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  • 2D Collision masks for handling slopes

    - by JiminyCricket
    I've been looking at the example at: http://create.msdn.com/en-US/education/catalog/tutorial/collision_2d_perpixel and am trying to figure out how to adjust the sprite once a collision has been detected. As David suggested at XNA 4.0 2D sidescroller variable terrain heightmap for walking/collision, I made a few sensor points (feet, sides, bottom center, etc.) and can easily detect when these points actually collide with non-transparent portions of a second texture (simple slope). I'm having trouble with the algorithm of how I would actually adjust the sprite position based on a collision. Say I detect a collision with the slope at the sprite's right foot. How can I scan the slope texture data to find the Y position to place the sprite's foot so it is no longer inside the slope? The way it is stored as a 1D array in the example is a bit confusing, should I try to store the data as a 2D array instead? For test purposes, I'm thinking of just using the slope texture alpha itself as a primitive and easy collision mask (no grass bits or anything besides a simple non-linear slope). Then, as in the example, I find the coordinates of any collisions between the slope texture and the sprite's sensors and mark these special sensor collisions as having occurred. Finally, in the case of moving up a slope, I would scan for the first transparent pixel above (in the texture's Ys at that X) the right foot collision point and set that as the new height of the sprite. I'm a little unclear also on when I should make these adjustments. Collisions are checked on every game.update() so would I quickly change the position of the sprite before the next update is called? I also noticed several people mention that it's best to separate collision checks horizontally and vertically, why is that exactly? Open to any suggestions if this is an inefficient or inaccurate way of handling this. I wish MSDN had provided an example of something like this, I didn't know it would be so much more complex than NES Mario style pure box platforming!

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  • Gödel, Escher, Bach - Gödel's string

    - by Brad Urani
    In the book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter, the author gives us a representation of the precursor to Gödel's string (Gödel's string's uncle) as: ~Ea,a': (I don't have the book in front of me but I think that's right). All that remains to get Gödel's string is to plug the Gödel number for this string into the free variable a''. What I don't understand is how to get the Gödel number for the functions PROOF-PAIR and ARITHMOQUINE. I understand how to write these functions in a programming language like FlooP (from the book) and could even write them myself in C# or Java, but the scheme that Hofstadter defines for Gödel numbering only applies to TNT (which is just his own syntax for natural number theory) and I don't see any way to write a procedure in TNT since it doesn't have any loops, variable assignments etc. Am I missing the point? Perhaps Gödel's string is not something that can actually be printed, but rather a theoretical string that need not actually be defined? I thought it would be neat to write a computer program that actually prints Gödel's string, or Gödel's string encoded by Gödel numbering (yes, I realize it would have a gazillion digits) but it seems like doing so requires some kind of procedural language and a Gödel numbering system for that procedural language that isn't included in the book. Of course once you had that, you could write a program that plugs random numbers into variable "a" and run procedure PROOF-PAIR on it to test for theoromhood of Gödel's string. If you let it run for a trillion years you might find a derivation that proves Gödel's string.

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  • Website not available everywhere

    - by Cedric Reichenbach
    Today I noticed my website http://mint-nachhilfe.ch/ was down, but other people (located in different networks) said it looks up from there. When I came home, I double-checked, and I can really reach it from here. Also, this website considers it down. Some facts: It's a Tomcat webapp, connected to an Apache2 server. I restarted both, no change. Another (ruby on rails) application is connected to this Apache2, which I couldn't reach either, but is considered online by above check website. At any point, I could directly connect to the Tomcat over http://mint-nachhilfe.ch:8080! I don't know how to go on searching for the root error. I assume it's related to the Apache2 server, but how could that be?

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  • Recommended total system backup solution

    - by bioShark
    I hope this question won't get closed immediately since it has a generic title. I already searched a bit around the answers here, but nothing satisfied me. I want a back-up solution that makes a total back-up, so that I can restore my Ubuntu in case of major failures, like HDD failing. As far as I can see, I have 2 choices: 1) Backing up with Deja Dup to an external disk. This is fine and I am already doing, but in case my HDD fails, and I make a new Ubuntu install on a new disk, will Deja Dup be able to restore all my setting and stuff from the backed up files? If it can, then what other files/folders should I add in Deja Dup to back-up (currently I have set only the recommended /home folder)? Is there a point in telling Deja Dup to back-up everything under "/" ? 2) A disk/partition cloning software. This would be something similar to Noton ghost. Is there such a software with nice GUI that you could recommend for Ubuntu? And even better, it would be nice if Ubuntu's liveCD could recognize such a clone at install step. I am using 11.10

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  • Is it possible to render and style a <title> element from within the <head> of an html document?

    - by Brian Z
    Is it possible to render and style a <title> element from within the <head> of an html document? I thought it was impossible to render information from the <head>, but the system status page for 37signals.com seems to be doing just that - http://status.37signals.com/. If you inspect the element at the very top of the page, the text that reads "37signals System Status", you'll see that the part of the DOM that is generating the text is the <head>'s <title>, and the css is as follows: title { display: block; margin: 10px auto; max-width: 840px; width: 100%; padding: 0 20px; float: left; color: black; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; -moz-box-sizing: border-box; box-sizing: border-box; } Can someone confirm that the <title> info from the <head> is indeed what is being rendered? If so, can someone point to documentation that defines this capability as I have not found any? I have applied the above css to an html document on my local web server using the same browser (chromium, os x 10.8.5) as the 37signals site was viewed on, yet my file did not display the <head>'s <title>.

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  • C# vector class - Interpolation design decision

    - by Benjamin
    Currently I'm working on a vector class in C# and now I'm coming to the point, where I've to figure out, how i want to implement the functions for interpolation between two vectors. At first I came up with implementing the functions directly into the vector class... public class Vector3D { public static Vector3D LinearInterpolate(Vector3D vector1, Vector3D vector2, double factor) { ... } public Vector3D LinearInterpolate(Vector3D other, double factor { ... } } (I always offer both: a static method with two vectors as parameters and one non-static, with only one vector as parameter) ...but then I got the idea to use extension methods (defined in a seperate class called "Interpolation" for example), since interpolation isn't really a thing only available for vectors. So this could be another solution: public class Vector3D { ... } public static class Interpolation { public static Vector3D LinearInterpolate(this Vector3D vector, Vector3D other, double factor) { ... } } So here an example how you'd use the different possibilities: { var vec1 = new Vector3D(5, 3, 1); var vec2 = new Vector3D(4, 2, 0); Vector3D vec3; vec3 = vec1.LinearInterpolate(vec2, 0.5); //1 vec3 = Vector3D.LinearInterpolate(vec1, vec2, 0.5); //2 //or with extension-methods vec3 = vec1.LinearInterpolate(vec2, 0.5); //3 (same as 1) vec3 = Interpolation.LinearInterpolation(vec1, vec2, 0.5); //4 } So I really don't know which design is better. Also I don't know if there's an ultimate rule for things like this or if it's just about what someone personally prefers. But I really would like to hear your opinions, what's better (and if possible why ).

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  • How do I stop ubuntu from detaching minimize/maximuze/close buttons?

    - by Shahbaz
    Some time ago I managed to get ubuntu to keep the window menubars in the menu rather than the bar above (I'm not sure if this part is unity or compiz, or what's the difference). That was by removing indicator-appmenu Anyway, so now everything is fine except one thing: If I have a window that is full screen, the minimize/maximize/close buttons are still grabbed by the bar on the top. Usually this doesn't cause a problem because the upper-left corner of the full screen window and the whole screen are not too far apart. However, one thing happens to me a lot, and that is I am working on something (programming), then I need to check some things from other places so I open some windows, see what I want and switch back to my work. Those windows however are temporary so at some point I want to close them. Now here's what happens: I have the focus on some window and I can't close the maximized window behind it unless I click on the window first, so that the buttons appear and then close it. I couldn't find anything on the internet about this. Is this something that's hardcoded in unity/compiz/whatever or is there actually a way to configure this?

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  • What's a nice explanation for pointers?

    - by Macneil
    In your own studies (on your own, or for a class) did you have an "ah ha" moment when you finally, really understood pointers? Do you have an explanation you use for beginner programmers that seems particularly effective? For example, when beginners first encounter pointers in C, they might just add &s and *s until it compiles (as I myself once did). Maybe it was a picture, or a really well motivated example, that made pointers "click" for you or your student. What was it, and what did you try before that didn't seem to work? Were any topics prerequisites (e.g. structs, or arrays)? In other words, what was necessary to understand the meaning of &s and *, when you could use them with confidence? Learning the syntax and terminology or the use cases isn't enough, at some point the idea needs to be internalized. Update: I really like the answers so far; please keep them coming. There are a lot of great perspectives here, but I think many are good explanations/slogans for ourselves after we've internalized the concept. I'm looking for the detailed contexts and circumstances when it dawned on you. For example: I only somewhat understood pointers syntactically in C. I heard two of my friends explaining pointers to another friend, who asked why a struct was passed with a pointer. The first friend talked about how it needed to be referenced and modified, but it was just a short comment from the other friend where it hit me: "It's also more efficient." Passing 4 bytes instead of 16 bytes was the final conceptual shift I needed.

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  • What is Cloud Computing?

    - by joelvarty
    This is a question that we discuss quite often at Edentity.  It’s one of those things, kind of like “web services” where the terminology has been thrown around by a ton of people and means a lot of different things. Here’s my favorite diagram so far, which is a visual breakdown of the material presented here by NIST, visualized by the folks at Cloud Security Alliance.     What I like about this diagram is that is shows several different ways that we can differentiate our definitions of cloud computing, from the essential characteristics, or which “Broad Network Access" and “On-Demand Self-Service” (which often are used on their own to define cloud computing) are but a couple of things that help make something “cloud”. The most important section from my point of view is the middle one – the Service Models.  This represents the different ways that cloud computing can be exposed from the ground up.  It can be an Infrastructure, a Platform or a piece of Software that an end user interacts with. This is the future, folks. more late - joel

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  • Subdomain still times out after being set up a month ago

    - by user8137
    I would like to use the subdomain www.high-res.domain.com to be accessed by external customers with specific permissions to access the site (like FTP). We use Network Solutions to house domain.com. We recently added a new IP address to point to www.high-res.domain.com. I gave the IP address to the company that hosts our website. I pinged www.high-res.domain.com and it points to the correct IP address but still times out. It’s been a few weeks now and when you ping it, it still times out. C:\>ping XXX.XXX.X.XXX Pinging XXX.XXX.X.XXX with 32 bytes of data: Request timed out. Request timed out. Request timed out. Request timed out. Ping statistics for XXX.XXX.X.XXX: Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 0, Lost = 4 (100% loss). tracert times out as well. I even went to DNS tools and a few other sites for checking this and it shows the same thing. I recently went into the DNSmgmt on our server (wink2k3sp1) and created an A record under the DomainDnsZones which translated to a CNAME when you look at it. Under the domain it has two entries, one to the subdomain and the other to the website host. Each has separate IP addresses. Is this correct?

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  • Canonicals with differing content

    - by Jimbo Jonny
    Interesting conundrum here with canonicals. Lets say I have a site with a "verified" system where other websites can become so and so "verified". Their url to send people to to confirm verification is something like "blah.com/verify/company1" and "blah.com/verify/company2". But logically "blah.com/verify" itself is not verifying anyone in particular, so it redirects to the signup form to get verified, at "blah.com/verify/register" As far as the actual companies registered, I figure it doesn't make sense to index every individual url with only the tiny difference of which company name it's saying yay or nay to being verified, so canonicals could come in handy on those pages to condense the indexing. Yet making "blah.com/verify" the canonical "hub" doesn't work well because it's a signup form, not a verification page, so technically has quite different content from the various verification pages themselves. But at the same time it's a bit unfair to choose 1 company to point all the canonical benefits too to use that as the "hub", yet a bit wasteful to have google index every individual verification page and spread out all that linkjuice. Basically, I'm just looking for advice, what's best for this from a search engine standpoint?

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  • How to configure remote access to multiple subnets behind a SonicWALL NSA 2400

    - by Kyle Noland
    I have a client that uses a SonicWALL NSA 2400 as their firewall. I need to setup a second LAN subnet for a handful of PC. Management has decided that there should be a second subnet even though intend to allow access across the two subnets - I know... I'm having trouble getting communication across the 2 subnets. I can ping each gateway, but I cannot ping or seem to route traffic fron subnet A to subnet B. Here is my current setup: X0 Interface: LAN zone with IP addres 192.168.1.1 X1 Interface: WAN zone with WAN IP address X2 Interface: LAN zone with IP address 192.168.75.1 I have configured ARP and routes for the secondar subnet (X2) according to this SonicWALL KB article: http://www.sonicwall.com/downloads/supporting_multiple_firewalled_subnets_on_sonicos_enhanced.pdf using "Example 1". At this point I don't minding if I have to throw the SonicWALL GVC software VPN client into the mix to make it work. It feel like I have an Access Rule issue, but for testing I made LAN LAN, WAN LAN and VPN LAN rules wide open with the same results.

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  • Group policy issues

    - by Alex Berry
    We are having an issue on one of our clients relatively new sbs installs. The domain consists of a single SBS 2011 server with 4 windows 7 clients and 3 xp clients. Most of the time everything is fine however roughly every 3 days windows 7 clients start timing out when trying to receive computer group policy. This results in hour long delays before getting to the login screen in the morning. This is accompanied by event ID 6006, win login errors stating it took 3599 seconds to process policy. Once they've booted they can log in without issue however gpupdate fails again on computer policy and gpresult comes back with access denied, even when run as domain admin... At this point if we restart the server the network is fine for 3 days. I thought perhaps it might be ipv6 or smb2, but disabling ipv6 on the clients doesn't help and the clients can browse the sysvol folder freely on smb2 anyway. Does anyone have any ideas or routes I can take to further diagnose the issue? Thanks in advance :)

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  • MWS2K8R2: Enabling Media Sharing using Streaming Media Services Role

    - by TheLizardKing
    So I have a Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 that stores a large collection of media (mostly mp3s) and I want to be able to deliver these files using a server/client setup with Windows Media Player being the client. I downloaded and installed Streaming Media Services Role. I even setup a publishing point with on-demand access. My issue is I can connect using WMP12 but it only connects as more of a stream and not a shared library. I can pause/play/skip as if it's a powerful radio station which is ok in my book but what I'd really like to do is allow me to control my music remotely, search and play for artists, maybe create playlists (not required but nice) and even connect it to an xbox. Is Streaming Media Services Role not what I should be using for this? Would installing WMP and sharing using that mechanism be a better option? Any Ideas?

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  • How not to suffer from ideologists when you're a pragmatic person?

    - by Lukas Eder
    My story: I'm a pragmatic person. Sometimes, the most simple solution to a problem to get the job done is the one that fits best for me, if its not an utter blasphemy and reproach to any design principles. Check out my answer to this question on stackoverflow. Simple. Works. Was accepted. Could be improved. Is clearly not perfect. And along comes this guy. He downvotes me, comments on the question how his answer is better, more accurate etc and calls me "plain wrong". Reminds me of this comic strip. :-) While on stackoverflow I can laugh at these things because those people are far away, in the real world I'm suffering from ideologies every now and then. Heck, I'm not creating a miracle piece of software, I need to keep that huge legacy thing running, and it's an adventure to me every day. I don't have the time or passion to beautify my code (or other people's code) to that extent. My question(s): How do you deal with ideologies / ideologists, when you're a pragmatic person? How do you deal with pragmatism / pragmatists, when you're an ideologic person? I'm interested in both point of views. Tell me your experience. But please, be fair, somewhat objective, and understand that you may NOT be entirely correct and your opinion is NOT the only true one... :-)

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  • Requesting quality analysis test cases up front of implementation/change

    - by arin
    Recently I have been assigned to work on a major requirement that falls between a change request and an improvement. The previous implementation was done (badly) by a senior developer that left the company and did so without leaving a trace of documentation. Here were my initial steps to approach this problem: Considering that the release date was fast approaching and there was no time for slip-ups, I initially asked if the requirement was a "must have". Since the requirement helped the product significantly in terms of usability, the answer was "If possible, yes". Knowing the wide-spread use and affects of this requirement, had it come to a point where the requirement could not be finished prior to release, I asked if it would be a viable option to thrash the current state and revert back to the state prior to the ex-senior implementation. The answer was "Most likely: no". Understanding that the requirement was coming from the higher management, and due to the complexity of it, I asked all usability test cases to be written prior to the implementation (by QA) and given to me, to aid me in the comprehension of this task. This was a big no-no for the folks at the management as they failed to understand this approach. Knowing that I had to insist on my request and the responsibility of this requirement, I insisted and have fallen out of favor with some of the folks, leaving me in a state of "baffledness". Basically, I was trying a test-driven approach to a high-risk, high-complexity and must-have requirement and trying to be safe rather than sorry. Is this approach wrong or have I approached it incorrectly? P.S.: The change request/improvement was cancelled and the implementation was reverted back to the prior state due to the complexity of the problem and lack of time. This only happened after a 2 hour long meeting with other seniors in order to convince the aforementioned folks.

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  • How can I start nginx via upstart ?

    - by Chiggsy
    Background: DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu DISTRIB_RELEASE=10.04 DISTRIB_CODENAME=lucid DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 10.04 LTS" I've built nginx, and I'd like to use upstart to start it: nginx upstart script from the site: description "nginx http daemon" start on runlevel 2 stop on runlevel 0 stop on runlevel 1 stop on runlevel 6 console owner exec /usr/sbin/nginx -c /etc/nginx/nginx.conf -g "daemon off;" respawn I get "unknown job" when i try to use initctl to run it, which I just learned apparently means there is an error, ( what's wrong with "Error" to describe errors?) Can someone point me in the right direction ? I've read the documentation , as it is, and it seems kind of sparse for a SysV init replacement... but whatever just need to add this job to the list, run it, and get on with what's left of my life... Any tips? EDIT: initctl version init (upstart 0.6.5)

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  • Clever memory usage through the years

    - by Ben Emmett
    A friend and I were recently talking about the really clever tricks people have used to get the most out of memory. I thought I’d share my favorites, and would love to hear yours too! Interleaving on drum memory Back in the ye olde days before I’d been born (we’re talking the 50s / 60s here), working memory commonly took the form of rotating magnetic drums. These would spin at a constant speed, and a fixed head would read from memory when the correct part of the drum passed it by, a bit like a primitive platter disk. Because each revolution took a few milliseconds, programmers took to manually arranging information non-sequentially on the drum, timing when an instruction or memory address would need to be accessed, then spacing information accordingly around the edge of the drum, thus reducing the access delay. Similar techniques were still used on hard disks and floppy disks into the 90s, but have become irrelevant with modern disk technologies. The Hashlife algorithm Conway’s Game of Life has attracted numerous implementations over the years, but Bill Gosper’s Hashlife algorithm is particularly impressive. Taking advantage of the repetitive nature of many cellular automata, it uses a quadtree structure to store the hashes of pieces of the overall grid. Over time there are fewer and fewer new structures which need to be evaluated, so it starts to run faster with larger grids, drastically outperforming other algorithms both in terms of speed and the size of grid which can be simulated. The actual amount of memory used is huge, but it’s used in a clever way, so makes the list . Elite’s procedural generation Ok, so this isn’t exactly a memory optimization – more a storage optimization – but it gets an honorable mention anyway. When writing Elite, David Braben and Ian Bell wanted to build a rich world which gamers could explore, but their 22K memory was something of a limitation (for comparison that’s about the size of my avatar picture at the top of this page). They procedurally generated all the characteristics of the 2048 planets in their virtual universe, including the names, which were stitched together using a lookup table of parts of names. In fact the original plans were for 2^52 planets, but it was decided that that was probably too many. Oh, and they did that all in assembly language. Other games of the time used similar techniques too – The Sentinel’s landscape generation algorithm being another example. Modern Garbage Collectors Garbage collection in managed languages like Java and .NET ensures that most of the time, developers stop needing to care about how they use and clean up memory as the garbage collector handles it automatically. Achieving this without killing performance is a near-miraculous feet of software engineering. Much like when learning chemistry, you find that every time you think you understand how the garbage collector works, it turns out to be a mere simplification; that there are yet more complexities and heuristics to help it run efficiently. Of course introducing memory problems is still possible (and there are tools like our memory profiler to help if that happens to you) but they’re much, much rarer. A cautionary note In the examples above, there were good and well understood reasons for the optimizations, but cunningly optimized code has usually had to trade away readability and maintainability to achieve its gains. Trying to optimize memory usage without being pretty confident that there’s actually a problem is doing it wrong. So what have I missed? Tell me about the ingenious (or stupid) tricks you’ve seen people use. Ben

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  • Quick Books accounting software

    - by Randall Davis
    Using a square 17" lcd monitor, and setting the Monitor to display text in larger font than default, some of the pages in QB have the bottom 2 or 3 lines chopped off. QB support has no ideas for a different/larger monitor that would solve the problem for those of us with 50 something eyes. Seems like everyone is going to the widescreen format, but when we tried one on the QB stuff, it spreads out the page to the point that it is deformed...too wide. Does anybody make a new square screen monitor in 19, 20, or bigger that would solve this issue. we can't be the only ones experiencing this.

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  • Why Are Minimized Programs Often Slow to Open Again?

    - by Jason Fitzpatrick
    It seems particularly counterintuitive: you minimize an application because you plan on returning to it later and wish to skip shutting the application down and restarting it later, but sometimes maximizing it takes even longer than launching it fresh. What gives? 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 Bart wants to know why he’s not saving any time with application minimization: I’m working in Photoshop CS6 and multiple browsers a lot. I’m not using them all at once, so sometimes some applications are minimized to taskbar for hours or days. The problem is, when I try to maximize them from the taskbar – it sometimes takes longer than starting them! Especially Photoshop feels really weird for many seconds after finally showing up, it’s slow, unresponsive and even sometimes totally freezes for minute or two. It’s not a hardware problem as it’s been like that since always on all on my PCs. Would I also notice it after upgrading my HDD to SDD and adding RAM (my main PC holds 4 GB currently)? Could guys with powerful pcs / macs tell me – does it also happen to you? I guess OSes somehow “focus” on active software and move all the resources away from the ones that run, but are not used. Is it possible to somehow set RAM / CPU / HDD priorities or something, for let’s say, Photoshop, so it won’t slow down after long period of inactivity? So what is the deal? Why does he find himself waiting to maximize a minimized app? The Answer SuperUser contributor Allquixotic explains why: Summary The immediate problem is that the programs that you have minimized are being paged out to the “page file” on your hard disk. This symptom can be improved by installing a Solid State Disk (SSD), adding more RAM to your system, reducing the number of programs you have open, or upgrading to a newer system architecture (for instance, Ivy Bridge or Haswell). Out of these options, adding more RAM is generally the most effective solution. Explanation The default behavior of Windows is to give active applications priority over inactive applications for having a spot in RAM. When there’s significant memory pressure (meaning the system doesn’t have a lot of free RAM if it were to let every program have all the RAM it wants), it starts putting minimized programs into the page file, which means it writes out their contents from RAM to disk, and then makes that area of RAM free. That free RAM helps programs you’re actively using — say, your web browser — run faster, because if they need to claim a new segment of RAM (like when you open a new tab), they can do so. This “free” RAM is also used as page cache, which means that when active programs attempt to read data on your hard disk, that data might be cached in RAM, which prevents your hard disk from being accessed to get that data. By using the majority of your RAM for page cache, and swapping out unused programs to disk, Windows is trying to improve responsiveness of the program(s) you are actively using, by making RAM available to them, and caching the files they access in RAM instead of the hard disk. The downside of this behavior is that minimized programs can take a while to have their contents copied from the page file, on disk, back into RAM. The time increases the larger the program’s footprint in memory. This is why you experience that delay when maximizing Photoshop. RAM is many times faster than a hard disk (depending on the specific hardware, it can be up to several orders of magnitude). An SSD is considerably faster than a hard disk, but it is still slower than RAM by orders of magnitude. Having your page file on an SSD will help, but it will also wear out the SSD more quickly than usual if your page file is heavily utilized due to RAM pressure. Remedies Here is an explanation of the available remedies, and their general effectiveness: Installing more RAM: This is the recommended path. If your system does not support more RAM than you already have installed, you will need to upgrade more of your system: possibly your motherboard, CPU, chassis, power supply, etc. depending on how old it is. If it’s a laptop, chances are you’ll have to buy an entire new laptop that supports more installed RAM. When you install more RAM, you reduce memory pressure, which reduces use of the page file, which is a good thing all around. You also make available more RAM for page cache, which will make all programs that access the hard disk run faster. As of Q4 2013, my personal recommendation is that you have at least 8 GB of RAM for a desktop or laptop whose purpose is anything more complex than web browsing and email. That means photo editing, video editing/viewing, playing computer games, audio editing or recording, programming / development, etc. all should have at least 8 GB of RAM, if not more. Run fewer programs at a time: This will only work if the programs you are running do not use a lot of memory on their own. Unfortunately, Adobe Creative Suite products such as Photoshop CS6 are known for using an enormous amount of memory. This also limits your multitasking ability. It’s a temporary, free remedy, but it can be an inconvenience to close down your web browser or Word every time you start Photoshop, for instance. This also wouldn’t stop Photoshop from being swapped when minimizing it, so it really isn’t a very effective solution. It only helps in some specific situations. Install an SSD: If your page file is on an SSD, the SSD’s improved speed compared to a hard disk will result in generally improved performance when the page file has to be read from or written to. Be aware that SSDs are not designed to withstand a very frequent and constant random stream of writes; they can only be written over a limited number of times before they start to break down. Heavy use of a page file is not a particularly good workload for an SSD. You should install an SSD in combination with a large amount of RAM if you want maximum performance while preserving the longevity of the SSD. Use a newer system architecture: Depending on the age of your system, you may be using an out of date system architecture. The “system architecture” is generally defined as the “generation” (think generations like children, parents, grandparents, etc.) of the motherboard and CPU. Newer generations generally support faster I/O (input/output), better memory bandwidth, lower latency, and less contention over shared resources, instead providing dedicated links between components. For example, starting with the “Nehalem” generation (around 2009), the Front-Side Bus (FSB) was eliminated, which removed a common bottleneck, because almost all system components had to share the same FSB for transmitting data. This was replaced with a “point to point” architecture, meaning that each component gets its own dedicated “lane” to the CPU, which continues to be improved every few years with new generations. You will generally see a more significant improvement in overall system performance depending on the “gap” between your computer’s architecture and the latest one available. For example, a Pentium 4 architecture from 2004 is going to see a much more significant improvement upgrading to “Haswell” (the latest as of Q4 2013) than a “Sandy Bridge” architecture from ~2010. Links Related questions: How to reduce disk thrashing (paging)? Windows Swap (Page File): Enable or Disable? Also, just in case you’re considering it, you really shouldn’t disable the page file, as this will only make matters worse; see here. And, in case you needed extra convincing to leave the Windows Page File alone, see here and here. 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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  • Static "LoD" hack opinions

    - by David Lively
    I've been playing with implementing dynamic level of detail for rendering a very large mesh in XNA. It occurred to me that (duh) the whole point of this is to generate small triangles close to the camera, and larger ones far away. Given that, rather than constantly modifying or swapping index buffers based on a feature's rendered size or distance from the camera, it would be a lot easier (and potentially quite a bit faster), to render a single "fan" or flat wedge/frustum-shaped planar mesh that is tessellated into small triangles close to the near or small end of the frustum and larger ones at the far end, sort of like this (overhead view) (Pardon the gap in the middle - I drew one side and mirrored it) The triangle sizes are chosen so that all are approximately the same size when projected. Then, that mesh would be transformed to track the camera so that the Z axis (center vertical in this image) is always aligned with the view direction projected into the XZ plane. The vertex shader would then read terrain heights from a height texture and adjust the Y coordinate of the mesh to match a height field that defines the terrain. This eliminates the need for culling (since the mesh is generated to match the viewport dimensions) and the need to modify the index and/or vertex buffers when drawing the terrain. Obviously this doesn't address terrain with overhangs, etc, but that could be handled to a certain extent by including a second mesh that defines a sort of "ceiling" via a different texture. The other LoD schemes I've seen aren't particularly difficult to implement and, in some cases, are a lot more flexible, but this seemed like a decent quick-and-dirty way to handle height map-based terrain without getting into geometry manipulation. Has anyone tried this? Opinions?

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  • How to Manage Technical Employees

    - by Ajarn Mark Caldwell
    In my current position as Software Engineering Manager I have been through a lot of ups and downs with staffing, ranging from laying-off everyone who was on my team as we went through the great economic downturn in 2007-2008, to numerous rounds of interviewing and hiring contractors, full-time employees, and converting some contractors to employee status.  I have not yet blogged much about my experiences, but I plan to do that more in the next few months.  But before I do that, let me point you to a great article that somebody else wrote on The Unspoken Truth About Managing Geeks that really hits the target.  If you are a non-technical person who manages technical employees, you definitely have to read that article.  And if you are a technical person who has been promoted into management, this article can really help you do your job and communicate up the line of command about your team.  When you move into management with all the new and different demands put on you, it is easy to forget how things work in the tech subculture, and to lose touch with your team.  This article will help you remember what’s going on behind the scenes and perhaps explain why people who used to get along great no longer are, or why things seem to have changed since your promotion. I have to give credit to Andy Leonard (blog | twitter) for helping me find that article.  I have been reading his series of ramble-rants on managing tech teams, and the above article is linked in the first rant in the series, entitled Goodwill, Negative and Positive.  I have read a handful of his entries in this series and so far I pretty much agree with everything he has said, so of course I would encourage you to read through that series, too.

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  • Sharing an external hard drive in Ubuntu using Samba

    - by cambraca
    /media/MYDISK is where my hard drive is mounted automatically. I created a symlink using: ln -s /media/MYDISK /home/camilo/MYDISK chmod 777 /home/camilo/MYDISK I'm setting up smb.conf like this: [myshare1] comment = external disk browsable = yes path = /home/camilo/MYDISK guest ok = yes read only = no create mask = 0775 Also, in the [global] section I tried adding the following lines: follow symlinks = yes wide links = yes unix extensions = no The problem is that when browsing the shared folder in Windows 7, I get a "\\etc\myshare1 is not accessible" error. When pointing the path to a regular folder it works fine. Also, when I point it directly to /media/MYDISK, it shows the same error. EDIT: to make it more interesting, I have no graphical interface, so I need to touch the config files directly..

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  • I know fundamental programming. But how do I get started in game development now?

    - by Rohan Menon
    I'm a 20 year old programming student. I know fundamental programming in BASIC, C, C++ and JAVA. What I wanted to ask is, where do I go from here? Are there any books that the community can mention that will help me develop a game or at least learn game development? I've had a lot of ideas and really want to make some sort of prototype to see if I'm suited for the industry. I really don't mind learning any new languages but I need to know what I should begin with. A good book that will help with a little more understanding as I go up will be very helpful. Maybe a tutorial to develop some basic 2D games like a side-scroller, snake or pocket tanks in an easy to understand SDK? I know that to get some credit under your belt, you need to be able to make a few games on your own. Also, what platform should I start on? The PC, iOS or Android (as an introduction) for now. I don't want to get into high level game design just yet. Just something a bit basic to help out in future development. Anything pointing me in the right direction will be really really helpful. Edit: Also, I want to say that I'm looking towards this from a game designer's point of view more than a game programmer. I want suggestions on any SDKs or easy to use programs I can use to understand game design. Then delve deeper into the programming after that. Not as employment but as developing your own games (for now).

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  • How can I add a custom item to the Sound Indicator (and make it clickable more than once)?

    - by con-f-use
    The original question One of the strength of Unity are the various standardized indicators. I want to customize the sound indicator with an additional menu entry that runs a small shell script. I'm not afraid of a little Python code and I hope someone can point me to the right subroutine in the right file. I suspect that will be fairly easy but all the indicators are just so bloated that I can't look through their code in a reasonable time. Any help is appreciated. I know it is possible as the marvelous Skype-Wrapper does it. Edit 2 - Now a dirty DBus hack The one click problem from one edit before has now turned into a DBus problem. Basically we have to tell the sound indicator that our bogus player has terminated now. A dirty hack navigates around that problem: #!/bin/bash # This is '/home/confus/bin/toggleSpeaker.sh' notify-send "Toggle Speaker" "$(date)" qdbus \ com.canonical.indicator.sound \ /org/ayatana/indicator/service \ org.ayatana.indicator.service.Shutdown exit 0 Help from the community is appreciated as I don't have experience any with DBus whatsoever. Edit 1 - Takkat found a solution but only clickable once? For some reason the solution proposed by Takkat has the drawback that the resulting entry in indicator sound can only be clicked once per session. If someone has a fix for, than please comment or answer, you will be upvoted. Here you can see the result: I strongly suspect the issue is related to the .desktop-file in /home/confus/.local/share/application/toggleSpeaker.desktop, which is this: [Desktop Entry] Type=Application Name=toggleSpeaker GenericName=Toggle Speaker Icon=gstreamer-properties Exec=/home/confus/bin/toggleSpeaker.sh Terminal=false And here is a minimal example of the script in /home/confus/bin/toggleSpeaker.sh for your consideration: #!/bin/bash # This is '/home/confus/bin/toggleSpeaker.sh' notify-send "Toggle Speaker" "$(date)" exit 0

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