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• PHP install sqlite3 extension

  - by Kevin

  We are using PHP 5.3.6 here, but we used the --without-sqlite3 command when compiling PHP. (It stands in the 'Configure Command' column). But, it is very risky to recompile PHP on that server; there are many visitors. How can we install/use sqlite3? Regards, Kevin [EDIT] yum repolist gives: Loaded plugins: fastestmirror Loading mirror speeds from cached hostfile * base: mirror.nl.leaseweb.net * extras: mirror.nl.leaseweb.net * updates: mirror.nl.leaseweb.net repo id repo name status base CentOS-5 - Base 3,566 extras CentOS-5 - Extras 237 updates CentOS-5 - Updates 376 repolist: 4,179 rpm -qa | grep php gives: php-pdo-5.3.6-1.w5 php-mysql-5.3.6-1.w5 psa-php5-configurator-1.5.3-cos5.build95101022.10 php-mbstring-5.3.6-1.w5 php-imap-5.3.6-1.w5 php-cli-5.3.6-1.w5 php-gd-5.3.6-1.w5 php-5.3.6-1.w5 php-common-5.3.6-1.w5 php-xml-5.3.6-1.w5 php -i | grep sqlite gives: PHP Warning: PHP Startup: Unable to load dynamic library '/usr/lib64/php/modules/sqlite3.so' - /usr/lib64/php/modules/sqlite3.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory in Unknown on line 0 Configure Command => './configure' '--build=x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu' '--host=x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu' '--target=x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu' '--program-prefix=' '--prefix=/usr' '--exec-prefix=/usr' '--bindir=/usr/bin' '--sbindir=/usr/sbin' '--sysconfdir=/etc' '--datadir=/usr/share' '--includedir=/usr/include' '--libdir=/usr/lib64' '--libexecdir=/usr/libexec' '--localstatedir=/var' '--sharedstatedir=/usr/com' '--mandir=/usr/share/man' '--infodir=/usr/share/info' '--cache-file=../config.cache' '--with-libdir=lib64' '--with-config-file-path=/etc' '--with-config-file-scan-dir=/etc/php.d' '--disable-debug' '--with-pic' '--disable-rpath' '--without-pear' '--with-bz2' '--with-exec-dir=/usr/bin' '--with-freetype-dir=/usr' '--with-png-dir=/usr' '--with-xpm-dir=/usr' '--enable-gd-native-ttf' '--without-gdbm' '--with-gettext' '--with-gmp' '--with-iconv' '--with-jpeg-dir=/usr' '--with-openssl' '--with-pcre-regex=/usr' '--with-zlib' '--with-layout=GNU' '--enable-exif' '--enable-ftp' '--enable-magic-quotes' '--enable-sockets' '--enable-sysvsem' '--enable-sysvshm' '--enable-sysvmsg' '--with-kerberos' '--enable-ucd-snmp-hack' '--enable-shmop' '--enable-calendar' '--without-mime-magic' '--without-sqlite' '--without-sqlite3' '--with-libxml-dir=/usr' '--enable-xml' '--with-system-tzdata' '--enable-force-cgi-redirect' '--enable-pcntl' '--with-imap=shared' '--with-imap-ssl' '--enable-mbstring=shared' '--enable-mbregex' '--with-gd=shared' '--enable-bcmath=shared' '--enable-dba=shared' '--with-db4=/usr' '--with-xmlrpc=shared' '--with-ldap=shared' '--with-ldap-sasl' '--with-mysql=shared,/usr' '--with-mysqli=shared,/usr/bin/mysql_config' '--enable-dom=shared' '--with-pgsql=shared' '--enable-wddx=shared' '--with-snmp=shared,/usr' '--enable-soap=shared' '--with-xsl=shared,/usr' '--enable-xmlreader=shared' '--enable-xmlwriter=shared' '--with-curl=shared,/usr' '--enable-fastcgi' '--enable-pdo=shared' '--with-pdo-odbc=shared,unixODBC,/usr' '--with-pdo-mysql=shared,/usr' '--with-pdo-pgsql=shared,/usr' '--with-pdo-sqlite=shared,/usr' '--with-pdo-dblib=shared,/usr' '--enable-json=shared' '--enable-zip=shared' '--with-readline' '--with-pspell=shared' '--enable-phar=shared' '--with-mcrypt=shared,/usr' '--with-tidy=shared,/usr' '--with-mssql=shared,/usr' '--enable-sysvmsg=shared' '--enable-sysvshm=shared' '--enable-sysvsem=shared' '--enable-posix=shared' '--with-unixODBC=shared,/usr' '--enable-fileinfo=shared' '--enable-intl=shared' '--with-icu-dir=/usr' '--with-recode=shared,/usr' /etc/php.d/pdo_sqlite.ini, /etc/php.d/sqlite3.ini, PHP Warning: Unknown: It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings. You are *required* to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. We selected 'Europe/Berlin' for 'CET/1.0/no DST' instead in Unknown on line 0 PDO drivers => mysql, sqlite pdo_sqlite PWD => /root/sqlite _SERVER["PWD"] => /root/sqlite _ENV["PWD"] => /root/sqlite

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• How to prevent delays associated with IPv6 AAAA records?

  - by Nic

  Our Windows servers are registering IPv6 AAAA records with our Windows DNS servers. However, we don't have IPv6 routing enabled on our network, so this frequently causes stall behaviours. Microsoft RDP is the worst offender. When connecting to a server that has a AAAA record in DNS, the remote desktop client will try IPv6 first, and won't fall back to IPv4 until the connection times out. Power users can work around this by connecting to the IP address directly. Resolving the IPv4 address with ping -4 hostname.foo always works instantly. What can I do to avoid this delay? Disable IPv6 on client? Nope, Microsoft says IPv6 is a mandatory part of the Windows operating system. Too many clients to ensure this is set everywhere consistently. Will cause more problems later when we finally implement IPv6. Disable IPv6 on the server? Nope, Microsoft says IPv6 is a mandatory part of the Windows operating system. Requires an inconvenient registry hack to disable the entire IPv6 stack. Ensuring this is correctly set on all servers is inconvenient. Will cause more problems later when we finally implement IPv6. Mask IPv6 records on the user-facnig DNS recursor? Nope, we're using NLNet Unbound and it doesn't support that. Prevent registration of IPv6 AAAA records on the Microsoft DNS server? I don't think that's even possible. At this point, I'm considering writing a script that purges all AAAA records from our DNS zones. Please, help me find a better way. UPDATE: DNS resolution is not the problem. As @joeqwerty points out in his answer, the DNS records are returned instantly. Both A and AAAA records are immediately available. The problem is that some clients (mstsc.exe) will preferentially attempt a connection over IPv6, and take a while to fall back to IPv4. This seems like a routing problem. The ping command produces a "General failure" error message because the destination address is unroutable. C:\Windows\system32>ping myhost.mydomain Pinging myhost.mydomain [2002:1234:1234::1234:1234] with 32 bytes of data: General failure. General failure. General failure. General failure. Ping statistics for 2002:1234:1234::1234:1234: Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 0, Lost = 4 (100% loss), I can't get a packet capture of this behaviour. Running this (failing) ping command does not produce any packets in Microsoft Network Monitor. Similarly, attempting a connection with mstsc.exe to a host with an AAAA record produces no traffic until it does a fallback to IPv4. UPDATE: Our hosts are all using publicly-routable IPv4 addresses. I think this problem might come down to a broken 6to4 configuration. 6to4 behaves differently on hosts with public IP addresses vs RFC1918 addresses. UPDATE: There is definitely something fishy with 6to4 on my network. When I disable 6to4 on the Windows client, connections resolve instantly. netsh int ipv6 6to4 set state disabled But as @joeqwerty says, this only masks the problem. I'm still trying to find out why IPv6 communication on our network is completely non-working.

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• Java, two JPanel on JFrame - Settings JPanel, StartMenu JPanel [on hold]

  - by Andy Tyurin

  There is my first question and I welcome community! I'm making a simple game and have some problems with Start menu. I have three buttons on my JPanel StartMenu and when I click "Settings" button, new JPanel will be open, but I don't know why buttons from StartMenu JPanel appeared in my Settings JPanel. My "Settings" JPanel has one ugly button "Back" in center and ugly grey background. I made some screens to see a problem. Start Menu JPanel when game launched Settings JPanel when button clicked Settings JPanel when mouse was over settings window There is code of StartMenu class: public class StartMenu extends JPanel { private GameButton startGameButton = new GameButton("Start game"); private GameButton settingsGameButton = new GameButton("Settings"); private GameButton exitGameButton = new GameButton("Exit game"); private Image bgImage = new ImageIcon(getClass().getClassLoader().getResource("ru/andydevs/astraLaserForce/bg.png")).getImage(); private int posX; private int posY; final private int WIDTH=(int)Game.SCREEN_DIMENSION.getWidth()/3; final private int HEIGHT=(int)Game.SCREEN_DIMENSION.getHeight()/2; public StartMenu() { setLayout(new GridBagLayout()); GridBagConstraints c = new GridBagConstraints(); setSize(new Dimension(WIDTH, HEIGHT)); posX=(int)Game.SCREEN_DIMENSION.getWidth()/2-WIDTH/2; posY=(int)Game.SCREEN_DIMENSION.getHeight()/2-HEIGHT/2; setBounds(posX, posY,WIDTH,HEIGHT); c.ipadx=95; c.ipady=15; c.fill = GridBagConstraints.HORIZONTAL; c.insets = new Insets(20,0,0,0); c.gridy=0; add(startGameButton, c); c.gridy=1; c.insets = new Insets(20,0,0,0); System.out.println(settingsGameButton.getWidth()); add(settingsGameButton, c); c.gridy=2; c.insets = new Insets(20,0,0,0); add(exitGameButton, c); settingsGameButton.addActionListener(new ActionListener() { @Override public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) { GameOptionsPanel gop = new GameOptionsPanel(); Game.container.add(gop); Game.container.setComponentZOrder(gop, 0); Game.container.revalidate(); Game.container.repaint(); } }); exitGameButton.addActionListener(new ActionListener() { @Override public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) { Main.currentGame.stop(); } }); } public void paintComponent(Graphics g) { g.drawImage(bgImage,0,0,WIDTH,HEIGHT,null); } } There is code of Settings JPanel public class GameOptionsPanel extends GamePanel { private GameButton backButton = new GameButton("Back"); private GameOptionsPanel that; public GameOptionsPanel() { super((int) (Game.SCREEN_DIMENSION.getWidth()/3), (int) (Game.SCREEN_DIMENSION.getHeight()/2), new Color(50,50,50)); that=this; setLayout(new GridBagLayout()); GridBagConstraints gbc = new GridBagConstraints(); gbc.fill=gbc.HORIZONTAL; add(backButton); backButton.addActionListener(new ActionListener() { @Override public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) { Game.container.remove(that); Game.container.revalidate(); Game.container.repaint(); } }); } } I glad to see some suggestions. Thanks.

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• Grow Your Business with Security

  - by Darin Pendergraft

  Author: Kevin Moulton Kevin Moulton has been in the security space for more than 25 years, and with Oracle for 7 years. He manages the East EnterpriseSecurity Sales Consulting Team. He is also a Distinguished Toastmaster. Follow Kevin on Twitter at twitter.com/kevin_moulton, where he sometimes tweets about security, but might also tweet about running, beer, food, baseball, football, good books, or whatever else grabs his attention. Kevin will be a regular contributor to this blog so stay tuned for more posts from him. It happened again! There I was, reading something interesting online, and realizing that a friend might find it interesting too. I clicked on the little email link, thinking that I could easily forward this to my friend, but no! Instead, a new screen popped up where I was asked to create an account. I was expected to create a User ID and password, not to mention providing some personally identifiable information, just for the privilege of helping that website spread their word. Of course, I didn’t want to have to remember a new account and password, I didn’t want to provide the requisite information, and I didn’t want to waste my time. I gave up, closed the web page, and moved on to something else. I was left with a bad taste in my mouth, and my friend might never find her way to this interesting website. If you were this content provider, would this be the outcome you were looking for? A few days later, I had a similar experience, but this one went a little differently. I was surfing the web, when I happened upon some little chotcke that I just had to have. I added it to my cart. When I went to buy the item, I was again brought to a page to create account. Groan! But wait! On this page, I also had the option to sign in with my OpenID account, my Facebook account, my Yahoo account, or my Google Account. I have all of those! No new account to create, no new password to remember, and no personally identifiable information to be given to someone else (I’ve already given it all to those other guys, after all). In this case, the vendor was easy to deal with, and I happily completed the transaction. That pleasant experience will bring me back again. This is where security can grow your business. It’s a differentiator. You’ve got to have a presence on the web, and that presence has to take into account all the smart phones everyone’s carrying, and the tablets that took over cyber Monday this year. If you are a company that a customer can deal with securely, and do so easily, then you are a company customers will come back to again and again. I recently had a need to open a new bank account. Every bank has a web presence now, but they are certainly not all the same. I wanted one that I could deal with easily using my laptop, but I also wanted 2-factor authentication in case I had to login from a shared machine, and I wanted an app for my iPad. I found a bank with all three, and that’s who I am doing business with. Let’s say, for example, that I’m in a regular Texas Hold-em game on Friday nights, so I move a couple of hundred bucks from checking to savings on Friday afternoons. I move a similar amount each week and I do it from the same machine. The bank trusts me, and they trust my machine. Most importantly, they trust my behavior. This is adaptive authentication. There should be no reason for my bank to make this transaction difficult for me. Now let's say that I login from a Starbucks in Uzbekistan, and I transfer $2,500. What should my bank do now? Should they stop the transaction? Should they call my home number? (My former bank did exactly this once when I was taking money out of an ATM on a business trip, when I had provided my cell phone number as my primary contact. When I asked them why they called my home number rather than my cell, they told me that their “policy” is to call the home number. If I'm on the road, what exactly is the use of trying to reach me at home to verify my transaction?) But, back to Uzbekistan… Should my bank assume that I am happily at home in New Jersey, and someone is trying to hack into my account? Perhaps they think they are protecting me, but I wouldn’t be very happy if I happened to be traveling on business in Central Asia. What if my bank were to automatically analyze my behavior and calculate a risk score? Clearly, this scenario would be outside of my typical behavior, so my risk score would necessitate something more than a simple login and password. Perhaps, in this case, a one-time password to my cell phone would prove that this is not just some hacker half way around the world. But, what if you're not a bank? Do you need this level of security? If you want to be a business that is easy to deal with while also protecting your customers, then of course you do. You want your customers to trust you, but you also want them to enjoy doing business with you. Make it easy for them to do business with you, and they’ll come back, and perhaps even Tweet about it, or Like you, and then their friends will follow. How can Oracle help? Oracle has the technology and expertise to help you to grown your business with security. Oracle Adaptive Access Manager will help you to prevent fraud while making it easier for your customers to do business with you by providing the risk analysis I discussed above, step-up authentication, and much more. Oracle Mobile and Social Access Service will help you to secure mobile access to applications by expanding on your existing back-end identity management infrastructure, and allowing your customers to transact business with you using the social media accounts they already know. You also have device fingerprinting and metrics to help you to grow your business securely. Security is not just a cost anymore. It’s a way to set your business apart. With Oracle’s help, you can be the business that everyone’s tweeting about. Image courtesy of Flickr user shareski

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• Customizing UPK outputs (Part 1)

  - by [email protected]

  If you are familiar with Oracle's User Productivity Kit, you are aware that UPK is a great product for rapidly developing application training. Did you know that you can also customize the UPK outputs to incorporate your company's logo, colors, and preferred styles? There are several areas that support customization: Logo - Within the developer, you can change the logo for all outputs at one time. Player - The player output uses a style sheet that can be updated to change colors, graphics and other visual branding. Documentation - The print documentation uses a Word-based template that can be modified to match your corporate standards. I'll discuss the first one today, and we'll cover the others in subsequent blogs. Before you begin: If you are working in a multi-user environment, ensure that you have "Modify" permissions for the Styles directory under the Publishing folder. Make a copy of the current styles. This recommendation is for backup purposes. If something goes wrong, you will have a way to recover. Consider creating your own category by creating a new folder under the Styles directory, and then copying the styles into your new folder. When you upgrade to future versions, the system will overwrite the standard styles with any new feature additions and updates that have been made. With your own category, all of your customizations will remain intact. To update the logos in all outputs: From the Tools Menu, choose Customize Logo. Select the category if necessary. Browse to select your logo. You can use any size logo, in any graphic format (*.bmp, *.gif, *.jpeg, *.jpg, *.png, or *.tif). The system will make a copy of your logo and add it to each of the publishing styles. Choose OK, and the update process begins. It may take a few minutes. Helpful hints: The logo you select is used "as is" - no resizing or cropping occurs during this process. The Customize Logo process automates replacing all the logo graphics for online deployment (small_logo.gif and large_logo.gif) and the headers in the documentation outputs. You can manually replace these graphics on an individual style basis if you prefer. The recommended logo size is 230 pixels wide x 44 pixels high. Prior to updating the logos, the system will display the size of the selected logo. If you use a logo that is much larger than the recommended size, the heading area will resize to fit the new logo, but that will impact the space available for your training material. If you are using a multi-user environment, the system will check out the publishing styles to you for the logo updates. After you review the styles, remember to check them in so the rest of your team can access the new changes. I'd be interested in hearing (or seeing) how you brand your UPK. Feel free to share in the comments! --Maria Cozzolino, Manager of Requirements & UI for UPK Product Development PS. For those of you who want to customize the player and documentation NOW, check out the detailed instructions in the Publishing Content chapter of the Content Development Guide.

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• Source-control 'wet-work'?

  - by Phil Factor

  When a design or creative work is flawed beyond remedy, it is often best to destroy it and start again. The other day, I lost the code to a long and intricate SQL batch I was working on. I’d thought it was impossible, but it happened. With all the technology around that is designed to prevent this occurring, this sort of accident has become a rare event.  If it weren’t for a deranged laptop, and my distraction, the code wouldn’t have been lost this time.  As always, I sighed, had a soothing cup of tea, and typed it all in again.  The new code I hastily tapped in  was much better: I’d held in my head the essence of how the code should work rather than the details: I now knew for certain  the start point, the end, and how it should be achieved. Instantly the detritus of half-baked thoughts fell away and I was able to write logical code that performed better.  Because I could work so quickly, I was able to hold the details of all the columns and variables in my head, and the dynamics of the flow of data. It was, in fact, easier and quicker to start from scratch rather than tidy up and refactor the existing code with its inevitable fumbling and half-baked ideas. What a shame that technology is now so good that developers rarely experience the cleansing shock of losing one’s code and having to rewrite it from scratch.  If you’ve never accidentally lost  your code, then it is worth doing it deliberately once for the experience. Creative people have, until Technology mistakenly prevented it, torn up their drafts or sketches, threw them in the bin, and started again from scratch.  Leonardo’s obsessive reworking of the Mona Lisa was renowned because it was so unusual:  Most artists have been utterly ruthless in destroying work that didn’t quite make it. Authors are particularly keen on writing afresh, and the results are generally positive. Lawrence of Arabia actually lost the entire 250,000 word manuscript of ‘The Seven Pillars of Wisdom’ by accidentally leaving it on a train at Reading station, before rewriting a much better version.  Now, any writer or artist is seduced by technology into altering or refining their work rather than casting it dramatically in the bin or setting a light to it on a bonfire, and rewriting it from the blank page.  It is easy to pick away at a flawed work, but the real creative process is far more brutal. Once, many years ago whilst running a software house that supplied commercial software to local businesses, I’d been supervising an accounting system for a farming cooperative. No packaged system met their needs, and it was all hand-cut code.  For us, it represented a breakthrough as it was for a government organisation, and success would guarantee more contracts. As you’ve probably guessed, the code got mangled in a disk crash just a week before the deadline for delivery, and the many backups all proved to be entirely corrupted by a faulty tape drive.  There were some fragments left on individual machines, but they were all of different versions.  The developers were in despair.  Strangely, I managed to re-write the bulk of a three-month project in a manic and caffeine-soaked weekend.  Sure, that elegant universally-applicable input-form routine was‘nt quite so elegant, but it didn’t really need to be as we knew what forms it needed to support.  Yes, the code lacked architectural elegance and reusability. By dawn on Monday, the application passed its integration tests. The developers rose to the occasion after I’d collapsed, and tidied up what I’d done, though they were reproachful that some of the style and elegance had gone out of the application. By the delivery date, we were able to install it. It was a smaller, faster application than the beta they’d seen and the user-interface had a new, rather Spartan, appearance that we swore was done to conform to the latest in user-interface guidelines. (we switched to Helvetica font to look more ‘Bauhaus’ ). The client was so delighted that he forgave the new bugs that had crept in. I still have the disk that crashed, up in the attic. In IT, we have had mixed experiences from complete re-writes. Lotus 123 never really recovered from a complete rewrite from assembler into C, Borland made the mistake with Arago and Quattro Pro  and Netscape’s complete rewrite of their Navigator 4 browser was a white-knuckle ride. In all cases, the decision to rewrite was a result of extreme circumstances where no other course of action seemed possible.   The rewrite didn’t come out of the blue. I prefer to remember the rewrite of Minix by young Linus Torvalds, or the rewrite of Bitkeeper by a slightly older Linus.  The rewrite of CP/M didn’t do too badly either, did it? Come to think of it, the guy who decided to rewrite the windowing system of the Xerox Star never regretted the decision. I’ll agree that one should often resist calls for a rewrite. One of the worst habits of the more inexperienced programmer is to denigrate whatever code he or she inherits, and then call loudly for a complete rewrite. They are buoyed up by the mistaken belief that they can do better. This, however, is a different psychological phenomenon, more related to the idea of some motorcyclists that they are operating on infinite lives, or the occasional squaddies that if they charge the machine-guns determinedly enough all will be well. Grim experience brings out the humility in any experienced programmer.  I’m referring to quite different circumstances here. Where a team knows the requirements perfectly, are of one mind on methodology and coding standards, and they already have a solution, then what is wrong with considering  a complete rewrite? Rewrites are so painful in the early stages, until that point where one realises the payoff, that even I quail at the thought. One needs a natural disaster to push one over the edge. The trouble is that source-control systems, and disaster recovery systems, are just too good nowadays.   If I were to lose this draft of this very blog post, I know I’d rewrite it much better. However, if you read this, you’ll know I didn’t have the nerve to delete it and start again.  There was a time that one prayed that unreliable hardware would deliver you from an unmaintainable mess of a codebase, but now technology has made us almost entirely immune to such a merciful act of God. An old friend of mine with long experience in the software industry has long had the idea of the ‘source-control wet-work’,  where one hires a malicious hacker in some wild eastern country to hack into one’s own  source control system to destroy all trace of the source to an application. Alas, backup systems are just too good to make this any more than a pipedream. Somehow, it would be difficult to promote the idea. As an alternative, could one construct a source control system that, on doing all the code-quality metrics, would systematically destroy all trace of source code that failed the quality test? Alas, I can’t see many managers buying into the idea. In reading the full story of the near-loss of Toy Story 2, it set me thinking. It turned out that the lucky restoration of the code wasn’t the happy ending one first imagined it to be, because they eventually came to the conclusion that the plot was fundamentally flawed and it all had to be rewritten anyway.  Was this an early  case of the ‘source-control wet-job’?’ It is very hard nowadays to do a rapid U-turn in a development project because we are far too prone to cling to our existing source-code.

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• Cocos2d Box2d how to shoot an object inside the screen

  - by Ahoura Ghotbi

  I have the code below : - (id) initWithGame:(mainGame*)game { if ((self = [super init])) { isTouchEnabled_ = YES; self.game = game; CGSize size = [[CCDirector sharedDirector] winSize]; screenH = size.height; screenW = size.width; character = [CCSprite spriteWithFile:@"o.png"]; character.position = ccp( size.width /2 , size.height/2 ); character.contentSize = CGSizeMake(72, 79); [self addChild:character z:10 tag:1]; _body = NULL; _radius = 14.0f; // Create ball body and shape b2BodyDef ballBodyDef; ballBodyDef.type = b2_dynamicBody; ballBodyDef.position.Set(100/PTM_RATIO, 100/PTM_RATIO); ballBodyDef.userData = character; _body = _game.world->CreateBody(&ballBodyDef); b2CircleShape circle; circle.m_radius = 26.0/PTM_RATIO; b2FixtureDef ballShapeDef; ballShapeDef.shape = &circle; ballShapeDef.density = 1.0f; ballShapeDef.friction = 0.2f; ballShapeDef.restitution = 0.8f; _body->CreateFixture(&ballShapeDef); [self schedule:@selector(gameChecker:)]; [self schedule:@selector(tick:)]; } return self; } - (void)gameChecker:(ccTime) dt{ if(character.position.y > 200){ [self unschedule:@selector(tick:)]; [self schedule:@selector(dropObject:)]; } } - (void)tick:(ccTime) dt { b2Vec2 force; force.Set(_body->GetLinearVelocity().x, _body->GetLinearVelocity().y+1.0f); for (b2Body* b = _game.world->GetBodyList(); b; b = b->GetNext()) { if (b->GetUserData() == character) { b->SetLinearVelocity(force); } } _game.world->Step(dt, 10, 10); for(b2Body *b = _game.world->GetBodyList(); b; b=b->GetNext()) { if (b->GetUserData() != NULL) { CCSprite *ballData = (CCSprite *)b->GetUserData(); ballData.position = ccp(b->GetPosition().x * PTM_RATIO, b->GetPosition().y * PTM_RATIO); ballData.rotation = -1 * CC_RADIANS_TO_DEGREES(b->GetAngle()); } } } -(void)dropObject:(ccTime) dt{ b2Vec2 force; force.Set(_body->GetLinearVelocity().x, _body->GetLinearVelocity().y-1.0f); for (b2Body* b = _game.world->GetBodyList(); b; b = b->GetNext()) { if (b->GetUserData() == character) { b->SetLinearVelocity(force); } } _game.world->Step(dt, 10, 10); for(b2Body *b = _game.world->GetBodyList(); b; b=b->GetNext()) { if (b->GetUserData() != NULL) { CCSprite *ballData = (CCSprite *)b->GetUserData(); ballData.position = ccp(b->GetPosition().x * PTM_RATIO, b->GetPosition().y * PTM_RATIO); ballData.rotation = -1 * CC_RADIANS_TO_DEGREES(b->GetAngle()); } } } I have been trying to get the effect that fruit ninja has when shooting the fruits. but it seems like its hard to get such animation so I was wondering if anyone can point me to the right direction and/or give me a sample code for a single object that gets thrown into the screen with a direction.

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• How do I use setFilmSize in panda3d to achieve the correct view?

  - by lhk

  I'm working with Panda3d and recently switched my game to isometric rendering. I moved the virtual camera accordingly and set an orthographic lens. Then I implemented the classes "Map" and "Canvas". A canvas is a dynamically generated mesh: a flat quad. I'm using it to render the ingame graphics. Since the game itself is still set in a 3d coordinate system I'm planning to rely on these canvases to draw sprites. I could have named this class "Tile" but as I'd like to use it for non-tile sketches (enemies, environment) as well I thought canvas would describe it's function better. Map does exactly what it's name suggests. Its constructor receives the number of rows and columns and then creates a standard isometric map. It uses the canvas class for tiles. I'm planning to write a map importer that reads a file to create maps on the fly. Here's the canvas implementation: class Canvas: def __init__(self, texture, vertical=False, width=1,height=1): # create the mesh format=GeomVertexFormat.getV3t2() format = GeomVertexFormat.registerFormat(format) vdata=GeomVertexData("node-vertices", format, Geom.UHStatic) vertex = GeomVertexWriter(vdata, 'vertex') texcoord = GeomVertexWriter(vdata, 'texcoord') # add the vertices for a flat quad vertex.addData3f(1, 0, 0) texcoord.addData2f(1, 0) vertex.addData3f(1, 1, 0) texcoord.addData2f(1, 1) vertex.addData3f(0, 1, 0) texcoord.addData2f(0, 1) vertex.addData3f(0, 0, 0) texcoord.addData2f(0, 0) prim = GeomTriangles(Geom.UHStatic) prim.addVertices(0, 1, 2) prim.addVertices(2, 3, 0) self.geom = Geom(vdata) self.geom.addPrimitive(prim) self.node = GeomNode('node') self.node.addGeom(self.geom) # this is the handle for the canvas self.nodePath=NodePath(self.node) self.nodePath.setSx(width) self.nodePath.setSy(height) if vertical: self.nodePath.setP(90) # the most important part: "Drawing" the image self.texture=loader.loadTexture(""+texture+".png") self.nodePath.setTexture(self.texture) Now the code for the Map class class Map: def __init__(self,rows,columns,size): self.grid=[] for i in range(rows): self.grid.append([]) for j in range(columns): # create a canvas for the tile. For testing the texture is preset tile=Canvas(texture="../assets/textures/flat_concrete",width=size,height=size) x=(i-1)*size y=(j-1)*size # set the tile up for rendering tile.nodePath.reparentTo(render) tile.nodePath.setX(x) tile.nodePath.setY(y) # and store it for later access self.grid[i].append(tile) And finally the usage def loadMap(self): self.map=Map(10, 10, 1) this function is called within the constructor of the World class. The instantiation of world is the entry point to the execution. The code is pretty straightforward and runs good. Sadly the output is not as expected: Please note: The problem is not the white rectangle, it's my player object. The problem is that although the map should have equal width and height it's stretched weirdly. With orthographic rendering I expected the map to be a perfect square. What did I do wrong ? UPDATE: I've changed the viewport. This is how I set up the orthographic camera: lens = OrthographicLens() lens.setFilmSize(40, 20) base.cam.node().setLens(lens) You can change the "aspect" by modifying the parameters of setFilmSize. I don't know exactly how they are related to window size and screen resolution but after testing a little the values above seem to work for me. Now everything is rendered correctly as long as I don't resize the window. Every change of the window's size as well as switching to fullscreen destroys the correct rendering. I know that implementing a listener for resize events is not in the scope of this question. However I wonder why I need to make the Film's height two times bigger than its width. My window is quadratic ! Can you tell me how to find out correct setting for the FilmSize ? UPDATE 2: I can imagine that it's hard to envision the behaviour of the game. At first glance the obvious solution is to pass the window's width and height in pixels to setFilmSize. There are two problems with that approach. The parameters for setFilmSize are ingame units. You'll get a way to big view if you pass the pixel size For some strange reason the image is distorted if you pass equal values for width and height. Here's the output for setFilmSize(800,800) You'll have to stress your eyes but you'll see what I mean

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• The Great Divorce

  - by BlackRabbitCoder

  I have a confession to make: I've been in an abusive relationship for more than 17 years now.  Yes, I am not ashamed to admit it, but I'm finally doing something about it. I met her in college, she was new and sexy and amazingly fast -- and I'd never met anything like her before.  Her style and her power captivated me and I couldn't wait to learn more about her.  I took a chance on her, and though I learned a lot from her -- and will always be grateful for my time with her -- I think it's time to move on. Her name was C++, and she so outshone my previous love, C, that any thoughts of going back evaporated in the heat of this new romance.  She promised me she'd be gentle and not hurt me the way C did.  She promised me she'd clean-up after herself better than C did.  She promised me she'd be less enigmatic and easier to keep happy than C was.  But I was deceived.  Oh sure, as far as truth goes, it wasn't a complete lie.  To some extent she was more fun, more powerful, safer, and easier to maintain.  But it just wasn't good enough -- or at least it's not good enough now. I loved C++, some part of me still does, it's my first-love of programming languages and I recognize its raw power, its blazing speed, and its improvements over its predecessor.  But with today's hardware, at speeds we could only dream to conceive of twenty years ago, that need for speed -- at the cost of all else -- has died, and that has left my feelings for C++ moribund. If I ever need to write an operating system or a device driver, then I might need that speed.  But 99% of the time I don't.  I'm a business-type programmer and chances are 90% of you are too, and even the ones who need speed at all costs may be surprised by how much you sacrifice for that.   That's not to say that I don't want my software to perform, and it's not to say that in the business world we don't care about speed or that our job is somehow less difficult or technical.  There's many times we write programs to handle millions of real-time updates or handle thousands of financial transactions or tracking trading algorithms where every second counts.  But if I choose to write my code in C++ purely for speed chances are I'll never notice the speed increase -- and equally true chances are it will be far more prone to crash and far less easy to maintain.  Nearly without fail, it's the macro-optimizations you need, not the micro-optimizations.  If I choose to write a O(n2) algorithm when I could have used a O(n) algorithm -- that can kill me.  If I choose to go to the database to load a piece of unchanging data every time instead of caching it on first load -- that too can kill me.  And if I cross the network multiple times for pieces of data instead of getting it all at once -- yes that can also kill me.  But choosing an overly powerful and dangerous mid-level language to squeeze out every last drop of performance will realistically not make stock orders process any faster, and more likely than not open up the system to more risk of crashes and resource leaks. And that's when my love for C++ began to die.  When I noticed that I didn't need that speed anymore.  That that speed was really kind of a lie.  Sure, I can be super efficient and pack bits in a byte instead of using separate boolean values.  Sure, I can use an unsigned char instead of an int.  But in the grand scheme of things it doesn't matter as much as you think it does.  The key is maintainability, and that's where C++ failed me.  I like to tell the other developers I work with that there's two levels of correctness in coding: Is it immediately correct? Will it stay correct? That is, you can hack together any piece of code and make it correct to satisfy a task at hand, but if a new developer can't come in tomorrow and make a fairly significant change to it without jeopardizing that correctness, it won't stay correct. Some people laugh at me when I say I now prefer maintainability over speed.  But that is exactly the point.  If you focus solely on speed you tend to produce code that is much harder to maintain over the long hall, and that's a load of technical debt most shops can't afford to carry and end up completely scrapping code before it's time.  When good code is written well for maintainability, though, it can be correct both now and in the future. And you know the best part is?  My new love is nearly as fast as C++, and in some cases even faster -- and better than that, I know C# will treat me right.  Her creators have poured hundreds of thousands of hours of time into making her the sexy beast she is today.  They made her easy to understand and not an enigmatic mess.  They made her consistent and not moody and amorphous.  And they made her perform as fast as I care to go by optimizing her both at compile time and a run-time. Her code is so elegant and easy on the eyes that I'm not worried where she will run to or what she'll pull behind my back.  She is powerful enough to handle all my tasks, fast enough to execute them with blazing speed, maintainable enough so that I can rely on even fairly new peers to modify my work, and rich enough to allow me to satisfy any need.  C# doesn't ask me to clean up her messes!  She cleans up after herself and she tries to make my life easier for me by taking on most of those optimization tasks C++ asked me to take upon myself.  Now, there are many of you who would say that I am the cause of my own grief, that it was my fault C++ didn't behave because I didn't pay enough attention to her.  That I alone caused the pain she inflicted on me.  And to some extent, you have a point.  But she was so high maintenance, requiring me to know every twist and turn of her vast and unrestrained power that any wrong term or bout of forgetfulness was met with painful reminders that she wasn't going to watch my back when I made a mistake.  But C#, she loves me when I'm good, and she loves me when I'm bad, and together we make beautiful code that is both fast and safe. So that's why I'm leaving C++ behind.  She says she's changing for me, but I have no interest in what C++0x may bring.  Oh, I'll still keep in touch, and maybe I'll see her now and again when she brings her problems to my door and asks for some attention -- for I always have a soft spot for her, you see.  But she's out of my house now.  I have three kids and a dog and a cat, and all require me to clean up after them, why should I have to clean up after my programming language as well?

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• Scripts Casing Flash Intro Animation To Stop [migrated]

  - by ubique

  When my Flash website loads, it freezes halfway through the initial animation for 2-3 seconds and then continues. This obviously doesn't look great and I can't figure out what is causing it. Am thinking it is one of the scripts in index.html causing the issue and have tried all sorts of ways to correct it - what have I done wrong? <!DOCTYPE html> <html lang="en"> <head> <title>company name</title> . . . <link href="style.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /> <script type="text/javascript" src="js/flashobject.js"></script> <!--[if lt IE 7]> <link href="ie6.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /> <![endif]--> </head> <body> <header> <hgroup> <h1>company</h1> <h2>company</h2> </hgroup> </header> <div id="container"> <div id="head"> <div class="aligncenter"><a href="http://www.adobe.com/go/EN_US-H-GET-FLASH"> <img src="http://www.adobe.com/images/shared/download_buttons/get_adobe_flash_player.png" alt="" /></a> </div> </div> </div> <div class="g-plus" data-href="https://plus.google.com/100925740920754223119?rel=publisher" data-width="170" data-height="69" data-theme="light"> </body> <!-- Flash --> <script type="text/javascript"> var fo = new FlashObject("main_v10.swf", "head", "100%", "100%", "8", ""); fo.addParam("quality", "high"); fo.addParam("allowFullScreen", "true"); fo.write("head"); </script> <!-- Hello Bar --> <script type="text/javascript" src="//www.hellobar.com/hellobar.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> new HelloBar(39040,52484); </script> <!-- GPlus --> <script type="text/javascript"> window.___gcfg = {lang: 'en'}; (function() {var po = document.createElement("script"); po.type = "text/javascript"; po.async = true;po.src = "https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js"; var s = document.getElementsByTagName("script")[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();</script> <!-- Google --> <script type="text/javascript"> var _gaq = _gaq || []; _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-xxxxxxxx-1']); _gaq.push(['_setSiteSpeedSampleRate', 10]); _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']); (function init() { var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true; ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga,s); })(); window.onload = init; </script> </html>

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• Undefined fireball movement behavior

  - by optimisez

  Demonstration video I try to do after the player shoot 10 times of fireball, then delete all the fireball objects and recreate a 10 new set of fireball objects. I did it but there is a weird bug happens that sometimes the fireball will come out from top and move to the right after shooting a few times. All the 10 fireballs should follow the player all the time and all the fireball should come out from player even after a new set of fireballs is recreated. Any ideas to fix it? Variables typedef struct gameObject{ float X; float Y; int length; int height; bool action; }; // Fireball #define FIREBALL_NUM 10 LPDIRECT3DTEXTURE9 fireball = NULL; RECT fireballRect; gameObject *fireballDest = new gameObject[FIREBALL_NUM]; int iFireBallAnimation; int fireballCount = 0; Set up Fireball void setUpFireBall() { // Initialize destination rectangle, rectangle height and length for (int i = 0; i < FIREBALL_NUM; i++) { fireballDest[i].X = 0; fireballDest[i].Y = 0; fireballDest[i].length = fireballRect.right - fireballRect.left; fireballDest[i].height = fireballRect.bottom - fireballRect.top; } iFireBallAnimation = fireballRect.right - fireballRect.left; // Initialize boolean for (int i = 0; i < FIREBALL_NUM; i++) { fireballDest[i].action = false; } } Initialize fireball void initFireball() { hr = D3DXCreateTextureFromFileEx(d3dDevice, "fireball.png", 512, 512, D3DX_DEFAULT, NULL, D3DFMT_A8R8G8B8, D3DPOOL_MANAGED, D3DX_DEFAULT, D3DX_DEFAULT, D3DCOLOR_XRGB(255, 255, 0), NULL, NULL, &fireball); // Initialize source rectangle fireballRect.left = 0; fireballRect.top = 256; fireballRect.right = 64; fireballRect.bottom = 320; setUpFireBall(); } Update fireball void update() { updateAnimation(); updateAI(); updatePhysics(); updateGameState(); } void updatePhysics() { motion(); collison(); } void motion() { playerMove(); playerJump(); playerGravity(); shootFireball(); fireballFollowPlayer(); } void shootFireball() { if (keyArr['Z']) fireballDest[fireballCount].action = true; if (fireballDest[fireballCount].action) { fireballDest[fireballCount].X += 10; if (fireballDest[fireballCount].X > 800) fireballCount++; } } void fireballFollowPlayer() { for (int i = 0; i < FIREBALL_NUM; i++) { if (fireballDest[i].action == false) { fireballDest[i].X = playerDest.X - 30; fireballDest[i].Y = playerDest.Y - 14; } } } void updateGameState() { // When no more fireball left, rearm fireball if (fireballCount == FIREBALL_NUM) { delete[] fireballDest; fireballDest = new gameObject[10]; fireballCount = 0; setUpFireBall(); } } Render fireball void renderFireball() { for (int i = 0; i < FIREBALL_NUM; i++) { if (fireballDest[i].action) sprite->Draw(fireball, &fireballRect, NULL, &D3DXVECTOR3(fireballDest[i].X, fireballDest[i].Y, 0), D3DCOLOR_XRGB(255,255, 255)); } }

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• Bitmap font rendering, UV generation and vertex placement

  - by jack

  I am generating a bitmap, however, I am not sure on how to render the UV's and placement. I had a thread like this once before, but it was too loosely worded as to what I was looking to do. What I am doing right now is creating a large 1024x1024 image with characters evenly placed every 64 pixels. Here is an example of what I mean. I then save the bitmap X/Y information to a file (which is all multiples of 64). However, I am not sure how to properly use this information and bitmap to render. This falls into two different categories, UV generation and kerning. Now I believe I know how to do both of these, however, when I attempt to couple them together I will get horrendous results. For example, I am trying to render two different text arrays, "123" and "njfb". While ignoring the texture quality (I will be increasing the texture to provide more detail once I fix this issue), here is what it looks like when I try to render them. http://img64.imageshack.us/img64/599/badfontrendering.png Now for the algorithm. I am doing my letter placement with both GetABCWidth and GetKerningPairs. I am using GetABCWidth for the width of the characters, then I am getting the kerning information for adjust the characters. Does anyone have any suggestions on how I can implement my own bitmap font renderer? I am trying to do this without using external libraries such as angel bitmap tool or freetype. I also want to stick to the way the bitmap font sheet is generated so I can do extra effects in the future. Rendering Algorithm for(U32 c = 0, vertexID = 0, i = 0; c < numberOfCharacters; ++c, vertexID += 4, i += 6) { ObtainCharInformation(fontName, m_Text[c]); letterWidth = (charInfo.A + charInfo.B + charInfo.C) * scale; if(c != 0) { DWORD BytesReq = GetGlyphOutlineW(dc, m_Text[c], GGO_GRAY8_BITMAP, &gm, 0, 0, &mat); U8 * glyphImg= new U8[BytesReq]; DWORD r = GetGlyphOutlineW(dc, m_Text[c], GGO_GRAY8_BITMAP, &gm, BytesReq, glyphImg, &mat); for (int k=0; k<nKerningPairs; k++) { if ((kerningpairs[k].wFirst == previousCharIndex) && (kerningpairs[k].wSecond == m_Text[c])) { letterBottomLeftX += (kerningpairs[k].iKernAmount * scale); break; } } letterBottomLeftX -= (gm.gmCellIncX * scale); } SetVertex(letterBottomLeftX, 0.0f, zFight, vertexID); SetVertex(letterBottomLeftX, letterHeight, zFight, vertexID + 1); SetVertex(letterBottomLeftX + letterWidth, letterHeight, zFight, vertexID + 2); SetVertex(letterBottomLeftX + letterWidth, 0.0f, zFight, vertexID + 3); zFight -= 0.001f; float BottomLeftX = (F32)(charInfo.bitmapXOrigin) / (float)m_BitmapWidth; float BottomLeftY = (F32)(charInfo.bitmapYOrigin + charInfo.charBitmapHeight) / (float)m_BitmapWidth; float TopLeftX = BottomLeftX; float TopLeftY = (F32)(charInfo.bitmapYOrigin) / (float)m_BitmapWidth; float TopRightX = (F32)(charInfo.bitmapXOrigin + charInfo.B - charInfo.C) / (float)m_BitmapWidth; float TopRightY = TopLeftY; float BottomRightX = TopRightX; float BottomRightY = BottomLeftY; SetTextureCoordinate(TopLeftX, TopLeftY, vertexID + 1); SetTextureCoordinate(BottomLeftX, BottomLeftY, vertexID + 0); SetTextureCoordinate(BottomRightX, BottomRightY, vertexID + 3); SetTextureCoordinate(TopRightX, TopRightY, vertexID + 2); /// index setting letterBottomLeftX += letterWidth; previousCharIndex = m_Text[c]; }

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• SDL_image & OpenGL Problem

  - by Dylan

  i've been following tutorials online to load textures using SDL and display them on a opengl quad. but ive been getting weird results that no one else on the internet seems to be getting... so when i render the texture in opengl i get something like this. http://www.kiddiescissors.com/after.png when the original .bmp file is this: http://www.kiddiescissors.com/before.bmp ive tried other images too, so its not that this particular image is corrupt. it seems like my rgb channels are all jumbled or something. im pulling my hair out at this point. heres the relevant code from my init() function if ( SDL_Init(SDL_INIT_VIDEO) != 0 ) { return 1; } SDL_GL_SetAttribute(SDL_GL_DOUBLEBUFFER, 1); SDL_GL_SetAttribute( SDL_GL_RED_SIZE, 8 ); SDL_GL_SetAttribute( SDL_GL_GREEN_SIZE, 8 ); SDL_GL_SetAttribute( SDL_GL_BLUE_SIZE, 8 ); SDL_GL_SetAttribute( SDL_GL_ALPHA_SIZE, 8 ); SDL_GL_SetAttribute(SDL_GL_MULTISAMPLEBUFFERS, 1); SDL_GL_SetAttribute(SDL_GL_MULTISAMPLESAMPLES, 4); SDL_SetVideoMode(WINDOW_WIDTH, WINDOW_HEIGHT, 32, SDL_HWSURFACE | SDL_GL_DOUBLEBUFFER | SDL_OPENGL); glMatrixMode(GL_PROJECTION); glLoadIdentity(); gluPerspective(50, (GLfloat)WINDOW_WIDTH/WINDOW_HEIGHT, 1, 50); glMatrixMode(GL_MODELVIEW); glLoadIdentity(); glEnable(GL_DEPTH_TEST); glEnable(GL_MULTISAMPLE); glEnable(GL_TEXTURE_2D); glTexEnvi(GL_TEXTURE_ENV, GL_TEXTURE_ENV_MODE, GL_MODULATE); glBlendFunc(GL_ONE, GL_ONE_MINUS_SRC_ALPHA); glEnable(GL_BLEND); heres the code that is called when my main player object (the one with which this sprite is associated) is initialized texture = 0; SDL_Surface* surface = IMG_Load("i.bmp"); glGenTextures(1, &texture); glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, texture); glTexImage2D(GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0, GL_RGB, surface->w, surface->h, 0, GL_RGB, GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE, surface->pixels); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MIN_FILTER, GL_LINEAR); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MAG_FILTER, GL_LINEAR); SDL_FreeSurface(surface); and then heres the relevant code from my display function glClear(GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT | GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT); glLoadIdentity(); glColor4f(1, 1, 1, 1); glPushMatrix(); glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, texture); glTranslatef(getCenter().x, getCenter().y, 0); glRotatef(getAngle()*(180/M_PI), 0, 0, 1); glTranslatef(-getCenter().x, -getCenter().y, 0); glBegin(GL_QUADS); glTexCoord2f(0, 0); glVertex3f(getTopLeft().x, getTopLeft().y, 0); glTexCoord2f(0, 1); glVertex3f(getTopLeft().x, getTopLeft().y + size.y, 0); glTexCoord2f(1, 1); glVertex3f(getTopLeft().x + size.x, getTopLeft().y + size.y, 0); glTexCoord2f(1, 0); glVertex3f(getTopLeft().x + size.x, getTopLeft().y, 0); glEnd(); glPopMatrix(); let me know if i left out anything important... or if you need more info from me. thanks a ton, -Dylan

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• Source-control 'wet-work'?

  - by Phil Factor

  When a design or creative work is flawed beyond remedy, it is often best to destroy it and start again. The other day, I lost the code to a long and intricate SQL batch I was working on. I’d thought it was impossible, but it happened. With all the technology around that is designed to prevent this occurring, this sort of accident has become a rare event.  If it weren’t for a deranged laptop, and my distraction, the code wouldn’t have been lost this time.  As always, I sighed, had a soothing cup of tea, and typed it all in again.  The new code I hastily tapped in  was much better: I’d held in my head the essence of how the code should work rather than the details: I now knew for certain  the start point, the end, and how it should be achieved. Instantly the detritus of half-baked thoughts fell away and I was able to write logical code that performed better.  Because I could work so quickly, I was able to hold the details of all the columns and variables in my head, and the dynamics of the flow of data. It was, in fact, easier and quicker to start from scratch rather than tidy up and refactor the existing code with its inevitable fumbling and half-baked ideas. What a shame that technology is now so good that developers rarely experience the cleansing shock of losing one’s code and having to rewrite it from scratch.  If you’ve never accidentally lost  your code, then it is worth doing it deliberately once for the experience. Creative people have, until Technology mistakenly prevented it, torn up their drafts or sketches, threw them in the bin, and started again from scratch.  Leonardo’s obsessive reworking of the Mona Lisa was renowned because it was so unusual:  Most artists have been utterly ruthless in destroying work that didn’t quite make it. Authors are particularly keen on writing afresh, and the results are generally positive. Lawrence of Arabia actually lost the entire 250,000 word manuscript of ‘The Seven Pillars of Wisdom’ by accidentally leaving it on a train at Reading station, before rewriting a much better version.  Now, any writer or artist is seduced by technology into altering or refining their work rather than casting it dramatically in the bin or setting a light to it on a bonfire, and rewriting it from the blank page.  It is easy to pick away at a flawed work, but the real creative process is far more brutal. Once, many years ago whilst running a software house that supplied commercial software to local businesses, I’d been supervising an accounting system for a farming cooperative. No packaged system met their needs, and it was all hand-cut code.  For us, it represented a breakthrough as it was for a government organisation, and success would guarantee more contracts. As you’ve probably guessed, the code got mangled in a disk crash just a week before the deadline for delivery, and the many backups all proved to be entirely corrupted by a faulty tape drive.  There were some fragments left on individual machines, but they were all of different versions.  The developers were in despair.  Strangely, I managed to re-write the bulk of a three-month project in a manic and caffeine-soaked weekend.  Sure, that elegant universally-applicable input-form routine was‘nt quite so elegant, but it didn’t really need to be as we knew what forms it needed to support.  Yes, the code lacked architectural elegance and reusability. By dawn on Monday, the application passed its integration tests. The developers rose to the occasion after I’d collapsed, and tidied up what I’d done, though they were reproachful that some of the style and elegance had gone out of the application. By the delivery date, we were able to install it. It was a smaller, faster application than the beta they’d seen and the user-interface had a new, rather Spartan, appearance that we swore was done to conform to the latest in user-interface guidelines. (we switched to Helvetica font to look more ‘Bauhaus’ ). The client was so delighted that he forgave the new bugs that had crept in. I still have the disk that crashed, up in the attic. In IT, we have had mixed experiences from complete re-writes. Lotus 123 never really recovered from a complete rewrite from assembler into C, Borland made the mistake with Arago and Quattro Pro  and Netscape’s complete rewrite of their Navigator 4 browser was a white-knuckle ride. In all cases, the decision to rewrite was a result of extreme circumstances where no other course of action seemed possible.   The rewrite didn’t come out of the blue. I prefer to remember the rewrite of Minix by young Linus Torvalds, or the rewrite of Bitkeeper by a slightly older Linus.  The rewrite of CP/M didn’t do too badly either, did it? Come to think of it, the guy who decided to rewrite the windowing system of the Xerox Star never regretted the decision. I’ll agree that one should often resist calls for a rewrite. One of the worst habits of the more inexperienced programmer is to denigrate whatever code he or she inherits, and then call loudly for a complete rewrite. They are buoyed up by the mistaken belief that they can do better. This, however, is a different psychological phenomenon, more related to the idea of some motorcyclists that they are operating on infinite lives, or the occasional squaddies that if they charge the machine-guns determinedly enough all will be well. Grim experience brings out the humility in any experienced programmer.  I’m referring to quite different circumstances here. Where a team knows the requirements perfectly, are of one mind on methodology and coding standards, and they already have a solution, then what is wrong with considering  a complete rewrite? Rewrites are so painful in the early stages, until that point where one realises the payoff, that even I quail at the thought. One needs a natural disaster to push one over the edge. The trouble is that source-control systems, and disaster recovery systems, are just too good nowadays.   If I were to lose this draft of this very blog post, I know I’d rewrite it much better. However, if you read this, you’ll know I didn’t have the nerve to delete it and start again.  There was a time that one prayed that unreliable hardware would deliver you from an unmaintainable mess of a codebase, but now technology has made us almost entirely immune to such a merciful act of God. An old friend of mine with long experience in the software industry has long had the idea of the ‘source-control wet-work’,  where one hires a malicious hacker in some wild eastern country to hack into one’s own  source control system to destroy all trace of the source to an application. Alas, backup systems are just too good to make this any more than a pipedream. Somehow, it would be difficult to promote the idea. As an alternative, could one construct a source control system that, on doing all the code-quality metrics, would systematically destroy all trace of source code that failed the quality test? Alas, I can’t see many managers buying into the idea. In reading the full story of the near-loss of Toy Story 2, it set me thinking. It turned out that the lucky restoration of the code wasn’t the happy ending one first imagined it to be, because they eventually came to the conclusion that the plot was fundamentally flawed and it all had to be rewritten anyway.  Was this an early  case of the ‘source-control wet-job’?’ It is very hard nowadays to do a rapid U-turn in a development project because we are far too prone to cling to our existing source-code.

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• Are IE 9 will have a place in heart of user ?

  - by anirudha

  in a advertisement of IE 9 MSFT compare two product first is their IE9 and second is chrome 6. I know 6 is not currently [9] but no objection because may be they make ads when 6 is currently version and have RC or beta in their hands. on IE 9 test-drive website they show many of people ads to show the user that IE9 is performance better or other chrome or Firefox not. well they not compare with Firefox because last days firefox not still in news and search trends like before RC release many of user googling for them. Well I myself found IE9 perform smoother then chrome. but what MSFT do after IE9 nothing they waiting for IE 10 not for give updates not as well as Google chrome and Firefox. Are IE9 have anything new for Developer even a small or big. well they tell you blah or useless things everytime when they make for next version no matter for you but a matter for them because they add a new thing even useless for developer. I am not have any feeling with IE bad but I like to make reviews as well as I can make. I show you something who I experience with IE and someother browser like Chrome and Firefox. IE 9 still have no plugin as well as other provided like Firefox have Firebug a great utilities who is best option for developer to debug their code. IE9 developer tool is good but still you never customize them or readymade customization available to work as in firefox many of person make customization for firebug like example :- firepicker for picking color in firebug , firebug autocomplete for intellisense like feature when you write JavaScript inside console panel , pixelperfect , firequery , sitepoint reference and many other great example we all love to use. as other things that Firefox give many things customizable like themes , ui and many thing customization means more thing user or developer want to make themselves and more contribution make them better software so Firefox is great because customization is a great thing inside firefox and chrome. if you read some post of developer on MSDN to what’s new in IE 9 developer tool that you feel they are joking whenever you see some other things of Firefox and chrome. in a Firefox a plugin perform many much things but in IE still use IE 9 developer tool no other option like in Firefox use Firebug and many other utilities to make development easier and time saving and best as we can do.if you see Firefox page on mozilla that sublines of firefox is high performance easy customization advanced security well you can say what’s performance but there is no comparison with IE because IE have only performance and nothing else. but Firefox have these three thing to make product love. and third thing I really love that security yeah security. from long time before whenever IE6 is no hackproff and many other easily hack IE6 whenever Firefox is secure. I found myself that many of website install a software on client’s computer and they still not know about them so they track everything. sometime they hijack the homepage and make their website as their homepage. sometime they do something and you trying  to go to  any website then they go to their site first. the problem I telling about not long before it’s time of late in 2008 whenever Firefox is much better then IE6. if someone have bad experience with anyone of these software share with us I like to hear your voice. whenever IE still not for use Firefox is a good option for us even user or developer. I not know why someone make next version of IE. IE still have time to go away from Web. Firefox not rude as IE they still believe in user feedback and chrome is also open the door for feedback on their product gooogle Chrome. but what thing they made in IE on user feedback nothing. they still thing to teach what they maked not thing about what user need. if you spent some hour on firefox and chrome then you found what’s matter. what thing you have whenever you use IE or other browser like google chrome and Firefox :- as a user IE give you nothing even tell you blah blah and more blah but still next version of IE means next IE6 for the web. as in Google chrome you find plugins addons or customization to make experience better but in IE9 you can’t customize anything even the themes they have by default. Firefox already have a great list of plugins or addons to make experience better with Web but IE9 have nothing. this means IE9 not for user and other like chrome and firefox give you much better experience then IE. next thing after user is developer. first thing is that all developer want smooth development who save their time not take too perhaps saving.posts on IE9 show that a list of thing improved in IE 9 developer tool but are one developer tool enough for web development so developer need more utilities to solve different different type of puzzle who IE 9 never give like in Firefox you have utilities to do a task even small or big one. in chrome same experience you have but IE9 never give any plugin or utilities to make our work faster even they are new headache for developer because IE not give update as soon as other because in Firefox and in chrome if a bug is reported then they solve them fast and distribute them in next version of software very soon but in IE wait for a long time like IE 9 and IE 8 have no official release between them as update. As my conclusion there is no reason to use IE and adopt 9 again. it’s really not for Developer or user even newbie or smart people. as a rule I want to beware you with IE because it’s my responsibilities to move the thing in good way as I can make. well are you sure that there is no reason or profit they thing to have with IE9  if not why they forget luna [windows xp] user. because they are old nothing they want to force user to give them some money by purchasing a new version of OS. so this a thing why they marketed their software. if you thing about what firefox and chrome want to make : Mozilla's mission is to promote openness, innovation and opportunity on the web. chrome mission we all see whenever we use them. but IE9 is a trick they promote because they want to add something to next version of windows. if somebody like IE9 [even surprised by ads they see or post they read] then they purchase windows soon as they possible. Well you feel that I am opposition of IE9 and favor of chrome and Firefox yeah you feel right I hate IE from a heart not from a pencil. well you get same thing when you have trying three product major I described here Chrome firefox and IE. well don’t believe on the blogs , posts or article who are provided by the merchant or vender’s website. open the eyes read and thing what they talk and feel are they really true. if you confused that compare with some other. now you know the true because no one telling so badly as a user can described who use them not only one who make their feature. always open the eyes don’t believe use your mind and find the truth. thanks for reading my post good bye and take care

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• How to change the language of driver interface for Canon Pixma printers?

  - by Sammy

  Is there a way to change the language of the driver interface for Canon Pixma printers? Which language is used seems to be determined by the language of the OS or the Windows localization settings. I really don't want that, I want to be able to set the language manually to my own liking, either during the driver installation or afterwards. I have found a workaround for Pixma IP2770 where you edit the setup.ini file by replacing the language names and the DLL search paths with <SELECT> under the LANGUAGES section. So instead of... 0000=<SELECT> 0001=Arabic,RES\STRING\IJInstAR.ini,RES\DLL\IJInstAR.dll 0804=Simplified Chinese,RES\STRING\IJInstCN.ini,RES\DLL\IJInstCN.dll 0404=Traditional Chinese,RES\STRING\IJInstTW.ini,RES\DLL\IJInstTW.dll 0005=Czech,RES\STRING\IJInstCZ.ini,RES\DLL\IJInstCZ.dll 0006=Danish,RES\STRING\IJInstDK.ini,RES\DLL\IJInstDK.dll 0007=German,RES\STRING\IJInstDE.ini,RES\DLL\IJInstDE.dll 0008=Greek,RES\STRING\IJInstGR.ini,RES\DLL\IJInstGR.dll 0009=English,RES\STRING\IJInstUS.ini,RES\DLL\IJInstUS.dll 000A=Spanish,RES\STRING\IJInstES.ini,RES\DLL\IJInstES.dll 000B=Finnish,RES\STRING\IJInstFI.ini,RES\DLL\IJInstFI.dll 000C=French,RES\STRING\IJInstFR.ini,RES\DLL\IJInstFR.dll 000E=Hungarian,RES\STRING\IJInstHU.ini,RES\DLL\IJInstHU.dll 0010=Italian,RES\STRING\IJInstIT.ini,RES\DLL\IJInstIT.dll 0011=Japanese,RES\STRING\IJInstJP.ini,RES\DLL\IJInstJP.dll 0012=Korean,RES\STRING\IJInstKR.ini,RES\DLL\IJInstKR.dll 0013=Dutch,RES\STRING\IJInstNL.ini,RES\DLL\IJInstNL.dll 0014=Norwegian,RES\STRING\IJInstNO.ini,RES\DLL\IJInstNO.dll 0015=Polish,RES\STRING\IJInstPL.ini,RES\DLL\IJInstPL.dll 0016=Portuguese,RES\STRING\IJInstPT.ini,RES\DLL\IJInstPT.dll 0019=Russian,RES\STRING\IJInstRU.ini,RES\DLL\IJInstRU.dll 001D=Swedish,RES\STRING\IJInstSE.ini,RES\DLL\IJInstSE.dll 001E=Thai,RES\STRING\IJInstTH.ini,RES\DLL\IJInstTH.dll 001F=Turkish,RES\STRING\IJInstTR.ini,RES\DLL\IJInstTR.dll 0021=Indonesian,RES\STRING\IJInstID.ini,RES\DLL\IJInstID.dll You get.... 0000=<SELECT> 0001=<SELECT> 0804=<SELECT> 0404=<SELECT> 0005=<SELECT> 0006=<SELECT> 0007=<SELECT> 0008=<SELECT> 0009=English,RES\STRING\IJInstUS.ini,RES\DLL\IJInstUS.dll 000A=<SELECT> 000B=<SELECT> 000C=<SELECT> 000E=<SELECT> 0010=<SELECT> 0011=<SELECT> 0012=<SELECT> 0013=<SELECT> 0014=<SELECT> 0015=<SELECT> 0016=<SELECT> 0019=<SELECT> 001D=<SELECT> 001E=<SELECT> 001F=<SELECT> 0021=<SELECT> .... in case English is the preferred language. It's a way to force the installation program to only install the English language support. IP2770 is a model for the Asian market, so if you want to check this out you need to go to the Canon India download page (for instance) to get the driver. Unfortunately this method is not possible with my IP4000. There is no driver even available for it to download for Windows Vista. But is there really no way of changing the language of the UI in any normal way, you know... without having to hack it? Besides, the driver for my printer comes with Windows Vista, so I don't even have to install any drivers. And little do I get the chance to set the language, knowing that the installation never happens. Any ideas?...

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• Dell Latitude E6430 Docking Station + Dual Monitor + Laptop Screen Tri-Monitor setup

  - by Larry

  I have a company issued laptop and docking station as well as two monitors The specifications of the hardware are as follows; Laptop: Latitude E6430 BIOS: A02.00 Processor: i7-3720QM CPU @ 2.60 (8 CPUs) Memory: 4096MB RAM Page file: 1825MB used, 4793MB available DirectX 11 Display Driver/Chip: MVIDIA NVS 5200M DAC: Integrated RAMDAC Aprox Total Memory: 2376 (Above 3 details same for both displays) Current Display Mode (Display 1): 1600x900 Current Display Mode (Display 2): 1440x900 the docking station is a Dell Latitude E6420 Docking Station PR03X Port Replicator and I don't think the monitor model is particularly relevant to resolving this issue but they are both Acer V193Ws The story goes like this; the laptop works fine if I VGA one monitor into the laptop through the vga port on the back of the lefthand side of the laptop I can achieve dual monitor display fine (laptop screen + monitor) if I plug the laptop into the docking station and use the vga port in the back of the docking station I can dual monitor fine (laptop screen + monitor) if I plug the laptop into the docking station, the laptop's lefthand side VGA port no longer seems to function at all I've spoken to internal IT about this issue and they're going to get me some kind of VGA splitter or a DVI-VGA adapter to use with the docking station for the second Acer Monitor, but that isn't going to happen for a few days. So I guess what I'm wondering is; is there any way to continue to use the side VGA port on my laptop while using the docking station VGA port? and as a secondary 'followup' pending resolution of the initial issue with getting both monitors up and running (at the moment I have both monitors on my desk but am just using my laptop screen as one of my dual monitor display with one of the monitors [the one connected to dock]), is there any way to CONTINUE to use my laptop monitor to in effect have a triple monitor display (2 monitors + docked laptop)? I am wondering this because internal IT told me that they were aware of some issues with the particular display drivers in my box and triple monitor displays but weren't really going to look TOO much in-depth into that (which is perfectly understandable) since getting the adapter for the dual monitors up and running was the greater priority within their purview. So this is a two parter; Can I dual monitor using two vga cables with 1 docking station vga port and one laptop vga port? is there a setting that can be tweaked somewhere? because plugging the box into the station seems to make the side port stop working and... Is there any reasonably simple and cost-effective work around (e.g. I am find with shelling out maybe a few dollars out of my own pocket for some hardware or software to make my company box tri-display capable) but if this requires some extensive rebuild or new OSs or doing stuff to the BIOS I'd rather have a straight answer about this being untenable as a slight modification to a (once again) company laptop and stop wasting time looking into it Thanks! and please let me know if you guys need any more details (tech specs or something) to answer this question [EDIT] 2/10/2014 Just an update; turned out it really was just a hardware limitation issue. The old laptop just couldn't hack it. Got a new laptop with a better video card and different monitors from my company and am successfully using a triple display currently (2 monitors + laptop screen)

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• Java - Tile engine changing number in array not changing texture

  - by Corey

  I draw my map from a txt file. Would I have to write to the text file to notice the changes I made? Right now it changes the number in the array but the tile texture doesn't change. Do I have to do more than just change the number in the array? public class Tiles { public Image[] tiles = new Image[5]; public int[][] map = new int[64][64]; private Image grass, dirt, fence, mound; private SpriteSheet tileSheet; public int tileWidth = 32; public int tileHeight = 32; Player player = new Player(); public void init() throws IOException, SlickException { tileSheet = new SpriteSheet("assets/tiles.png", tileWidth, tileHeight); grass = tileSheet.getSprite(0, 0); dirt = tileSheet.getSprite(7, 7); fence = tileSheet.getSprite(2, 0); mound = tileSheet.getSprite(2, 6); tiles[0] = grass; tiles[1] = dirt; tiles[2] = fence; tiles[3] = mound; int x=0, y=0; BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new FileReader("assets/map.dat")); String line; while ((line = in.readLine()) != null) { String[] values = line.split(","); for (String str : values) { int str_int = Integer.parseInt(str); map[x][y]=str_int; //System.out.print(map[x][y] + " "); y=y+1; } //System.out.println(""); x=x+1; y = 0; } in.close(); } public void update(GameContainer gc) { } public void render(GameContainer gc) { for(int x = 0; x < map.length; x++) { for(int y = 0; y < map.length; y ++) { int textureIndex = map[y][x]; Image texture = tiles[textureIndex]; texture.draw(x*tileWidth,y*tileHeight); } } } Mouse picking public void checkDistance(GameContainer gc) { Input input = gc.getInput(); float mouseX = input.getMouseX(); float mouseY = input.getMouseY(); double mousetileX = Math.floor((double)mouseX/tiles.tileWidth); double mousetileY = Math.floor((double)mouseY/tiles.tileHeight); double playertileX = Math.floor(playerX/tiles.tileWidth); double playertileY = Math.floor(playerY/tiles.tileHeight); double lengthX = Math.abs((float)playertileX - mousetileX); double lengthY = Math.abs((float)playertileY - mousetileY); double distance = Math.sqrt((lengthX*lengthX)+(lengthY*lengthY)); if(input.isMousePressed(Input.MOUSE_LEFT_BUTTON) && distance < 4) { System.out.println("Clicked"); if(tiles.map[(int)mousetileX][(int)mousetileY] == 1) { tiles.map[(int)mousetileX][(int)mousetileY] = 0; } } System.out.println(tiles.map[(int)mousetileX][(int)mousetileY]); }

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• What would cause an .exe to vanish without a trace?

  - by Peter pete

  I have a few computers. One computer, at home, one day suddenly had its pgbouncer.exe vanish. The antivirus didn't have it in its virus chest [avast]. I couldn't find the bgbouncer anywhere. All the other pgbouncer files remained where they used to be, except the exe had vanished. I hadn't uninstalled it, nor had anyone else used the machine. I hadn't installed any new software since the previous time I had used it either. Just now, however, my TV computer was running out of disk space, which was weird because I had python setup to do transcoding and archiving. I logged in and voila! python.exe had vanished !! Once again, Avast.exe didn't have it in its virus chest, and dunno! I do this time, with the TV computer, know exactly the date that python vanished. Sat the 18th my python scripts ran fine. Sat the 19th python was gone. I'm going to do some hunting in the event log to see what happened that day. But if anyone has experienced vanishings before and has a clue what happened, I would like to know. FYI: Both computers (bgbouncer vanish and python vanish) were running Win7 with the RDP hack and both on SSDs and both with Avast. Both computers had all windows updates set to manual(to prevent random stuff changing!) and neither had recently had any windows updates manually applied. FYI2: Tv computer had since the beginning of October dropbox running all the time trying to download two files. Sadly, a temporary download of each of these two files by dropbox resulted in Avast freaking out and virus-chesting them, and then dropbox downloading them partially again, before being dropboxed. Now, these two files were binaries from a program I had personally written and were clean on other machines. Since the python vanishing I have deleted these two binaries from dropbox (using the website) and dropbox exe on the tv computer is now at peace. I don't think this should cause python.exe to vanish though :/ New edit: On the 18/10/2013, at 0742 my python script ended with an error: "file still in use" which was unexpected but I shrugged it off since sometimes media portal doesn't release the recording. But on second thoughts is weird since the show in use would have been finished recording the day before. On the 18/10/2013 at 0807 the windows event log complains that several drivers required for CutePDF, send to onenote 2010, send to onenote 2013, microsoft xps document writer aren't installed. I just checked now and indeed those printers have vanished! New update! I found my python.exe that had been removed. It was still in the C:\Python33\ directory except it had been renamed to a random string charater.tmp (ie, it was made into a temp file) with a creation date of 19/10/2013 at 0600:02 am. Now, the computer normally wakes at 6am to do transcoding. What could have moved my python file into a tmp file?

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• saving and retrieving a text file in java?

  - by user3319432

  import java.sql. ; import java.awt.; import javax.swing.; import java.awt.event.; public class saving extends JFrame implements ActionListener{ JTextField edpno=new JTextField(10); JLabel l0= new JLabel ("EDP Number: "); JComboBox fname = new JComboBox(); JLabel l1= new JLabel("First Name: "); JTextField lname= new JTextField(20); JLabel l2= new JLabel("Last Name: "); // JTextField contno= new JTextField(20); // JLabel l3= new JLabel("Contact Number: "); JComboBox contno = new JComboBox(); JLabel l3 = new JLabel ("Contact Number: "); JButton bOK = new JButton("Save"); JButton bRetrieve = new JButton("Retrieve"); private ImageIcon icon; JPanel C=new JPanel(){ protected void paintComponent(Graphics g){ g.drawImage(icon.getImage(),0,0,null); super.paintComponent(g); } }; public Search Record (){ icon=new ImageIcon("images/canres.png"); C.setOpaque(false); C.setLayout(new GridLayout(5,2,4,4)); setTitle("Search Record"); C.add (l0); C.add (edpno); edpno.addActionListener(this); C.add (l1); C.add (fname); fname.setForeground(Color.BLUE); fname.setFont(new Font(" ", Font.BOLD,15)); C.add (l2); C.add (lname); C.add (l3); C.add (contno); contno.setForeground(Color.BLUE); contno.setFont(new Font(" ", Font.BOLD,15)); C.add(bOK); bOK.addActionListener(this); C.add (bRetrieve); bRetrieve.addActionListener(this); bOK.setBackground(Color.white); bRetrieve.setBackground(Color.white); } public void saverecord(){ try{ //Connect to the Database Class.forName("sun.jdbc.odbc.JdbcOdbcDriver"); String path ="jdbc:odbc:;DRIVER=Microsoft Access Driver (*.mdb);DBQ=Database/roomassign.mdb"; String DBPassword =""; String DBUserName =""; Connection con = DriverManager.getConnection(path,"",""); Statement s = con.createStatement(); s.executeQuery("select firstname, Lastname, contact number from name WHERE edpno ='"+edpno.getText()+"'"); ResultSet rs = s.getResultSet(); ResultSetMetaData md = rs.getMetaData(); while(rs.next()) { fname.setSelectedItem(rs.getString(1)); lname.setText(rs.getString(2)); contno.setSelectedItem(rs.getString(3)); // crs.setSelectedItem(rs.getString(4)); } s.close(); con.close(); } catch(Exception Q) { JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(this,Q); } } public void SaveRecord(){ try{ Class.forName("sun.jdbc.odbc.JdbcOdbcDriver"); String path = "jdbc:odbc:;DRIVER=Microsoft Access Driver (*.mdb);DBQ=Database/roomassign.mdb"; String DBPassword =""; String DBUsername =""; Connection con = DriverManager.getConnection(path,"",""); Statement s = con.createStatement(); String sql = "UPDATE rooms SET Firstname='"+fname.getSelectedItem()+"',Lastname='"+lname.getText()+"',Contactnumber='"+contno.getSelectedItem()+"' WHERE '"+edpno.getText()+"'=edpno"; s.executeUpdate(sql); JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(this,"New room Record has been successfully saved"); dispose(); s.close(); con.close(); } catch(Exception Mismatch){ JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(this,Mismatch); } } public void actionPerformed (ActionEvent ako){ if (ako.getSource() == bRetrieve){ dispose(); } else if (ako.getSource() == bOK){ SaveRecord(); } } public static void main (String [] awtsave){ new Search(); } }

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• WiFi stops working after a while in Lenovo ThinkPad W520 (Ubuntu 12.04)

  - by el10780

  After several minutes(I do not know how many) there is no internet connection on my laptop via Wi-Fi.Ubuntu doesn't show any kind of message that my WiFi was disconnected neither there is a signal drop,but suddenly Firefox stops connecting to web pages.I checked my modem/router and it seems that it is working fine.I tried also to reboot the WiFi device and nothing happens.The only thing that it makes it work again is a reboot of the system and if I do not want to do a reboot then I am enforced to connect to the Internet using Ethernet cable.Does anybody know what is happening? ## Some Hardware info that might be helpful ## el10780@ThinkPad-W520:~$ sudo lshw -class network *-network description: Ethernet interface product: 82579LM Gigabit Network Connection vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 19 bus info: pci@0000:00:19.0 logical name: eth0 version: 04 serial: f0:de:f1:f1:be:10 size: 100Mbit/s capacity: 1Gbit/s width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm msi bus_master cap_list ethernet physical tp 10bt 10bt-fd 100bt 100bt-fd 1000bt-fd autonegotiation configuration: autonegotiation=on broadcast=yes driver=e1000e driverversion=1.5.1-k duplex=full firmware=0.13-3 ip=192.168.0.10 latency=0 link=yes multicast=yes port=twisted pair speed=100Mbit/s resources: irq:50 memory:f3a00000-f3a1ffff memory:f3a2b000-f3a2bfff ioport:6080(size=32) *-network description: Wireless interface product: Centrino Advanced-N + WiMAX 6250 vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:03:00.0 logical name: wlan0 version: 5e serial: 64:80:99:63:14:74 width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list ethernet physical wireless configuration: broadcast=yes driver=iwlwifi driverversion=3.2.0-26-generic firmware=41.28.5.1 build 33926 ip=192.168.0.6 latency=0 link=yes multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11abgn resources: irq:52 memory:f3900000-f3901fff *-network description: Ethernet interface physical id: 1 bus info: usb@2:1.3 logical name: wmx0 serial: 00:1d:e1:53:b2:e8 capabilities: ethernet physical configuration: driver=i2400m firmware=i6050-fw-usb-1.5.sbcf link=no el10780@ThinkPad-W520:~$ lspci 00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 2nd Generation Core Processor Family DRAM Controller (rev 09) 00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200/2nd Generation Core Processor Family PCI Express Root Port (rev 09) 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 2nd Generation Core Processor Family Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 09) 00:16.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family MEI Controller #1 (rev 04) 00:16.3 Serial controller: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family KT Controller (rev 04) 00:19.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82579LM Gigabit Network Connection (rev 04) 00:1a.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family USB Enhanced Host Controller #2 (rev 04) 00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family High Definition Audio Controller (rev 04) 00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 1 (rev b4) 00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 2 (rev b4) 00:1c.3 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 4 (rev b4) 00:1c.4 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 5 (rev b4) 00:1c.6 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 7 (rev b4) 00:1d.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family USB Enhanced Host Controller #1 (rev 04) 00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation QM67 Express Chipset Family LPC Controller (rev 04) 00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family 6 port SATA AHCI Controller (rev 04) 00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family SMBus Controller (rev 04) 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GF108 [Quadro 1000M] (rev a1) 03:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation Centrino Advanced-N + WiMAX 6250 (rev 5e) 0d:00.0 System peripheral: Ricoh Co Ltd Device e823 (rev 08) 0d:00.3 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Ricoh Co Ltd R5C832 PCIe IEEE 1394 Controller (rev 04) 0e:00.0 USB controller: NEC Corporation uPD720200 USB 3.0 Host Controller (rev 04) el10780@ThinkPad-W520:~$ rfkill list all 0: hci0: Bluetooth Soft blocked: no Hard blocked: no 1: tpacpi_bluetooth_sw: Bluetooth Soft blocked: no Hard blocked: no 2: phy0: Wireless LAN Soft blocked: no Hard blocked: no 3: i2400m-usb:2-1.3:1.0: WiMAX Soft blocked: yes Hard blocked: no The weirdest thing is this screenshot which I took after running the **Additional Drivers** program.I mean I have a NVidia Quadro 1000M and my Intel Centrino WiFi Card and this shows that there are not proprietay drivers for my system. http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/268/screenshotfrom201207062.png/

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• Online ALTER TABLE in MySQL 5.6

  - by Marko Mäkelä

  This is the low-level view of data dictionary language (DDL) operations in the InnoDB storage engine in MySQL 5.6. John Russell gave a more high-level view in his blog post April 2012 Labs Release – Online DDL Improvements. MySQL before the InnoDB Plugin Traditionally, the MySQL storage engine interface has taken a minimalistic approach to data definition language. The only natively supported operations were CREATE TABLE, DROP TABLE and RENAME TABLE. Consider the following example: CREATE TABLE t(a INT); INSERT INTO t VALUES (1),(2),(3); CREATE INDEX a ON t(a); DROP TABLE t; The CREATE INDEX statement would be executed roughly as follows: CREATE TABLE temp(a INT, INDEX(a)); INSERT INTO temp SELECT * FROM t; RENAME TABLE t TO temp2; RENAME TABLE temp TO t; DROP TABLE temp2; You could imagine that the database could crash when copying all rows from the original table to the new one. For example, it could run out of file space. Then, on restart, InnoDB would roll back the huge INSERT transaction. To fix things a little, a hack was added to ha_innobase::write_row for committing the transaction every 10,000 rows. Still, it was frustrating that even a simple DROP INDEX would make the table unavailable for modifications for a long time. Fast Index Creation in the InnoDB Plugin of MySQL 5.1 MySQL 5.1 introduced a new interface for CREATE INDEX and DROP INDEX. The old table-copying approach can still be forced by SET old_alter_table=0. This interface is used in MySQL 5.5 and in the InnoDB Plugin for MySQL 5.1. Apart from the ability to do a quick DROP INDEX, the main advantage is that InnoDB will execute a merge-sort algorithm before inserting the index records into each index that is being created. This should speed up the insert into the secondary index B-trees and potentially result in a better B-tree fill factor. The 5.1 ALTER TABLE interface was not perfect. For example, DROP FOREIGN KEY still invoked the table copy. Renaming columns could conflict with InnoDB foreign key constraints. Combining ADD KEY and DROP KEY in ALTER TABLE was problematic and not atomic inside the storage engine. The ALTER TABLE interface in MySQL 5.6 The ALTER TABLE storage engine interface was completely rewritten in MySQL 5.6. Instead of introducing a method call for every conceivable operation, MySQL 5.6 introduced a handful of methods, and data structures that keep track of the requested changes. In MySQL 5.6, online ALTER TABLE operation can be requested by specifying LOCK=NONE. Also LOCK=SHARED and LOCK=EXCLUSIVE are available. The old-style table copying can be requested by ALGORITHM=COPY. That one will require at least LOCK=SHARED. From the InnoDB point of view, anything that is possible with LOCK=EXCLUSIVE is also possible with LOCK=SHARED. Most ALGORITHM=INPLACE operations inside InnoDB can be executed online (LOCK=NONE). InnoDB will always require an exclusive table lock in two phases of the operation. The execution phases are tied to a number of methods: handler::check_if_supported_inplace_alter Checks if the storage engine can perform all requested operations, and if so, what kind of locking is needed. handler::prepare_inplace_alter_table InnoDB uses this method to set up the data dictionary cache for upcoming CREATE INDEX operation. We need stubs for the new indexes, so that we can keep track of changes to the table during online index creation. Also, crash recovery would drop any indexes that were incomplete at the time of the crash. handler::inplace_alter_table In InnoDB, this method is used for creating secondary indexes or for rebuilding the table. This is the ‘main’ phase that can be executed online (with concurrent writes to the table). handler::commit_inplace_alter_table This is where the operation is committed or rolled back. Here, InnoDB would drop any indexes, rename any columns, drop or add foreign keys, and finalize a table rebuild or index creation. It would also discard any logs that were set up for online index creation or table rebuild. The prepare and commit phases require an exclusive lock, blocking all access to the table. If MySQL times out while upgrading the table meta-data lock for the commit phase, it will roll back the ALTER TABLE operation. In MySQL 5.6, data definition language operations are still not fully atomic, because the data dictionary is split. Part of it is inside InnoDB data dictionary tables. Part of the information is only available in the *.frm file, which is not covered by any crash recovery log. But, there is a single commit phase inside the storage engine. Online Secondary Index Creation It may occur that an index needs to be created on a new column to speed up queries. But, it may be unacceptable to block modifications on the table while creating the index. It turns out that it is conceptually not so hard to support online index creation. All we need is some more execution phases: Set up a stub for the index, for logging changes. Scan the table for index records. Sort the index records. Bulk load the index records. Apply the logged changes. Replace the stub with the actual index. Threads that modify the table will log the operations to the logs of each index that is being created. Errors, such as log overflow or uniqueness violations, will only be flagged by the ALTER TABLE thread. The log is conceptually similar to the InnoDB change buffer. The bulk load of index records will bypass record locking. We still generate redo log for writing the index pages. It would suffice to log page allocations only, and to flush the index pages from the buffer pool to the file system upon completion. Native ALTER TABLE Starting with MySQL 5.6, InnoDB supports most ALTER TABLE operations natively. The notable exceptions are changes to the column type, ADD FOREIGN KEY except when foreign_key_checks=0, and changes to tables that contain FULLTEXT indexes. The keyword ALGORITHM=INPLACE is somewhat misleading, because certain operations cannot be performed in-place. For example, changing the ROW_FORMAT of a table requires a rebuild. Online operation (LOCK=NONE) is not allowed in the following cases: when adding an AUTO_INCREMENT column, when the table contains FULLTEXT indexes or a hidden FTS_DOC_ID column, or when there are FOREIGN KEY constraints referring to the table, with ON…CASCADE or ON…SET NULL option. The FOREIGN KEY limitations are needed, because MySQL does not acquire meta-data locks on the child or parent tables when executing SQL statements. Theoretically, InnoDB could support operations like ADD COLUMN and DROP COLUMN in-place, by lazily converting the table to a newer format. This would require that the data dictionary keep multiple versions of the table definition. For simplicity, we will copy the entire table, even for DROP COLUMN. The bulk copying of the table will bypass record locking and undo logging. For facilitating online operation, a temporary log will be associated with the clustered index of table. Threads that modify the table will also write the changes to the log. When altering the table, we skip all records that have been marked for deletion. In this way, we can simply discard any undo log records that were not yet purged from the original table. Off-page columns, or BLOBs, are an important consideration. We suspend the purge of delete-marked records if it would free any off-page columns from the old table. This is because the BLOBs can be needed when applying changes from the log. We have special logging for handling the ROLLBACK of an INSERT that inserted new off-page columns. This is because the columns will be freed at rollback.

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• NHibernate Pitfalls: Custom Types and Detecting Changes

  - by Ricardo Peres

  This is part of a series of posts about NHibernate Pitfalls. See the entire collection here. NHibernate supports the declaration of properties of user-defined types, that is, not entities, collections or primitive types. These are used for mapping a database columns, of any type, into a different type, which may not even be an entity; think, for example, of a custom user type that converts a BLOB column into an Image. User types must implement interface NHibernate.UserTypes.IUserType. This interface specifies an Equals method that is used for comparing two instances of the user type. If this method returns false, the entity is marked as dirty, and, when the session is flushed, will trigger an UPDATE. So, in your custom user type, you must implement this carefully so that it is not mistakenly considered changed. For example, you can cache the original column value inside of it, and compare it with the one in the other instance. Let’s see an example implementation of a custom user type that converts a Byte[] from a BLOB column into an Image: 1: [Serializable] 2: public sealed class ImageUserType : IUserType 3: { 4: private Byte[] data = null; 5: 6: public ImageUserType() 7: { 8: this.ImageFormat = ImageFormat.Png; 9: } 10: 11: public ImageFormat ImageFormat 12: { 13: get; 14: set; 15: } 16: 17: public Boolean IsMutable 18: { 19: get 20: { 21: return (true); 22: } 23: } 24: 25: public Object Assemble(Object cached, Object owner) 26: { 27: return (cached); 28: } 29: 30: public Object DeepCopy(Object value) 31: { 32: return (value); 33: } 34: 35: public Object Disassemble(Object value) 36: { 37: return (value); 38: } 39: 40: public new Boolean Equals(Object x, Object y) 41: { 42: return (Object.Equals(x, y)); 43: } 44: 45: public Int32 GetHashCode(Object x) 46: { 47: return ((x != null) ? x.GetHashCode() : 0); 48: } 49: 50: public override Int32 GetHashCode() 51: { 52: return ((this.data != null) ? this.data.GetHashCode() : 0); 53: } 54: 55: public override Boolean Equals(Object obj) 56: { 57: ImageUserType other = obj as ImageUserType; 58: 59: if (other == null) 60: { 61: return (false); 62: } 63: 64: if (Object.ReferenceEquals(this, other) == true) 65: { 66: return (true); 67: } 68: 69: return (this.data.SequenceEqual(other.data)); 70: } 71: 72: public Object NullSafeGet(IDataReader rs, String[] names, Object owner) 73: { 74: Int32 index = rs.GetOrdinal(names[0]); 75: Byte[] data = rs.GetValue(index) as Byte[]; 76: 77: this.data = data as Byte[]; 78: 79: if (data == null) 80: { 81: return (null); 82: } 83: 84: using (MemoryStream stream = new MemoryStream(this.data ?? new Byte[0])) 85: { 86: return (Image.FromStream(stream)); 87: } 88: } 89: 90: public void NullSafeSet(IDbCommand cmd, Object value, Int32 index) 91: { 92: if (value != null) 93: { 94: Image data = value as Image; 95: 96: using (MemoryStream stream = new MemoryStream()) 97: { 98: data.Save(stream, this.ImageFormat); 99: value = stream.ToArray(); 100: } 101: } 102: 103: (cmd.Parameters[index] as DbParameter).Value = value ?? DBNull.Value; 104: } 105: 106: public Object Replace(Object original, Object target, Object owner) 107: { 108: return (original); 109: } 110: 111: public Type ReturnedType 112: { 113: get 114: { 115: return (typeof(Image)); 116: } 117: } 118: 119: public SqlType[] SqlTypes 120: { 121: get 122: { 123: return (new SqlType[] { new SqlType(DbType.Binary) }); 124: } 125: } 126: } In this case, we need to cache the original Byte[] data because it’s not easy to compare two Image instances, unless, of course, they are the same.

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• “It’s only test code…”

  - by Chris George

  “Let me hack this in, it’s only test code”, “Don’t worry about getting it reviewed, it’s only test code”, “It doesn’t have to be elegant or efficient, it’s only test code”… do these phrases sound familiar? Chances are if you’ve working with test automation, at one point or other you will have heard these phrases, you have probably even used them yourself! What is certain is that code written under this “it’s only test code” mantra will come back and bite you in the arse! I’ve recently encountered a case where a test was giving a false positive, therefore hiding a real product bug because that test code was very badly written. Firstly it was very difficult to understand what the test was actually trying to achieve let alone how it was doing it, and this complexity masked a simple logic error. These issues are real and they do happen. Let’s take a step back from this and look at what we are trying to do. We are writing test code that tests product code, and we do this to create a suite of tests that will help protect our software against regressions. This test code is making sure that the product behaves as it should by employing some sort of expected result verification. The simple cases of these are generally not a problem. However, automation allows us to explore more complex scenarios in many more permutations. As this complexity increases then so does the complexity of the test code. It is at this point that code which has not been architected properly will cause problems.   Keep your friends close… So, how do we make sure we are doing it right? The development teams I have worked on have always had Test Engineers working very closely with their Software Engineers. This is something that I have always tried to take full advantage of. They are coding experts! So run your ideas past them, ask for advice on how to structure your code, help you design your data structures. This may require a shift in your teams viewpoint, as contrary to this section title and folklore, Software Engineers are not actually the mortal enemy of Test Engineers. As time progresses, and test automation becomes more and more ingrained in what we do, the two roles are converging more than ever. Over the 16 years I have spent as a Test Engineer, I have seen the grey area between the two roles grow significantly larger. This serves to strengthen the relationship and common bond between the two roles which helps to make test code activities so much easier!   Pair for the win Possibly the best thing you could do to write good test code is to pair program on the task. This will serve a few purposes. you will get the benefit of the Software Engineers knowledge and experience the Software Engineer will gain knowledge on the testing process. Sharing the love is a wonderful thing! two pairs of eyes are always better than one… And so are two brains. Between the two of you, I will guarantee you will derive more useful test cases than if it was just one of you.   Code reviews Another policy which certainly pays dividends is the practice of code reviews. By having one of your peers review your code before you commit it serves two purposes. Firstly, it forces you to explain your code. Just the act of doing this will often pick up errors in your code. Secondly, it gets yet another pair of eyes on your code! I cannot stress enough how important code reviews are. The benefits they offer apply as much to product code as test code. In short, Software and Test Engineers should all be doing them! It can be extended even further by getting test code reviewed by a Software Engineer and a Test Engineer, and likewise product code. This serves to keep both functions in the loop with changes going on within your code base.   Learn from your devs I briefly touched on this earlier but I’d like to go into more detail here. Pairing with your Software Engineers when writing your test code is such an amazing opportunity to improve your coding skills. As I sit here writing this article waiting to be called into court for jury service, it reminds me that it takes a lot of patience to be a Test Engineer, almost as much as it takes to be a juror! However tempting it is to go rushing in and start writing your automated tests, resist that urge. Discuss what you want to achieve then talk through the approach you’re going to take. Then code it up together. I find it really enlightening to ask questions like ‘is there a better way to do this?’ Or ‘is this how you would code it?’ The latter question, especially, is where I learn the most. I’ve found that most Software Engineers will be reluctant to show you the ‘right way’ to code something when writing tests because they perceive the ‘right way’ to be too complicated for the Test Engineer (e.g. not mentioning LINQ and instead doing something verbose). So by asking how THEY would code it, it unleashes their true dev-ness and advanced code usually ensues! I would like to point out, however, that you don’t have to accept their method as the final answer. On numerous occasions I have opted for the more simple/verbose solution because I found the code written by the Software Engineer too advanced and therefore I would find it unreadable when I return to the code in a months’ time! Always keep the target audience in mind when writing clever code, and in my case that is mostly Test Engineers.  

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• Screenshot Tour: Ubuntu Touch 14.04 on a Nexus 7

  - by Chris Hoffman

  Ubuntu 14.04 LTS will “form the basis of the first commercially available Ubuntu tablets,” according to Canonical. We installed Ubuntu Touch 14.04 on our own hardware to see what those tablets will be like. We don’t recommend installing this yourself, as it’s still not a polished, complete experience. We’re using “Ubuntu Touch” as shorthand here — apparently this project’s new name is “Ubuntu For Devices.” The Welcome Screen Ubuntu’s touch interface is all about edge swipes and hidden interface elements — it has a lot in common with Windows 8, actually. You’ll see the welcome screen when you boot up or unlock a Ubuntu tablet or phone. If you have new emails, text messages, or other information, it will appear on this screen along with the time and date. If you don’t, you’ll just see a message saying “No data sources available.” The Dash Swipe in from the right edge of the welcome screen to access the Dash, or home screen. This is actually very similar to the Dash on Ubuntu’s Unity desktop. This isn’t a surprise — Canonical wants the desktop and touch versions of Ubuntu to use the same code. In the future, the desktop and touch versions of Ubuntu will use the same version of Unity and Unity will adjust its interface depending on what type of device your’e using. Here you’ll find apps you have installed and apps available to install. Tap an installed app to launch it or tap an available app to view more details and install it. Tap the My apps or Available headings to view a complete list of apps you have installed or apps you can install. Tap the Search box at the top of the screen to start searching — this is how you’d search for new apps to install. As you’d expect, a touch keyboard appears when you tap in the Search field or any other text field. The launcher isn’t just for apps. Tap the Apps heading at the top of the screen and you’ll see hidden text appear — Music, Video, and Scopes. This hidden navigation is used throughout Ubuntu’s different apps and can be easy to miss at first. Swipe to the left or right to move between these screens. These screens are also similar to the different panels in Unity on the desktop. The Scopes section allows you to view different search scopes you have installed. These are used to search different sources when you start a search from the Dash. Search from the Music or Videos scopes to search for local media files on your device or media files online. For example, searching in the Music scope will show you music results from Grooveshark by default. Navigating Ubuntu Touch Swipe in from the left edge anywhere on the system to open the launcher, a bar with shortcuts to apps. This launcher is very similar to the launcher on the left of Ubuntu’s Unity desktop — that’s the whole idea, after all. Once you’ve opened an app, you can leave the app by swiping in from the left. The launcher will appear — keep moving your finger towards the right edge of teh screen. This will swipe the current app off the screen, taking you back to the Dash. Once back on the Dash, you’ll see your open apps represented as thumbnails under Recent. Tap a thumbnail here to go back to a running app. To remove an app from here, long-press it and tap the X button that appears. Swipe in from the right edge in any app to quickly switch between recent apps. Swipe in from the right edge and hold your finger down to reveal an application switcher that shows all your recent apps and lets you choose between them. Swipe down from the top of the screen to access the indicator panel. Here you can connect to Wi-Fi networks, view upcoming events, control GPS and Bluetooth hardware, adjust sound settings, see incoming messages, and more. This panel is for quick access to hardware settings and notifications, just like the indicators on Ubuntu’s Unity desktop. The Apps System settings not included in the pull-down panel are available in the System Settings app. To access it, tap My apps on the Dash and tap System Settings, search for the System Settings app, or open the launcher bar and tap the settings icon. The settings here a bit limited compared to other operating systems, but many of the important options are available here. You can add Evernote, Ubuntu One, Twitter, Facebook, and Google accounts from here. A free Ubuntu One account is mandatory for downloading and updating apps. A Google account can be used to sync contacts and calendar events. Some apps on Ubuntu are native apps, while many are web apps. For example, the Twitter, Gmail, Amazon, Facebook, and eBay apps included by default are all web apps that open each service’s mobile website as an app. Other applications, such as the Weather, Calendar, Dialer, Calculator, and Notes apps are native applications. Theoretically, both types of apps will be able to scale to different screen resolutions. Ubuntu Touch and Ubuntu desktop may one day share the same apps, which will adapt to different display sizes and input methods. Like Windows 8 apps, Ubuntu apps hide interface elements by default, providing you with a full-screen view of the content. Swipe up from the bottom of an app’s screen to view its interface elements. For example, swiping up from the bottom of the Web Browser app reveals Back, Forward, and Refresh buttons, along with an address bar and Activity button so you can view current and recent web pages. Swipe up even more from the bottom and you’ll see a button hovering in the middle of the app. Tap the button and you’ll see many more settings. This is an overflow area for application options and functions that can’t fit on the navigation bar. The Terminal app has a few surprising Easter eggs in this panel, including a “Hack into the NSA” option. Tap it and the following text will appear in the terminal: That’s not very nice, now tracing your location . . . . . . . . . . . .Trace failed You got away this time, but don’t try again. We’d expect to see such Easter eggs disappear before Ubuntu Touch actually ships on real devices. Ubuntu Touch has come a long way, but it’s still not something you want to use today. For example, it doesn’t even have a built-in email client — you’ll have to us your email service’s mobile website. Few apps are available, and many of the ones that are are just mobile websites. It’s not a polished operating system intended for normal users yet — it’s more of a preview for developers and device manufacturers. If you really want to try it yourself, you can install it on a Wi-Fi Nexus 7 (2013), Nexus 10, or Nexus 4 device. Follow Ubuntu’s installation instructions here.

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