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  • Have Fun with Mozilla Firefox’s Spark and Ember Paper Toys [Geek Project]

    - by Asian Angel
    Are you looking for a fun paper-craft project to work on while showing your support for Mozilla Firefox? Then you will enjoy the Spark and Ember paper toys that the folks from the Mozilla Indonesia community have put together. Each comes in an easy to print three page PDF file for easy storage and sharing with friends. Photo courtesy of Mozilla Blog Indonesia. Download the Spark Paper Toy Download the Ember Paper Toy [via Mozilla Blog Indonesia] What is a Histogram, and How Can I Use it to Improve My Photos?How To Easily Access Your Home Network From Anywhere With DDNSHow To Recover After Your Email Password Is Compromised

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  • Friends, Food, and Fun at the My Oracle Support Community Meetup

    - by Oracle OpenWorld Blog Team
    By Leslie McNeillJoin us at the third annual My Oracle Support Community Meetup for food and drink, fun and conversation After a long day at Oracle OpenWorld, take time to relax and meet your peers in the My Oracle Support Community and some of the Oracle employees who moderate the community. The Meetup event is a great place to get together before dinner, or spend the evening getting to know other Community members and Oracle Support Moderators in person. Not a My Oracle Support Community member yet? Joining is easy - Oracle Premier Support customers can log in with the same account they use to access My Oracle Support to begin taking advantage of the resources the Community offers. If you're an Oracle Premier Support customer but don’t yet have a login, talk to the Customer User Administrator (CUA) at your company now to get access to the Oracle proactive portfolio, including My Oracle Support Community. Oracle Premier Support Customers need to register to receive their invitation to the Meetup and find out the details. Visit the Customer Support Services Oracle OpenWorld Website to discover how you can take advantage of all Oracle OpenWorld has to offer.

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  • What programming language should I learn for fun?

    - by Bo Milanovich
    Disclaimer: I'm not a programmer, but I do like coding from time to time. This is strictly for fun, nothing else. I'm an economist :) I learned Delphi in the past (7 years ago, forgot 99% of it), BASIC (10 years ago). I now know a bit of PHP. So I want to learn a programming language just so I can kill some time, but it'd be awesome if it would be useful as well. I've narrowed down choices to the following: Python (heard it was easy yet useful, Google's appengine runs on python) Java (awesome because cross-platform and very popular, also I'm an Android fan so I might even develop some apps) Continue learning PHP? (awesome language, I'm a web developer somewhat so it may be useful) Something else? Thanks!

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  • How To Customize Wallpaper in Windows 7 Starter Edition

    - by Asian Angel
    If you have the Starter Edition of Windows 7 installed on your netbook you may be sick of looking at the default wallpaper. With Starter Background Changer you can access other customization options with ease. Before There is not a lot that you can say about the singular default wallpaper included with the Starter Edition…it just kind of sits there all boring like. Installing Starter Background Changer Since the installer part of the program is in French we have the entire set of install windows shown here with the appropriate buttons highlighted to get you through the whole process without any problems. Using Starter Background Changer Once the installation process has finished you will simply see a quiet screen with no desktop icons or Start Menu entries visible. Now if you are wondering at this point “Did the program finish installing or did it install at all?” the answer is yes. Right click on your desktop and you will notice a new entry on the Context Menu…the same one that is included in the other editions but not Starter. Time to have some fun… The Personalization Window will open maximized but we have reduced it here for our screenshots. You have four regular categories to choose from in the lower part of the window: Wallpaper, Colors, Sounds, & Screensavers. The first category that we chose for our example was Wallpaper. As you can see here the main display area (My Collection) has no wallpapers showing at the moment. You can use the drop-down menu to access your My Pictures Folder or browse for a different location. Notice that you can choose how the image fills the screen and set up a timed wallpaper slideshow at the bottom. Any picture (or pictures) selected will be added to the My Collection display for easy access the next time you open the window. Once you choose a picture click on Validate the modification to set the wallpaper for your desktop and return to the main window. When you return to the main window you will see a preview for your selection. At this point you can simply close the window or make further adjustments in the other categories. Starter Background Changer provides easy one-stop access to other customization areas. We started off with Colors… Followed by Sounds… And finally Screensavers. Before you do close the main window you can take a quick look at the Options if desired. We did set Optimization of the images to High on our system. Quick and easy wallpaper satisfaction. We did pin the Program Window to our Taskbar…nice if you prefer this method as opposed to the Desktop Context Menu. Conclusion If you have been longing for a way to change the wallpaper in Windows 7 Starter Edition then you will definitely want to give this program a try. Goodbye boring default wallpaper! For more wonderful ways to customize your Windows 7 Started Edition be sure to read our article here. Links Download Starter Background Changer Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Awesome Desktop Wallpapers: The Windows 7 EditionWindows 7 Welcome Screen Taking Forever? Here’s the Fix (Maybe)Desktop Fun: Starship Theme WallpapersDesktop Fun: Starscape Theme WallpapersDesktop Fun: Fantasy Theme Wallpapers TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Office 2010 reviewed in depth by Ed Bott FoxClocks adds World Times in your Statusbar (Firefox) Have Fun Editing Photo Editing with Citrify Outlook Connector Upgrade Error Gadfly is a cool Twitter/Silverlight app Enable DreamScene in Windows 7

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  • Fun Visual Studio 2010 Wallpapers

    - by ScottGu
    Two weeks ago I blogged about a cool new site that allows you to download and customize the Visual Studio code editor background and text colors (for both VS 2008 and VS 2010 version). The site also allows you to submit and share your own Visual Studio color schemes with others. Another new community site has recently launched that allows you to download Visual Studio 2010 themed images that you can use for your Windows desktop background.  You can visit the site here: http://vs2010wallpapers.com/  In addition to browsing and downloading Visual Studio themed wallpapers, you can also submit your own into the gallery to share with others. [In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu] Browsing Wallpaper Images The site has dozens of wallpaper images that you can browse through and choose from.  They range from the cool and abstract: To the fun and silly: Enabling the Wallpaper Images as your Windows Desktop You can zoom in on any image (hover over the image and then click the “zoom” button that appears over it) and then download it to be your Windows desktop image.  If you visit the site using Internet Explorer, you can also zoom in on the image, then right click on the image and choose the “Set as Background” context menu item to enable it as your Windows desktop. Note: you want to make sure you download the zoomed-in/high resolution version of the wallpaper to make sure it looks good as the wallpaper on your desktop. Hope this helps, Scott

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  • Fun with Database Mail

    - by DavidWimbush
    I just had some fun with a new server I set up. I configured Database Mail but it wouldn't send mail. In the Database Log was an error message I've never had before: The mail could not be sent to the recipients because of the mail server failure. (Sending Mail using Account 1 (2010-02-15T16:58:54). Exception Message: Could not connect to mail server. (A non-recoverable error occurred during a database lookup). ) I looked around and found this forum thread: http://www.sqlteam.com/forums/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=139909. I looked into the anti-virus software and firewall but neither of those helped. Then I noticed the last post where they original poster said "oops, I put an @ in the name of the SMTP server". How I laughed. What a ***! At least my problem isn't because I did something that careless. But then that little voice in my head said "Better check, just to be on the safe side". SMTP Server Name: smtp@domain. Who's the *** now? So, rbarlow, thanks very much for making the same silly mistake first so I could find the answer. (And I'm sorry for thinking you were a ***!)

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  • Lazy coding is fun

    - by Anthony Trudeau
    Every once in awhile I get the opportunity to write an application that is important enough to do, but not important enough to do the right way -- meaning standards, best practices, good architecture, et al.  I call it lazy coding.  The industry calls it RAD (rapid application development). I started on the conversion tool at the end of last week.  It will convert our legacy data to a completely new system which I'm working on piece by piece.  It will be used in the future, but only the new parts because it'll only be necessary to convert the individual pieces of the data once.  It was the perfect opportunity to just whip something together, but it was still functional unlike a prototype or proof of concept.  Although I would never write an application like this for a customer (internal or external) this methodology (if you can call it that) works great for something like this. I wouldn't be surprised if I get flamed for equating RAD to lazy coding or lacking standards, best practice, or good architecture.  Unfortunately, it fits in the current usage.  Although, it's possible to create a good, maintainable application using the RAD methodology, it's just too ripe for abuse and requires too much discipline for someone let alone a team to do right. Sometimes it's just fun to throw caution to the wind and start slamming code.

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  • Researching runtime technologies (Xmas fun with HTML5)

    - by Eric Nelson
    The Internet Explorer 9.0 team just posted about Pirates love Daises. This is a showcase game for the power of HTML 5 running inside IE 9.0 – and the author has done a fantastic job (you can get more details from Grant’s blog post). A game developer is an ISV (Independent Software Vendor) – a B2C  ISV. In my role I don’t (typically) work with B2C ISVs, hence a reasonable question is “Why blog about it?”. I think applications like this demonstrate the power of HTML 5 and IE9 for delivering really rich user experiences which have the promise of working cross browser and cross platform - in the future as HTML5 capable browsers become the norm. Microsoft is investing heavily in implementing a great “run time” in IE9 if cross platform is an important requirement for your UX. And the other reason for blogging this… it is nearly Xmas and we all should be having a little more fun on the run in. Hence you can play with confidence that your defence to your manager is “I’m just researching a powerful runtime that Microsoft is working on which could be significant to our future B2B product directions” Play now (Needs HTML 5 browser such as IE9) Related Links: To install IE9 Beta or the Preview (which won’t replace your existing IE) check our the IE9 TestDrive center. Learn about our other important UX runtime with the on-demand recordings of the Silverlight FireStarter event. If you want FREE help with new technologies from Microsoft, sign up to Microsoft Platform Ready.

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  • Some fun with RadGridView for Silverlight literally !

    April Fools' Day is a great excuse for me to do something funny with RadGridView. So todays post will have less geekness and more fun than usually.   Silverlight being a great platform and RadGridView being enormously flexible control provoked me to do something that you can not exactly call the typical Line-Off-Business application.   So enjoy this small  Pexeso game clone created with the help of RadGridView for Silverlight and some standard Silverlight re-styling techniques. The rules are simple : Try to open two identical cards at the same time. The goal of the game try to open all cards this way. My best score was 3:43 !  Will be glad if you share yours :) .   For the sake of geekness I will keep the tradition to share the sources. Those of you who need an example of altering the behavior of the cells in ...Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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  • Sand, Sun and Partner Fun

    - by Kristin Rose
    Last Memorial Day weekend marked the unofficial start of summer and a time to remember those who fight for our freedom each day. It was a weekend complete with BBQ’s, beach time, and of course plenty of sunshine. Here at OPN, the start of summer marks an exciting time no doubt; a time where we finalize and fine tune some Oracle OpenWorld partner events, like this year’s Oracle PartnerNetwork Exchange @ OpenWorld program! Oracle is launching the new Oracle PartnerNetwork Exchange program to offer a new look and feel for partners attending OpenWorld. Get your bathing suits ready because this week long event will feature new deep dive content that will have you swimming in networking opportunities, including an Oracle Partner keynote with Oracle executives like Judson Althoff, SVP of WWA&C. For those who have already registered, be sure to bring your sunscreen as you take part in some exclusive, first degree exposure to Oracle’s top experts, providing a unique and unified partner experience.For those partners wanting to make a real splash, don’t forget that you will be able to complete OPN Certification testing onsite at Oracle OpenWorld. To learn more about the many opportunities and ways to engage with Oracle and other partners, watch the below video hosted by Lydia Smyers, GVP of WWA&C.Wishing you sun and fun,The OPN Communications Team

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  • SQL SERVER – A Puzzle – Fun with NULL – Fix Error 8117

    - by pinaldave
    During my 8 years of career, I have been involved in many interviews. Quite often, I act as the  interview. If I am the interviewer, I ask many questions – from easy questions to difficult ones. When I am the interviewee, I frequently get an opportunity to ask the interviewer some questions back. Regardless of the my capacity in attending the interview, I always make it a point to ask the interviewer at least one question. What is NULL? It’s always fun to ask this question during interviews, because in every interview, I get a different answer. NULL is often confused with false, absence of value or infinite value. Honestly, NULL is a very interesting subject as it bases its behavior in server settings. There are a few properties of NULL that are universal, but the knowledge about these properties is not known in a universal sense. Let us run this simple puzzle. Run the following T-SQL script: SELECT SUM(data) FROM (SELECT NULL AS data) t It will return the following error: Msg 8117, Level 16, State 1, Line 1 Operand data type NULL is invalid for sum operator. Now the error makes it very clear that NULL is invalid for sum Operator. Frequently enough, I have showed this simple query to many folks whom I came across. I asked them if they could modify the subquery and return the result as NULL. Here is what I expected: Even though this is a very simple looking query, so far I’ve got the correct answer from only 10% of the people to whom I have asked this question. It was common for me to receive this kind of answer – convert the NULL to some data type. However, doing so usually returns the value as 0 or the integer they passed. SELECT SUM(data) FROM (SELECT ISNULL(NULL,0) AS data) t I usually see many people modifying the outer query to get desired NULL result, but that is not allowed in this simple puzzle. This small puzzle made me wonder how many people have a clear understanding about NULL. Well, here is the answer to my simple puzzle. Just CAST NULL AS INT and it will return the final result as NULL: SELECT SUM(data) FROM (SELECT CAST(NULL AS INT) AS data) t Now that you know the answer, don’t you think it was very simple indeed? This blog post is especially dedicated to my friend Madhivanan who has written an excellent blog post about NULL. I am confident that after reading the blog post from Madhivanan, you will have no confusion regarding NULL in the future. Read: NULL, NULL, NULL and nothing but NULL. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Puzzle, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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  • Fun with Sun Ray, 3D, Oracle VM x86 and SRIOV

    - by wim.coekaerts
    One of the things I like about my job is that I get to play around with stuff and make use of the technologies we work on in my teams. Sort of my own little playground. It allows me to study the products in great detail and put them to use in ways that individual product teams don't always intend them to be used for :) but that makes it fun. I have a lot of this set up at home because... work is sort of hobby and I just like to tinker with it. Anyway, a few weeks ago I was looking at my sun ray rig at home and how well 3D works. Google Earth and some basic opengl tests like glxspheres combined with virtualgl. It resulted in some very cool demos recorded with my little camera (sorry for the crappy quality of the video :-) : OVDC (soft client) on my mac Sun Ray 2FS Never mind the hickups during zoom, that's because I was using the scrollwheel on my mouse and I can't scroll uninterrupted :) Anyway, this is quite cool ! The setup for this was the following : Sun Ray on LAN, Sun Ray Server 5 latest installed on OL5.5 inside a VM running on Oracle VM 2.2 (hardware virt, with a virtual network (vif)) and the virtualgl rendering happened on another box (wopr5) that runs linux on a little atom D520 with an ION2 gpu. So network goes from Sun Ray to Sun Ray Server to wopr5 and back. Given that this is full screen 3D it puts a good amount of load on the network and it's pretty cool that SRS was just a VM :) So, separately, I had written a little blog entry about using sriov and oracle vm a while back. link to sriov blog entry Last night when I came home I wanted to do some more playing around with SRIOV and live migrate. To do this, I wanted to set up a VM with 2 network interfaces, one virtual network (vif) and then one that's one of the SRIOV virtual functions from my network card. Inside the guest they show as eth0 and eth1, and then bond them using a standard linux bonding device (bond0 here) with active active links. The goal here is that on live migrate, we would detach the VF (eth1 in guest in this case), the bond would then just hum along on eth0 (vif) we can live migrate the VM and then on the other server after the migrate completes we re-attach a VF to the VM there and eth1 pops up again and the bond uses both eth0/eth1 to do its work. So, to set this up, I figured, why not use my sun ray server VM because the 3D work generates a nice network load and is very latency/timing sensitive. In the end, I ran glxspheres on my sunray server (vm) displaying on my sun ray 2 fs and while that was running, I did my live migrate test of this vm (unplug pci VF, migrate, reconnect vf) and guess what, it just kept running :) veryyyyyy cool. now, it was supposed to, but it's always nice to see it actually work, for real. Here's a diagram of it. No gimics - just real technology at work ! enjoy :)

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  • How to make sprint planning fun

    - by Jacob Spire
    Not only are our sprint planning meetings not fun, they're downright dreadful. The meetings are tedious, and boring, and take forever (a day, but it feels like a lot longer). The developers complain about it, and dread upcoming plannings. Our routine is pretty standard (user story inserted into sprint backlog by priority story is taken apart to tasks tasks are estimated in hours repeat), and I can't figure out what we're doing wrong. How can we make the meetings more enjoyable? ... Some more details, in response to requests for more information: Why are the backlog items not inserted and prioritized before sprint kickoff? User stories are indeed prioritized; we have no idea how long they'll take until we break them down into tasks! From the (excellent) answers here, I see that maybe we shouldn't estimate tasks at all, only the user stories. The reason we estimate tasks (and not stories) is because we've been getting story-estimates terribly wrong -- but I guess that's the subject for an altogether different question. Why are developers complaining? Meetings are long. Meetings are monotonous. Story after story, task after task, struggling (yes, struggling) to estimate how long it will take and what it involves. Estimating tasks makes user-story-estimation seem pointless. The longer the meeting, the less focus in the room. The less focused colleagues are, the longer the meeting takes. A recursive hate-spiral develops. We've considered splitting the meeting into two days in order to keep people focused, but the developers wouldn't hear of it. One day of planning is bad enough; now we'll have two?! Part of our problem is that we go into very small detail (in order to get more accurate estimations). But when we estimate roughly, we go way off the mark! To sum up the question: What are we doing wrong? What additional ways are there to make the meeting generally more enjoyable?

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  • Fun With the Chrome JavaScript Console and the Pluralsight Website

    - by Steve Michelotti
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/michelotti/archive/2013/07/24/fun-with-the-chrome-javascript-console-and-the-pluralsight-website.aspxI’m currently working on my third course for Pluralsight. Everyone already knows that Scott Allen is a “dominating force” for Pluralsight but I was curious how many courses other authors have published as well. The Pluralsight Authors page - http://pluralsight.com/training/Authors – shows all 146 authors and you can click on any author’s page to see how many (and which) courses they have authored. The problem is: I don’t want to have to click into 146 pages to get a count for each author. With this in mind, I figured I could write a little JavaScript using the Chrome JavaScript console to do some “detective work.” My first step was to figure out how the HTML was structured on this page so I could do some screen-scraping. Right-click the first author - “Inspect Element”. I can see there is a primary <div> with a class of “main” which contains all the authors. Each author is in an <h3> with an <a> tag containing their name and link to their page:     This web page already has jQuery loaded so I can use $ directly from the console. This allows me to just use jQuery to inspect items on the current page. Notice this is a multi-line command. In order to use multiple lines in the console you have to press SHIFT-ENTER to go to the next line:     Now I can see I’m extracting data just fine. At this point I want to follow each URL. Then I want to screen-scrape this next page to see how many courses each author has done. Let’s take a look at the author detail page:       I can see we have a table (with a css class of “course”) that contains rows for each course authored. This means I can get the number of courses pretty easily like this:     Now I can put this all together. Back on the authors page, I want to follow each URL, extract the returned HTML, and grab the count. In the code below, I simply use the jQuery $.get() method to get the author detail page and the “data” variable that is in the callback contains the HTML. A nice feature of jQuery is that I can simply put this HTML string inside of $() and I can use jQuery selectors directly on it in conjunction with the find() method:     Now I’m getting somewhere. I have every Pluralsight author and how many courses each one has authored. But that’s not quite what I’m after – what I want to see are the authors that have the MOST courses in the library. What I’d like to do is to put all of the data in an array and then sort that array descending by number of courses. I can add an item to the array after each author detail page is returned but the catch here is that I can’t perform the sort operation until ALL of the author detail pages have executed. The jQuery $.get() method is naturally an async method so I essentially have 146 async calls and I don’t want to perform my sort action until ALL have completed (side note: don’t run this script too many times or the Pluralsight servers might think your an evil hacker attempting a DoS attack and deny you). My C# brain wants to use a WaitHandle WaitAll() method here but this is JavaScript. I was able to do this by using the jQuery Deferred() object. I create a new deferred object for each request and push it onto a deferred array. After each request is complete, I signal completion by calling the resolve() method. Finally, I use a $.when.apply() method to execute my descending sort operation once all requests are complete. Here is my complete console command: 1: var authorList = [], 2: defList = []; 3: $(".main h3 a").each(function() { 4: var def = $.Deferred(); 5: defList.push(def); 6: var authorName = $(this).text(); 7: var authorUrl = $(this).attr('href'); 8: $.get(authorUrl, function(data) { 9: var courseCount = $(data).find("table.course tbody tr").length; 10: authorList.push({ name: authorName, numberOfCourses: courseCount }); 11: def.resolve(); 12: }); 13: }); 14: $.when.apply($, defList).then(function() { 15: console.log("*Everything* is complete"); 16: var sortedList = authorList.sort(function(obj1, obj2) { 17: return obj2.numberOfCourses - obj1.numberOfCourses; 18: }); 19: for (var i = 0; i < sortedList.length; i++) { 20: console.log(authorList[i]); 21: } 22: });   And here are the results:     WOW! John Sonmez has 44 courses!! And Matt Milner has 29! I guess Scott Allen isn’t the only “dominating force”. I would have assumed Scott Allen was #1 but he comes in as #3 in total course count (of course Scott has 11 courses in the Top 50, and 14 in the Top 100 which is incredible!). Given that I’m in the middle of producing only my third course, I better get to work!

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  • More Fun With Math

    - by PointsToShare
    More Fun with Math   The runaway student – three different ways of solving one problem Here is a problem I read in a Russian site: A student is running away. He is moving at 1 mph. Pursuing him are a lion, a tiger and his math teacher. The lion is 40 miles behind and moving at 6 mph. The tiger is 28 miles behind and moving at 4 mph. His math teacher is 30 miles behind and moving at 5 mph. Who will catch him first? Analysis Obviously we have a set of three problems. They are all basically the same, but the details are different. The problems are of the same class. Here is a little excursion into computer science. One of the things we strive to do is to create solutions for classes of problems rather than individual problems. In your daily routine, you call it re-usability. Not all classes of problems have such solutions. If a class has a general (re-usable) solution, it is called computable. Otherwise it is unsolvable. Within unsolvable classes, we may still solve individual (some but not all) problems, albeit with different approaches to each. Luckily the vast majority of our daily problems are computable, and the 3 problems of our runaway student belong to a computable class. So, let’s solve for the catch-up time by the math teacher, after all she is the most frightening. She might even make the poor runaway solve this very problem – perish the thought! Method 1 – numerical analysis. At 30 miles and 5 mph, it’ll take her 6 hours to come to where the student was to begin with. But by then the student has advanced by 6 miles. 6 miles require 6/5 hours, but by then the student advanced by another 6/5 of a mile as well. And so on and so forth. So what are we to do? One way is to write code and iterate it until we have solved it. But this is an infinite process so we’ll end up with an infinite loop. So what to do? We’ll use the principles of numerical analysis. Any calculator – your computer included – has a limited number of digits. A double floating point number is good for about 14 digits. Nothing can be computed at a greater accuracy than that. This means that we will not iterate ad infinidum, but rather to the point where 2 consecutive iterations yield the same result. When we do financial computations, we don’t even have to go that far. We stop at the 10th of a penny.  It behooves us here to stop at a 10th of a second (100 milliseconds) and this will how we will avoid an infinite loop. Interestingly this alludes to the Zeno paradoxes of motion – in particular “Achilles and the Tortoise”. Zeno says exactly the same. To catch the tortoise, Achilles must always first come to where the tortoise was, but the tortoise keeps moving – hence Achilles will never catch the tortoise and our math teacher (or lion, or tiger) will never catch the student, or the policeman the thief. Here is my resolution to the paradox. The distance and time in each step are smaller and smaller, so the student will be caught. The only thing that is infinite is the iterative solution. The race is a convergent geometric process so the steps are diminishing, but each step in the solution takes the same amount of effort and time so with an infinite number of steps, we’ll spend an eternity solving it.  This BTW is an original thought that I have never seen before. But I digress. Let’s simply write the code to solve the problem. To make sure that it runs everywhere, I’ll do it in JavaScript. function LongCatchUpTime(D, PV, FV) // D is Distance; PV is Pursuers Velocity; FV is Fugitive’ Velocity {     var t = 0;     var T = 0;     var d = parseFloat(D);     var pv = parseFloat (PV);     var fv = parseFloat (FV);     t = d / pv;     while (t > 0.000001) //a 10th of a second is 1/36,000 of an hour, I used 1/100,000     {         T = T + t;         d = t * fv;         t = d / pv;     }     return T;     } By and large, the higher the Pursuer’s velocity relative to the fugitive, the faster the calculation. Solving this with the 10th of a second limit yields: 7.499999232000001 Method 2 – Geometric Series. Each step in the iteration above is smaller than the next. As you saw, we stopped iterating when the last step was small enough, small enough not to really matter.  When we have a sequence of numbers in which the ratio of each number to its predecessor is fixed we call the sequence geometric. When we are looking at the sum of sequence, we call the sequence of sums series.  Now let’s look at our student and teacher. The teacher runs 5 times faster than the student, so with each iteration the distance between them shrinks to a fifth of what it was before. This is a fixed ratio so we deal with a geometric series.  We normally designate this ratio as q and when q is less than 1 (0 < q < 1) the sum of  + … +  is  – 1) / (q – 1). When q is less than 1, it is easier to use ) / (1 - q). Now, the steps are 6 hours then 6/5 hours then 6/5*5 and so on, so q = 1/5. And the whole series is multiplied by 6. Also because q is less than 1 , 1/  diminishes to 0. So the sum is just  / (1 - q). or 1/ (1 – 1/5) = 1 / (4/5) = 5/4. This times 6 yields 7.5 hours. We can now continue with some algebra and take it back to a simpler formula. This is arduous and I am not going to do it here. Instead let’s do some simpler algebra. Method 3 – Simple Algebra. If the time to capture the fugitive is T and the fugitive travels at 1 mph, then by the time the pursuer catches him he travelled additional T miles. Time is distance divided by speed, so…. (D + T)/V = T  thus D + T = VT  and D = VT – T = (V – 1)T  and T = D/(V – 1) This “strangely” coincides with the solution we just got from the geometric sequence. This is simpler ad faster. Here is the corresponding code. function ShortCatchUpTime(D, PV, FV) {     var d = parseFloat(D);     var pv = parseFloat (PV);     var fv = parseFloat (FV);     return d / (pv - fv); } The code above, for both the iterative solution and the algebraic solution are actually for a larger class of problems.  In our original problem the student’s velocity (speed) is 1 mph. In the code it may be anything as long as it is less than the pursuer’s velocity. As long as PV > FV, the pursuer will catch up. Here is the really general formula: T = D / (PV – FV) Finally, let’s run the program for each of the pursuers.  It could not be worse. I know he’d rather be eaten alive than suffering through yet another math lesson. See the code run? Select  “Catch Up Time” in www.mgsltns.com/games.htm The host is running on Unix, so the link is case sensitive. That’s All Folks

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  • More Fun with C# Iterators and Generators

    - by James Michael Hare
    In my last post, I talked quite a bit about iterators and how they can be really powerful tools for filtering a list of items down to a subset of items.  This had both pros and cons over returning a full collection, which, in summary, were:   Pros: If traversal is only partial, does not have to visit rest of collection. If evaluation method is costly, only incurs that cost on elements visited. Adds little to no garbage collection pressure.    Cons: Very slight performance impact if you know caller will always consume all items in collection. And as we saw in the last post, that con for the cost was very, very small and only really became evident on very tight loops consuming very large lists completely.    One of the key items to note, though, is the garbage!  In the traditional (return a new collection) method, if you have a 1,000,000 element collection, and wish to transform or filter it in some way, you have to allocate space for that copy of the collection.  That is, say you have a collection of 1,000,000 items and you want to double every item in the collection.  Well, that means you have to allocate a collection to hold those 1,000,000 items to return, which is a lot especially if you are just going to use it once and toss it.   Iterators, though, don't have this problem.  Each time you visit the node, it would return the doubled value of the node (in this example) and not allocate a second collection of 1,000,000 doubled items.  Do you see the distinction?  In both cases, we're consuming 1,000,000 items.  But in one case we pass back each doubled item which is just an int (for example's sake) on the stack and in the other case, we allocate a list containing 1,000,000 items which then must be garbage collected.   So iterators in C# are pretty cool, eh?  Well, here's one more thing a C# iterator can do that a traditional "return a new collection" transformation can't!   It can return **unbounded** collections!   I know, I know, that smells a lot like an infinite loop, eh?  Yes and no.  Basically, you're relying on the caller to put the bounds on the list, and as long as the caller doesn't you keep going.  Consider this example:   public static class Fibonacci {     // returns the infinite fibonacci sequence     public static IEnumerable<int> Sequence()     {         int iteration = 0;         int first = 1;         int second = 1;         int current = 0;         while (true)         {             if (iteration++ < 2)             {                 current = 1;             }             else             {                 current = first + second;                 second = first;                 first = current;             }             yield return current;         }     } }   Whoa, you say!  Yes, that's an infinite loop!  What the heck is going on there?  Yes, that was intentional.  Would it be better to have a fibonacci sequence that returns only a specific number of items?  Perhaps, but that wouldn't give you the power to defer the execution to the caller.   The beauty of this function is it is as infinite as the sequence itself!  The fibonacci sequence is unbounded, and so is this method.  It will continue to return fibonacci numbers for as long as you ask for them.  Now that's not something you can do with a traditional method that would return a collection of ints representing each number.  In that case you would eventually run out of memory as you got to higher and higher numbers.  This method, though, never runs out of memory.   Now, that said, you do have to know when you use it that it is an infinite collection and bound it appropriately.  Fortunately, Linq provides a lot of these extension methods for you!   Let's say you only want the first 10 fibonacci numbers:       foreach(var fib in Fibonacci.Sequence().Take(10))     {         Console.WriteLine(fib);     }   Or let's say you only want the fibonacci numbers that are less than 100:       foreach(var fib in Fibonacci.Sequence().TakeWhile(f => f < 100))     {         Console.WriteLine(fib);     }   So, you see, one of the nice things about iterators is their power to work with virtually any size (even infinite) collections without adding the garbage collection overhead of making new collections.    You can also do fun things like this to make a more "fluent" interface for for loops:   // A set of integer generator extension methods public static class IntExtensions {     // Begins counting to inifity, use To() to range this.     public static IEnumerable<int> Every(this int start)     {         // deliberately avoiding condition because keeps going         // to infinity for as long as values are pulled.         for (var i = start; ; ++i)         {             yield return i;         }     }     // Begins counting to infinity by the given step value, use To() to     public static IEnumerable<int> Every(this int start, int byEvery)     {         // deliberately avoiding condition because keeps going         // to infinity for as long as values are pulled.         for (var i = start; ; i += byEvery)         {             yield return i;         }     }     // Begins counting to inifity, use To() to range this.     public static IEnumerable<int> To(this int start, int end)     {         for (var i = start; i <= end; ++i)         {             yield return i;         }     }     // Ranges the count by specifying the upper range of the count.     public static IEnumerable<int> To(this IEnumerable<int> collection, int end)     {         return collection.TakeWhile(item => item <= end);     } }   Note that there are two versions of each method.  One that starts with an int and one that starts with an IEnumerable<int>.  This is to allow more power in chaining from either an existing collection or from an int.  This lets you do things like:   // count from 1 to 30 foreach(var i in 1.To(30)) {     Console.WriteLine(i); }     // count from 1 to 10 by 2s foreach(var i in 0.Every(2).To(10)) {     Console.WriteLine(i); }     // or, if you want an infinite sequence counting by 5s until something inside breaks you out... foreach(var i in 0.Every(5)) {     if (someCondition)     {         break;     }     ... }     Yes, those are kinda play functions and not particularly useful, but they show some of the power of generators and extension methods to form a fluid interface.   So what do you think?  What are some of your favorite generators and iterators?

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  • When Your Favorite Video Game Characters go Trick-or-Treating [Video]

    - by Asian Angel
    Halloween has arrived and all of your favorite video game characters are out and about collecting lots of candy goodness. The question is whether or not all will be successful in collecting treats or if the tricks will be on them! Note: Video contains some language that may be considered inappropriate. Videogame Trick-or-Treating [Dorkly] 6 Start Menu Replacements for Windows 8 What Is the Purpose of the “Do Not Cover This Hole” Hole on Hard Drives? How To Log Into The Desktop, Add a Start Menu, and Disable Hot Corners in Windows 8

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  • So Pretty [Halloween Horror Short Film]

    - by Asian Angel
    A young woman riding the train at night becomes involved in an interesting conversation with a young man about vampires. She thinks vampires are mysterious and misunderstood, but will she still feel the same way by the time the train ride is over? The Continuum: Halloween Short Film – “So Pretty” [via Neatorama] 6 Start Menu Replacements for Windows 8 What Is the Purpose of the “Do Not Cover This Hole” Hole on Hard Drives? How To Log Into The Desktop, Add a Start Menu, and Disable Hot Corners in Windows 8

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  • The Twelve Days of Geekmas

    - by YatriTrivedi
    Looking for some last minute shopping for your favorite geek? We put a few holiday shopping items into the form of a song to show off just how geeky your Christmas can be. Make sure that you read through the list to the tune of the Twelve Days of Christmas. Yes, we’re really being silly today. Have fun! Image by dawolf On the twelfth day of Geekmas, a dear friend gave to me… Latest Features How-To Geek ETC The Complete List of iPad Tips, Tricks, and Tutorials The 50 Best Registry Hacks that Make Windows Better The How-To Geek Holiday Gift Guide (Geeky Stuff We Like) LCD? LED? Plasma? The How-To Geek Guide to HDTV Technology The How-To Geek Guide to Learning Photoshop, Part 8: Filters Improve Digital Photography by Calibrating Your Monitor The Brothers Mario – Epic Gangland Style Mario Brothers Movie Trailer [Video] Score Awesome Games on the Cheap with the Humble Indie Bundle Add a Colorful Christmas Theme to Your Windows 7 Desktop This Windows Hack Changes the Blue Screen of Death to Red Edit Images Quickly in Firefox with Pixlr Grabber Zoho Writer, Sheet, and Show Now Available in Chrome Web Store

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  • Holiday Book Recommendation

    - by dalton
    I'm after a book to read whilst on holiday. Some criteria: The book has to be relatively short. < 500 pages. I'd prefer a book that changes your thinking, rather than reams of syntax to look at. So the last two years here have been my books: Last year, The Craftsman by Richard Sennet (Changed how I viewed career development, quality) Year before, Zen and The art of motorcycle maintenance (Makes you think about quality, maintenance)

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  • Fun Visual Studio 2010 Wallpapers

    Two weeks ago I blogged about a cool new site that allows you to download and customize the Visual Studio code editor background and text colors (for both VS 2008 and VS 2010 version). The site also allows you to submit and share your own Visual Studio color schemes with others. Another new community site has recently launched that allows you to download Visual Studio 2010 themed images that you can use for your Windows desktop background.  You can visit the site here: http://vs2010wallpapers.com/ ...Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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  • Fun Visual Studio 2010 Wallpapers

    - by Latest Microsoft Blogs
    Two weeks ago I blogged about a cool new site that allows you to download and customize the Visual Studio code editor background and text colors (for both VS 2008 and VS 2010 version). The site also allows you to submit and share your own Visual Studio Read More......(read more)

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  • ‘Assassin’s Creed: Pirates’ now Available to Play In-Browser for Free

    - by Akemi Iwaya
    Are you ready to sail the high seas in search of treasure and adventure? All you need is a browser and the determination to be the ‘King of the Caribbean’ in ‘Assassin’s Creed: Pirates’, the latest in-browser game release from Microsoft! If you are curious as to how this game fits into the broader Assassin’s Creed Universe, here is the answer. From the blog post: Gameplay is based on the iOS “Assassin’s Creed Pirates” game, allowing you to be captain Alonzo Batilla, who is racing his ship through the Caribbean, evading mines and other hurdles, while searching for treasure. Keep in mind that the game is a demo at the moment, but still a lot of fun for any Assassin’s Creed fan! Play the demo and learn more about the game via the links below. Good luck and have fun! Play Assassin’s Creed: Pirates [Demo Homepage] Arrrrrr! ‘Assassin’s Creed Pirates’ – for the Web – now available ['The Fire Hose Blog' - Microsoft] [via The Windows Club]

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  • Play Your Favorite DOS Games in XP, Vista, and Windows 7

    - by Matthew Guay
    Want to take a trip down memory lane with old school DOS games?  D-Fend Reloaded makes it easy for you to play your favorite DOS games directly on XP, Vista, and Windows 7. D-Fend Reloaded is a great frontend for DOSBox, the popular DOS emulator.  It lets you install and run many DOS games and applications directly from its interface without ever touching a DOS prompt.  It works great on XP, Vista, and Windows 7 32 & 64-bit versions.   Getting Started Download D-Fend Reloaded (link below), and install with the default settings.  You don’t need to install DOSBox, as D-Fend Reloaded will automatically install all the components you need to run DOS games on Windows. D-Fend Reloaded can also be installed as a portable application, so you can run it from a flash drive on any Windows computer by selecting User defined installation. Then select Portable mode installation. Once D-Fend Reloaded is installed, you can go ahead and open the program. Then simply click “Accept all settings” to apply the default settings.   D-Fend is now ready to run all of your favorite DOS games. Installing DOS Games and Applications: To install a DOS game or application, simply drag-and-drop a zip file of the app into D-Fend Reloaded’s window.  D-Fend Reloaded will automatically extract the program… Then will ask you to name the application and choose where to store it — by default it uses the name of the DOS app. Now you’ll see a new entry for the app you just installed.  Simply double-click to run it.   D-Fend will remind you that you can switch out of fullscreen mode by pressing Alt+Enter, and can also close the DOS application by pressing Ctrl+F9.  Press Ok to run the program. Here we’re running Ms. PacPC, a remake of the classic game Ms. Pac-Man, in full-screen mode.  All features work automatically, including sound, and you never have to setup anything from DOS command line — it just works. Here it’s in windowed mode running on Windows 7. Please note that your color scheme may change to Windows Basic while running DOS applications. You can run DOS application just as easily.  Here’s Word 5.5 running in in DOSBox through D-Fend Reloaded… Game Packs: Want to quickly install many old DOS freeware and trial games?  D-Fend Reloaded offers several game packs that let you install dozens of DOS games with only four clicks…just download and run the game pack installer of your choice (link below). Now you’ve got a selection of DOS games to choose from. Here’s a group of poor lemmings walking around … in Windows 7. Conclusion D-Fend Reloaded gives you a great way to run your favorite DOS games and applications directly from XP, Vista, and Windows 7.  Give it a try, and relive your DOS days from the comfort of your Windows desktop. What were some of your favorite DOS games and applications? Leave a comment and let us know. Links Download D-Fend Reloaded Download DOS game packs for D-Fend Reloaded Download Ms. Pac-PC Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Friday Fun: Get Your Mario OnFriday Fun: Go Retro with PacmanThursday’s Pre-Holiday Lazy Links RoundupFriday Fun: Five More Time Wasting Online GamesFriday Fun: Holiday Themed Games 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 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional The Growth of Citibank Quickly Switch between Tabs in IE Windows Media Player 12: Tweak Video & Sound with Playback Enhancements Own a cell phone, or does a cell phone own you? Make your Joomla & Drupal Sites Mobile with OSMOBI Integrate Twitter and Delicious and Make Life Easier

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  • Having Fun with Coding4Fun&rsquo;s Windows Phone 7 Controls

    - by mbcrump
    I’m a big believer in having a hobby project as you can probably tell from the first sentence in my “personal webpage using Silverlight” article. One of my current hobby projects is to re-do my current WP7 application in the marketplace. I knew up front that I needed a “Loading” animation and a better “About” box. After starting to develop my own, I noticed a great set of WP7 controls by Coding4Fun and decided to use them in my new application. Before I go any further they are FREE and Open-Source. It is really simple to get started, just go to the CodePlex site and click the download button. After you have downloaded it then extract it to a Folder and you will have 4 DLL files. They are listed below: Now create a Windows Phone 7 Project and add references to the DLL’s by right clicking on the References folder and clicking “Add references”.   After adding the references, we can get started. I needed a ProgressOverlay animation or “Loading Screen” while my RSS feed is downloading. Basically, you just need to add the following namespace to whatever page you want the control on: xmlns:Controls="clr-namespace:Coding4Fun.Phone.Controls;assembly=Coding4Fun.Phone.Controls" And then the code inside your Grid or wherever you want the Loading screen placed. <Controls:ProgressOverlay Name="progressOverlay" > <Controls:ProgressOverlay.Content> <TextBlock>Loading</TextBlock> </Controls:ProgressOverlay.Content> </Controls:ProgressOverlay> Bam, you now have a great looking loading screen. Of course inside the ProgressOverlay, you may want to add a Visibility property to turn it off after your data loads if you are using MVVM or similar pattern.   Next up, I needed a nice clean “About Box” that looks good but is also functional. Meaning, if they click on my twitter name, web or email to launch the appropriate task. Again, this is only a few lines of code: var p = new AboutPrompt(); p.VersionNumber = "2.0"; p.Show("Michael Crump", "@mbcrump", "[email protected]", @"http://michaelcrump.net"); A nice clean “About” box with just a few lines of code! I’m all for code that I don’t have to write. It also comes with a pretty sweet InputPrompt for grabbing info from a user: The code for this is also very simple: InputPrompt input = new InputPrompt(); input.Completed += (s, e) => { MessageBox.Show(e.Result.ToString()); }; input.Title = "Input Box"; input.Message = "What does a \"Developer Large\" T-Shirt Mean? "; input.Show(); I also enjoyed the PhoneHelper that allows you to get data out of the WMAppManifest File very easy. So for example if I wanted the Version info from the WMAppManifest file. I could write one line and get it. PhoneHelper.GetAppAttribute("Version") Of course you would want to make sure you add the following using statement: using Coding4Fun.Phone.Controls.Data; You can’t have all these cool controls without a great set of Converters. The included BooleanToVisibility converter will convert a Boolean to and from a Visibility value. This is excellent when using something like a CheckBox to display a TextBox when its checked. See the example below: The code is below: <phone:PhoneApplicationPage.Resources> <Converters:BooleanToVisibilityConverter x:Key="BooleanToVisibilityConverter"/> </phone:PhoneApplicationPage.Resources> <CheckBox x:Name="checkBox"/> <TextBlock Text="Display Text" Visibility="{Binding ElementName=checkBox, Path=IsChecked, Converter={StaticResource BooleanToVisibilityConverter} }"/> That’s not all the goodies included. They also provide a RoundedButton, TimePicker and several other converters. The documentation is great and I would recommend you give them a shot if you need any of this functionality. Btw, thank Brian Peek for his awesome work on Coding4Fun!  Subscribe to my feed

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