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XNA RTS A* pathfinding issues

- by Slayter

I'm starting to develop an RTS game using the XNA framework in C# and am still in the very early prototyping stage. I'm working on the basics. I've got unit selection down and am currently working on moving multiple units. I've implemented an A* pathfinding algorithm which works fine for moving a single unit. However when moving multiple units they stack on top of each other. I tried fixing this with a variation of the boids flocking algorithm but this has caused units to sometimes freeze and get stuck trying to move but going no where. Ill post the related methods for moving the units below but ill only post a link to the pathfinding class because its really long and i don't want to clutter up the page. These parts of the code are in the update method for the main controlling class: if (selectedUnits.Count > 0) { int indexOfLeader = 0; for (int i = 0; i < selectedUnits.Count; i++) { if (i == 0) { indexOfLeader = 0; } else { if (Vector2.Distance(selectedUnits[i].position, destination) < Vector2.Distance(selectedUnits[indexOfLeader].position, destination)) indexOfLeader = i; } selectedUnits[i].leader = false; } selectedUnits[indexOfLeader].leader = true; foreach (Unit unit in selectedUnits) unit.FindPath(destination); } foreach (Unit unit in units) { unit.Update(gameTime, selectedUnits); } These three methods control movement in the Unit class: public void FindPath(Vector2 destination) { if (path != null) path.Clear(); Point startPoint = new Point((int)position.X / 32, (int)position.Y / 32); Point endPoint = new Point((int)destination.X / 32, (int)destination.Y / 32); path = pathfinder.FindPath(startPoint, endPoint); pointCounter = 0; if (path != null) nextPoint = path[pointCounter]; dX = 0.0f; dY = 0.0f; stop = false; } private void Move(List<Unit> units) { if (nextPoint == position && !stop) { pointCounter++; if (pointCounter <= path.Count - 1) { nextPoint = path[pointCounter]; if (nextPoint == position) stop = true; } else if (pointCounter >= path.Count) { path.Clear(); pointCounter = 0; stop = true; } } else { if (!stop) { map.occupiedPoints.Remove(this); Flock(units); // Move in X ********* TOOK OUT SPEED ********** if ((int)nextPoint.X > (int)position.X) { position.X += dX; } else if ((int)nextPoint.X < (int)position.X) { position.X -= dX; } // Move in Y if ((int)nextPoint.Y > (int)position.Y) { position.Y += dY; } else if ((int)nextPoint.Y < (int)position.Y) { position.Y -= dY; } if (position == nextPoint && pointCounter >= path.Count - 1) stop = true; map.occupiedPoints.Add(this, position); } if (stop) { path.Clear(); pointCounter = 0; } } } private void Flock(List<Unit> units) { float distanceToNextPoint = Vector2.Distance(position, nextPoint); foreach (Unit unit in units) { float distance = Vector2.Distance(position, unit.position); if (unit != this) { if (distance < space && !leader && (nextPoint != position)) { // create space dX += (position.X - unit.position.X) * 0.1f; dY += (position.Y - unit.position.Y) * 0.1f; if (dX > .05f) nextPoint.X = nextPoint.X - dX; else if (dX < -.05f) nextPoint.X = nextPoint.X + dX; if (dY > .05f) nextPoint.Y = nextPoint.Y - dY; else if (dY < -.05f) nextPoint.Y = nextPoint.Y + dY; if ((dX < .05f && dX > -.05f) && (dY < .05f && dY > -.05f)) stop = true; path[pointCounter] = nextPoint; Console.WriteLine("Make Space: " + dX + ", " + dY); } else if (nextPoint != position && !stop) { dX = speed; dY = speed; Console.WriteLine(dX + ", " + dY); } } } } And here's the link to the pathfinder: https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B_Cqt6txUDkddU40QXBMeTR1djA I hope this post wasn't too long. Also please excuse the messiness of the code. As I said before this is early prototyping. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

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Application Development: Python or Java (or PHP)

- by luckysmack

I'm looking to get into application development, such as Facebook or Android apps and games. I am doing this for fun and to learn. Once my skills are to par I would like to have some side income from the apps, but I'm not banking on living off that (just so you know where I'm coming from and know what my end goals are). Currently I know and am familiar with PHP and frameworks such as cakephp and yii. However, I have been wanting to learn another language to broaden my horizons and to become a better developer. So I have narrowed it down to 2 languages. Python, and Java (I can already hear people cringing at the difference in the languages I have chosen, but I have some reasons). Python: closer to PHP that Java. Cross platformability. Also great as a general scripting language and has many file system level benefits that PHP does not. Cleaner syntax, readability, blah blah and the list goed on. Python will work great for cross platform apps and can be run on many OS's and is supported by Facebook for app development. But there is no support on Android (for full fledged apps). Java: a much stronger typed language, very robust community and corporate backing. Knowing Java is also good for personal marketability for enterprises, if you're into that. The main benefit here is that Java can write apps natively for Android and the apps can be ported for web versions to play on Facebook. So while I have seen many developers prefer Java over the two, Java has this significant advantage, where I can market my apps in both markets and in the future build more potential income. But like I said it is for fun. While money isn't the goal, it would still be nice. PHP: I'm putting this here because I know it already, and I'm sure a case could be made for it. It obviously works great for Facebook but like Python does not do so well on android. While it's mostly the realm of 'application development' that appeals to me, I do find Android apps fairly interesting and something that has a ton of potential to. But then again Facebook has a ton more users and the apps can also potentially be more immersive (desktop vs. mobile). So this is why I'm kinda stuck on what route to choose. Python for Facebook and web apps, with likely faster development to production times, or Java which can be developed for any of the platforms to make apps. Side note: I'm not really trying to get into 3D development, mostly 2D. And I also want to make an app with real-time play (websockets, etc). Someone mentioned node, js to me for that but Python seems to be more globally versatile for my goals. So, to anyone that does Facebook or Android development in either language: what do you suggest? Any input is valuable and I do appreciate it. And sorry for being long winded. EDIT: as mentioned in one of the answers, my primary goal is gaming. Although I do have some plans for non gaming apps such as general web based and desktop based ones. But gaming is my main goal with the possibility of income. EDIT: Another consideration could be Jython. Writing Python code which is converted into Java bytecode. This would allow the ability to do Android apps using Python. I could be wrong though, I'm still looking into it. Update 1-26-11: I recently acquired a new job which required I learn .NET using C#. Im sure some of you are cringing already but I really like the whole system and how it all works together between desktop and web development. But, as I am still interested in Python very much, and after some research I have decided I will learn Python as well as the IronPython implementation for .NET. But (again: I know...) since .NET is mostly a Windows thing and not as cross-compatible as I like, I will be learning Mono which is a cross platform implementation of .NET where I can use what I learn at work using C# and what I want to learn, Python/IronPython. So while learning and writing C#/.NET @ work I will be learning Python - Mono - Iron Python for what I want to do personally. And the benefit of them all being very closely related will help me out a lot, I think. What do you guys think? I almost feel like that should be another question, but there's not much of a question. Either way, you guys gave very helpful input.

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CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, June 19, 2012

CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, June 19, 2012Popular ReleasesXenta Framework - extensible enterprise n-tier application framework: Xenta Framework 1.8.0: System Requirements OS Windows 7 Windows Vista Windows Server 2008 Windows Server 2008 R2 Web Server Internet Information Service 7.0 or above .NET Framework .NET Framework 4.0 WCF Activation feature HTTP Activation Non-HTTP Activation for net.pipe/net.tcp WCF bindings ASP.NET MVC ASP.NET MVC 3.0 Database Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Additional Deployment Configuration Started Windows Process Activation service Start...ASP.NET REST Services Framework: Release 1.3 - Standard version: The REST-services Framework v1.3 has important functional changes allowing to use complex data types as service call parameters. Such can be mapped to form or query string variables or the HTTP Message Body. This is especially useful when REST-style service URLs with POST or PUT HTTP method is used. Beginning from v1.1 the REST-services Framework is compatible with ASP.NET Routing model as well with CRUD (Create, Read, Update, and Delete) principle. These two are often important when buildin...NanoMVVM: a lightweight wpf MVVM framework: v0.10 stable beta: v0.10 Minor fixes to ui and code, added error example to async commands, separated project into various releases (mainly into logical wholes), removed expression blend satellite assembliesCrashReporter.NET : Exception reporting library for C# and VB.NET: CrashReporter.NET 1.1: Added screenshot support that takes screenshot of user's desktop on application crash and provides option to include screenshot with crash report. Added Windows version in crash reports. Added email field and exception type field in crash report dialog. Added exception type in crash reports. Added screenshot tab that shows crash screenshot.RULI Chain Code Image Generator: RULI Chain Code BW Image Generator v. 0.5: bugfix: corrected wrong height/width 2 pixel too much in each directionMFCMAPI: June 2012 Release: Build: 15.0.0.1034 Full release notes at SGriffin's blog. If you just want to run the MFCMAPI or MrMAPI, get the executables. If you want to debug them, get the symbol files and the source. The 64 bit builds will only work on a machine with Outlook 2010 64 bit installed. All other machines should use the 32 bit builds, regardless of the operating system. Facebook BadgeMonoGame - Write Once, Play Everywhere: MonoGame 2.5.1: Release Notes The MonoGame team are pleased to announce that MonoGame v2.5.1 has been released. This release contains important bug fixes and minor updates. Recent additions include project templates for iOS and MacOS. The MonoDevelop.MonoGame AddIn also works on Linux. We have removed the dependency on the thirdparty GamePad library to allow MonoGame to be included in the debian/ubuntu repositories. There have been a major bug fix to ensure textures are disposed of correctly as well as some ...JayData - The cross-platform HTML5 data-management library for JavaScript: JayData 1.1.0: JayData is a unified data access library for JavaScript developers to query and update data from different sources like WebSQL, IndexedDB, OData, Facebook or YQL. The library can be integrated with Knockout.js or Sencha Touch 2. See it in action in this 6 minutes video Sencha Touch 2 example app using JayData: Netflix browser. New features in JayData 1.1.0http://jaydata.org/blog/release-notes OData provider improvements We worked out the support of OData v1 and v3 (beyond v2). Visit http://...XDA ROM Hub: XDA ROM Hub v0.36: Fixed typo's :D Added simple guide.JaySvcUtil - generate JavaScript context from OData metadata: JaySvcUtil 1.1: JaySvcUtil 1.1 You will need the JayData library to use contexts generated with JaySvcUtil! Get it from here: http://jaydata.codeplex.com.????: ????2.0.2: 1、???????????。 2、DJ???????10?，?????????10?。 3、??.NET 4.5(Windows 8)????????????。 4、???????????。 5、??????????????。 6、???Windows 8????。 7、?????2.0.1???????????????。 8、??DJ?????????。Azure Storage Explorer: Azure Storage Explorer 5 Preview 1 (6.17.2012): Azure Storage Explorer verison 5 is in development, and Preview 1 provides an early look at the new user interface and some of the new features. Here's what's new in v5 Preview 1: New UI, similar to the new Windows Azure HTML5 portal Support for configuring and viewing storage account logging Support for configuring and viewing storage account monitoring Uses the Windows Azure 1.7 SDK libraries Bug fixesCodename 'Chrometro': Developer Preview: Welcome to the Codename 'Chrometro' Developer Preview! This is the very first public preview of the app. Please note that this is a highly primitive build and the app is not even half of what it is meant to be. The Developer Preview sports the following: 1) An easy to use application setup. 2) The Assistant which simplifies your task of customization. 3) The partially complete Metro UI. 4) A variety of settings 5) A partially complete web browsing experience To get started, download the Ins...????????API for .Net SDK: SDK for .Net ??? Release 2: 6?19????? ?? - ???????????????，???????0?????????。 ?? - ???Entity?????Suggestion??????????????JSON????????。 ?? - ???OAuth?Request??????AccessToken???SourceKey????QueryString?????????。 6?17????? ??? - .net 4.0 SDK??Dynamic??????????????????API?? ??? - ?Utility?????????API??????DateTime???ParseUTCDate ?? - ?????????????Json.net???，???SDK????Json.net?????。 ?? - ???Client??????API???GetCommand?PostCommand，?????????????????API??。 ?? - ???????，??????API?，??????API???，???string???，??Enti...Cosmos (C# Open Source Managed Operating System): Release 92560: Prerequisites Visual Studio 2010 - Any version including Express. Express users must also install Visual Studio 2010 Integrated Shell runtime VMWare - Cosmos can run on real hardware as well as other virtualization environments but our default debug setup is configured for VMWare. VMWare Player (Free). or Workstation VMWare VIX API 1.11AutoUpdaterdotNET : Autoupdate for VB.NET and C# Developer: AutoUpdater.NET 1.1: Release Notes New feature added that allows user to select remind later interval.Microsoft SQL Server Product Samples: Database: AdventureWorks 2008 OLTP Script: Install AdventureWorks2008 OLTP database from script The AdventureWorks database can be created by running the instawdb.sql DDL script contained in the AdventureWorks 2008 OLTP Script.zip file. The instawdb.sql script depends on two path environment variables: SqlSamplesDatabasePath and SqlSamplesSourceDataPath. The SqlSamplesDatabasePath environment variable is set to the default Microsoft ® SQL Server 2008 path. You will need to change the SqlSamplesSourceDataPath environment variable to th...WipeTouch, a jQuery touch plugin: 1.2.0: Changes since 1.1.0: New: wipeMove event, triggered while moving the mouse/finger. New: added "source" to the result object. Bug fix: sometimes vertical wipe events would not trigger correctly. Bug fix: improved tapToClick handler. General code refactoring. Windows Phone 7 is not supported, yet! Its behaviour is completely broken and would require some special tricks to make it work. Maybe in the future...Phalanger - The PHP Language Compiler for the .NET Framework: 3.0.0.3026 (June 2012): Fixes: round( 0.0 ) local TimeZone name TimeZone search compiling multi-script-assemblies PhpString serialization DocDocument::loadHTMLFile() token_get_all() parse_url()BlackJumboDog: Ver5.6.4: 2012.06.13 Ver5.6.4 　(1) Web???????、???POST??????????????????New Projectsasp.net membership: A basic membership project for the use of various learning issues like MVC, Entity Framework, ASP.NET membership, Ajax, IOC Container, Application architectureCRM 2011 Visual Studio Tools: CRM 2011 Visual Studio Tools is a VSPackage for Visual Studio 2010. It contains at the beginning the CRM 2011 Script Injector, which is using the FiddlerCore. This will allow the JavaScript developer to test his scripts without the need to upload and publish the files in CRM. The tool will exchange the needed scripts on the fly with the version on your local machine, while you navigate through the CRM in your Browser. It is supporting right now Visual Studio 2010 and Microsoft CRM 2011 On-...Crop Circle Maze: This project is for our team to educate ourselves on developing 3D programming skills.DarkLight Engine: Le DarkLight engine est un moteur 3D basé programmé en C# et utilisant les API DirectX10 et WPF.DirectX Tool Kit: DirectXTK is a shared source library of helpers for Direct3D 11 C++ applications.DirectXTex texture processing library: DirectXTex is a shared source library for doing Direct3D texture processing and image I/O.FluentHtmlWriter: Extensions to HtmlTextWriter to enable a fluent coding interfaceHarrier: A multithreaded TCP/IP server with Lua scripting, designed as a base for your own server projects.Hide "Limited Access" in SharePoint interface: Hides "Limited Access" entries unitl user decides to show them in user.aspxiPark: iParkogeditor.net: ogeditor.net is web based WYSIWYG HTML editor with built-in File Manager. ogEditor has some unique features never seen before.Pi# - Raspberry Pi GPIO Library for .NET: A .NET GPIO Library for the Raspberry PiProLaunch: ProLaunch is an Application Launcher for Windows w/ Twitter Integration and URL shortening capabilities.SharePoint 2010 Photo Gallery Spotlight: This sandboxed webpart displays images from a Picture Gallery and presents it in a visual representation modeled after jQuery Tools Scrollable projectSharp Tables: A hierarchical database package designed to efficiently manage very large amounts of data, in C#.simple is facebook: This is an android application that connect to Facebook Survival Engine: Small ActionScript-based game. Monsters, explosions, big guns (now small, but soon...) and very bad graphics mixed in this project. Join us and have fun :)Synthetic Transaction Monitoring Framework: provides infrastructure and tools for scheduling and executing synthetic user scenarios via Windows Azure. The World Around: Personal project to create a catalog of the most beautiful and popular places of the world.Vokabeltrainer App für Windows Phone 7.5: Der Link zur App kommt sobald die veröffentlicht ist.WillowTree# CKY: graohix updateded to reflect the main game images

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Disaster Recovery Discovery

- by Rodney Landrum

Last weekend I joined several of my IT staff on a mission to perform a DR test in our remote CoLo center in a large South East city of the US. Can I be more obtuse? The goal was simple for me as the sole DBA in a throng of Windows, Storage, Network and SAN admins – restore the databases and make them work. There were 4 applications that back ended to 7 SQL Server databases on 4 different SQL Server instances. We would maintain the original server names, but beyond that it was fair game. We had time to prepare so I was able to script out or otherwise automate the recovery process. I used sp_help_revlogin for three of the servers, a bit of a cheat actually because restoring the Master database on the target DR servers was the specified course of action according to the DR procedures ( the caveat “IF REQUIRED” left it open to interpretation. I really wanted to avoid the step of restoring Master for a number of reasons but mainly because I did not want to deal with issues starting SQL Services afterward. Having to account for the location of TempDB and the version conflicts of the resource DBs were just two of the battles I chose not to fight. Not to mention other system database location problems that might arise and prevent SQL from starting. I was going to have to restore all of the user databases anyway, so I would not really gain any benefit, outside of logins, for taking the time to restore the source Master database over the newly installed one on the fresh server. What I wanted was the ability to restore the Master database as a user database, call it Master_Mine, from a backup on the source system and then use that restored database to script the SQL Logins and passwords on the DR systems. While I did not attempt this on the trip, the thought stuck in my mind and this past week I succeeded at scripting user accounts and passwords using only a restored copy of the Master database. Granted there were several challenges to overcome. Also, as is usual for any work like this the usual disclaimers apply: This is not something that I would imagine Microsoft would condone or support and this was really only an experiment for me to learn if it was even possible. While I have tested the process with success, I do not know that I would use this technique in a documented procedure because future updates for SQL Server will render this technique non-functional. I thought at first, incorrectly of course, that I could use sp_help_revlogin on a restored copy of the master database I named Master_Mine. Since sp_help_revlogin uses system schema objects, sys.syslogins and sys.server_principals, this was not going to work because all results would come from the main Master database. To test this I added a SQL login via SSMS, backed up Master, restored it as Master_Mine, and then deleted the login. Even though the test account I created should presumably still be in the Master_Mine database, I should be able to get to it and script out its creation with its password hash so that I would not need to know the password, but any applications that stored that password would not have to be altered in the DR scenario. They would just work as expected. Once I realized that would not work I began looking deeper. Knowing that sys.syslogins and sys.server_principals are system views, their underlying code should be available with sp_helptext, right? They were. And this led me to discover the two tables sys.sysxlgns and sys.sysprivs, where the data I needed was stored. These tables existed in both the real Master and the restored copy, Master_Mine. I used this information to tweak the sp_help_revlogin stored procedure to use these tables instead to create the logins cursor used in sp_help_revlogin. For the password hash, sp_help_revlogin uses the function LoginProperty() which takes a user name and option ‘passwordhash’ to return the hash for the user. Unfortunately, it requires the login to exist in the Master database. This would not work. So another slight modification I had to make was to pull the password hash itself (pwdhash from sys.sysxlgns) into the logins cursor and comment out the section of sp_help_revlogin that uses LoginProperty. Instead, I pass the pwdhash value as the variable @PWD_varbinary to the sp_hexadecimal stored procedure which is also created by and used within the code provided by Microsoft in the link above for sp_help_revlogin. The final challenge: sys.sysxlgns and sys.server_principals are visible only within a Dedicated Administrator Connection (DAC) query window in SSMS or within SQLCDMD. To open a DAC connection you have to be logged in on the SQL Server itself, via RDP in my case, and you preface the server name in the query connection with ADMIN:, so that the server connection looks like ADMIN:ServerName. From there you can create the modified stored procedure in the restored copy of a Master database from a source system as whatever name you like, and then run the modified stored procedure. I named my new stored procedure usp_help_revlogin_MyMaster. Upon execution I was happy to see the logins and password hashes that I needed to apply from the source Master database without having to restore over the new Master system database and without the need to access the original server (assuming it was down due to whatever disaster put it in that state). You will note that I am not providing full code samples here of the modifications. I will say that it was a slight bit of work and anyone who needed to do this for whatever reason, could fairly easily roll their own solution with the information provided herein. My goal, as I said was to prove that this could be done and provide another option if required to ease the burden of getting SQL Servers up and available in an emergency situation where alternatives may be more challenging or otherwise unavailable.

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Best Method For Evaluating Existing Software or New Software

How many of us have been faced with having to decide on an off-the-self or a custom built component, application, or solution to integrate in to an existing system or to be the core foundation of a new system? What is the best method for evaluating existing software or new software still in the design phase? One of the industry preferred methodologies to use is the Active Reviews for Intermediate Designs (ARID) evaluation process. ARID is a hybrid mixture of the Active Design Review (ADR) methodology and the Architectural Tradeoff Analysis Method (ATAM). So what is ARID? ARD’s main goal is to ensure quality, detailed designs in software. One way in which it does this is by empowering reviewers by assigning generic open ended survey questions. This approach attempts to remove the possibility for allowing the standard answers such as “Yes” or “No”. The ADR process ignores the “Yes”/”No” questions due to the fact that they can be leading based on how the question is asked. Additionally these questions tend to receive less thought in comparison to more open ended questions. Common Active Design Review Questions What possible exceptions can occur in this component, application, or solution? How should exceptions be handled in this component, application, or solution? Where should exceptions be handled in this component, application, or solution? How should the component, application, or solution flow based on the design? What is the maximum execution time for every component, application, or solution? What environments can this component, application, or solution? What data dependencies does this component, application, or solution have? What kind of data does this component, application, or solution require? Ok, now I know what ARID is, how can I apply? Let’s imagine that your organization is going to purchase an off-the-shelf (OTS) solution for its customer-relationship management software. What process would we use to ensure that the correct purchase is made? If we use ARID, then we will have a series of 9 steps broken up by 2 phases in order to ensure that the correct OTS solution is purchases. Phase 1 Identify the Reviewers Prepare the Design Briefing Prepare the Seed Scenarios Prepare the Materials When identifying reviewers for a design it is preferred that they be pulled from a candidate pool comprised of developers that are going to implement the design. The believe is that developers actually implementing the design will have more a vested interest in ensuring that the design is correct prior to the start of code. Design debriefing consist of a summary of the design, examples of the design solving real world examples put in to use and should be no longer than two hours typically. The primary goal of this briefing is to adequately summarize the design so that the review members could actually implement the design. In the example of purchasing an OTS product I would attempt to review my briefing prior to its distribution with the review facilitator to ensure that nothing was excluded that should have not been. This practice will also allow me to test the length of the briefing to ensure that can be delivered in an appropriate about of time. Seed Scenarios are designed to illustrate conceptualized scenarios when applied with a set of sample data. These scenarios can then be used by the reviewers in the actual evaluation of the software, All materials needed for the evaluation should be prepared ahead of time so that they can be reviewed prior to and during the meeting. Materials Included: Presentation Seed Scenarios Review Agenda Phase 2 Present ARID Present Design Brainstorm and prioritize scenarios Apply scenarios Summarize Prior to the start of any ARID review meeting the Facilitator should define the remaining steps of ARID so that all the participants know exactly what they are doing prior to the start of the review process. Once the ARID rules have been laid out, then the lead designer presents an overview of the design which typically takes about two hours. During this time no questions about the design or rational are allowed to be asked by the review panel as a standard, but they are written down for use latter in the process. After the presentation the list of compiled questions is then summarized and sent back to the lead designer as areas that need to be addressed further. In the example of purchasing an OTS product issues could arise regarding security, the implementation needed or even if this is this the correct product to solve the needed solution. After the Design presentation a brainstorming and prioritize scenarios process begins by reducing the seed scenarios down to just the highest priority scenarios. These will then be used to test the design for suitability. Once the selected scenarios have been defined the reviewers apply the examples provided in the presentation to the scenarios. The intended output of this process is to provide code or pseudo code that makes use of the examples provided while solving the selected seed scenarios. As a standard rule, the designers of the systems are not allowed to help the review board unless they all become stuck. When this occurs it is documented and along with the reason why the designer needed to help the review panel back on track. Once all of the scenarios have been completed the review facilitator reviews with the group issues that arise during the process. Then the reviewers will be polled as to efficacy of the review experience. References: Clements, Paul., Kazman, Rick., Klien, Mark. (2002). Evaluating Software Architectures: Methods and Case Studies Indianapolis, IN: Addison-Wesley

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Repeated disconnects on WPA PEAP network

- by exasperated

My school has a WPA PEAP network with GTC inner authentication. I am able to connect to the network, but once I load a website or two, the network become unresponsive (i.e. in Chromium, it gets stuck at "Sending request"), and I'm eventually disconnected. Any help will be greatly appreciated. Here's some log output. I can provide more if needed: Ubuntu 13.04 3.8.0-32-generic x86_64 lsusb: 03:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation Centrino Advanced-N 6235 (rev 24) lsmod: iwldvm 241872 0 mac80211 606457 1 iwldvm iwlwifi 173516 1 iwldvm cfg80211 511019 3 iwlwifi,mac80211,iwldvm dmesg: [ 3.501227] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0: irq 46 for MSI/MSI-X [ 3.503541] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0: loaded firmware version 18.168.6.1 [ 3.527153] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0: CONFIG_IWLWIFI_DEBUG disabled [ 3.527162] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0: CONFIG_IWLWIFI_DEBUGFS enabled [ 3.527170] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0: CONFIG_IWLWIFI_DEVICE_TRACING enabled [ 3.527178] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0: CONFIG_IWLWIFI_DEVICE_TESTMODE enabled [ 3.527186] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0: CONFIG_IWLWIFI_P2P disabled [ 3.527192] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0: Detected Intel(R) Centrino(R) Advanced-N 6235 AGN, REV=0xB0 [ 3.527240] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0: L1 Disabled; Enabling L0S [ 3.551049] ieee80211 phy0: Selected rate control algorithm 'iwl-agn-rs' [ 375.153065] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0: L1 Disabled; Enabling L0S [ 375.159727] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0: Radio type=0x2-0x1-0x0 [ 375.553201] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0: L1 Disabled; Enabling L0S [ 375.559871] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0: Radio type=0x2-0x1-0x0 [ 1892.110738] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0: L1 Disabled; Enabling L0S [ 1892.117357] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0: Radio type=0x2-0x1-0x0 [ 5227.235372] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0: L1 Disabled; Enabling L0S [ 5227.242122] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0: Radio type=0x2-0x1-0x0 [ 5817.817954] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0: L1 Disabled; Enabling L0S [ 5817.824560] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0: Radio type=0x2-0x1-0x0 [ 5824.571917] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0 wlan0: disabling HT/VHT due to WEP/TKIP use [ 5824.571929] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0 wlan0: disabling HT as WMM/QoS is not supported by the AP [ 5824.571935] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0 wlan0: disabling VHT as WMM/QoS is not supported by the AP [ 6956.290061] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0: L1 Disabled; Enabling L0S [ 6956.296671] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0: Radio type=0x2-0x1-0x0 [ 6963.080560] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0 wlan0: disabling HT/VHT due to WEP/TKIP use [ 6963.080566] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0 wlan0: disabling HT as WMM/QoS is not supported by the AP [ 6963.080570] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0 wlan0: disabling VHT as WMM/QoS is not supported by the AP [ 7613.469241] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0: L1 Disabled; Enabling L0S [ 7613.475870] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0: Radio type=0x2-0x1-0x0 [ 7620.201265] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0 wlan0: disabling HT/VHT due to WEP/TKIP use [ 7620.201278] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0 wlan0: disabling HT as WMM/QoS is not supported by the AP [ 7620.201285] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0 wlan0: disabling VHT as WMM/QoS is not supported by the AP [ 8232.762453] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0: L1 Disabled; Enabling L0S [ 8232.769065] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0: Radio type=0x2-0x1-0x0 [ 8239.581772] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0 wlan0: disabling HT/VHT due to WEP/TKIP use [ 8239.581784] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0 wlan0: disabling HT as WMM/QoS is not supported by the AP [ 8239.581792] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0 wlan0: disabling VHT as WMM/QoS is not supported by the AP [13763.634808] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0: L1 Disabled; Enabling L0S [13763.641427] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0: Radio type=0x2-0x1-0x0 [16955.598953] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0: L1 Disabled; Enabling L0S [16955.605574] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0: Radio type=0x2-0x1-0x0 lshw: *-network description: Wireless interface product: Centrino Advanced-N 6235 vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:03:00.0 logical name: wlan0 version: 24 serial: b4:b6:76:a0:4b:3c width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list ethernet physical wireless configuration: broadcast=yes driver=iwlwifi driverversion=3.8.0-32-generic firmware=18.168.6.1 ip=10.250.169.96 latency=0 link=yes multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11abgn resources: irq:46 memory:f7c00000-f7c01fff iwlist scan: Cell 02 - Address: 24:DE:C6:B0:C7:D9 Channel:36 Frequency:5.18 GHz (Channel 36) Quality=29/70 Signal level=-81 dBm Encryption key:on ESSID:"CatChat2x" Bit Rates:6 Mb/s; 9 Mb/s; 12 Mb/s; 18 Mb/s; 24 Mb/s 36 Mb/s; 48 Mb/s; 54 Mb/s Mode:Master Extra:tsf=0000004ff3fe419b Extra: Last beacon: 27820ms ago IE: Unknown: 0009436174436861743278 IE: Unknown: 01088C129824B048606C IE: Unknown: 030124 IE: IEEE 802.11i/WPA2 Version 1 Group Cipher : CCMP Pairwise Ciphers (1) : CCMP Authentication Suites (1) : 802.1x IE: Unknown: 2D1ACC011BFFFF000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 IE: Unknown: 3D1624001B000000FF000000000000000000000000000000 IE: Unknown: DD180050F2020101800003A4000027A4000042435E0062322F00 IE: Unknown: DD1E00904C33CC011BFFFF000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 IE: Unknown: DD1A00904C3424001B000000FF000000000000000000000000000000 Cell 04 - Address: 24:DE:C6:B0:C3:E9 Channel:149 Frequency:5.745 GHz Quality=28/70 Signal level=-82 dBm Encryption key:on ESSID:"CatChat2x" Bit Rates:6 Mb/s; 9 Mb/s; 12 Mb/s; 18 Mb/s; 24 Mb/s 36 Mb/s; 48 Mb/s; 54 Mb/s Mode:Master Extra:tsf=000000181f60e19c Extra: Last beacon: 28680ms ago IE: Unknown: 0009436174436861743278 IE: Unknown: 01088C129824B048606C IE: Unknown: 030195 IE: Unknown: 050400010000 IE: IEEE 802.11i/WPA2 Version 1 Group Cipher : CCMP Pairwise Ciphers (1) : CCMP Authentication Suites (1) : 802.1x IE: Unknown: 2D1ACC011BFFFF000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 IE: Unknown: 3D1695001B000000FF000000000000000000000000000000 IE: Unknown: DD180050F2020101800003A4000027A4000042435E0062322F00 IE: Unknown: DD1E00904C33CC011BFFFF000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 IE: Unknown: DD1A00904C3495001B000000FF000000000000000000000000000000 IE: Unknown: DD07000B8601040817 IE: Unknown: DD0E000B860103006170313930333032 Cell 09 - Address: 24:DE:C6:B0:C0:29 Channel:149 Frequency:5.745 GHz Quality=39/70 Signal level=-71 dBm Encryption key:on ESSID:"CatChat2x" Bit Rates:6 Mb/s; 9 Mb/s; 12 Mb/s; 18 Mb/s; 24 Mb/s 36 Mb/s; 48 Mb/s; 54 Mb/s Mode:Master Extra:tsf=00000112fb688ede Extra: Last beacon: 27716ms ago ifconfig (while connected): wlan0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr b4:b6:76:a0:4b:3c inet addr:10.250.16.220 Bcast:10.250.31.255 Mask:255.255.240.0 inet6 addr: fe80::b6b6:76ff:fea0:4b3c/64 Scope:Link UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:230023 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:130970 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:255999759 (255.9 MB) TX bytes:16652605 (16.6 MB) iwconfig (while connected): wlan0 IEEE 802.11abgn ESSID:"CatChat2x" Mode:Managed Frequency:5.745 GHz Access Point: 24:DE:C6:B0:C0:29 Bit Rate=6 Mb/s Tx-Power=15 dBm Retry long limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off Power Management:off Link Quality=36/70 Signal level=-74 dBm Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0 Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:3 Missed beacon:0

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how to run this qt script? (newbie question)

- by GB_J

I have a qt script(barchart.qs) that creates a graph for me. I don't know how i can incorporate(ie show the graph) in my qt mainwindow. Can some one please help me look at the code and what its outputs are? I tried engine.evaluate, but i do not know what is the QScriptValue i'm getting in return. Thanks sooo much. This is the script: BarChart.prototype = new QWidget; BarChart.prototype.suffix = ""; function BarChart(parent) { QWidget.call(this, parent); } // find the maximum value and widest (pixel-wise) label and suffix BarChart.prototype.showEvent = function(event) { var fm = new QFontMetrics(this); this.margin = 20; this.titleHeight = fm.height(); this.barHeight = 1.5 * fm.height(); this.barSpacing = 0.6 * fm.height(); this.maxValue = this.suffixWidth = this.labelWidth = 0; var count = 0; for (d in this.data) { this.labelWidth = Math.max(this.labelWidth, fm.width(d)); this.maxValue = Math.max(this.maxValue, this.data[d]); this.suffixWidth = Math.max(this.suffixWidth, fm.width(String(this.data[d]) + " " + this.suffix)); count++; } this.startHue = 15; this.hueDelta = 360 / count; this.size = new QSize(640, this.titleHeight + 2 * this.margin + (this.barHeight + this.barSpacing) * count); } BarChart.prototype.paintEvent = function(event) { var p = new QPainter; p.begin(this); // background and title p.fillRect(this.rect, new QBrush(new QColor(255, 255, 255))); p.drawText(0, 0, this.width, this.margin + this.titleHeight, Qt.AlignCenter, this.windowTitle, 0); var ofs = this.labelWidth + this.margin; var ww = this.width - this.suffixWidth - ofs - 2 * this.margin; var hue = this.startHue; var y = 0; p.translate(this.margin, this.titleHeight + 1.5 * this.margin); for (d in this.data) { // label on the left side p.setPen(new QColor(Qt.black)); p.drawText(0, y, this.labelWidth, this.barHeight, Qt.AlignVCenter + Qt.AlignRight, d, 0); // the colored bar var gradient = new QLinearGradient(new QPoint(ofs, y), new QPoint(ofs, y + this.barHeight)); gradient.setColorAt(0, QColor.fromHsv(hue, 255, 240)); gradient.setColorAt(1, QColor.fromHsv(hue, 255, 92)); p.setBrush(new QBrush(gradient)); p.setPen(new QColor(96, 96, 96)); var bw = this.data[d] * ww / this.maxValue; p.drawRect(ofs, y, bw, this.barHeight); // extra text at the end of the bar var text = new String(this.data[d] + " " + this.suffix); p.setPen(new QColor(Qt.black)); p.drawText(ofs + bw + this.margin/2, y, this.suffixWidth, this.barHeight, Qt.AlignVCenter + Qt.AlignLeft, text, 0); // for the next bar y += (this.barHeight + this.barSpacing); hue += this.hueDelta; if (hue >= 360) hue -= 360; } p.end(); } BarChart.prototype.wheelEvent = function(event) { this.startHue += event.delta() / 8 / 5; if (this.startHue = 360) this.startHue -= 360; if (this.startHue < 0) this.startHue += 360; this.update(); event.ignore(); } BarChart.prototype.mousePressEvent = function(event) { var fname = QFileDialog.getSaveFileName(this, "Save", ".", "*.png", 0, 0); if (fname.length > 0) { var img = new QImage(this.size, QImage.Format_ARGB32_Premultiplied); this.render(img); img.save(new QFile(fname)); } } var chart = new BarChart; chart.windowTitle = "Monthly"; chart.suffix = "reports"; chart.data = { "September" : 45, "October" : 60, "November" : 56, "December" : 0 }; chart.show(); QCoreApplication.exec();

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How do I resolve this exercise on C++? [closed]

- by user40630

(Card Shuffling and Dealing) Create a program to shuffle and deal a deck of cards. The program should consist of class Card, class DeckOfCards and a driver program. Class Card should provide: a) Data members face and suit of type int. b) A constructor that receives two ints representing the face and suit and uses them to initialize the data members. c) Two static arrays of strings representing the faces and suits. d) A toString function that returns the Card as a string in the form “face of suit.” You can use the + operator to concatenate strings. Class DeckOfCards should contain: a) A vector of Cards named deck to store the Cards. b) An integer currentCard representing the next card to deal. c) A default constructor that initializes the Cards in the deck. The constructor should use vector function push_back to add each Card to the end of the vector after the Card is created and initialized. This should be done for each of the 52 Cards in the deck. d) A shuffle function that shuffles the Cards in the deck. The shuffle algorithm should iterate through the vector of Cards. For each Card, randomly select another Card in the deck and swap the two Cards. e) A dealCard function that returns the next Card object from the deck. f) A moreCards function that returns a bool value indicating whether there are more Cards to deal. The driver program should create a DeckOfCards object, shuffle the cards, then deal the 52 cards. This above is the exercise I'm trying to solve. I'd be very much appreciated if someone could solve it and explain it to me. The main idea of the program is quite simple. What I don't get is how to build the constructor for the class DeckOfCards and how to generate the 52 cards of the deck with different suits and faces. Untill now I've managed to do this: #include <iostream> #include <vector> using namespace std; /* * */ /* a) Data members face and suit of type int. b) A constructor that receives two ints representing the face and suit and uses them to initialize the data members. c) Two static arrays of strings representing the faces and suits. d) A toString function that returns the Card as a string in the form “face of suit.” You can use the + operator to concatenate strings. */ class Card { public: Card(int, int); string toString(); private: int suit, face; static string faceNames[13]; static string suitNames[4]; }; string Card::faceNames[13] = {"Ace","Two","Three","Four","Five","Six","Seven","Eight","Nine","Ten","Queen","Jack","King"}; string Card::suitNames[4] = {"Diamonds","Clubs","Hearts","Spades"}; string Card::toString() { return faceNames[face]+" of "+suitNames[suit]; } Card::Card(int f, int s) :face(f), suit(s) { } /* Class DeckOfCards should contain: a) A vector of Cards named deck to store the Cards. b) An integer currentCard representing the next card to deal. c) A default constructor that initializes the Cards in the deck. The constructor should use vector function push_back to add each Card to the end of the vector after the Card is created and initialized. This should be done for each of the 52 Cards in the deck. d) A shuffle function that shuffles the Cards in the deck. The shuffle algorithm should iterate through the vector of Cards. For each Card, randomly select another Card in the deck and swap the two Cards. e) A dealCard function that returns the next Card object from the deck. f) A moreCards function that returns a bool value indicating whether there are more Cards to deal. */ class DeckOfCards { public: DeckOfCards(); void shuffleCards(); Card dealCard(); bool moreCards(); private: vector<Card> deck(52); int currentCard; }; int main(int argc, char** argv) { return 0; } DeckOfCards::DeckOfCards() { //I'm stuck here I have no idea of what to take out of here. //I still don't fully get the idea of class inside class and that's turning out as a problem. I try to find a way to set the suits and faces members of the class Card but I can't figure out how. for(int i=0; i<deck.size(); i++) { deck[i]//....There is no function to set them. They must be set when initialized. But how?? } } For easier reading: http://pastebin.com/pJeXMH0f

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How do I cleanly design a central render/animation loop?

- by mtoast

I'm learning some graphics programming, and am in the midst of my first such project of any substance. But, I am really struggling at the moment with how to architect it cleanly. Let me explain. To display complicated graphics in my current language of choice (JavaScript -- have you heard of it?), you have to draw graphical content onto a <canvas> element. And to do animation, you must clear the <canvas> after every frame (unless you want previous graphics to remain). Thus, most canvas-related JavaScript demos I've seen have a function like this: function render() { clearCanvas(); // draw stuff here requestAnimationFrame(render); } render, as you may surmise, encapsulates the drawing of a single frame. What a single frame contains at a specific point in time, well... that is determined by the program state. So, in order for my program to do its thing, I just need to look at the state, and decide what to render. Right? Right. But that is more complicated than it seems. My program is called "Critter Clicker". In my program, you see several cute critters bouncing around the screen. Clicking on one of them agitates it, making it bounce around even more. There is also a start screen, which says "Click to start!" prior to the critters being displayed. Here are a few of the objects I'm working with in my program: StartScreenView // represents the start screen CritterTubView // represents the area in which the critters live CritterList // a collection of all the critters Critter // a single critter model CritterView // view of a single critter Nothing too egregious with this, I think. Yet, when I set out to flesh out my render function, I get stuck, because everything I write seems utterly ugly and reminiscent of a certain popular Italian dish. Here are a couple of approaches I've attempted, with my internal thought process included, and unrelated bits excluded for clarity. Approach 1: "It's conditions all the way down" // "I'll just write the program as I think it, one frame at a time." if (assetsLoaded) { if (userClickedToStart) { if (critterTubDisplayed) { if (crittersDisplayed) { forEach(crittersList, function(c) { if (c.wasClickedRecently) { c.getAgitated(); } }); } else { displayCritters(); } } else { displayCritterTub(); } } else { displayStartScreen(); } } That's a very much simplified example. Yet even with only a fraction of all the rendering conditions visible, render is already starting to get out of hand. So, I dispense with that and try another idea: Approach 2: Under the Rug // "Each view object shall be responsible for its own rendering. // "I'll pass each object the program state, and each can render itself." startScreen.render(state); critterTub.render(state); critterList.render(state); In this setup, I've essentially just pushed those crazy nested conditions to a deeper level in the code, hiding them from view. In other words, startScreen.render would check state to see if it needed actually to be drawn or not, and take the correct action. But this seems more like it only solves a code-aesthetic problem. The third and final approach I'm considering that I'll share is the idea that I could invent my own "wheel" to take care of this. I'm envisioning a function that takes a data structure that defines what should happen at any given point in the render call -- revealing the conditions and dependencies as a kind of tree. Approach 3: Mad Scientist renderTree({ phases: ['startScreen', 'critterTub', 'endCredits'], dependencies: { startScreen: ['assetsLoaded'], critterTub: ['startScreenClicked'], critterList ['critterTubDisplayed'] // etc. }, exclusions: { startScreen: ['startScreenClicked'], // etc. } }); That seems kind of cool. I'm not exactly sure how it would actually work, but I can see it being a rather nifty way to express things, especially if I flex some of JavaScript's events. In any case, I'm a little bit stumped because I don't see an obvious way to do this. If you couldn't tell, I'm coming to this from the web development world, and finding that doing animation is a bit more exotic than arranging an MVC application for handling simple requests - responses. What is the clean, established solution to this common-I-would-think problem?

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JustCode Provides Reflector Alternative

- by Joe Mayo

If you've been a loyal Reflector user, you've probably been exposed to the debacle surrounding RedGate's decision to no longer offer a free version. Since then, the race has begun for a replacement with a provider that would stand by their promises to the community. Mono has an ongoing free alternative, which has been available for a long time. However, other vendors are stepping up to the plate, with their own offerings. If Not Reflector, Then What? One of these vendors is Telerik. In their recent Q1 2011 release of JustCode, Telerik offers a decompilation utility rivaling what we've become accustomed to in Reflector. Not only does Telerik offer a usable replacement, but they've (in my opinion), produced a product that integrates more naturally with visual Studio than any other product ever has. Telerik's decompilation process is so easy that the accompanying demo in this post is blindingly short (except for the presence of verbose narrative). If you want to follow along with this demo, you'll need to have Telerik JustCode installed. If you don't have JustCode yet, you can buy it or download a trial at the Telerik Web site . A Tall Tale; Prove It! With JustCode, you can view code in the .NET Framework or any other 3rd party library (that isn't well obfuscated). This demo depends on LINQ to Twitter, which you can download from CodePlex.com and create a reference or install the package online as described in my previous post on NuGet. Regardless of the method, you'll have a project with a reference to LINQ to Twitter. Use a Console Project if you want to follow along with this demo. Note: If you've created a Console project, remember to ensure that the Target Framework is set to .NET Framework 4. The default is .NET Framework 4 Client Profile, which doesn't work with LINQ to Twitter. You can check by double-clicking the Properties folder on the project and inspecting the Target Framework setting. Next, you'll need to add some code to your program that you want to inspect. Here, I add code to instantiate a TwitterContext, which is like a LINQ to SQL DataContext, but works with Twitter: var l2tCtx = new TwitterContext(); If you're following along add the code above to the Main method, which will look similar to this: using LinqToTwitter; namespace NuGetInstall { class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { var l2tCtx = new TwitterContext(); } } } The code above doesn't really do anything, but it does give something that I can show and demonstrate how JustCode decompilation works. Once the code is in place, click on TwitterContext and press the F12 (Go to Definition) key. As expected, Visual Studio opens a metadata file with prototypes for the TwitterContext class. Here's the result: Opening a metadata file is the normal way that Visual Studio works when navigating to the definition of a type where you don't have the code. The scenario with TwitterContext happens because you don't have the source code to the file. Visual Studio has always done this and you can experiment by selecting any .NET type, i.e. a string type, and observing that Visual Studio opens a metadata file for the .NET String type. The point I'm making here is that JustCode works the way Visual Studio works and you'll see how this can make your job easier. In the previous figure, you only saw prototypes associated with the code. i.e. Notice that the default constructor is empty. Again, this is normal because Visual Studio doesn't have the ability to decompile code. However, that's the purpose of this post; showing you how JustCode fills that gap. To decompile code, right click on TwitterContext in the metadata file and select JustCode Navigate -> Decompile from the context menu. The shortcut keys are Ctrl+1. After a brief pause, accompanied by a progress window, you'll see the metadata expand into full decompiled code. Notice below how the default constructor now has code as opposed to the empty member prototype in the original metadata: And Why is This So Different? Again, the big deal is that Telerik JustCode decompilation works in harmony with the way that Visual Studio works. The navigate to functionality already exists and you can use that, along with a simple context menu option (or shortcut key) to transform prototypes into decompiled code. Telerik is filling the the Reflector/Red Gate gap by providing a supported alternative to decompiling code. Many people, including myself, used Reflector to decompile code when we were stuck with buggy libraries or insufficient documentation. Now we have an alternative that's officially supported by a company with an excellent track record for customer (developer) service, Telerik. Not only that, JustCode has several other IDE productivity tools that make the deal even sweeter. Joe

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Making a non-trivial Image and Video Gallery with a really nice interface

- by Cawas

Short part: I'm starting to build an Image and Video Gallery for our intranet. It's pretty much like an image gallery with video thumbnails that play on click. It's just good to keep that in mind because caching and streaming happen in very different ways there. It will serve to browse our reference database, which will also contain searching, tagging and voting. There are 3 features that I need to begin with: Quick preview of thumbnails from each Gallery Fast zoom in / out Animated scrolling Now to the long part, since I can't seem to reduce this: I hope this question belongs here. Maybe people can read this through and identify with it, specially since I expect answers to be pretty specific. The first plan was getting Apple's mobile me gallery as base, because it just so happens to have all those 3 features. If you've never seem it, you should check it out. Move the mouse over each collection and you'll get a nice preview "per pixel". Carousel got a really good scrolling, not just because of the pretty effect. I like it much more than cooliris, but it would be nice to have it in several rows, maybe without the magnifying effect... Then it could be all in the same place with the zoom. The more the features blend-in together, the better. Zooming out with the mouse, scrolling by dragging, once the zoom is really out it becomes a browsing through galleries, with the quick-show preview of each, all properly cached and fast. That'd be perfect. A very compelling interface will be important in this project. Well, my point here is just describing what I need and hope to hear from people with more experience in all that stuff of what's already done and what I'd have to do myself. And how (i.e. which framework to use) to do it. To begin with, I've found a gallery demo and its source code (I think it was from here, but the link seems broken now). I guess it was made in SproutCore, which is what mobileme was based upon. Definitely with JQuery (which already seems a little slow). But I'm still missing two features there: the carousel and the fast zoom (it's just not as slow as the zoom in this demo with cappuccino). Then I've found a supposedly better one with a pretty good and similar zoom, that I'm not sure if it's using any framework and is already in php. Right now it'd be better having just the HTML, no server-side, since I'm building interface first. So, can anyone point directions? There are way too many options! Should I look for another solution closer to what I need, or try and tweak this one? I'm not familiar with any framework at all. Sorry for bringing this question that I will have to answer myself anyway sooner or later and sorry that I couldn't make this smaller. Thanks.

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XmlWriter and lower ASCII characters

- by Rick Strahl

Ran into an interesting problem today on my CodePaste.net site: The main RSS and ATOM feeds on the site were broken because one code snippet on the site contained a lower ASCII character (CHR(3)). I don't think this was done on purpose but it was enough to make the feeds fail. After quite a bit of debugging and throwing in a custom error handler into my actual feed generation code that just spit out the raw error instead of running it through the ASP.NET MVC and my own error pipeline I found the actual error. The lovely base exception and error trace I got looked like this: Error: '', hexadecimal value 0x03, is an invalid character. at System.Xml.XmlUtf8RawTextWriter.InvalidXmlChar(Int32 ch, Byte* pDst, Boolean entitize)at System.Xml.XmlUtf8RawTextWriter.WriteElementTextBlock(Char* pSrc, Char* pSrcEnd)at System.Xml.XmlUtf8RawTextWriter.WriteString(String text)at System.Xml.XmlWellFormedWriter.WriteString(String text)at System.Xml.XmlWriter.WriteElementString(String localName, String ns, String value)at System.ServiceModel.Syndication.Rss20FeedFormatter.WriteItemContents(XmlWriter writer, SyndicationItem item, Uri feedBaseUri)at System.ServiceModel.Syndication.Rss20FeedFormatter.WriteItem(XmlWriter writer, SyndicationItem item, Uri feedBaseUri)at System.ServiceModel.Syndication.Rss20FeedFormatter.WriteItems(XmlWriter writer, IEnumerable`1 items, Uri feedBaseUri)at System.ServiceModel.Syndication.Rss20FeedFormatter.WriteFeed(XmlWriter writer)at System.ServiceModel.Syndication.Rss20FeedFormatter.WriteTo(XmlWriter writer)at CodePasteMvc.Controllers.ApiControllerBase.GetFeed(Object instance) in C:\Projects2010\CodePaste\CodePasteMvc\Controllers\ApiControllerBase.cs:line 131 XML doesn't like extended ASCII Characters It turns out the issue is that XML in general does not deal well with lower ASCII characters. According to the XML spec it looks like any characters below 0x09 are invalid. If you generate an XML document in .NET with an embedded  entity (as mine did to create the error above), you tend to get an XML document error when displaying it in a viewer. For example, here's what the result of my feed output looks like with the invalid character embedded inside of Chrome which displays RSS feeds as raw XML by default: Other browsers show similar error messages. The nice thing about Chrome is that you can actually view source and jump down to see the line that causes the error which allowed me to track down the actual message that failed. If you create an XML document that contains a 0x03 character the XML writer fails outright with the error: '', hexadecimal value 0x03, is an invalid character. The good news is that this behavior is overridable so XML output can at least be created by using the XmlSettings object when configuring the XmlWriter instance. In my RSS configuration code this looks something like this:MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream(); var settings = new XmlWriterSettings() { CheckCharacters = false }; XmlWriter writer = XmlWriter.Create(ms,settings); and voila the feed now generates. Now generally this is probably NOT a good idea, because as mentioned above these characters are illegal and if you view a raw XML document you'll get validation errors. Luckily though most RSS feed readers however don't care and happily accept and display the feed correctly, which is good because it got me over an embarrassing hump until I figured out a better solution. How to handle extended Characters? I was glad to get the feed fixed for the time being, but now I was still stuck with an interesting dilemma. CodePaste.net accepts user input for code snippets and those code snippets can contain just about anything. This means that ASP.NET's standard request filtering cannot be applied to this content. The code content displayed is encoded before display so for the HTML end the CHR(3) input is not really an issue. While invisible characters are hardly useful in user input it's not uncommon that odd characters show up in code snippets. You know the old fat fingering that happens when you're in the middle of a coding session and those invisible characters do end up sometimes in code editors and then end up pasted into the HTML textbox for pasting as a Codepaste.net snippet. The question is how to filter this text? Looking back at the XML Charset Spec it looks like all characters below 0x20 (space) except for 0x09 (tab), 0x0A (LF), 0x0D (CR) are illegal. So applying the following filter with a RegEx should work to remove invalid characters:string code = Regex.Replace(item.Code, @"[\u0000-\u0008,\u000B,\u000C,\u000E-\u001F]", ""); Applying this RegEx to the code snippet (and title) eliminates the problems and the feed renders cleanly.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in .NET XML Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (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); })();

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get eigenvalue pca with java

- by Muhamad Burhanudin

I try use PCA to reduce dimention, and i use jama for help me using matrix. but, i got problem when get eigenvalue with jama. for example i hava 2 image dimention 100x100, then i create single matrix 2 image x (100x100). there is 20.000 pixel. and how to get reduction with eigenvalue? this is sample my code : public static void main(String[] args) { BufferedImage bi; int[] rgb; int R, G, B; // int[] jum; double[][] gray = new double[500][500] ; String[] baris = new String[1000]; try { //bi = ImageIO.read(new File("D:\\c.jpg")); int[][] pixelData = new int[bi.getHeight() * bi.getWidth()][3]; int counter = 0; for (int i = 0; i < bi.getHeight(); i++) { for (int j = 0; j < bi.getWidth(); j++) { gray[i][j] = getPixelData(bi, i, j); // R = getR(bi, i, j); //G = getG(bi, i, j); //B = getB(bi, i, j); //jum = R + G + B; // gray[counter] = Double.toString(R + G + B / 3); // System.out.println("Gray " +gray); //for (int k = 0; k < rgb.length; k++) { // pixelData[counter][k] = rgb[k]; // } counter++; } } } catch (IOException e) { e.printStackTrace(); } Matrix matrix = new Matrix(gray); PCA pca = new PCA(matrix); pca.getEigenvalue(6); String n = pca.toString(); System.err.println("nilai n "+n); //double dete = pcadete(matrix,3600); } private static int getPixelData(BufferedImage bi, int x, int y) { int argb = bi.getRGB(y, x); int r, g, b; int gray; int rgb[] = new int[]{ (argb >> 16) & 0xff, //red (argb >> 8) & 0xff, //green (argb) & 0xff //blue }; r = rgb[0]; g = rgb[1]; b = rgb[2]; gray = (r + g + b) / 3; System.out.println("gray: " + gray); return gray; } when i show eigenvalue in this code : PCA pca = new PCA(matrix); pca.getEigenvalue(6); String n = pca.toString(); System.err.println("nilai n "+n); Result is : nilai n PCA@c3e9e9 Can, u tell me what way to get eigenvalue and reduction dimension.

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My pay pal button will not link to pay pal. It only refreshes page, why?

- by JPJedi

I have the following code in my registration page to go to a paypal button. But when I click on the button it just refreshes the page. Is their something I am missing? I should be able to include a paypal button on an aspx page right? <asp:Content ID="Content1" ContentPlaceHolderID="head" Runat="Server"> </asp:Content> <asp:Content ID="Content2" ContentPlaceHolderID="ContentPlaceHolder1" Runat="Server"> <asp:Panel runat="server" ID="pnlRegisterPage" CssClass="registerPage"> <table> <tr> <td><p>Plain text</p></td> <td> <form action="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr" method="post"> <input type="hidden" name="cmd" value="_s-xclick"> <input type="hidden" name="hosted_button_id" value="Z8TACKRHQR722"> <table> <tr><td><input type="hidden" name="on0" value="Registration Type">Registration Type</td></tr><tr><td><select name="os0"> <option value="Team">Team $80.00</option> <option value="Individual">Individual $40.00</option> </select> </td></tr> </table> <input type="hidden" name="currency_code" value="USD"> <input type="image" src="https://www.paypal.com/en_US/i/btn/btn_buynowCC_LG.gif" border="0" name="submit" alt="PayPal - The safer, easier way to pay online!"> <img alt="" border="0" src="https://www.paypal.com/en_US/i/scr/pixel.gif" width="1" height="1"> </form> </td> </tr> </table> </asp:Panel> </asp:Content> Master Page <body> <form id="form1" runat="server"> <asp:ToolkitScriptManager ID="ToolkitScriptManager1" runat="server"> </asp:ToolkitScriptManager> <div class="masterbody"> <center> <asp:Image runat="server" ID="imgLogo" ImageUrl="" /></center> <div class="menubar"> <div class="loginview"> <asp:LoginView ID="MenuBar" runat="server"> <AnonymousTemplate> </AnonymousTemplate> <LoggedInTemplate> </LoggedInTemplate> </asp:LoginView> </div> </div> <div> <asp:ContentPlaceHolder ID="ContentPlaceHolder1" runat="server"> </asp:ContentPlaceHolder> </div> </div> <div class="footer"></div> </form> </body>

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CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, January 09, 2011

CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, January 09, 2011Popular ReleasesEnhSim: EnhSim 2.2.10 BETA: 2.2.10 BETAThis release supports WoW patch 4.03a at level 85 To use this release, you must have the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=A7B7A05E-6DE6-4D3A-A423-37BF0912DB84 To use the GUI you must have the .NET 4.0 Framework installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=9cfb2d51-5ff4-4491-b0e5-b386f32c0992 - Removed the part...TweetSharp: TweetSharp v2.0.0.0 - Preview 7: Documentation for this release may be found at http://tweetsharp.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=UserGuide&referringTitle=Documentation. Note: This code is currently preview quality. Preview 7 ChangesFixes the regression issue in OAuth from Preview 6 Preview 6 ChangesMaintenance release with user reported fixes Preview 5 ChangesMaintenance release with user reported fixes Third Party Library VersionsHammock v1.0.6: http://hammock.codeplex.com Json.NET 3.5 Release 8: http://json.codeplex.comExtended WPF Toolkit: Extended WPF Toolkit - 1.3.0: What's in the 1.3.0 Release?BusyIndicator ButtonSpinner ChildWindow ColorPicker - Updated (Breaking Changes) DateTimeUpDown - New Control Magnifier - New Control MaskedTextBox - New Control MessageBox NumericUpDown RichTextBox RichTextBoxFormatBar - Updated .NET 3.5 binaries and SourcePlease note: The Extended WPF Toolkit 3.5 is dependent on .NET Framework 3.5 and the WPFToolkit. You must install .NET Framework 3.5 and the WPFToolkit in order to use any features in the To...sNPCedit: sNPCedit v0.9d: added elementclient coordinate catcher to catch coordinates select a target (ingame) i.e. your char, npc or monster than click the button and coordinates+direction will be transfered to the selected row in the table corrected labels from Rot to Direction (because it is a vector)AutoLoL: AutoLoL v1.5.2: Implemented the Auto Updater Fix: Your settings will no longer be cleared with new releases of AutoLoL The mastery Editor and Browser now have their own tabs instead of nested tabs The Browser tab will only show the masteries matching ALL filters instead of just one Added a 'Browse' button in the Mastery Editor tab to open the Masteries Directory The Browser tab now shows a message when there are no mastery files in the Masteries Directory Fix: Fixed the Save As dialog again, for ...Ionics Isapi Rewrite Filter: 2.1 latest stable: V2.1 is stable, and is in maintenance mode. This is v2.1.1.25. It is a bug-fix release. There are no new features. 28629 29172 28722 27626 28074 29164 27659 27900 many documentation updates and fixes proper x64 build environment. This release includes x64 binaries in zip form, but no x64 MSI file. You'll have to manually install x64 servers, following the instructions in the documentation.StyleCop for ReSharper: StyleCop for ReSharper 5.1.14980.000: A considerable amount of work has gone into this release: Huge focus on performance around the violation scanning subsystem: - caching added to reduce IO operations around reading and merging of settings files - caching added to reduce creation of expensive objects Users should notice condsiderable perf boost and a decrease in memory usage. Bug Fixes: - StyleCop's new ObjectBasedEnvironment object does not resolve the StyleCop installation path, thus it does not return the correct path ...VivoSocial: VivoSocial 7.4.1: New release with bug fixes and updates for performance.SSH.NET Library: 2011.1.6: Fixes CommandTimeout default value is fixed to infinite. Port Forwarding feature improvements Memory leaks fixes New Features Add ErrorOccurred event to handle errors that occurred on different thread New and improve SFTP features SftpFile now has more attributes and some operations Most standard operations now available Allow specify encoding for command execution KeyboardInteractiveConnectionInfo class added for "keyboard-interactive" authentication. Add ability to specify bo....NET Extensions - Extension Methods Library for C# and VB.NET: Release 2011.03: Added lot's of new extensions and new projects for MVC and Entity Framework. object.FindTypeByRecursion Int32.InRange String.RemoveAllSpecialCharacters String.IsEmptyOrWhiteSpace String.IsNotEmptyOrWhiteSpace String.IfEmptyOrWhiteSpace String.ToUpperFirstLetter String.GetBytes String.ToTitleCase String.ToPlural DateTime.GetDaysInYear DateTime.GetPeriodOfDay IEnumberable.RemoveAll IEnumberable.Distinct ICollection.RemoveAll IList.Join IList.Match IList.Cast Array.IsNullOrEmpty Array.W...EFMVC - ASP.NET MVC 3 and EF Code First: EFMVC 0.5- ASP.NET MVC 3 and EF Code First: Demo web app ASP.NET MVC 3, Razor and EF Code FirstVidCoder: 0.8.0: Added x64 version. Made the audio output preview more detailed and accurate. If the chosen encoder or mixdown is incompatible with the source, the fallback that will be used is displayed. Added "Auto" to the audio mixdown choices. Reworked non-anamorphic size calculation to work better with non-standard pixel aspect ratios and cropping. Reworked Custom anamorphic to be more intuitive and allow display width to be set automatically (Thanks, Statick). Allowing higher bitrates for 6-ch....NET Voice Recorder: Auto-Tune Release: This is the source code and binaries to accompany the article on the Coding 4 Fun website. It is the Auto Tuner release of the .NET Voice Recorder application.BloodSim: BloodSim - 1.3.2.0: - Simulation Log is now automatically disabled and hidden when running 10 or more iterations - Hit and Expertise are now entered by Rating, and include option for a Racial Expertise bonus - Added option for boss to use a periodic magic ability (Dragon Breath) - Added option for boss to periodically Enrage, gaining a Damage/Attack Speed buffAllNewsManager.NET: AllNewsManager.NET 1.2.1: AllNewsManager.NET 1.2.1 It is a minor update from version 1.2xUnit.net - Unit Testing for .NET: xUnit.net 1.7 Beta: xUnit.net release 1.7 betaBuild #1533 Important notes for Resharper users: Resharper support has been moved to the xUnit.net Contrib project. Important note for TestDriven.net users: If you are having issues running xUnit.net tests in TestDriven.net, especially on 64-bit Windows, we strongly recommend you upgrade to TD.NET version 3.0 or later. This release adds the following new features: Added support for ASP.NET MVC 3 Added Assert.Equal(double expected, double actual, int precision)...Json.NET: Json.NET 4.0 Release 1: New feature - Added Windows Phone 7 project New feature - Added dynamic support to LINQ to JSON New feature - Added dynamic support to serializer New feature - Added INotifyCollectionChanged to JContainer in .NET 4 build New feature - Added ReadAsDateTimeOffset to JsonReader New feature - Added ReadAsDecimal to JsonReader New feature - Added covariance to IJEnumerable type parameter New feature - Added XmlSerializer style Specified property support New feature - Added ...ASP .NET MVC CMS (Content Management System): Atomic CMS 2.1.2: Atomic CMS 2.1.2 release notes Atomic CMS installation guide N2 CMS: 2.1: N2 is a lightweight CMS framework for ASP.NET. It helps you build great web sites that anyone can update. Major Changes Support for auto-implemented properties ({get;set;}, based on contribution by And Poulsen) All-round improvements and bugfixes File manager improvements (multiple file upload, resize images to fit) New image gallery Infinite scroll paging on news Content templates First time with N2? Try the demo site Download one of the template packs (above) and open the proj...Mobile Device Detection and Redirection: 0.1.11.10: IMPORTANT CHANGESThis release changes the way some WURFL capabilities and attributes are exposed to .NET developers. If you cast MobileCapabilities to return some values then please read the Release Note before implementing this release. The following code snippet can be used to access any WURFL capability. For instance, if the device is a tablet: string capability = Request.Browser["is_tablet"]; SummaryNew attributes have been added to the redirect section: originalUrlAsQueryString If se...New Projects[OOBL] Projekt: Projekt iz kolegija Objektno Oblikovanje na Fakultetu Elektrotehnike i Racunarstva u Zagrebu.Aikido Glossary Reader: The Aikido Glossary Reader application makes it easier for Aikido students to search for Japanese terms used in martial arts training.AsyncFunc: AsyncFunc makes it easy to implement Event-based Asynchronous Pattern in .NET.BeijingAgricultureScience: ???????????BizTalk 5010 999 Generation: Create 5010 999 acknowledgement from the default 997 Generated by BizTalk ServerCheck if Knowledge Base fix is installed script: A handy script that checks if a knowledge base fix is installed or not.Coproject - rich project management: Coproject is a sample Silverlight application built on WCF RIA Services and Caliburn.Micro framework. It should demonstrate typical scenarios in business applications.DeskNote: DeskNote, makes taking and displaying a notes a lot easier. Have your notes on your desktop, write your notes in a text file and it will be automatically displayed on the desktop. DriveBackup: Are you tired of losing data? And do you sometimes forget to backup your data? Then this program is right for you, one-time setup with each new removable disk and after that Drive Backup instantly backs up your data in the background, without you pushing a button.ELSEngine XNA Game OS Engine: XNA Game Operating System Engine, designed to handle and make easy to use Interface, Interface assets, game screens, menus, controls, and more. Designed to be adaptable to XBOX or Windows, and to ANY style game.FermaProject: Team Ferma ProjectHalfNetworkNET: HalfNetworkNET makes it easier for <target user group> to <activity>. You'll no longer have to <activity>. It's developed in C++/CLILFS Record: LFS Record is a camera animation and video recording tool for Live for Speed users. It doesn't replace programs like Fraps 100%, but in most cases you'll find LFS Record allows a lot more freedom and control. It's developed in C# using WPF .net 4.MPC HC Web remote: A Web interface for Media Player Classic Home Cinema. Designed especialy for smart phones. Tested on Nokia 5800, but in theory it works on all smart phones with wifi & a browser.MSMS2CMP: Very simple application to swap particular strings (MSMS and CMPD number) in .mgf files (results from Mascot search engine used to identify proteins by mass spectrometry data). This might be a kind of example of using Regex and Text File I/OMy Now Playing to Twitter: A Simple WinForm Program that can get what user is playing in Winamp and send a status to Twitter. It's wrote in VB.Net but some source code is port of MiniTwitter(http://minitwitter.codeplex.com)and uses tagLib-sharp library(https://github.com/mono/taglib-sharp)RPM Header for .NET: RPM Header for .NET allows a developer to access the headers of RPM Package Manager files. It's developed in C#.SilverMenu: SilverMenu brings some of the menu functionality of Silverlight for Windows Phone 7 to the XNA world.Smartgrid Smartmeter GRYD: The GRYD smartgrid and Smartmeter project shows features and capabilities like Demand Response, Smart Home Appliance Load Curtailments, DMS integration with SCADA etc. GRYD, Gryd.org is to teach you the technology, this is only for personal use and not commercial use.WakeMeQt: WakeMeQt is a smart alarm for the Nokia n810 (and probably n800) internet tablets. Using a Nintendo Wii remote as the sensor it monitors your movements during sleep and chooses the optimal time to wake you. It's developed in C++ using the Qt framework.WPF SplitButton & MenuButton: This WPF SplitButton and MenuButton implementation aims to be more robust and visual attractive than the other WPF split buttons available on CodePlex and elsewhere. The code is based on David Anson's implementation made available on his blog.Y2XMas: Merry Chirstmas - Happy New Year 2011 software

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Thread.Interrupt Is Evil

- by Alois Kraus

Recently I have found an interesting issue with Thread.Interrupt during application shutdown. Some application was crashing once a week and we had not really a clue what was the issue. Since it happened not very often it was left as is until we have got some memory dumps during the crash. A memory dump usually means WindDbg which I really like to use (I know I am one of the very few fans of it). After a quick analysis I did find that the main thread already had exited and the thread with the crash was stuck in a Monitor.Wait. Strange Indeed. Running the application a few thousand times under the debugger would potentially not have shown me what the reason was so I decided to what I call constructive debugging. I did create a simple Console application project and try to simulate the exact circumstances when the crash did happen from the information I have via memory dump and source code reading. The thread that was crashing was actually MS code from an old version of the Microsoft Caching Application Block. From reading the code I could conclude that the main thread did call the Dispose method on the CacheManger class which did call Thread.Interrupt on the cache scavenger thread which was just waiting for work to do. My first version of the repro looked like this static void Main(string[] args) { Thread t = new Thread(ThreadFunc) { IsBackground = true, Name = "Test Thread" }; t.Start(); Console.WriteLine("Interrupt Thread"); t.Interrupt(); } static void ThreadFunc() { while (true) { object value = Dequeue(); // block until unblocked or awaken via ThreadInterruptedException } } static object WaitObject = new object(); static object Dequeue() { object lret = "got value"; try { lock (WaitObject) { } } catch (ThreadInterruptedException) { Console.WriteLine("Got ThreadInterruptException"); lret = null; } return lret; } I do start a background thread and call Thread.Interrupt on it and then directly let the application terminate. The thread in the meantime does plenty of Monitor.Enter/Leave calls to simulate work on it. This first version did not crash. So I need to dig deeper. From the memory dump I did know that the finalizer thread was doing just some critical finalizers which were closing file handles. Ok lets add some long running finalizers to the sample. class FinalizableObject : CriticalFinalizerObject { ~FinalizableObject() { Console.WriteLine("Hi we are waiting to finalize now and block the finalizer thread for 5s."); Thread.Sleep(5000); } } class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { FinalizableObject fin = new FinalizableObject(); Thread t = new Thread(ThreadFunc) { IsBackground = true, Name = "Test Thread" }; t.Start(); Console.WriteLine("Interrupt Thread"); t.Interrupt(); GC.KeepAlive(fin); // prevent finalizing it too early // After leaving main the other thread is woken up via Thread.Abort // while we are finalizing. This causes a stackoverflow in the CLR ThreadAbortException handling at this time. } With this changed Main method and a blocking critical finalizer I did get my crash just like the real application. The funny thing is that this is actually a CLR bug. When the main method is left the CLR does suspend all threads except the finalizer thread and declares all objects as garbage. After the normal finalizers were called the critical finalizers are executed to e.g. free OS handles (usually). Remember that I did call Thread.Interrupt as one of the last methods in the Main method. The Interrupt method is actually asynchronous and does wake a thread up and throws a ThreadInterruptedException only once unlike Thread.Abort which does rethrow the exception when an exception handling clause is left. It seems that the CLR does not expect that a frozen thread does wake up again while the critical finalizers are executed. While trying to raise a ThreadInterrupedException the CLR goes down with an stack overflow. Ups not so nice. Why has this nobody noticed for years is my next question. As it turned out this error does only happen on the CLR for .NET 4.0 (x86 and x64). It does not show up in earlier or later versions of the CLR. I have reported this issue on connect here but so far it was not confirmed as a CLR bug. But I would be surprised if my console application was to blame for a stack overflow in my test thread in a Monitor.Wait call. What is the moral of this story? Thread.Abort is evil but Thread.Interrupt is too. It is so evil that even the CLR of .NET 4.0 contains a race condition during the CLR shutdown. When the CLR gurus can get it wrong the chances are high that you get it wrong too when you use this constructs. If you do not believe me see what Patrick Smacchia does blog about Thread.Abort and List.Sort. Not only the CLR creators can get it wrong. The BCL writers do sometimes have a hard time with correct exception handling as well. If you do tell me that you use Thread.Abort frequently and never had problems with it I do suspect that you do not have looked deep enough into your application to find such sporadic errors.

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Content Query Web Part and the Yes/No Field

- by Bil Simser

The Content Query Web Part (CQWP) is a pretty powerful beast. It allows you to do multiple site queries and aggregate the results. This is great for rolling up content and doing some summary type reporting. Here’s a trick to remember about Yes/No fields and using the CQWP. If you’re building a news style site and want to aggregate say all the announcements that people tag a certain way, up onto the home page this might be a solution. First we need to allow a way for users of all our sites to mark an announcement for inclusion on our Intranet Home Page. We’ll do this by just modifying the Announcement Content type and adding a Yes/No field to it. There are alternate ways of doing this like building a new Announcement type or stapling a feature to all sites to add our column but this is pretty low impact and only affects our current site collection so let’s go with it for now, okay? You can berate me in the comments about the proper way I should have done this part. Go to the Site Settings for the Site Collection and click on Site Content Types under the Galleries. This takes you to the gallery for this site and all subsites. Scroll down until you see the List Content Types and click on Announcements. Now we’re modifying the Announcement content type which affects all those announcement lists that are created by default if you’re building sites using the Team Site template (or creating a new Announcements list on any site for that matter). Click on Add from new site column under the Column list. This will allow us to create a new Yes/No field that users will see in Announcement items. This field will allow the user to flag the announcement for inclusion on the home page. Feel free to modify the fields as you see fit for your environment, this is just an example. Now that we’ve added the column to our Announcements Content type we can go into any site that has an announcement list, modify that announcement and flag it to be included on our home page. See the new Featured column? That was the result of modifying our Announcements Content Type on this site collection. Now we can move onto the dirty part, displaying it in a CQWP on the home page. And here is where the fun begins (and the head scratching should end). On our home page we want to drop a Content Query Web Part and aggregate any Announcement that’s been flagged as Featured by the users (we could also add the filter to handle Expires so we don’t show old content so go ahead and do that if you want). First add a CQWP to the page then modify the settings for the web part. In the first section, Query, we want the List Type to be set to Announcements and the Content type to be Announcement so set your options like this: Click Apply and you’ll see the results display all Announcements from any site in the site collection. I have five team sites created each with a unique announcement added to them. Now comes the filtering. We don’t want to include every announcement, only ones users flag using that Featured column we added. At first blush you might scroll down to the Additional Filters part of the Query options and set the Featured column to be equal to Yes: This seems correct doesn’t it? After all, the column is a Yes/No column and looking at an announcement in the site, it displays the field as Yes or No: However after applying the filter you get this result: (I have the announcements from Team Site 1 and Team Site 4 flagged as Featured) Huh? It’s BACKWARDS! Let’s confirm that. Go back in and change the Additional Filters section from Yes to No and hit Apply and you get this: Wait a minute? Shouldn’t I see Team Site 1 and 4 if the logic is backwards? Why am I seeing the same thing as before. What gives… For whatever reason, unknown to me, a Yes/No field (even though it displays as such) really uses 1 and 0 behind the scenes. Yeah, someone was stuck on using integer values for booleans when they wrote SharePoint (probably after a long night of white boarding ways to mess with developers heads) and came up with this. The solution is pretty simple but not very discoverable. Set the filter to include your flagged items like so: And it will filter the items marked as Featured correctly giving you this result: This kind of solution could also be extended and enhanced. Here are a few suggestions and ideas: Modify the ItemStyle.xsl file to add a new style for this aggregation which would include the first few paragraphs of the body (or perhaps add another field to the Content type called Excerpt or Summary and display that instead) Add an Image column to the Announcement Content type to include a Picture field and display it in the summary Add a Category choice field (Employee News, Current Events, Headlines, etc.) and add multiple CQWPs to the home page filtering each one on a different category I know some may find this topic old and dusty but I didn’t see a lot out there specifically on filtering the Yes/No fields and the whole 1/0 trick was a little wonky, so I figured a few pictures would help walk through overcoming yet another SharePoint weirdness. With a little work and some creative juices you can easily us the power of aggregation and the CQWP to build a news site from content on your team sites.

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YouTube Scalability Lessons

- by Bertrand Matthelié

@font-face { font-family: "Arial"; }@font-face { font-family: "Courier New"; }@font-face { font-family: "Wingdings"; }@font-face { font-family: "Calibri"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }h2 { margin: 12pt 0cm 3pt; page-break-after: avoid; font-size: 14pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-style: italic; }a:link, span.MsoHyperlink { color: blue; text-decoration: underline; }a:visited, span.MsoHyperlinkFollowed { color: purple; text-decoration: underline; }span.Heading2Char { font-family: Calibri; font-weight: bold; font-style: italic; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }ol { margin-bottom: 0cm; }ul { margin-bottom: 0cm; } Very interesting blog post by Todd Hoff at highscalability.com presenting “7 Years of YouTube Scalability Lessons in 30 min” based on a presentation from Mike Solomon, one of the original engineers at YouTube: …. The key takeaway away of the talk for me was doing a lot with really simple tools. While many teams are moving on to more complex ecosystems, YouTube really does keep it simple. They program primarily in Python, use MySQL as their database, they’ve stuck with Apache, and even new features for such a massive site start as a very simple Python program. That doesn’t mean YouTube doesn’t do cool stuff, they do, but what makes everything work together is more a philosophy or a way of doing things than technological hocus pocus. What made YouTube into one of the world’s largest websites? Read on and see... Stats @font-face { font-family: "Arial"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; } 4 billion Views a day 60 hours of video is uploaded every minute 350+ million devices are YouTube enabled Revenue double in 2010 The number of videos has gone up 9 orders of magnitude and the number of developers has only gone up two orders of magnitude. 1 million lines of Python code Stack @font-face { font-family: "Arial"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; } Python - most of the lines of code for YouTube are still in Python. Everytime you watch a YouTube video you are executing a bunch of Python code. Apache - when you think you need to get rid of it, you don’t. Apache is a real rockstar technology at YouTube because they keep it simple. Every request goes through Apache. Linux - the benefit of Linux is there’s always a way to get in and see how your system is behaving. No matter how bad your app is behaving, you can take a look at it with Linux tools like strace and tcpdump. MySQL - is used a lot. When you watch a video you are getting data from MySQL. Sometime it’s used a relational database or a blob store. It’s about tuning and making choices about how you organize your data. Vitess- a new project released by YouTube, written in Go, it’s a frontend to MySQL. It does a lot of optimization on the fly, it rewrites queries and acts as a proxy. Currently it serves every YouTube database request. It’s RPC based. Zookeeper - a distributed lock server. It’s used for configuration. Really interesting piece of technology. Hard to use correctly so read the manual Wiseguy - a CGI servlet container. Spitfire - a templating system. It has an abstract syntax tree that let’s them do transformations to make things go faster. Serialization formats - no matter which one you use, they are all expensive. Measure. Don’t use pickle. Not a good choice. Found protocol buffers slow. They wrote their own BSON implementation, which is 10-15 time faster than the one you can download. ...Contiues. Read the blog Watch the video

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T-SQL Tuesday #34: Help! I Need Somebody!

- by Most Valuable Yak (Rob Volk)

Welcome everyone to T-SQL Tuesday Episode 34! When last we tuned in, Mike Fal (b|t) hosted Trick Shots. These highlighted techniques or tricks that you figured out on your own which helped you understand SQL Server better. This month, I'm asking you to look back this past week, year, century, or hour...to a time when you COULDN'T figure it out. When you were stuck on a SQL Server problem and you had to seek help. In the beginning... SQL Server has changed a lot since I started with it. <Cranky Old Guy> Back in my day, Books Online was neither. There were no blogs. Google was the third-place search site. There were perhaps two or three community forums where you could ask questions. (Besides the Microsoft newsgroups...which you had to access with Usenet. And endure the wrath of...Celko.) Your "training" was reading a book, made from real dead trees, that you bought from your choice of brick-and-mortar bookstore. And except for your local user groups, there were no conferences, seminars, SQL Saturdays, or any online video hookups where you could interact with a person. You'd have to call Microsoft Support...on the phone...a LANDLINE phone. And none of this "SQL Family" business!</Cranky Old Guy> Even now, with all these excellent resources available, it's still daunting for a beginner to seek help for SQL Server. The product is roughly 1247.4523 times larger than it was 15 years ago, and it's simply impossible to know everything about it.* So whether you are a beginner, or a seasoned pro of over a decade's experience, what do you do when you need help on SQL Server? That's so meta... In the spirit of offering help, here are some suggestions for your topic: Tell us about a person or SQL Server community who have been helpful to you. It can be about a technical problem, or not, e.g. someone who volunteered for your local SQL Saturday. Sing their praises! Let the world know who they are! Do you have any tricks for using Books Online? Do you use the locally installed product, or are you completely online with BOL/MSDN/Technet, and why? If you've been using SQL Server for over 10 years, how has your help-seeking changed? Are you using Twitter, StackOverflow, MSDN Forums, or another resource that didn't exist when you started? What made you switch? Do you spend more time helping others than seeking help? What motivates you to help, and how do you contribute? Structure your post along the lyrics to The Beatles song Help! Audio or video renditions are particularly welcome! Lyrics must include reference to SQL Server terminology or community, and performances must be in your voice or include you playing an instrument. These are just suggestions, you are free to write whatever you like. Bonus points if you can incorporate ALL of these into a single post. (Or you can do multiple posts, we're flexible like that.) Help us help others by showing how others helped you! Legalese, Your Rights, Yada yada... If you would like to participate in T-SQL Tuesday please be sure to follow the rules below: Your blog post must be published between Tuesday, September 11, 2012 00:00:00 GMT and Wednesday, September 12, 2012 00:00:00 GMT. Include the T-SQL Tuesday logo (above) and hyperlink it back to this post. If you don’t see your post in trackbacks, add the link to the comments below. If you are on Twitter please tweet your blog using the #TSQL2sDay hashtag. I can be contacted there as @sql_r, in case you have questions or problems with comments/trackback. I'll have a follow-up post listing all the contributions as soon as I can. Thank you all for participating, and special thanks to Adam Machanic (b|t) for all his help and for continuing this series!

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Relative cam movement and momentum on arbitrary surface

- by user29244

I have been working on a game for quite long, think sonic classic physics in 3D or tony hawk psx, with unity3D. However I'm stuck at the most fundamental aspect of movement. The requirement is that I need to move the character in mario 64 fashion (or sonic adventure) aka relative cam input: the camera's forward direction always point input forward the screen, left or right input point toward left or right of the screen. when input are resting, the camera direction is independent from the character direction and the camera can orbit the character when input are pressed the character rotate itself until his direction align with the direction the input is pointing at. It's super easy to do as long your movement are parallel to the global horizontal (or any world axis). However when you try to do this on arbitrary surface (think moving along complex curved surface) with the character sticking to the surface normal (basically moving on wall and ceiling freely), it seems harder. What I want is to achieve the same finesse of movement than in mario but on arbitrary angled surfaces. There is more problem (jumping and transitioning back to the real world alignment and then back on a surface while keeping momentum) but so far I didn't even take off the basics. So far I have accomplish moving along the curved surface and the relative cam input, but for some reason direction fail all the time (point number 3, the character align slowly to the input direction). Do you have an idea how to achieve that? Here is the code and some demo so far: The demo: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/24530447/flash%20build/litesonicengine/LiteSonicEngine5.html Camera code: using UnityEngine; using System.Collections; public class CameraDrive : MonoBehaviour { public GameObject targetObject; public Transform camPivot, camTarget, camRoot, relcamdirDebug; float rot = 0; //---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- void Start() { this.transform.position = targetObject.transform.position; this.transform.rotation = targetObject.transform.rotation; } void FixedUpdate() { //the pivot system camRoot.position = targetObject.transform.position; //input on pivot orientation rot = 0; float mouse_x = Input.GetAxisRaw( "camera_analog_X" ); // rot = rot + ( 0.1f * Time.deltaTime * mouse_x ); // wrapAngle( rot ); // //when the target object rotate, it rotate too, this should not happen UpdateOrientation(this.transform.forward,targetObject.transform.up); camRoot.transform.RotateAround(camRoot.transform.up,rot); //debug the relcam dir RelativeCamDirection() ; //this camera this.transform.position = camPivot.position; //set the camera to the pivot this.transform.LookAt( camTarget.position ); // } //---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- public float wrapAngle ( float Degree ) { while (Degree < 0.0f) { Degree = Degree + 360.0f; } while (Degree >= 360.0f) { Degree = Degree - 360.0f; } return Degree; } private void UpdateOrientation( Vector3 forward_vector, Vector3 ground_normal ) { Vector3 projected_forward_to_normal_surface = forward_vector - ( Vector3.Dot( forward_vector, ground_normal ) ) * ground_normal; camRoot.transform.rotation = Quaternion.LookRotation( projected_forward_to_normal_surface, ground_normal ); } float GetOffsetAngle( float targetAngle, float DestAngle ) { return ((targetAngle - DestAngle + 180)% 360) - 180; } //---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- void OnDrawGizmos() { Gizmos.DrawCube( camPivot.transform.position, new Vector3(1,1,1) ); Gizmos.DrawCube( camTarget.transform.position, new Vector3(1,5,1) ); Gizmos.DrawCube( camRoot.transform.position, new Vector3(1,1,1) ); } void OnGUI() { GUI.Label(new Rect(0,80,1000,20*10), "targetObject.transform.up : " + targetObject.transform.up.ToString()); GUI.Label(new Rect(0,100,1000,20*10), "target euler : " + targetObject.transform.eulerAngles.y.ToString()); GUI.Label(new Rect(0,100,1000,20*10), "rot : " + rot.ToString()); } //---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- void RelativeCamDirection() { float input_vertical_movement = Input.GetAxisRaw( "Vertical" ), input_horizontal_movement = Input.GetAxisRaw( "Horizontal" ); Vector3 relative_forward = Vector3.forward, relative_right = Vector3.right, relative_direction = ( relative_forward * input_vertical_movement ) + ( relative_right * input_horizontal_movement ) ; MovementController MC = targetObject.GetComponent<MovementController>(); MC.motion = relative_direction.normalized * MC.acceleration * Time.fixedDeltaTime; MC.motion = this.transform.TransformDirection( MC.motion ); //MC.transform.Rotate(Vector3.up, input_horizontal_movement * 10f * Time.fixedDeltaTime); } } Mouvement code: using UnityEngine; using System.Collections; public class MovementController : MonoBehaviour { public float deadZoneValue = 0.1f, angle, acceleration = 50.0f; public Vector3 motion ; //-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- void OnGUI() { GUILayout.Label( "transform.rotation : " + transform.rotation ); GUILayout.Label( "transform.position : " + transform.position ); GUILayout.Label( "angle : " + angle ); } void FixedUpdate () { Ray ground_check_ray = new Ray( gameObject.transform.position, -gameObject.transform.up ); RaycastHit raycast_result; Rigidbody rigid_body = gameObject.rigidbody; if ( Physics.Raycast( ground_check_ray, out raycast_result ) ) { Vector3 next_position; //UpdateOrientation( gameObject.transform.forward, raycast_result.normal ); UpdateOrientation( gameObject.transform.forward, raycast_result.normal ); next_position = GetNextPosition( raycast_result.point ); rigid_body.MovePosition( next_position ); } } //-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- private void UpdateOrientation( Vector3 forward_vector, Vector3 ground_normal ) { Vector3 projected_forward_to_normal_surface = forward_vector - ( Vector3.Dot( forward_vector, ground_normal ) ) * ground_normal; transform.rotation = Quaternion.LookRotation( projected_forward_to_normal_surface, ground_normal ); } private Vector3 GetNextPosition( Vector3 current_ground_position ) { Vector3 next_position; // //-------------------------------------------------------------------- // angle = 0; // Vector3 dir = this.transform.InverseTransformDirection(motion); // angle = Vector3.Angle(Vector3.forward, dir);// * 1f * Time.fixedDeltaTime; // // if(angle > 0) this.transform.Rotate(0,angle,0); // //-------------------------------------------------------------------- next_position = current_ground_position + gameObject.transform.up * 0.5f + motion ; return next_position; } } Some observation: I have the correct input, I have the correct translation in the camera direction ... but whenever I attempt to slowly lerp the direction of the character in direction of the input, all I get is wild spin! Sad Also discovered that strafing to the right (immediately at the beginning without moving forward) has major singularity trapping on the equator!! I'm totally lost and crush (I have already done a much more featured version which fail at the same aspect)

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Soft lockup after upgrade - cannot install from live CD

- by nbm

I dual-boot MacIntel Core 2 duo. nVidia graphics. Ran upgrade from ubuntu 13.10 to 14.04 (64 bit). On restart ran into {numbers} Bug: soft lockup - CPU#0 stuck for 22s! [swapper/0:1] Tried loading earlier kernel: same problem Tried re-installing ubuntu from a liveCD that has worked in the past: version 13.04. Same problem. Tried re-partitioning hard drive using Mac OS X disk utility and then installing ubuntu 14.04LTS from liveCD. Same problem. Not possible to verify liveCD disk (creates same "soft lockup" bug.) Tried installing from the liveCD with version 13.04 that I know works (that's how I got Ubuntu on this machine in the first place.) Same problem. I know this is not a hardware problem as OS X works just fine, I am using it right now on the same machine. I have been using various versions of Ubuntu for 2 years. Things I cannot do: Open a terminal Verify CD image Start ubuntu from CD (same soft lockup problem) This problem is similar to some other questions, none of which have been satisfactorily answered: Ubuntu 14.04 soft lockup on Vostro 3500 Cannot do fresh install of Ubuntu 13.04 while booting from DVD: "soft lockup" bug Live CD stalls when installing Ubuntu 13.10 UPDATE 6/11/14: Following some much-appreciated advice from bain (see below) I burned a 12.04LTS disk and started with kernel parameters: noapic, no1apic, acpi=off, nomodeset, elevator=deadline, and clocksource=jiffies. With all of these parameters I was able to load the 12.04LTS CD ("Try without installing"). It worked fine. However, as soon as I tried to install Ubuntu from the CD, my wired ethernet (eth0) connection would hang. There are already various askubuntu questions and bug reports about this problem, none of which had answers for me. (E.g., dhclient eth0 does nothing, none of the various reset commands does anything, manually setting IP &etc does nothing. I could reliably kill the ethernet connection by clicking "install ubuntu" every single time.) I could go ahead and install 12.04 without an internet connection, but the install would freeze after mostly completing (I tried several times.) There were some relevant error messages in the details of the install output script that, IIRC, had to do with searching for missing files and not being able to access eth0 (internet) to get them. To be honest I gave up at that point and I'm not sure I wrote those down. If I find some notes I will post them. At this point I no longer have Ubuntu on my system. I wiped the partitions and am using exclusively OS X. I am leaving this question in case it helps anyone else with similar problems. I love open source and I love Linux, and the next machine I get I will probably just build from Arch. At the moment I miss repositories and a lot of other things about Ubuntu, but the OS X terminal is 'nix, I can pretty much use all the open source apps I like, and while I am not a fan of the Apple software it gets the job done for me. Unlike Ubuntu, which can't even install. I realize this isn't necessarily a place for a soapbox speech, but when I first installed 12.04 several years ago there were already people in the community complaining that Canonical was going too "commercial". But I loved it. Several years later and all I've seen is Canonical adding more not-so-useful bells and whistles to Ubuntu while continually failing to fix basic problems on upgrades. With a dual-boot (and sometimes triple-boot) system it always took me some tweaking to get an upgrade to work, and to some extent that is okay. But at this point I feel like Canonical ought to just put a price tag on Ubuntu. All I see is more commercialism and advertising and product tie-ins, and ongoing problems do not get fixed. I am a big fan of open-source, not-for profit enterprise. I am also a big fan of for-profit enterprise, which certainly has its place and usefulness. I am not a fan of companies who pretend to be in favor of open source but really are just out to make a buck, and IMNSHO that is what Canonical has become. This is a great community and I wish you all the best, but my next install of Linux will not be Ubuntu.

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Trouble with AABB collision response and physics

- by WCM

I have been racking my brain trying to figure out a problem I am having with physics and basic AABB collision response. I am fairly close as the physics are mostly right. Gravity feels good and movement is solid. The issue I am running into is that when I land on the test block in my project, I can jump off of it most of the time. If I repeatedly jump in place, I will eventually get stuck one or two pixels below the surface of the test block. If I try to jump, I can become free of the other block, but it will happen again a few jumps later. I feel like I am missing something really obvious with this. I have two functions that support the detection and function to return a vector for the overlap of the two rectangle bounding boxes. I have a single update method that is processing the physics and collision for the entity. I feel like I am missing something very simple, like an ordering of the physics vs. collision response handling. Any thoughts or help can be appreciated. I apologize for the format of the code, tis prototype code mostly. The collision detection function: public static bool Collides(Rectangle source, Rectangle target) { if (source.Right < target.Left || source.Bottom < target.Top || source.Left > target.Right || source.Top > target.Bottom) { return false; } return true; } The overlap function: public static Vector2 GetMinimumTranslation(Rectangle source, Rectangle target) { Vector2 mtd = new Vector2(); Vector2 amin = source.Min(); Vector2 amax = source.Max(); Vector2 bmin = target.Min(); Vector2 bmax = target.Max(); float left = (bmin.X - amax.X); float right = (bmax.X - amin.X); float top = (bmin.Y - amax.Y); float bottom = (bmax.Y - amin.Y); if (left > 0 || right < 0) return Vector2.Zero; if (top > 0 || bottom < 0) return Vector2.Zero; if (Math.Abs(left) < right) mtd.X = left; else mtd.X = right; if (Math.Abs(top) < bottom) mtd.Y = top; else mtd.Y = bottom; // 0 the axis with the largest mtd value. if (Math.Abs(mtd.X) < Math.Abs(mtd.Y)) mtd.Y = 0; else mtd.X = 0; return mtd; } The update routine (gravity = 0.001f, jumpHeight = 0.35f, moveAmount = 0.15f): public void Update(GameTime gameTime) { Acceleration.Y = gravity; Position += new Vector2((float)(movement * moveAmount * gameTime.ElapsedGameTime.TotalMilliseconds), (float)(Velocity.Y * gameTime.ElapsedGameTime.TotalMilliseconds)); Velocity.Y += Acceleration.Y; Vector2 previousPosition = new Vector2((int)Position.X, (int)Position.Y); KeyboardState keyboard = Keyboard.GetState(); movement = 0; if (keyboard.IsKeyDown(Keys.Left)) { movement -= 1; } if (keyboard.IsKeyDown(Keys.Right)) { movement += 1; } if (Position.Y + 16 > GameClass.Instance.GraphicsDevice.Viewport.Height) { Velocity.Y = 0; Position = new Vector2(Position.X, GameClass.Instance.GraphicsDevice.Viewport.Height - 16); IsOnSurface = true; } if (Collision.Collides(BoundingBox, GameClass.Instance.block.BoundingBox)) { Vector2 mtd = Collision.GetMinimumTranslation(BoundingBox, GameClass.Instance.block.BoundingBox); Position += mtd; Velocity.Y = 0; IsOnSurface = true; } if (keyboard.IsKeyDown(Keys.Space) && !previousKeyboard.IsKeyDown(Keys.Space)) { if (IsOnSurface) { Velocity.Y = -jumpHeight; IsOnSurface = false; } } previousKeyboard = keyboard; } This is also a full download to the project. https://www.box.com/s/3rkdtbso3xgfgc2asawy P.S. I know that I could do this with the XNA Platformer Starter Kit algo, but it has some deep flaws that I am going to try to live without. I'd rather go the route of collision response via an overlay function. Thanks for any and all insight!

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background image disappears when position relative used in firefox

- by toomanyairmiles

So I'm trying to add a badge to the top right corner of a site I'm doing some work on. z-index works to float the object above the page content but each time i try to use position relative the background image disappears only position absolute shows the image. I don't really want to use absolute as the image needs to be positioned on the right hand side of the sites menu bar not the right hand side of the viewport. Any thoughts or advice appreciated <div class="badge-box"> <a href="http://www.google.com" class="badge">Book Now!</a> </div> <div id="header"> <a href="index.php"><img src="images/pixel.gif" width="378" height="31" alt="Welcome to Gwynfryn Farm Cottages" /></a> </div> <div id="main-menu"> <div> <a href="/">Home</a> <a href="/cottages.php">Our Cottages</a> <a href="/gwynfryn.php">Bed & Breakfast</a> <a href="/rates.php">Price Guide</a> <a href="/llanbedr.php">Location & Local Attractions</a> <a href="/news.php">News & Special Offers</a> <a href="/contact.php">Contact Us</a> </div> </div> .badge-box { width: 1030px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; border: 0px solid red; } .badge { background: url(../images/badge.png) 0px 0px no-repeat; width: 148px; height: 148px; text-indent: -10000px; position: relative; z-index: 999; } #header { width: 960px; height: 40px; margin-left:auto; margin-right:auto; margin-top:20px; padding: 20px 0px 0px 20px; background: #58564f url(../images/header-top-background.png); } #main-menu { width: 980px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; height: 35px; /*background: red;*/ background: #58564f url(../images/header-bottom-background.png); font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; } #main-menu div { width: 776px; height: 35px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; background: blue; } #main-menu div a { display: block; float: left; padding: 5px 10px 0px 10px; height: 30px; color: #FFFFFF; font-size: 1.2em; text-align: center; background: green; } #main-menu div a:hover { background-color: #333333; }

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Styling ASP.NET MVC Error Messages

- by MightyZot

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/MightyZot/archive/2013/11/11/styling-asp.net-mvc-error-messages.aspxOff the cuff, it may look like you’re stuck with the presentation of your error messages (model errors) in ASP.NET MVC. That’s not the case, though. You actually have quite a number of options with regard to styling those boogers. Like many of the helpers in MVC, the Html.ValidationMessageFor helper has multiple prototypes. One of those prototypes lets you pass a dictionary, or anonymous object, representing attribute values for the resulting markup. @Html.ValidationMessageFor( m => Model.Whatever, null, new { @class = “my-error” }) By passing the htmlAttributes parameter, which is the last parameter in the call to the prototype of Html.ValidationMessageFor shown above, I can style the resulting markup by associating styles to the my-error css class. When you run your MVC project and view the source, you’ll notice that MVC adds the class field-validation-valid or field-validation-error to a span created by the helper. You could actually just style those classes instead of adding your own…it’s really up to you. Now, what if you wanted to move that error message around? Maybe you want to put that error message in a box or a callout. How do you do that? When I first started using MVC, it didn’t occur to me that the Html.ValidationMessageFor helper just spits out a little bit of markup. I wanted to put the error messages in boxes with white backgrounds, our site originally had a black background, and show a little nib on the side to make them look like callouts or conversation bubbles. Not realizing how much freedom there is in the styling and markup, and after reading someone else’s post, I created my own version of the ValidationMessageFor helper that took out the span and replaced it with divs. I styled the divs to produce the effect of a popup box and had a lot of trouble with sizing and such. That’s a really silly and unnecessary way to solve this problem. If you want to move your error messages around, all you have to do is move the helper. MVC doesn’t appear to care where you put it, which makes total sense when you think about it. Html.ValidationMessageFor is just spitting out a little markup using a little bit of reflection on the name you’re passing it. All you’ve got to do to style it the way you want it is to put it in whatever markup you desire. Take a look at this, for example… <div class=”my-anchor”>@Html.ValidationMessageFor( m => Model.Whatever )</div> @Html.TextBoxFor(m => Model.Whatever) Now, given that bit of HTML, consider the following CSS… <style> .my-anchor { position:relative; } .field-validation-error { background-color:white; border-radius:4px; border: solid 1px #333; display: block; position: absolute; top:0; right:0; left:0; text-align:right; } </style> The my-anchor class establishes an anchor for the absolutely positioned error message. Now you can move the error message wherever you want it relative to the anchor. Using css3, there are some other tricks. For example, you can use the :not(:empty) selector to select the span and apply styles based upon whether or not the span has text in it. Keep it simple, though. Moving your elements around using absolute positioning may cause you issues on devices with screens smaller than your standard laptop or PC. While looking for something else recently, I saw someone asking how to style the output for Html.ValidationSummary. Html.ValidationSummery is the helper that will spit out a list of property errors, general model errors, or both. Html.ValidationSummary spits out fairly simple markup as well, so you can use the techniques described above with it also. The resulting markup is a <ul><li></li></ul> unordered list of error messages that carries the class validation-summary-errors In the forum question, the user was asking how to hide the error summary when there are no errors. Their errors were in a red box and they didn’t want to show an empty red box when there aren’t any errors. Obviously, you can use the css3 selectors to apply different styles to the list when it’s empty and when it’s not empty; however, that’s not support in all browsers. Well, it just so happens that the unordered list carries the style validation-summary-valid when the list is empty. While the div rendered by the Html.ValidationSummary helper renders a visible div, containing one invisible listitem, you can always just style the whole div with “display:none” when the validation-summary-valid class is applied and make it visible when the validation-summary-errors class is applied. Or, if you don’t like that solution, which I like quite well, you can also check the model state for errors with something like this… int errors = ViewData.ModelState.Sum(ms => ms.Value.Errors.Count); That’ll give you a count of the errors that have been added to ModelState. You can check that and conditionally include markup in your page if you want to. The choice is yours. Obviously, doing most everything you can with styles increases the flexibility of the presentation of your solution, so I recommend going that route when you can. That picture of the fat guy jumping has nothing to do with the article. That’s just a picture of me on the roof and I thought it was funny. Doesn’t every post need a picture?

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How to fix Ubuntu 12.04.3 boot to black screen full of errors in white text, after upgrading on dell inspiron 1501

- by Ibuntu

I am running a Dell Inspiron 1501 I use Linux only. No Microsoft or Apple operating systems (or really anything closed-source). I've only been using Linux for a little over a year but I'm starting to gain a comfortable level of familiarity with the system and terminology. I've been having some issues with Quantel Quetzal and Raring Ringtail, especially with older hardware, so I opted to install Ubuntu 12.04.3 Precise Pangolin on the Inspiron 1501. I checked my MD5 sum after downloading my ISO and all was good. I have in fact used this iso/dvd to install Precise Pangolin successfully on a few other systems (some of which are even older than this laptop). Install goes fine. The wireless card doesn't work out of the box but this is a known issue which is fairly easy to fix. So, first thing I did was open up a terminal and run sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade which, part way through, crashed (I assume lightdm and possibly X) and took me to a black screen filled with white lines of text that were either errors or just the ouputs of commands. The reason I say that is because I was unable to gleam any useful information from the output on the screen. I did take a picture however and will post a link. After that, every time I boot the system it goes right to that black screen posting all the error messages or output in white text. I never get a purple Ubuntu splash, so from what I can tell after reading this wiki article: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Troubleshooting/BlankScreen That means that after the kernel is selected, it is unable to correctly implement the settings it needs. If the purple splash never shows, the frame buffer was never set correctly right? This leads me to believe that it could be a kernel issue? The wiki suggested to try and pinpoint the issue by rolling back kernels until I find one that works. Is this my best option? I think I'm going to give it a try anyways and will let everyone know if I am able to solve the issue this way. I have since done a few reinstalls and some trouble-shooting including a couple hours scouring the net for anyone with any kind of similar issue. Most of the issues I could find involved getting a black screen after login and none of them said anything about any information output on this black screen. My reinstalls have taught me that there is no issue updating, but as soon as I run sudo apt-get upgrade my system goes to the black screen and every time I boot it up it does the same thing. The only way to fix is by reinstall. I never get any ability to log in. After a hard power off to the laptop (because I cannot use ctrl+alt+del to reboot) when it boots again it goes to the grub boot menu and I can select between regular boot, recovery mode and the two memtest options. I never tried the memtest options but the other two both lead to the same black screen. Some people having a black/blank screen issue claim to have fixed it by using 12.10 or 13.04 but I believe they were having a different issue where they got a black/blank screen after logging in. I think I will still give these images a try, but mostly figured I would just wait another day or two for 13.10. Other things I figured I would try from the following three articles: After logging in, there's a black screen and my cursor, nothing else! in Ubuntu 12.10 Black Screen on Login After Upgrading to 12.04 I can't get to the login screen include opening a terminal using ctrl+alt+f1 and trying a variety of reseting unity, x settings, lightdm (or switching to gdm); but I doubt this will work or that I will even be able to access a terminal. I'm pretty sure the whole system is stuck after it loads the last line on the black screen. I will try these things and post more information when I have. Hopefully someone has an idea in the meantime and I will keep checking back trying to find a solution. Thank you. Here are 3 different pictures of the error message. I had to take with my phone: http://ubuntuone.com/album/0TBBkxmVajJIQQtoN9mVdN

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