndre1981 highlights the reason we use hibernate everyday: Because it saves the status of all running programs. I leave all my programs open and can resume working the next day very easily. Doing a real boot would require to start all programs again, load all the same files into those programs, get to the same place that I was at before, and put all my windows in exactly the same place. Hibernating saves a lot of work pulling these things back up again. It’s not unusual to find computers around the office here that have been hibernated day in and day out for months without an actual full system shutdown and restart. It’s enormously convenient to freeze your work space at the exact moment you stopped working and to turn right around and resume there the next morning. 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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Wikipedia A* pathfinding algorithm takes a lot of time

- by Vee

I've successfully implemented A* pathfinding in C# but it is very slow, and I don't understand why. I even tried not sorting the openNodes list but it's still the same. The map is 80x80, and there are 10-11 nodes. I took the pseudocode from here Wikipedia And this is my implementation: public static List<PGNode> Pathfind(PGMap mMap, PGNode mStart, PGNode mEnd) { mMap.ClearNodes(); mMap.GetTile(mStart.X, mStart.Y).Value = 0; mMap.GetTile(mEnd.X, mEnd.Y).Value = 0; List<PGNode> openNodes = new List<PGNode>(); List<PGNode> closedNodes = new List<PGNode>(); List<PGNode> solutionNodes = new List<PGNode>(); mStart.G = 0; mStart.H = GetManhattanHeuristic(mStart, mEnd); solutionNodes.Add(mStart); solutionNodes.Add(mEnd); openNodes.Add(mStart); // 1) Add the starting square (or node) to the open list. while (openNodes.Count > 0) // 2) Repeat the following: { openNodes.Sort((p1, p2) => p1.F.CompareTo(p2.F)); PGNode current = openNodes[0]; // a) We refer to this as the current square.) if (current == mEnd) { while (current != null) { solutionNodes.Add(current); current = current.Parent; } return solutionNodes; } openNodes.Remove(current); closedNodes.Add(current); // b) Switch it to the closed list. List<PGNode> neighborNodes = current.GetNeighborNodes(); double cost = 0; bool isCostBetter = false; for (int i = 0; i < neighborNodes.Count; i++) { PGNode neighbor = neighborNodes[i]; cost = current.G + 10; isCostBetter = false; if (neighbor.Passable == false || closedNodes.Contains(neighbor)) continue; // If it is not walkable or if it is on the closed list, ignore it. if (openNodes.Contains(neighbor) == false) { openNodes.Add(neighbor); // If it isn’t on the open list, add it to the open list. isCostBetter = true; } else if (cost < neighbor.G) { isCostBetter = true; } if (isCostBetter) { neighbor.Parent = current; // Make the current square the parent of this square. neighbor.G = cost; neighbor.H = GetManhattanHeuristic(current, neighbor); } } } return null; } Here's the heuristic I'm using: private static double GetManhattanHeuristic(PGNode mStart, PGNode mEnd) { return Math.Abs(mStart.X - mEnd.X) + Math.Abs(mStart.Y - mEnd.Y); } What am I doing wrong? It's an entire day I keep looking at the same code.

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SQL SERVER – Importance of User Without Login

- by pinaldave

Some questions are very open ended and it is very hard to come up with exact requirements. Here is one question I was asked in recent User Group Meeting. Question: “In recent version of SQL Server we can create user without login. What is the use of it?” Great question indeed. Let me first attempt to answer this question but after reading my answer I need your help. I want you to help him as well with adding more value to it. Answer: Let us visualize a scenario. An application has lots of different operations and many of them are very sensitive operations. The common practice was to do give application specific role which has more permissions and access level. When a regular user login (not system admin), he/she might have very restrictive permissions. The application itself had a user name and password which means applications can directly login into the database and perform the operation. Developers were well aware of the username and password as it was embedded in the application. When developer leaves the organization or when the password was changed, the part of the application had to be changed where the same username and passwords were used. Additionally, developers were able to use the same username and password and login directly to the same application. In earlier version of SQL Server there were application roles. The same is later on replaced by “User without Login”. Now let us recreate the above scenario using this new “User without Login”. In this case, User will have to login using their own credentials into SQL Server. This means that the user who is logged in will have his/her own username and password. Once the login is done in SQL Server, the user will be able to use the application. Now the database should have another User without Login which has all the necessary permissions and rights to execute various operations. Now, Application will be able to execute the script by impersonating “user without login – with more permissions”. Here there is assumed that user login does not have enough permissions and another user (without login) there are more rights. If a user knows how the application is using the database and their various operations, he can switch the context to user without login making him enable for doing further modification. Make sure to explicitly DENY view definition permission on the database. This will make things further difficult for user as he will have to know exact details to get additional permissions. If a user is System Admin all the details which I just mentioned in above three paragraphs does not apply as admin always have access to everything. Additionally, the method describes above is just one of the architecture and if someone is attempting to damage the system, they will still be able to figure out a workaround. You will have to put further auditing and policy based management to prevent such incidents and accidents. I guess this is my answer. I read it multiple times but I still feel that I am missing something. There should be more to this concept than what I have just described. I have merely described one scenario but there will be many more scenarios where this situation will be useful. Now is your turn to help – please leave a comment with the additional suggestion where exactly “User without Login” will be useful as well did I miss anything when I described above scenario. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Security, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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Antenna Aligner Part 7: Connecting the dots

- by Chris George

The app is basically ready, so I eagerly started to sort out creating the application entry in iTunes Connect. It's mostly intuitive actually, although I did have to create yet another icon for iTunes sized 512x512 pixels, damn lucky I did the original graphics as vector! It took me longer to write the application description than anything else, I'm so not a tech author! I didn't like the way you have to 'make up' an SKU (Stock Keeping Unit) number. I have to do some googling to find out that it really doesn't matter what it is! It should be more obvious what to do from the actual website itself. That aside, the rest of it was actually fairly straightforward. As well as the details of the application, iPhone and iPad screenshots were also required. This posed somewhat of a problem. The iPhone ones were easy (as I have one!), but I do not (yet) own an iPad . So I thought I'd leave the iPad screenshots out for now. Once the application details were sorted, I moved onto the rights and pricing. At the start of the project I had made the decision that I wouldn't charge any more than the lowest amount £0.59. I believe there is a market for this, but as my first foray into app development I didn't want to take the mick. I did realise, however, that I had built my app with a developer certificate and provisioning profile. This was fairly quickly corrected, and again Nomad made this very easy to switch over to the distribution certificate and provisioning profile. With a sense of excitement I cracked open iTunes connect and clicked the upload button ... ...slight snag... . when the Nomad project was started, Apple allowed uploads of these binaries via iTunes Connect. But this is no longer possible, the only upload path is via the Application Loader available from the Apple Developer program. This itself has one limitation, it only runs on a mac! D'OH!!! Actually my language was somewhat more colourful when this fact came to light. After picking my laptop up off the floor and putting it back together... ok only joking, but I did nearly throw it out of frustration!... I started to consider the options; I briefly entertained the idea of buying a cheap mac from ebay... no, that defeats the whole object of what I'm doing, plus my wife wouldn't be impressed there are some guys out there in the interweb who will upload your app for a small fee...but I don't really like the idea of giving some faceless email address my apple developer login details, as well as my app binary! find some willing friend with a mac who would kindly let me use it... obviously this is the only sensible option. In the meantime, I informed the Nomad team about this slight 'issue' and they are currently investigating possible solutions...

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SQL 2012 Licensing Thoughts

- by Geoff N. Hiten

The only thing more controversial than new Federal Tax plans is new Licensing plans from Microsoft. In both cases, everyone calculates several numbers. First, will I pay more or less under this plan? Second, will my competition pay more or less than now? Third, will <insert interesting person/company here> pay more or less? Not that items 2 and 3 are meaningful, that is just how people think. Much like tax plans, the devil is in the details, so lets see how this looks. Microsoft shows it here: http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/en/us/future-editions/sql2012-licensing.aspx First up is a switch from per-socket to per-core licensing. Anyone who didn’t see something like this coming should rapidly search for a new line of work because you are not paying attention. The explosion of multi-core processors has made SQL Server a bargain. Microsoft is in business to make money and the old per-socket model was not going to do that going forward. Per-core licensing also simplifies virtualization licensing. Physical Core = Virtual Core, at least for licensing. Oversubscribe your processors, that’s your lookout. You still pay for what is exposed to the VM. The cool part is you can seamlessly move physical and virtual workloads around and the licenses follow. The catch is you have to have Software Assurance to make the licenses mobile. Nice touch there. Let’s have a moment of silence for the late, unlamented, largely ignored Workgroup Edition. To quote the Microsoft FAQ: “Standard becomes our sole edition for basic database needs”. Considering I haven’t encountered a singe instance of SQL Server Workgroup Edition in the wild, I don’t think this will be all that controversial. As for pricing, it looks like a wash with current per-socket pricing based on four core sockets. Interestingly, that is the minimum core count Microsoft proposes to swap to transition per-socket to per-core if you are on Software Assurance. Reading the fine print shows that if you are using more, you will get more core licenses: From the licensing FAQ. 15. How do I migrate from processor licenses to core licenses? What is the migration path? Licenses purchased with Software Assurance (SA) will upgrade to SQL Server 2012 at no additional cost. EA/EAP customers can continue buying processor licenses until your next renewal after June 30, 2012. At that time, processor licenses will be exchanged for core-based licenses sufficient to cover the cores in use by processor-licensed databases (minimum of 4 cores per processor for Standard and Enterprise, and minimum of 8 EE cores per processor for Datacenter). Looks like the folks who invested in the AMD 12-core chips will make out like bandits. Now, on to something new: SQL Server Business Intelligence Edition. Yep, finally a BI-specific SKU licensed for server+CAL configurations only. Note that Enterprise Edition still supports the complete feature set; the BI Edition is intended for smaller shops who want to use the full BI feature set but without needing Enterprise Edition scale (or costs). No, you don’t get ColumnStore, Compression, or Partitioning in the BI Edition. Those are Enterprise scale features, ThankYouVeryMuch. Then again, your starting licensing costs are about one sixth of an Enterprise Edition system (based on an 8 core server). The only part of the message I am missing is if the current Failover Licensing Policy will change. Do we need to fully or partially license failover servers? That is a detail I definitely want to know.

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Ubuntu keyboard shortcuts - two-part question

- by Don

Background: I come from a Windows background and just started dual-booting Ubuntu (my first Linux experience) about 4 days ago. So my systems are Windows 7/Ubuntu 12.04, and so far I'm loving Ubuntu. I am a dedicated mouse-abolitionist (trackpads are hell) and do most of my browsing and navigation with keyboard shortcuts. However, on switching to Ubuntu, a lot of my keyboard shortcuts are gone, and my productivity has resultantly taken a huge hit anytime I am using Ubuntu. Problem 1: My computer was designed to display on-screen notifications for a second when I hit caps-lock or num-lock, and there are no constant indicators of the lock status (LEDs, etc). In Ubuntu, the keys still worked, but the notifications were gone. Googling got me a tutorial on key-binding(Compiz) and scripts, so now I have capslock and numlock running this script: #!/bin/bash icon="/usr/share/icons/gnome/scalable/devices/keyboard.svg" case $1 in 'scrl') mask=3 key="Scroll" ;; 'num') mask=2 key="Num" ;; 'caps') mask=1 key="Caps" ;; esac value=$(xset q | grep "LED mask" | sed -r "s/.*LED mask:\s+[0-9a-fA-F]+([0-9a-fA-F]).*/\1/") if [ $(( 0x$value & 0x$mask )) == $mask ] then output="$key Lock" output2="On" else output="$key Lock" output2="Off" fi notify-send -i $icon "$output" "$output2" -t 1000 But, whether turning it off or on, the notifications always say that I have turned it on. Is there an easy fix for this, or an easier way to work it to get it do display the CORRECT notifications? Problem 2: I'm not sure if this is because of my keyboard or Ubuntu. In Windows, I use Chrome and use the ctrl+pgUp/pgDwn shortcuts quite a bit to switch between tabs. On my keyboard, I can enter pgUp and pgDwn by either disabling NumLock and hitting 9 or 3 respectively on the 10key. Alternately I can hold the fn key and hit up or down arrow. The first method is the one I very heavily relied upon, and it works in Firefox for Ubuntu, but not in Chrome nor in Chromium. The second method (ctrl + fn + up/down) works fine in Chrome. However, I'd dearly like to find a method to make the first method work. Any suggestions? Thanks in advance for your help. Update: @julien: I've checked the keyboard layout options - I didn't find anything that seemed useful for this goal. @Marty: The script runs once when the button is pressed. In Compiz, I've tied those two keys to the script, so when I press the button, it runs the script with the button pressed as a parameter. Update: @elmicha: Thanks. That one works a lot better, and it even pops an icon into the status bar when caps lock is on. There's still a very slight problem in that if I quickly tap the key twice, the image will show that it has been turned on and then turned off, and the notifaction will come and go from my status area, but the text of both notifications will be "Caps Lock on". Same with Num Lock. However, if the time between presses is long enough for the first notification to disappear, everything displays correctly. Given how quickly the notifications disappear, I don't expect this will pose too much of a problem for me.

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Conflict Minerals - Design to Compliance

- by C. Chadwick

Dr. Christina Schröder - Principal PLM Consultant, Enterprise PLM Solutions EMEA What does the Conflict Minerals regulation mean? Conflict Minerals has recently become a new buzz word in the manufacturing industry, particularly in electronics and medical devices. Known as the "Dodd-Frank Section 1502", this regulation requires SEC listed companies to declare the origin of certain minerals by 2014. The intention is to reduce the use of tantalum, tungsten, tin, and gold which originate from mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and adjoining countries that are controlled by violent armed militia abusing human rights. Manufacturers now request information from their suppliers to see if their raw materials are sourced from this region and which smelters are used to extract the metals from the minerals. A standardized questionnaire has been developed for this purpose (download and further information). Soon, even companies which are not directly affected by the Conflict Minerals legislation will have to collect and maintain this information since their customers will request the data from their suppliers. Furthermore, it is expected that the public opinion and consumer interests will force manufacturers to avoid the use of metals with questionable origin. Impact for existing products Several departments are involved in the process of collecting data and providing conflict minerals compliance information. For already marketed products, purchasing typically requests Conflict Minerals declarations from the suppliers. In order to address requests from customers, technical operations or product management are usually responsible for keeping track of all parts, raw materials and their suppliers so that the required information can be provided. For complex BOMs, it is very tedious to maintain complete, accurate, up-to-date, and traceable data. Any product change or new supplier can, in addition to all other implications, have an effect on the Conflict Minerals compliance status. Influence on product development It makes sense to consider compliance early in the planning and design of new products. Companies should evaluate which metals are needed or contained in supplier parts and if these could originate from problematic sources. The answer influences the cost and risk analysis during the development. If it is known early on that a part could be non-compliant with respect to Conflict Minerals, alternatives can be evaluated and thus costly changes at a later stage can be avoided. Integrated compliance management Ideally, compliance data for Conflict Minerals, but also for other regulations like REACH and RoHS, should be managed in an integrated supply chain system. The compliance status is directly visible across the entire BOM at any part level and for the finished product. If data is missing, a request to the supplier can be triggered right away without having to switch to another system. The entire process, from identification of the relevant parts, requesting information, handling responses, data entry, to compliance calculation is fully covered end-to-end while being transparent for all stakeholders. Agile PLM Product Governance and Compliance (PG&C) The PG&C module extends Agile PLM with exactly this integrated functionality. As with the entire Agile product suite, PG&C can be configured according to customer requirements: data fields, attributes, workflows, routing, notifications, and permissions, etc… can be quickly and easily tailored to a customer’s needs. Optionally, external databases can be interfaced to query commercially available sources of Conflict Minerals declarations which obviates the need for a separate supplier request in many cases. Suppliers can access the system directly for data entry through a special portal. The responses to the standard EICC-GeSI questionnaire can be imported by the supplier or internally. Manual data entry is also supported. A set of compliance-specific dashboards and reports complement the functionality Conclusion The increasing number of product compliance regulations, for which Conflict Minerals is just one example, requires companies to implement an efficient data and process management in this area. Consumer awareness in this matter increases as well so that an integrated system from development to production also provides a competitive advantage. Follow this link to learn more about Agile's PG&C solution

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Child transforms problem when loading 3DS models using assimp

- by MhdSyrwan

I'm trying to load a textured 3d model into my scene using assimp model loader. The problem is that child meshes are not situated correctly (they don't have the correct transformations). In brief: all the mTansform matrices are identity matrices, why would that be? I'm using this code to render the model: void recursive_render (const struct aiScene *sc, const struct aiNode* nd, float scale) { unsigned int i; unsigned int n=0, t; aiMatrix4x4 m = nd->mTransformation; m.Scaling(aiVector3D(scale, scale, scale), m); // update transform m.Transpose(); glPushMatrix(); glMultMatrixf((float*)&m); // draw all meshes assigned to this node for (; n < nd->mNumMeshes; ++n) { const struct aiMesh* mesh = scene->mMeshes[nd->mMeshes[n]]; apply_material(sc->mMaterials[mesh->mMaterialIndex]); if (mesh->HasBones()){ printf("model has bones"); abort(); } if(mesh->mNormals == NULL) { glDisable(GL_LIGHTING); } else { glEnable(GL_LIGHTING); } if(mesh->mColors[0] != NULL) { glEnable(GL_COLOR_MATERIAL); } else { glDisable(GL_COLOR_MATERIAL); } for (t = 0; t < mesh->mNumFaces; ++t) { const struct aiFace* face = &mesh->mFaces[t]; GLenum face_mode; switch(face->mNumIndices) { case 1: face_mode = GL_POINTS; break; case 2: face_mode = GL_LINES; break; case 3: face_mode = GL_TRIANGLES; break; default: face_mode = GL_POLYGON; break; } glBegin(face_mode); for(i = 0; i < face->mNumIndices; i++)// go through all vertices in face { int vertexIndex = face->mIndices[i];// get group index for current index if(mesh->mColors[0] != NULL) Color4f(&mesh->mColors[0][vertexIndex]); if(mesh->mNormals != NULL) if(mesh->HasTextureCoords(0))//HasTextureCoords(texture_coordinates_set) { glTexCoord2f(mesh->mTextureCoords[0][vertexIndex].x, 1 - mesh->mTextureCoords[0][vertexIndex].y); //mTextureCoords[channel][vertex] } glNormal3fv(&mesh->mNormals[vertexIndex].x); glVertex3fv(&mesh->mVertices[vertexIndex].x); } glEnd(); } } // draw all children for (n = 0; n < nd->mNumChildren; ++n) { recursive_render(sc, nd->mChildren[n], scale); } glPopMatrix(); } What's the problem in my code ? I've added some code to abort the program if there's any bone in the meshes, but the program doesn't abort, this means : no bones, is that normal? if (mesh->HasBones()){ printf("model has bones"); abort(); } Note: I am using openGL & SFML & assimp

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How to solve conflicts with another programmer..

- by Tio

Hi all.. I've read this question, but I think it doesn't really applies in my case.. I started to work at new company about 2 months ago with the position of senior web developer, there was already one programmer there, my position is above his, but I'm not his boss.. I don't tell him what to do.. Since the day I started to work at the company, I managed to implement a kind of a test server which he refuses to use, implemented a project management tool which he refuses to use also, and I'm in the process of implementing version control using mercurial ( damn Mercurial that's giving me so much headaches ), which he is going to use.. He is a nice guy, but just the other day we had a big discussion about "best practices", and "coding standards".. for me it's absolutely necessary to have this two things, at the place I'm currently working... otherwise it's not going to work.. This discussion, basically revolved about using short tags and the echo shortcut, and how we shouldn't use it anymore ( because I sometimes use short tags ).. this went for about 15 minutes, until I finally dropped the subject because I had work to do.. and of course he didn't budge even a millimeter, he's continuing to use short tags, and the echo shortcut and he not even cares about what I think.. When I mentioned that we are a team, he told me: "We are not a team, you work on your projects and I work on mine".. Let's just say, that the switch in my brain flipped, I raised my voice, and I told him that he was going nuts.. this was the most improper way to deal it with, I know, but there are certain things that can't be said to me.. The question here, is how do I deal with this? I want, to implement more changes on our work workflow, and I know that it's going to be a pain, with him always complaining and saying things like this.. Our boss is going to intervene in a few days, I talked to him today, the other programmer send him an email the day we had the discussion complaining.. Just to clarify, when I talk about implementing changes, I just don't appear at work, the next day with a sheet of paper, and say: "This is our we are doing things from now on! And there is no discussion.." For example, when I was trying to implement the project management tool, I took the time to talk to everybody that was going to be involved in it, to see what they think about it.. everyone was positive except him, he responded that it was just a mean to control us even more.. Does anyone has any idea on how to deal with this? PS: Truth to be told, I didn't start the best way with him, in the 4º day of work at the company, I found a really bad piece of code on our custom CMS, one of those things that I only expect to find in code produced by a programmer that has only 1 month of training in programming, and I talked to my boss about it... he showed up at the time I saw that piece of code, he saw my face and asked about it, so I told him.. I know the worst thing that can be said to a programmer is saying that their code is awful, but I've already learned that my code isn't the best of the world, so I take criticism in a completely different way now.. maybe he doesn't..

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When row estimation goes wrong

- by Dave Ballantyne

Whilst working at a client site, I hit upon one of those issues that you are not sure if that this is something entirely new or a bug or a gap in your knowledge. The client had a large query that needed optimizing. The query itself looked pretty good, no udfs, UNION ALL were used rather than UNION, most of the predicates were sargable other than one or two minor ones. There were a few extra joins that could be eradicated and having fixed up the query I then started to dive into the plan. I could see all manor of spills in the hash joins and the sort operations, these are caused when SQL Server has not reserved enough memory and has to write to tempdb. A VERY expensive operation that is generally avoidable. These, however, are a symptom of a bad row estimation somewhere else, and when that bad estimation is combined with other estimation errors, chaos can ensue. Working my way back down the plan, I found the cause, and the more I thought about it the more i came convinced that the optimizer could be making a much more intelligent choice. First step is to reproduce and I was able to simplify the query down a single join between two tables, Product and ProductStatus, from a business point of view, quite fundamental, find the status of particular products to show if ‘active’ ,’inactive’ or whatever. The query itself couldn’t be any simpler The estimated plan looked like this: Ignore the “!” warning which is a missing index, but notice that Products has 27,984 rows and the join outputs 14,000. The actual plan shows how bad that estimation of 14,000 is : So every row in Products has a corresponding row in ProductStatus. This is unsurprising, in fact it is guaranteed, there is a trusted FK relationship between the two columns. There is no way that the actual output of the join can be different from the input. The optimizer is already partly aware of the foreign key meta data, and that can be seen in the simplifiction stage. If we drop the Description column from the query: the join to ProductStatus is optimized out. It serves no purpose to the query, there is no data required from the table and the optimizer knows that the FK will guarantee that a matching row will exist so it has been removed. Surely the same should be applied to the row estimations in the initial example, right ? If you think so, please upvote this connect item. So what are our options in fixing this error ? Simply changing the join to a left join will cause the optimizer to think that we could allow the rows not to exist. or a subselect would also work However, this is a client site, Im not able to change each and every query where this join takes place but there is a more global switch that will fix this error, TraceFlag 2301. This is described as, perhaps loosely, “Enable advanced decision support optimizations”. We can test this on the original query in isolation by using the “QueryTraceOn” option and lo and behold our estimated plan now has the ‘correct’ estimation. Many thanks goes to Paul White (b|t) for his help and keeping me sane through this

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Issues glVertexAttribPointer last 2 parameters?

- by NoobScratcher

Introduction Hello I will start out by explaining my setup, showing samples as I go along explaining the situation. I'm using these tools: OpenGL 3.3 GLSL 330 C++ Problem The problem is when I render the wavefront obj 3d model it gives a very weird visual glitch the model was supposed to be a square but instead its a triangluated mess with parts of the vertexes pointing in a stretched direction in massive amounts towards the bottom left side of the frustum.... Explanation: I'm using std::vectors to store my wavefront .obj model data using sscanf to get the floating point values into the structure members x,y,z and store them into the Points structure variable p; int index = IndexAssigner(1, 1); ifstream file (list[index].c_str() ); points.push_back(Point()); Point p; int face[4]; while (!file.eof() ) { char modelbuffer[10000]; file.getline(modelbuffer, 10000); switch(modelbuffer[0]) { case 'v' : sscanf(modelbuffer, "v %f %f %f", &p.x, &p.y, &p.z); points.push_back(p); break; case 'f': sscanf(modelbuffer, "f %d %d %d %d", face, face+1, face+2, face+3 ); faces.push_back(face[0]); faces.push_back(face[1]); faces.push_back(face[2]); faces.push_back(face[3]); } //Turn on FileReader aka "RENDER CODE" FileReader = true; } then I render the Points vector using the .data() member of std::vectors to the frustum. Other declarations: int numfloats = 4; float* point=reinterpret_cast<float*>(&points[0]); int num_bytes=numfloats*sizeof(float); Vector declarations: struct Point {float x, y , z; }; std::vector<int>faces; std::vector<Point>points; Render code: glGenBuffers(1, &vertexbuffer); glGenTextures(1, &ModelTexture); glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, vertexbuffer); glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_3D, ModelTexture); glTexImage2D(GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0,GL_RGBA, ModelSurface->w, ModelSurface->h, 0, GL_BGR, GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE, ModelSurface->pixels); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MIN_FILTER, GL_NEAREST); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MAG_FILTER, GL_NEAREST); glBufferData(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, sizeof(points), points.data(), GL_STATIC_DRAW); glVertexAttribPointer(3, 3, GL_FLOAT, GL_FALSE,num_bytes ,points.data()); glEnableVertexAttribArray(3); //Translation Process GLfloat TranslationMatrix[] = { 1.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 1.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0 }; //Send Translation Matrix up to the vertex shader glUniformMatrix4fv(translation, 1, TRUE, TranslationMatrix); glDrawElements( GL_QUADS, faces.size(), GL_UNSIGNED_INT, faces.data()); I tried looking at what was causing this and went through every function every parameter ,etc looked at the man pages. Then found out that it could be my glVertexAttribPointer. Here are the man pages for glVertexAttribPointer http://www.opengl.org/sdk/docs/man/xhtml/glVertexAttribPointer.xml The last 2 parameters is my problem How do I write those 2 last parameters do I try putting the data from Points into it?. glVertexAttribPointer(3, 3, GL_FLOAT, GL_FALSE,num_bytes ,points.data()); How does it work with vectors? Is it fast?* if you can not be bothered too look at the man pages here is the scripts coming from the man pages directly. Stride Specifies the byte offset between consecutive generic vertex attributes. If stride is 0, the generic vertex attributes are understood to be tightly packed in the array. The initial value is 0. Pointer Specifies a pointer to the first component of the first generic vertex attribute in the array. The initial value is 0. If you want my full source - http://ideone.com/fPfkg Thanks Again if you do read this.

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Generate texture for a heightmap

- by James

I've recently been trying to blend multiple textures based on the height at different points in a heightmap. However i've been getting poor results. I decided to backtrack and just attempt to recreate one single texture from an SDL_Surface (i'm using SDL) and just send that into opengl. I'll put my code for creating the texture and reading the colour values. It is a 24bit TGA i'm loading, and i've confirmed that the rest of my code works because i was able to send the surfaces pixels directly to my createTextureFromData function and it drew fine. struct RGBColour { RGBColour() : r(0), g(0), b(0) {} RGBColour(unsigned char red, unsigned char green, unsigned char blue) : r(red), g(green), b(blue) {} unsigned char r; unsigned char g; unsigned char b; }; // main loading code SDLSurfaceReader* reader = new SDLSurfaceReader(m_renderer); reader->readSurface("images/grass.tga"); // new texture unsigned char* newTexture = new unsigned char[reader->m_surface->w * reader->m_surface->h * 3 * reader->m_surface->w]; for (int y = 0; y < reader->m_surface->h; y++) { for (int x = 0; x < reader->m_surface->w; x += 3) { int index = (y * reader->m_surface->w) + x; RGBColour colour = reader->getColourAt(x, y); newTexture[index] = colour.r; newTexture[index + 1] = colour.g; newTexture[index + 2] = colour.b; } } unsigned int id = m_renderer->createTextureFromData(newTexture, reader->m_surface->w, reader->m_surface->h, RGB); // functions for reading pixels RGBColour SDLSurfaceReader::getColourAt(int x, int y) { Uint32 pixel; Uint8 red, green, blue; RGBColour rgb; pixel = getPixel(m_surface, x, y); SDL_LockSurface(m_surface); SDL_GetRGB(pixel, m_surface->format, &red, &green, &blue); SDL_UnlockSurface(m_surface); rgb.r = red; rgb.b = blue; rgb.g = green; return rgb; } // this function taken from SDL documentation // http://www.libsdl.org/cgi/docwiki.cgi/Introduction_to_SDL_Video#getpixel Uint32 SDLSurfaceReader::getPixel(SDL_Surface* surface, int x, int y) { int bpp = m_surface->format->BytesPerPixel; Uint8 *p = (Uint8*)m_surface->pixels + y * m_surface->pitch + x * bpp; switch (bpp) { case 1: return *p; case 2: return *(Uint16*)p; case 3: if (SDL_BYTEORDER == SDL_BIG_ENDIAN) return p[0] << 16 | p[1] << 8 | p[2]; else return p[0] | p[1] << 8 | p[2] << 16; case 4: return *(Uint32*)p; default: return 0; } } I've been stumped at this, and I need help badly! Thanks so much for any advice.

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Personal Financial Management – The need for resuscitation

- by Salil Ravindran

Until a year or so ago, PFM (Personal Financial Management) was the blue eyed boy of every channel banking head. In an age when bank account portability is still fiction, PFM was expected to incentivise customers to switch banks. It still is, in some emerging economies, but if the state of PFM in matured markets is anything to go by, it is in a state of coma and badly requires resuscitation. Studies conducted around the year show an alarming decline and stagnation in PFM usage in mature markets. A Sept 2012 report by Aite Group – Strategies for PFM Success shows that 72% of users hadn’t used PFM and worse, 58% of them were not kicked about using it. Of the rest who had used it, only half did on a bank site. While there are multiple reasons for this lack of adoption, some are glaringly obvious. While pretty graphs and pie charts are important to provide a visual representation of my income and expense, it is simply not enough to encourage me to return. Static representation of data without any insightful analysis does not help me. Budgeting and Cash Flow is important but when I have an operative account, a couple of savings accounts, a mortgage loan and a couple of credit cards help me with what my affordability is in specific contexts rather than telling me I just busted my budget. Help me with relative importance of each budget category so that I know it is fine to go over budget on books for my daughter as against going over budget on eating out. Budget over runs and spend analysis are post facto and I am informed of my sins only when I return to online banking. That too, only if I decide to come to the PFM area. Fundamentally, PFM should be a part of my banking engagement rather than an analysis tool. It should be contextual so that I can make insight based decisions. So what can be done to resuscitate PFM? Amalgamation with banking activities – In most cases, PFM tools are integrated into online banking pages and they are like chapter 37 of a long story. PFM needs to be a way of banking rather than a tool. Available balances should shift to Spendable Balances. Budget and goal related insights should be integrated with transaction sessions to drive pre-event financial decisions. Personal Financial Guidance - Banks need to think ground level and see if their PFM offering is really helping customers achieve self actualisation. Banks need to recognise that most customers out there are non-proficient about making the best value of their money. Customers return when they know that they are being guided rather than being just informed on their finance. Integrating contextual financial offers and financial planning into PFM is one way ahead. Yet another way is to help customers tag unwanted spending thereby encouraging sound savings habits. Mobile PFM – Most banks have left all those numbers on online banking. With access mostly having moved to devices and the success of apps, moving PFM on to devices will give it a much needed shot in the arm. This is not only about presenting the same wine in a new bottle but also about leveraging the power of the device in pushing real time notifications to make pre-purchase decisions. The pursuit should be to analyse spend, budgets and financial goals real time and push them pre-event on to the device. So next time, I should know that I have over run my eating out budget before walking into that burger joint and not after. Increase participation and collaboration – Peer group experiences and comments are valued above those offered by the bank. Integrating social media into PFM engagement will let customers share and solicit their financial management experiences with their peer group. Peer comparisons help benchmark one’s savings and spending habits with those of the peer group and increases stickiness. While mature markets have gone through this learning in some way over the last one year, banks in maturing digital banking economies increasingly seem to be falling into this trap. Best practices lie in profiling and segmenting customers, being where they are and contextually guiding them to identify and achieve their financial goals. Banks could look at the likes of Simple and Movenbank to draw inpiration from.

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Deploying Oracle ADF Essentials Applications to Glassfish

- by Shay Shmeltzer

With the new Oracle ADF Essentials offering you can now deploy applications that leverage Oracle ADF on the open source Glassfish 3.1 server. Deployment is documented in the official JDeveloper and ADF documentation (here) but below is a summary of the steps and a video of the steps you'll need to take to get a basic Oracle ADF Essentials application to work on GlassFish. Note - to make starting/stopping GlassFish easier for my demo I used my GlassFish extension that you can get here. First we'll install some ADF Runtime libraries on GlassFish Download and install Glassfish (Note - if you also have an Oracle DB on the same machine, you'll want to switch GlassFish's HTTP port to something else instead of 8080). Download the Oracle ADF Essentials packaging - this will get you an adf_essentials.zip file. Copy the adf_essentials.zip to the lib directory of your Glassfish domain - on a default windows install this would be: C:\glassfish3\glassfish\domains\domain1\lib Go the the above lib directory and issue a unzip -j adf_essentials.zip This will extract the ADF libraries to the directory. Now you can start the Glassfish server. Now let's configure Glassfish to handle applications of the ADF type: Invoke the admin console of glassfish (http://localhost:4848) and log into your admin account. Go to Configurations->Server-config->JVM Settings and choose the JVM Options tab Add the following entries: -XX:MaxPermSize=512m (note this entry should already exist so just make sure it has a big enough value) -Doracle.mds.cache=simple While we are in the admin console, we can also define JDBC connections that will be used by our application. Go into Resources->JDBC->JDBC Connection Pools and click to create a New one Give it a name and choose the resource type to be javax.sql.XADataSource and choose Oracle as the Database Driver vendor. Click Next Scroll down to the Additional Properties section and start filling in the information for your database. The values for an Oracle XE will be (user=hr, databaseName = XE, Password=hr, ServerName=localhost, DriverType=thin, PortNumber=1521) Click Finish Click Ping to check your connection works. Now define a new JDBC Resource that will use the pool you just defined. In my example I called the resource jdbc/HRDS You will need this name to match the name in your Application Module connection configuraiton.Now you can re-start the Glassfish server for the changes to take effect. Get an ADF application going (you can use the regular Fusion Application template for this) Go into the project properties of your viewController project, under the deployment section click to edit the deployment profile that is defined there. Go to Platform and choose Glassfish 3.1 from the drop down list. Click ok to go back to your project. Go to Application -> Application Properties-> Deployment Go to Platform and choose Glassfish 3.1 from the drop down list. Click ok to go back to your project. This step will make sure that JDeveloper will autoamtically add the necessary ADF libraries to the EAR file that is being generated for deployment on Glassfish Go to your Application->Deploy and deploy either to an EAR file or directly to a Glassfish server connection that you created. Things should just work, but if they don't then look up the server.log in the log directory and check out what error is in there. Here is a video demo of the various steps: Note - right now the deployment of an ADF application takes about 2 minutes on my machine we are hoping to be able to improve this timing in the future. People who are more familiar with Glassfish might want to explore using exploded directory deployment and see if they can get it to work.

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