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  • Delay command execution over sockets

    - by David
    I've been trying to fix the game loop in a real time (tick delay) MUD. I realized using Thread.Sleep would seem clunky when the user spammed commands through their choice of client (Zmud, etc) e.g. east;south;southwest would wait three move ticks and then output everything from the past couple rooms. The game loop basically calls a Flush and Fill method for each socket during each tick (50ms) private void DoLoop() { Stopwatch stopWatch = new Stopwatch(); stopWatch.Start(); while (running) { // for each socket, flush and fill ConnectionMonitor.Update(); stopWatch.Stop(); WaitIfNeeded(stopWatch.ElapsedMilliseconds); stopWatch.Reset(); } } The Fill method fires the command events, but as mentioned before, they currently block using Thread.Sleep. I tried adding a "ready" flag to the state object that attempts to execute the command along with a queue of spammed commands, but it ends up executing one command and queuing up the rest i.e. each subsequent command executes something that got queued up that should've been executed before. I must be missing something about the timer. private readonly Queue<SpammedCommand> queuedCommands = new Queue<SpammedCommand>(); private bool ready = true; private void TryExecuteCommand(string input) { var commandContext = CommandContext.Create(input); var player = Server.Current.Database.Get<Player>(Session.Player.Key); var commandInfo = Server.Current.CommandLookup .FindCommand(commandContext.CommandName, player.IsAdmin); if (commandInfo != null) { if (!ready) { // queue command queuedCommands.Enqueue(new SpammedCommand() { Context = commandContext, Info = commandInfo }); return; } if (queuedCommands.Count > 0) { // queue the incoming command queuedCommands.Enqueue(new SpammedCommand() { Context = commandContext, Info = commandInfo, }); // dequeue and execute var command = queuedCommands.Dequeue(); command.Info.Command.Execute(Session, command.Context); setTimeout(command.Info.TickLength); return; } commandInfo.Command.Execute(Session, commandContext); setTimeout(commandInfo.TickLength); } else { Session.WriteLine("Command not recognized"); } } Finally, setTimeout was supposed to set the execution delay (TickLength) for that command, and makeReady just sets the ready flag on the state object to true. private void setTimeout(TickDelay tickDelay) { ready = false; var t = new System.Timers.Timer() { Interval = (long) tickDelay, AutoReset = false, }; t.Elapsed += makeReady; t.Start(); // fire this in tickDelay ms } // MAKE READYYYYY!!!! private void makeReady(object sender, System.Timers.ElapsedEventArgs e) { ready = true; } Am I missing something about the System.Timers.Timer created in setTimeout? How can I execute (and output) spammed commands per TickLength without using Thread.Sleep?

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  • Best Practices for High Volume CPA Import Operations with ebXML in B2B 11g

    - by Shub Lahiri, A-Team
    Background B2B 11g supports ebXML messaging protocol, where multiple CPAs can be imported via command-line utilities.  This note highlights one aspect of the best practices for import of CPA, when large numbers of CPAs in the excess of several hundreds are required to be maintained within the B2B repository. Symptoms The import of CPA usually is a 2-step process, namely creating a soa.zip file using b2bcpaimport utility based on a CPA properties file and then using b2bimport to import the b2b repository.  The commands are provided below: ant -f ant-b2b-util.xml b2bcpaimport -Dpropfile="<Path to cpp_cpa.properties>" -Dstandard=true ant -f ant-b2b-util.xml b2bimport -Dlocalfile=true -Dexportfile="<Path to soa.zip>" -Doverwrite=true Usually the first command completes fairly quickly regardless of the number of CPAs in the repository. However, as the number of trading partners within the repository goes up, the time to complete the second command could go up to ~30 secs per operation. So, this could add up to a significant amount, if there is a need to import hundreds of CPA in a production system within a limited downtime, maintenance window.  Remedy In situations, where there is a large number of entries to be imported, it is best to setup a staging environment and go through the import operation of each individual CPA in an empty repository. Since, this will be done in an empty repository, the time taken for completion should be reasonable.  After all the partner profiles have been imported, a full repository export can be taken to capture the metadata for all the entries in one file.  If this single file with all the partner entries is imported in a loaded repository, the total time taken for import of all the CPAs should see a dramatic reduction. Results Let us take a look at the numbers to see the benefit of this approach. With a pre-loaded repository of ~400 partners, the individual import time for each entry takes ~30 secs. So, if we had to import another 100 partners, the individual entries will take ~50 minutes (100 times ~30 secs). On the other hand, if we prepare the repository export file of the same 100 partners from a staging environment earlier, the import takes about ~5 mins. The total processing time for the loading of metadata, specially in a production environment, can thus be shortened by almost a factor of 10. Summary The following diagram summarizes the entire approach and process. Acknowledgements The material posted here has been compiled with the help from B2B Engineering and Product Management teams.

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  • Nashorn in the Twitterverse

    - by jlaskey
    I have been following how often Nashorn has been showing up on the net.  Nashorn got a burst of tweets when we announced Project Nashorn and I was curious how Nashorn was trending per day, maybe graph the result.  Counting tweets manually seemed mindless, so why not write a program to do the same. This is where Nashorn + Java came shining through.  There is a very nice Java library out there called Twitter4J https://github.com/yusuke/twitter4j that handles all things Twitter.  After running bin/getAccessToken.sh to get a twitter4j.properties file with personal authorization, all I had to do to run my simple exploratory app was; nashorn -cp $TWITTER4J/twitter4j-core-3.0.1.jar GetHomeTimeline.js The content of GetHomeTimeline.js is as follows; var twitter4j      = Packages.twitter4j; var TwitterFactory = twitter4j.TwitterFactory; var Query          = twitter4j.Query; var twitter = new TwitterFactory().instance; var query   = new Query("nashorn OR nashornjs"); query.count = 100; do {     var result = twitter.search(query);     var tweets = result.tweets;     for each (tweet in tweets) {         print("@" + tweet.user.screenName + "\t" + tweet.text);     } } while (query = result.nextQuery()); How easy was that?  Now to hook it up to the JavaFX graphing library... 

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  • How can I diagnose/debug "maximum number of clients reached" X errors?

    - by jmtd
    Hi, I'm hitting a problem whereby X prevents processes from creating windows, uttering something like the following into ~/.xsession-errors: cannot open display: :0.0 Maximum number of clients reached Searching around there are lots of examples of people facing this problem, and sometimes people identify which program they are running is using up all the client slots. See e.g. LP 70872 (Firefox), LP 263211 (gnome-screensaver). For what it's worth, I run gnome-terminal, thunderbird, chromium-browser, empathy, tomboy and virtualbox nearly all the time, on top of the normal stuff you get with the GNOME desktop, and occasionally some other bits and pieces. However my question is not "which of my programs is causing this problem" but rather, how can one go about diagnosing this problem? In the above (and other) bugs, forum reports, etc., a number of tools are suggested: xlsclients - lists the client applications for the given display, but I don't think that corresponds to 'X clients' xrestop - a top-style X resources tool, one row per X client. Lots of '' clients, not shown in xlsclients output xwininfo -root -children lists X window objects From what I can gather, the problem might not be too many clients at all, but rather resources kept around in the X server for clients who have long-since detached. But it would also appear that you cannot (easily?) relate X resources back to their client. Can one effectively diagnose this issue once it has started to occur, or is a tedious divide-and-conquer approach for the apps I run the only approach open to me? Update Jan 2011: I think I have resolved this issue. For the benefit of anyone stumbling across this, nautilus and/or compiz or something in that chain of software was segfaulting due to a wallpaper I had. I had chosen an XML file as my wallpaper, which defined a rotating gallery of images. It was hand-made, but based on /usr/share/backgrounds/contest/background-1.xml or similar. Disabling the wallpaper and I have not had a crash since. I'm not marking this as answered yet, since the actual specific problem was not my question, but how to diagnose it was. Unfortunately this was mostly trial-and-error which sucks.

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  • Write and fprintf for file I/O

    - by Darryl Gove
    fprintf() does buffered I/O, where as write() does unbuffered I/O. So once the write() completes, the data is in the file, whereas, for fprintf() it may take a while for the file to get updated to reflect the output. This results in a significant performance difference - the write works at disk speed. The following is a program to test this: #include <fcntl.h #include <unistd.h #include <stdio.h #include <stdlib.h #include <errno.h #include <stdio.h #include <sys/time.h #include <sys/types.h #include <sys/stat.h static double s_time; void starttime() { s_time=1.0*gethrtime(); } void endtime(long its) { double e_time=1.0*gethrtime(); printf("Time per iteration %5.2f MB/s\n", (1.0*its)/(e_time-s_time*1.0)*1000); s_time=1.0*gethrtime(); } #define SIZE 10*1024*1024 void test_write() { starttime(); int file = open("./test.dat",O_WRONLY|O_CREAT,S_IWGRP|S_IWOTH|S_IWUSR); for (int i=0; i<SIZE; i++) { write(file,"a",1); } close(file); endtime(SIZE); } void test_fprintf() { starttime(); FILE* file = fopen("./test.dat","w"); for (int i=0; i<SIZE; i++) { fprintf(file,"a"); } fclose(file); endtime(SIZE); } void test_flush() { starttime(); FILE* file = fopen("./test.dat","w"); for (int i=0; i<SIZE; i++) { fprintf(file,"a"); fflush(file); } fclose(file); endtime(SIZE); } int main() { test_write(); test_fprintf(); test_flush(); } Compiling and running I get 0.2MB/s for write() and 6MB/s for fprintf(). A large difference. There's three tests in this example, the third test uses fprintf() and fflush(). This is equivalent to write() both in performance and in functionality. Which leads to the suggestion that fprintf() (and other buffering I/O functions) are the fastest way of writing to files, and that fflush() should be used to enforce synchronisation of the file contents.

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  • Paranoid management, contractor checking work [closed]

    - by user833345
    Just wanted to get some opinions and experiences on an issue I'm having at work. First, a little background. I've been working at a company for some time (past any probation periods) and rewriting a horrendous system. No tests, incomplete and broken functionality everywhere, enough copypasta to feed a small village, redundant code, more unused SQL tables than used ones and terrible performance. I've never seen such bad code, pretty much all of it is worthy of being posted on TheDailyWTF. The company has been operating for a number of years and have had a string of bad developers working on this system. I made a call on rewriting instead of refactoring since I judged it to be less work overall and decided that the result will address the requirements more appropriately, since the central requirement is to have a future-proof system for the next decade with plenty of room to scale up. Refactoring would have entailed untangling a huge ball of yarn and at the same time integrating it with a proper foundation or building a foundation from scratch. I've introduced the latest spiffy framework, unit & functional testing, CI, a bug tracker and agile workflow to the environment. I've fixed most of the performance issues of the old system (there were no indexes on any of the tables, for example). I've created an automated deployment process for the old system. The CTO has been maintaining the old system while I have been building the new one and he has been advising management that everything is being done as per best practices. However, management is hiring a contractor to come in and verify my work. In my experience, this is unprecedented. I can understand their reasoning to an extent, since they've had bad luck in the past, but can't help but feel somewhat offended at the fact that they distrust two senior developers who have been working with them for some time enough that a third party is being brought in. And it's not just me who is under watch - people's emails are constantly checked, someone had a remote desktop application installed on their computer of which I was asked to check the usage logs to try to determine if they were stealing sensitive data and there are CCTV cameras in one of the rooms. It's the first time I've decided to disable my Skype history at work. Am I right to feel indignant here? Has anyone else ever encountered such a situation? If so, how did it work out in the end? Was it worth sticking around? Should I just find another job?

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  • Can't change color of sprites in unity

    - by Aceleeon
    I would like to create a script that targets a 2d sprite "enemy" and changes their color to red (slightly opaque red if possible) when you hit tab. I have this code from a 3d tutorial hoping the transition would work. But it does not. I only get the script to cycle the enemy tags but never changes the color of the sprite. I have the code below I'm very new to coding, and any help would be FANTASTIC! HELP! hahah. TL;DR Cant get 3d color targeting to work for 2D. Check out the c#code below using UnityEngine; using System.Collections; using System.Collections.Generic; public class Targetting : MonoBehaviour { public List targets; public Transform selectedTarget; private Transform myTransform; // Use this for initialization void Start () { targets = new List(); selectedTarget = null; myTransform = transform; AddAllEnemies(); } public void AddAllEnemies() { GameObject[] go = GameObject.FindGameObjectsWithTag("Enemy"); foreach(GameObject enemy in go) AddTarget(enemy.transform); } public void AddTarget(Transform enemy) { targets.Add(enemy); } private void SortTargetsByDistance() { targets.Sort(delegate(Transform t1,Transform t2) { return Vector3.Distance(t1.position, myTransform.position).CompareTo(Vector3.Distance(t2.position, myTransform.position)); }); } private void TargetEnemy() { if(selectedTarget == null) { SortTargetsByDistance(); selectedTarget = targets[0]; } else { int index = targets.IndexOf(selectedTarget); if(index < targets.Count -1) { index++; } else { index = 0; } selectedTarget = targets[index]; } } private void SelectTarget() { selectedTarget.GetComponent().color = Color.red; } private void DeselectTarget() { selectedTarget.GetComponent().color = Color.blue; selectedTarget = null; } // Update is called once per frame void Update() { if(Input.GetKeyDown(KeyCode.Tab)) { TargetEnemy(); } } }

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  • TransportWithMessageCredential & Service Bus – Introduction

    - by Michael Stephenson
    Recently we have been working on a project using the Windows Azure Service Bus to expose line of business applications. One of the topics we discussed a lot was around the security aspects of the solution. Most of the samples you see for Windows Azure Service Bus often use the shared secret with the Access Control Service to protect the service bus endpoint but one of the problems we found was that with this scenario any claims resulting from credentials supplied by the client are not passed through to the service listening to the service bus endpoint. As an example of this we originally were hoping that we could give two different clients their own shared secret key and the issuer for each would indicate which client it was. If the claims had flown to the listening service then we could check that the message sent by client one was a type they are allowed to send. Unfortunately this claim isn't flown to the listening service so we were unable to implement this scenario. We had also seen samples that talk about changing the relayClientAuthenticationType attribute would allow you to authenticate the client within the service itself rather than with ACS. While this was interesting it wasn't exactly what we wanted. By removing the step where access to the Relay endpoint is protected by authentication against ACS it means that anyone could send messages via the service bus to the on-premise listening service which would then authenticate clients. In our scenario we certainly didn't want to allow clients to skip the ACS authentication step because this could open up two attack opportunities for an attacker. The first of these would allow an attacker to send messages through to our on-premise servers and potentially cause a denial of service situation. The second case would be with the same kind of attack by running lots of messages through service bus which were then rejected the attacker would be causing us to incur charges per message on our Windows Azure account. The correct way to implement our desired scenario is to combine one of the common options for authenticating against ACS so the service bus endpoint cannot be accessed by an unauthenticated caller with the normal WCF security features using the TransportWithMessageCredential security option. Looking around I could not find any guidance on how to implement this correctly so on the back of setting this up I decided to write a couple of articles to walk through a couple of the common scenarios you may be interested in. These are available on the following links: Walkthrough - Combining shared secret and username token Walkthrough – Combining shared secret and certificates

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  • Why do old programming languages continue to be revised?

    - by SunAvatar
    This question is not, "Why do people still use old programming languages?" I understand that quite well. In fact the two programming languages I know best are C and Scheme, both of which date back to the 70s. Recently I was reading about the changes in C99 and C11 versus C89 (which seems to still be the most-used version of C in practice and the version I learned from K&R). Looking around, it seems like every programming language in heavy use gets a new specification at least once per decade or so. Even Fortran is still getting new revisions, despite the fact that most people using it are still using FORTRAN 77. Contrast this with the approach of, say, the typesetting system TeX. In 1989, with the release of TeX 3.0, Donald Knuth declared that TeX was feature-complete and future releases would contain only bug fixes. Even beyond this, he has stated that upon his death, "all remaining bugs will become features" and absolutely no further updates will be made. Others are free to fork TeX and have done so, but the resulting systems are renamed to indicate that they are different from the official TeX. This is not because Knuth thinks TeX is perfect, but because he understands the value of a stable, predictable system that will do the same thing in fifty years that it does now. Why do most programming language designers not follow the same principle? Of course, when a language is relatively new, it makes sense that it will go through a period of rapid change before settling down. And no one can really object to minor changes that don't do much more than codify existing pseudo-standards or correct unintended readings. But when a language still seems to need improvement after ten or twenty years, why not just fork it or start over, rather than try to change what is already in use? If some people really want to do object-oriented programming in Fortran, why not create "Objective Fortran" for that purpose, and leave Fortran itself alone? I suppose one could say that, regardless of future revisions, C89 is already a standard and nothing stops people from continuing to use it. This is sort of true, but connotations do have consequences. GCC will, in pedantic mode, warn about syntax that is either deprecated or has a subtly different meaning in C99, which means C89 programmers can't just totally ignore the new standard. So there must be some benefit in C99 that is sufficient to impose this overhead on everyone who uses the language. This is a real question, not an invitation to argue. Obviously I do have an opinion on this, but at the moment I'm just trying to understand why this isn't just how things are done already. I suppose the question is: What are the (real or perceived) advantages of updating a language standard, as opposed to creating a new language based on the old?

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  • Avoiding the Black Hole of Leads

    - by Charles Knapp
    Sales says, "Marketing doesn’t deliver enough qualified leads. So, we generate 90% of our own leads." Meanwhile, Marketing says, "We generate most of the leads. But, Sales doesn’t contact them quickly enough, while the lead is still interested." According to Sirius Decisions: Up to 90% of leads never make it to closure Sales works on only 11% of the leads supplied by Marketing Only 18% of the leads Sales accepts convert to opportunities Yet, 45% of prospects typically buy a product from someone within 12 months The root cause of these commonplace complaints is a disconnect between the funnels of marketing and sales. Unfortunately, we often see companies with an assortment of poorly integrated marketing tools. It takes too long and too many people to move the data around, scrub it, upload it from one system to another, and get it routed to the right sales teams. As a result, leads fall through the cracks, contextual information is lost, and by the time sales actually contacts a customer it may be too late. Sales automation alone is not enough. Marketing automation (including social) is not enough. Sales and Marketing must work together. It’s time to connect the silos of marketing and sales pipelines and analytics. It’s time for integrated Sales and Marketing automation. Integrated pipelines improve lead quality and timeliness. Marketing systems can track a rich set of contextual information about a prospect–self-disclosed information about interests, content viewed, and so on. This insight can equip the sales rep with rich information to make a face-to-face conversation more relevant and more likely to convert to the next stage in the sales process. Integrated lead to revenue (LTR) management provides end-to-end visibility, enabling the company to measure what is working. Marketing can measure its impact on revenue and other business outcomes, and sales can harness and redirect marketing investments to areas where they most help achieve sales objectives. It’s a win-win play. Marketing delivers more leads that are qualified, cuts cost per lead, and demonstrates a strong Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI). Sales spends more time with warm leads and less time on cold calls, achieves higher close rates, and delivers more revenue. Learn more by attending our Integrated Sales and Marketing session at the upcoming CloudWorld conferences. Or, visit our Sales and Marketing Cloud Service site for videos and other learning resources.

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  • Turn-Based RPG Battle Instance Layout For Larger Groups

    - by SoulBeaver
    What a title, eh? I'm currently designing a videogame; a turn-based RPG like Final Fantasy (because everybody knows Final Fantasy). It's a 2D sprite game. These are my ideas for combat: -The player has a group of 15 members (main character included) -During battle, five of the group are designated as active, and appear in the battle. -These five may be switched out at leisure, or when one of the five die. -At any time, the Waiting members can cast buffs, be healed by the active members, or perform special attacks. -Battles should contain 10+ monsters at least. I'm aiming for 20, but I'm not sure if that's possible yet. -Battles should feel larger than normal due to the interaction of Waiting members, active members and the increased amount of monsters per battle. -The player has two rows in which to put the Active members: front and back. -Depending on the implementation, I might allow comboing of player attacks and skills. These are just design ideas, so beware! I have not been able to test this out yet- I have no idea yet if any of these ideas bunched together will make for a compelling game. What sounds good on paper doesn't necessarily have to be good in practice! What I'm asking now is how to create the layout for this. My starting point are the battles in Final Fantasy VI, with up to 5-6 monsters on the left and the characters on the right- monsters on both sides if it's a pincer attack. However, this view would not work feasible with my goal of 20 monsters and 5 characters. All the monsters on the left would appear cluttered unless I scale them far far back. If I create a pincer-like map, then there would be no real pincer-attack possible. If I space the monsters out I force the player to scroll the screen- a game mechanic I've come across and not enjoyed imho. My question is: does anybody have any layouts or guides for designing battle maps in turn-based RPGs, especially with a larger number of enemies taken into consideration? How should it look? I am not asking for specific combat mechanics, just the layout for the moment.

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  • What will be the better way for data retrieval on application that needs to handle limited amount of data.?

    - by Milanix
    This is not really a coding question since, I am not adding any code in here. Since, adding my code snippets itself would make this question really long. Instead, I am pretty interested in knowing a better ways for data retrieval on application that needs to handle limited amount of data which isn't updated regularly. Let's take this example: I am writing an application which gets a schedule as an XML from server. I have written a logic in order to parse XML version and update database only if the version is newer than the local version. Although the update is checked automatically/manually on daily basis based on user preference, the actual version update happens only once per few months or so. Since, this is done by some other authority which doesn't provide API but, rather inform publicly on their changes. The actual XML contains a "(n number of groups)(days in a week) (n number of schedule)" . The group is usually 6 and the number of schedule is usually 2. So basically there would usually be only around 100 strings. Now although I have used SQLite at the moment. I want to know how to make update on database. Should I show progress dialog that the application is updating and exit the app when it's done? Since, my updates are infrequent i don't think this will really harm user experience but, is there any better ways to do it? Because I don't want update to be made when user is searching which is done using database. This will cause an database already open exception. Atleast I have faced this problem before. Is it better to rather parse XML every time when user wants to view certain things or to use SQLite? Since, I make lots of use of adapter in my app to create lists, will that degrade the performance? It would really be a great help if anyone can give me better overview about it. Or may be counter argument against each. Many thanks!

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  • Does it make the game more fun when the user is forced to progress thru the levels sequentially rather than letting them pick and play?

    - by BeachRunnerJoe
    Hello. For the first time in my game, I'm stuck with a real design dilemma. I guess that's a good thing ;) I'm building a word puzzle game that has five levels, each with 30 puzzles. Currently, the user has to solve one puzzle at a time before moving to the next. However, I'm finding the user occasionally gets stuck on a puzzle, at which point they can no longer play until they solve it. This is obviously bad because many people will just quit playing the game and delete the app since they get frustrated and can't play any other puzzles until the current puzzle is solved. The only elegant solution I can find to helping the player get unstuck is changing the design of the game to allow the users to pick any puzzle to play at any time. This way, if they get stuck, they can come back to it later and at least they have other puzzles to play in the meantime. It's my opinion, however, that this new flow design doesn't make the game as fun as the original flow design where the player has to complete a puzzle before moving to the next. To me, it's like anything else, when you only have one of something, it's more enjoyable, but when you have 30 of something, it's far less enjoyable. In fact, when I present the user with 30 puzzles to choose from that they need to solve before unlocking the next level, it almost seems as tho I'm making them feel like it's work they have to do. I even had a tester voluntarily tell me that being forced to complete a puzzle before moving to the next is more motivating. My questions are... Do you agree/disagree? Do you have any suggestions for how I can help the player get unstuck? Thanks so much in advance for your thoughts! EDIT: I should mention that I've already considered a few other solutions to helping the user get unstuck, but none of them seem like good ideas. They are... Add more hints: Currently, the user gets two hints per puzzle. If I increase the hint count, it only makes the game more easy and still leaves the possibility of the user getting stuck. Add a "Show Solution" button: This seems like a bad idea because it's my opinion this takes the fun out of the game for many people who would probably otherwise solve the puzzle if they didn't have the quick option to see the solution.

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  • Analysing SQLBits Feedback

    - by jamiet
    Earlier this week I received all the feedback that people offered on my session at SQLBits 7 in York – “SSIS Dataflow Performance Tuning” (the video is available online if you wish to see it). As you may have gathered from previous posts on this blog and my less-SQLy-focused Wordpress blog I am a big fan of collecting and tracking both personal and public data and session feedback lends itself very well to tracking because it is quantitative rather than qualitative; by that I mean attendees are invited to provide marks out of ten rather than (or, in the case of SQLBits, as well as) written comments. The SQLBits feedback is also useful because they use a consistent format – the same questions are asked each time – this means it is particularly easy to to track whether the scores that people give are trending up or down. I suspect that somewhere the SQLBits organisers have a big Analysis Services cube (ok, perhaps its an Excel pivot table) that allows them to analyse these scores per conference, speaker, track etc.… and there’s no reason that we as session speakers cannot do the same thing. To that end I have started to store my feedback in an Excel spreadsheet of my own which in the interests of transparency is available for public viewing (only a web browser required) on SkyDrive at http://cid-550f681dad532637.office.live.com/view.aspx/Public/Misc/Personal%20SQLBits%20Session%20Feedback.xlsx. I have used a pivot table to aggregate all that feedback and here is a screenshot: I am hereby making a public plea to the SQLBits organisers (on the off-chance that they are reading) to please continue to keep the feedback format consistent in the future and I encourage them to publish all of the feedback in an anonymised form. I would also encourage anyone doing conference speaking to track their conference feedback in the same way that I am doing so that you get an insight into whether or not you are improving over time. It is not difficult to setup and maintaining it as you do more sessions takes very little effort. Storing feedback data like this leads me to wider thoughts about well-known conventions and data format standardisation. Let’s imagine a utopia where there were a standard set of questions for capturing session feedback that were leveraged at every conference regardless of subject matter, location or culture; that would give rise to immense cross-conference and cross-discipline analysis – the data analyst in me goes giddy at the thought of it. It is scenarios like this that drive my interest both in data formats such as iCalendar, microformats and RDF, and in emerging movements such as the semantic web and linked data, all things which I have written about in the past. I don’t know whether we will ever reach the stage where every piece of data has structured, descriptive metadata associated with it but I live in hope. @Jamiet

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  • Validation and Error Generation when using the Data Mapper Pattern

    - by AndyPerlitch
    I am working on saving state of an object to a database using the data mapper pattern, but I am looking for suggestions/guidance on the validation and error message generation step (step 4 below). Here are the general steps as I see them for doing this: (1) The data mapper is used to get current info (assoc array) about the object in db: +=====================================================+ | person_id | name | favorite_color | age | +=====================================================+ | 1 | Andy | Green | 24 | +-----------------------------------------------------+ mapper returns associative array, eg. Person_Mapper::getPersonById($id) : $person_row = array( 'person_id' => 1, 'name' => 'Andy', 'favorite_color' => 'Green', 'age' => '24', ); (2) the Person object constructor takes this array as an argument, populating its fields. class Person { protected $person_id; protected $name; protected $favorite_color; protected $age; function __construct(array $person_row) { $this->person_id = $person_row['person_id']; $this->name = $person_row['name']; $this->favorite_color = $person_row['favorite_color']; $this->age = $person_row['age']; } // getters and setters... public function toArray() { return array( 'person_id' => $this->person_id, 'name' => $this->name, 'favorite_color' => $this->favorite_color, 'age' => $this->age, ); } } (3a) (GET request) Inputs of an HTML form that is used to change info about the person is populated using Person::getters <form> <input type="text" name="name" value="<?=$person->getName()?>" /> <input type="text" name="favorite_color" value="<?=$person->getFavColor()?>" /> <input type="text" name="age" value="<?=$person->getAge()?>" /> </form> (3b) (POST request) Person object is altered with the POST data using Person::setters $person->setName($_POST['name']); $person->setFavColor($_POST['favorite_color']); $person->setAge($_POST['age']); *(4) Validation and error message generation on a per-field basis - Should this take place in the person object or the person mapper object? - Should data be validated BEFORE being placed into fields of the person object? (5) Data mapper saves the person object (updates row in the database): $person_mapper->savePerson($person); // the savePerson method uses $person->toArray() // to get data in a more digestible format for the // db gateway used by person_mapper Any guidance, suggestions, criticism, or name-calling would be greatly appreciated.

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  • Setting uniform value of a vertex shader for different sprites in a SpriteBatch

    - by midasmax
    I'm using libGDX and currently have a simple shader that does a passthrough, except for randomly shifting the vertex positions. This shift is a vec2 uniform that I set within my code's render() loop. It's declared in my vertex shader as uniform vec2 u_random. I have two different kind of Sprites -- let's called them SpriteA and SpriteB. Both are drawn within the same SpriteBatch's begin()/end() calls. Prior to drawing each sprite in my scene, I check the type of the sprite. If sprite instance of SpriteA: I set the uniform u_random value to Vector2.Zero, meaning that I don't want any vertex changes for it. If sprite instance of SpriteB, I set the uniform u_random to Vector2(MathUtils.random(), MathUtils.random(). The expected behavior was that all the SpriteA objects in my scene won't experience any jittering, while all SpriteB objects would be jittering about their positions. However, what I'm experiencing is that both SpriteA and SpriteB are jittering, leading me to believe that the u_random uniform is not actually being set per Sprite, and being applied to all sprites. What is the reason for this? And how can I fix this such that the vertex shader correctly accepts the uniform value set to affect each sprite individually? passthrough.vsh attribute vec4 a_color; attribute vec3 a_position; attribute vec2 a_texCoord0; uniform mat4 u_projTrans; uniform vec2 u_random; varying vec4 v_color; varying vec2 v_texCoord; void main() { v_color = a_color; v_texCoord = a_texCoord0; vec3 temp_position = vec3( a_position.x + u_random.x, a_position.y + u_random.y, a_position.z); gl_Position = u_projTrans * vec4(temp_position, 1.0); } Java Code this.batch.begin(); this.batch.setShader(shader); for (Sprite sprite : sprites) { Vector2 v = Vector2.Zero; if (sprite instanceof SpriteB) { v.x = MathUtils.random(-1, 1); v.y = MathUtils.random(-1, 1); } shader.setUniformf("u_random", v); sprite.draw(this.batch); } this.batch.end();

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  • WCF Routing Service Filter Generator

    - by Michael Stephenson
    Recently I've been working with the WCF routing service and in our case we were simply routing based on the SOAP Action. This is a pretty good approach for a standard redirection of the message when all messages matching a SOAP Action will go to the same endpoint. Using the SOAP Action also lets you be specific about which methods you expose via the router. One of the things which was a pain was the number of routing rules I needed to create because we were routing for a lot of different methods. I could have explored the option of using a regular expression to match the message to its routing but I wanted to be very specific about what's routed and not risk exposing methods I shouldn't via the router. I decided to put together a little spreadsheet so that I can generate part of the configuration I would need to put in the configuration file rather than have to type this by hand. To show how this works download the spreadsheet from the following url: https://s3.amazonaws.com/CSCBlogSamples/WCF+Routing+Generator.xlsx In the spreadsheet you will see that the squares in green are the ones which you need to amend. In the below picture you can see that you specify a prefix and suffix for the filter name. The core namespace from the web service your generating routing rules for and the WCF endpoint name which you want to route to. In column A you will see the green cells where you add the list of method names which you want to include routing rules for. The spreadsheet will workout what the full SOAP Action would be then the name you will use for that filter in your WCF Routing filters. In column D the spreadsheet will have generated the XML snippet which you can add to the routing filters section in your configuration file. In column E the spreadsheet will have created the XML snippet which you can add to the routing table to send messages matching each filter to the appropriate WCF client endpoint to forward the message to the required destination. Hopefully you can see that with this spreadsheet it would be very easy to produce accurate XML for the WCF Routing configuration if you had a large number of routing rules. If you had additional methods in other services you can simply copy the worksheet and add multiple copies to the Excel workbook. One worksheet per service would work well.

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  • Code testing practice

    - by Robin Castlin
    So now I have come to the conclusion like many others that having some way of constantly testing your code is good practice since it enables fewer people to be involved (colleges and customers alike) by simply knowing what's wrong before someone else finds out the hard way. I've heard and read some about Unit Testing and understand what it's supposed to do and all. The there are so many different types of bugs. It can be everything from web browser not being able not being able to send correct values, javascript failing, a global function messing up a piece of code somewhere to a change that looked good when testing it out but fails in some special case which was hard to anticipate. My simply finding these errors I learn to rarely repeat them again, but there seems to always be new bugs to be found and learnt from. I would guess maybe the best practice would be to run every page and it's functions a couple of times, witness the result and repeat this in Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer (and all smartphones apparently) to make sure it works as intended. However this would take quite some time to do consider I don't work with patches/versions and do little fixes here and there a couple of times per week. What I prefer would be some kind of page I can just load that tests as much things as possible to make sure the site works as intended. Basicly just run a lot of cURL's with POST-values and see if I get expected result. But how would I preferably not increase the IDs of every mysql rows if I delete these testing rows? It feels silly to be on ID 1000 with maybe 50 rows in total. If I could build a new project from scratch I would probably implement some kind of smooth way to return a "TRUE" on testing instead of the actual page. But this solution would for the moment being have to be passed on existing projects. My question What would you recommend to be the best way to test my site to make sure that existing functions does their job upon editing the code? Should I consider to implement a lot of edits first, then test manually the entire code to make sure it still works? Is there any nice way of testing codes without "hurting" the ID columns? Extra thoughs Would it be a good idea to associate all of my files to the different parts of my site which they affect? For instance if I edit home.php I will through documentation test if my homepage's start works as intended since it's the only part of my site it should affect.

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  • Why can't the IT industry deliver large, faultless projects quickly as in other industries?

    - by MainMa
    After watching National Geographic's MegaStructures series, I was surprised how fast large projects are completed. Once the preliminary work (design, specifications, etc.) is done on paper, the realization itself of huge projects take just a few years or sometimes a few months. For example, Airbus A380 "formally launched on Dec. 19, 2000", and "in the Early March, 2005", the aircraft was already tested. The same goes for huge oil tankers, skyscrapers, etc. Comparing this to the delays in software industry, I can't help wondering why most IT projects are so slow, or more precisely, why they cannot be as fast and faultless, at the same scale, given enough people? Projects such as the Airbus A380 present both: Major unforeseen risks: while this is not the first aircraft built, it still pushes the limits if the technology and things which worked well for smaller airliners may not work for the larger one due to physical constraints; in the same way, new technologies are used which were not used yet, because for example they were not available in 1969 when Boeing 747 was done. Risks related to human resources and management in general: people quitting in the middle of the project, inability to reach a person because she's on vacation, ordinary human errors, etc. With those risks, people still achieve projects like those large airliners in a very short period of time, and despite the delivery delays, those projects are still hugely successful and of a high quality. When it comes to software development, the projects are hardly as large and complicated as an airliner (both technically and in terms of management), and have slightly less unforeseen risks from the real world. Still, most IT projects are slow and late, and adding more developers to the project is not a solution (going from a team of ten developer to two thousand will sometimes allow to deliver the project faster, sometimes not, and sometimes will only harm the project and increase the risk of not finishing it at all). Those which are still delivered may often contain a lot of bugs, requiring consecutive service packs and regular updates (imagine "installing updates" on every Airbus A380 twice per week to patch the bugs in the original product and prevent the aircraft from crashing). How can such differences be explained? Is it due exclusively to the fact that software development industry is too young to be able to manage thousands of people on a single project in order to deliver large scale, nearly faultless products very fast?

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  • High traffic chat - how to check if there is new message and show it for all users

    - by user2633999
    I already had question about this but obviously it was not accepted very well, apparently too long when it's actually more information so you could have given me better answer. Ok, I will be much clearer now. Best possible logic to develop scalable chat in terms of stability, storing/reading messages on chat, updating chat on new message for all users etc.? I have most of this developed, the logic I think I miss is -- check if there is new message and show it for all users. I have this implemented but it crashes the site due to its traffic of 300k-400k people, so that's my main question. The chat is PHP based and uses Pusher (www.pusher.com) for instant messaging but it lacks what I need because it's more like a websocket. I'm using hardcoded files to keep messages (want to avoid database as much as possible). It's a no extension type of file, I'm sure you know. I'm getting crash with $fp = fopen(..., "w"); // pretend ... is the path and filename fwrite($fp, $msg); //hardcode the message fclose($fp); where $msg is the message itself. I'm having 1 file per message. I show last 150 messages = 150 file accesses and reads, yeah it's too much I guess. I have better logic now which I'm pursuing and that is 1 file with last 50-100 messages at all time. Sure it should be much better. How does it crash, that's the trickiest part because everything seems ordinary, believe me it is difficult to determine what exactly crashes the site, but in like 5 minutes when I try to open the site it's gone, then I put the old content without chat and is back online again. I'm having jquery post every 1 second to check if there is new message. I'm using timestamp in a special file where I keep the time last message was sent and if ((time() - time in file) <= 2) = reload last 150 messages including the last one. Too much input/output, write/read or however to say it I think is what crashes the site.

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  • How do I randomly generate a top-down 2D level with separate sections and is infinite?

    - by Bagofsheep
    I've read many other questions/answers about random level generation but most of them deal with either randomly/proceduraly generating 2D levels viewed from the side or 3D levels. What I'm trying to achieve is sort of like you were looking straight down on a Minecraft map. There is no height, but the borders of each "biome" or "section" of the map are random and varied. I already have basic code that can generate a perfectly square level with the same tileset (randomly picking segments from the tileset image), but I've encountered a major issue for wanting the level to be infinite: Beyond a certain point, the tiles' positions become negative on one or both of the axis. The code I use to only draw tiles the player can see relies on taking the tiles position and converting it to the index number that represents it in the array. As you well know, arrays cannot have a negative index. Here is some of my code: This generates the square (or rectangle) of tiles: //Scale is in tiles public void Generate(int sX, int sY) { scaleX = sX; scaleY = sY; for (int y = 0; y <= scaleY; y++) { tiles.Add(new List<Tile>()); for (int x = 0; x <= scaleX; x++) { tiles[tiles.Count - 1].Add(tileset.randomTile(x * tileset.TileSize, y * tileset.TileSize)); } } } Before I changed the code after realizing an array index couldn't be negative my for loops looked something like this to center the map around (0, 0): for (int y = -scaleY / 2; y <= scaleY / 2; y++) for (int x = -scaleX / 2; x <= scaleX / 2; x++) Here is the code that draws the tiles: int startX = (int)Math.Floor((player.Position.X - (graphics.Viewport.Width) - tileset.TileSize) / tileset.TileSize); int endX = (int)Math.Ceiling((player.Position.X + (graphics.Viewport.Width) + tileset.TileSize) / tileset.TileSize); int startY = (int)Math.Floor((player.Position.Y - (graphics.Viewport.Height) - tileset.TileSize) / tileset.TileSize); int endY = (int)Math.Ceiling((player.Position.Y + (graphics.Viewport.Height) + tileset.TileSize) / tileset.TileSize); for (int y = startY; y < endY; y++) { for (int x = startX; x < endX; x++) { if (x >= 0 && y >= 0 && x <= scaleX && y <= scaleY) tiles[y][x].Draw(spriteBatch); } } So to summarize what I'm asking: First, how do I randomly generate a top-down 2D map with different sections (not chunks per se, but areas with different tile sets) and second, how do I get past this negative array index issue?

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  • Trying to use stencils in 2D while retaining layer depth

    - by Steve
    This is a screen of what's going on just so you can get a frame of reference. http://i935.photobucket.com/albums/ad199/fobwashed/tilefloors.png The problem I'm running into is that my game is slowing down due to the amount of texture swapping I'm doing during my draw call. Since walls, characters, floors, and all objects are on their respective sprite sheet containing those types, per tile draw, the loaded texture is swapping no less than 3 to 5+ times as it cycles and draws the sprites in order to layer properly. Now, I've tried throwing all common objects together into their respective lists, and then using layerDepth drawing them that way which makes things a lot better, but the new problem I'm running into has to do with the way my doors/windows are drawn on walls. Namely, I was using stencils to clear out a block on the walls that are drawn in the shape of the door/window so that when the wall would draw, it would have a door/window sized hole in it. This is the way my draw was set up for walls when I was going tile by tile rather than grouped up common objects. first it would check to see if a door/window was on this wall. If not, it'd skip all the steps and just draw normally. Otherwise end the current spriteBatch Clear the buffers with a transparent color to preserve what was already drawn start a new spritebatch with stencil settings draw the door area end the spriteBatch start a new spritebatch that takes into account the previously set stencil draw the wall which will now be drawn with a hole in it end that spritebatch start a new spritebatch with the normal settings to continue drawing tiles In the tile by tile draw, clearing the depth/stencil buffers didn't matter since I wasn't using any layerDepth to organize what draws on top of what. Now that I'm drawing from lists of common objects rather than tile by tile, it has sped up my draw call considerably but I can't seem to figure out a way to keep the stencil system to mask out the area a door or window will be drawn into a wall. The root of the problem is that when I end a spriteBatch to change the DepthStencilState, it flattens the current RenderTarget and there is no longer any depth sorting for anything drawn further down the line. This means walls always get drawn on top of everything regardless of depth or positioning in the game world and even on top of each other as the stencil has to happen once for every wall that has a door or window. Does anyone know of a way to get around this? To boil it down, I need a way to draw having things sorted by layer depth while also being able to stencil/mask out portions of specific sprites.

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  • Variable number of GUI Buttons

    - by Wakaka
    I have a generic HTML5 Canvas GUI Button class and a Scene class. The Scene class has a method called createButton(), which will create a new Button with onclick parameter and store it in a list of buttons. I call createButton() for all UI buttons when initializing the Scene. Because buttons can appear and disappear very often during rendering, Scene would first deactivate all buttons (temporarily remove their onclick, onmouseover etc property) before each render frame. During rendering, the renderer would then activate the required buttons for that frame. The problem is that part of the UI requires a variable number of buttons, and their onclick, onmouseover etc properties change frequently. An example is a buffs system. The UI will list all buffs as square sprites for the current unit selected, and mousing over each square will bring up a tooltip with some information on the buff. But the number of buffs is variable thus I won't know how many buttons to create at the start. What's the best way to solve this problem? P.S. My game is in Javascript, and I know I can use HTML buttons, but would like to make my game purely Canvas-based. Create buttons on-the-fly during rendering. Thus I will only have buttons when I require them. After the render frame these buttons would be useless and removed. Create a fixed set of buttons that I'm going to assume the number of buffs per unit won't exceed. During each render frame activate the buttons accordingly and set their onmouseover property. Assign a button to each Buff instance. This sounds wrong as the buff button is a part of the GUI which can only have one unit selected. Assigning a button to every single Buff in the game seems to be overkill. Also, I would need to change the button's position every render frame since its order in the unit's list of buffs matter. Any other solutions? I'm actually quite for idea (1) but am worried about the memory/time issues of creating a new Button() object every render frame. But this is in Javascript where object creation is oh-so-common ({} mainly) due to automatic garbage collection. What is your take on this? Thanks!

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  • Does it make the game more fun when the user is forced to progress through the levels sequentially rather than letting them pick and play?

    - by BeachRunnerJoe
    Hello. For the first time in my game, I'm stuck with a real design dilemma. I guess that's a good thing ;) I'm building a word puzzle game that has five levels, each with 30 puzzles. Currently, the user has to solve one puzzle at a time before moving to the next. However, I'm finding the user occasionally gets stuck on a puzzle, at which point they can no longer play until they solve it. This is obviously bad because many people will probably just quit playing the game and delete the app. The only elegant solution I can find to helping the player get unstuck is changing the design of the game to allow the users to pick any puzzle to play at any time. This way, if they get stuck, they can come back to it later and at least they have other puzzles to play in the meantime. It's my opinion, however, that this new flow design doesn't make the game as fun as the original flow design where the player has to complete a puzzle before moving to the next. To me, it's like anything else, when you only have one of something, it's more enjoyable, but when you have 30 of something, it's far less enjoyable. In fact, when I present the user with 30 puzzles to choose from, I'm concerned I might be making them feel like it's a lot of work they have to do and that's bad. I even had a tester voluntarily tell me that being forced to complete a puzzle before moving to the next is actually motivating. My questions are... Do you agree/disagree? Do you have any suggestions for how I can help the player get unstuck? Thanks so much in advance for your thoughts! EDIT: I should mention that I've already considered a few other solutions to helping the user get unstuck, but none of them seem like good ideas. They are... Add more hints: Currently, the user gets two hints per puzzle. If I increase the hint count, it only makes the game more easy and still leaves the possibility of the user getting stuck. Add a "Show Solution" button: This seems like a bad idea because it's my opinion this takes the fun out of the game for many people who would probably otherwise solve the puzzle if they didn't have the quick option to see the solution.

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  • Legal concerns with orchestrating a music submission contest

    - by Amplify91
    My team and I are getting pretty far along in the development of our latest game and have been thinking about audio. We decided to host an audio submission contest where we will offer a little cash and some equity stake in the game as prizes. We are also giving away copies of the game to participants. We hope not only to find audio for our game, but to meet some cool sound artists and promote the game a bit through the process. First of all, is this even a good idea? What are some potential dangers in doing this? Will it even be well received among artists? Secondly, I wrote up some Terms and Conditions in my best legal-speak to try to protect us and clarify how the contest will be run. Are these sufficient to make sure everyone involved is treated fairly and is legally protected? They are as follows: All submissions (The Submission) must be licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-3.0) By applying a CC-BY-3.0 license, you (The Submitter) expressly give Detour Games (and all members wherein) permission to copy, distribute, transmit, modify, adapt, and make commercial use of The Submission. The Submitter must own all rights to The Submission and be within their rights to license it as specified and submit it. The Submitter claims responsibility for the legality of The Submission. If The Submission is found to infringe on the rights of a person or entity other than those of The Submitter, Detour Games will not be held liable as all responsibility and liability for the legality of The Submission is that of The Submitter's. No more than two free copies of The Game per submitter. All flat cash prizes will only be disbursed pending the success of our first $5,000 Kickstarter campaign. These prizes will be disbursed 30 days after Detour Games receives the Kickstarter funds. All equity prizes (percentage of profits) are defined as the given percent of total profits after costs for a period of one year (12 months) after the release of RAW. These prizes will be disbursed semi-annually. All prize money will be disbursed through either an electronic fund transfer through a service such as PayPal or by a mailed money order. It is The Submitter's responsibility to cooperate with Detour Games in the disbursement of the funds. Detour Games reserves the right to change these Terms and Conditions at any time without notice. By participating in the contest, The Submitter agrees to and accepts all terms and conditions listed. What else could I do (legally) to protect everyone involved?

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