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  • Eclipse Indigo very slow on Kubuntu 12.04

    - by herom
    hello fellow ubuntu users! I have a really big problem with my Eclipse Indigo running on Kubuntu 12.04 32bit, Dell Vostro 3500, Intel(R) Core(TM) i5 CPU M480 @ 2.67 (as cat /proc/cpuinfo said). It has 4GB RAM. cat /proc/cpuinfo brings up the following: processor : 0 vendor_id : GenuineIntel cpu family : 6 model : 37 model name : Intel(R) Core(TM) i5 CPU M 480 @ 2.67GHz stepping : 5 microcode : 0x2 cpu MHz : 1197.000 cache size : 3072 KB physical id : 0 siblings : 4 core id : 0 cpu cores : 2 apicid : 0 initial apicid : 0 fdiv_bug : no hlt_bug : no f00f_bug : no coma_bug : no fpu : yes fpu_exception : yes cpuid level : 11 wp : yes flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe nx rdtscp lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts xtopology nonstop_tsc aperfmperf pni dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm pcid sse4_1 sse4_2 popcnt lahf_lm ida arat dts tpr_shadow vnmi flexpriority ept vpid bogomips : 5319.85 clflush size : 64 cache_alignment : 64 address sizes : 36 bits physical, 48 bits virtual power management: processor : 1 vendor_id : GenuineIntel cpu family : 6 model : 37 model name : Intel(R) Core(TM) i5 CPU M 480 @ 2.67GHz stepping : 5 microcode : 0x2 cpu MHz : 1197.000 cache size : 3072 KB physical id : 0 siblings : 4 core id : 2 cpu cores : 2 apicid : 4 initial apicid : 4 fdiv_bug : no hlt_bug : no f00f_bug : no coma_bug : no fpu : yes fpu_exception : yes cpuid level : 11 wp : yes flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe nx rdtscp lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts xtopology nonstop_tsc aperfmperf pni dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm pcid sse4_1 sse4_2 popcnt lahf_lm ida arat dts tpr_shadow vnmi flexpriority ept vpid bogomips : 5319.88 clflush size : 64 cache_alignment : 64 address sizes : 36 bits physical, 48 bits virtual power management: processor : 2 vendor_id : GenuineIntel cpu family : 6 model : 37 model name : Intel(R) Core(TM) i5 CPU M 480 @ 2.67GHz stepping : 5 microcode : 0x2 cpu MHz : 1197.000 cache size : 3072 KB physical id : 0 siblings : 4 core id : 0 cpu cores : 2 apicid : 1 initial apicid : 1 fdiv_bug : no hlt_bug : no f00f_bug : no coma_bug : no fpu : yes fpu_exception : yes cpuid level : 11 wp : yes flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe nx rdtscp lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts xtopology nonstop_tsc aperfmperf pni dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm pcid sse4_1 sse4_2 popcnt lahf_lm ida arat dts tpr_shadow vnmi flexpriority ept vpid bogomips : 5319.88 clflush size : 64 cache_alignment : 64 address sizes : 36 bits physical, 48 bits virtual power management: processor : 3 vendor_id : GenuineIntel cpu family : 6 model : 37 model name : Intel(R) Core(TM) i5 CPU M 480 @ 2.67GHz stepping : 5 microcode : 0x2 cpu MHz : 1197.000 cache size : 3072 KB physical id : 0 siblings : 4 core id : 2 cpu cores : 2 apicid : 5 initial apicid : 5 fdiv_bug : no hlt_bug : no f00f_bug : no coma_bug : no fpu : yes fpu_exception : yes cpuid level : 11 wp : yes flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe nx rdtscp lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts xtopology nonstop_tsc aperfmperf pni dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm pcid sse4_1 sse4_2 popcnt lahf_lm ida arat dts tpr_shadow vnmi flexpriority ept vpid bogomips : 5319.88 clflush size : 64 cache_alignment : 64 address sizes : 36 bits physical, 48 bits virtual power management: java -version brings the following: java version "1.7.0_04" Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.7.0_04-b20) Java HotSpot(TM) Server VM (build 23.0-b21, mixed mode) it's the Oracle Java, not OpenJDK. I try to develop an Android application for GoogleTV and Eclipse is this slow, that it can't follow my typing (extreme lagging!!), but this issue makes it almost impossible! here is my eclipse.ini file: -startup plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher_1.2.0.v20110502.jar --launcher.library plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.gtk.linux.x86_1.1.100.v20110505 -product org.eclipse.epp.package.java.product --launcher.defaultAction openFile -showsplash org.eclipse.platform --launcher.XXMaxPermSize 512m --launcher.defaultAction openFile -vmargs -Dosgi.requiredJavaVersion=1.5 -Declipse.p2.unsignedPolicy=allow -Xms256m -Xmx512m -Xss4m -XX:PermSize=128m -XX:MaxPermSize=384m -XX:CompileThreshold=5 -XX:MaxGCPauseMillis=10 -XX:MaxHeapFreeRatio=70 -XX:+CMSIncrementalPacing -XX:+UnlockExperimentalVMOptions -XX:+UseG1GC -XX:+UseFastAccessorMethods -XX:ReservedCodeCacheSize=64m -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote has anybody faced the same problems? can anybody help me on this problem? it's really urgent as I'm sitting here at my company and am not able to do anything productive...

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  • CacheAdapter 2.4 – Bug fixes and minor functional update

    - by Glav
    Note: If you are unfamiliar with the CacheAdapter library and what it does, you can read all about its awesome ability to utilise memory, Asp.Net Web, Windows Azure AppFabric and memcached caching implementations via a single unified, simple to use API from here and here.. The CacheAdapter library is receiving an update to version 2.4 and is currently available on Nuget here. Update: The CacheAdapter has actualy just had a minor revision to 2.4.1. This significantly increases the performance and reliability in memcached scenario under more extreme loads. General to moderate usage wont see any noticeable difference though. Bugs This latest version fixes a big that is only present in the memcached implementation and is only seen in rare, intermittent times (making i particularly hard to find). The bug is where a cache node would be removed from the farm when errors in deserialization of cached objects would occur due to serialised data not being read from the stream in entirety. The code also contains enhancements to better surface serialization exceptions to aid in the debugging process. This is also specifically targeted at the memcached implementation. This is important when moving from something like memory or Asp.Web caching mechanisms to memcached where the serialization rules are not as lenient. There are a few other minor bug fixes, code cleanup and a little refactoring. Minor feature addition In addition to this bug fix, many people have asked for a single setting to either enable or disable the cache.In this version, you can disable the cache by setting the IsCacheEnabled flag to false in the application configuration file. Something like the example below: <Glav.CacheAdapter.MainConfig> <setting name="CacheToUse" serializeAs="String"> <value>memcached</value> </setting> <setting name="DistributedCacheServers" serializeAs="String"> <value>localhost:11211</value> </setting> <setting name="IsCacheEnabled" serializeAs="String"> <value>False</value> </setting> </Glav.CacheAdapter.MainConfig> Your reasons to use this feature may vary (perhaps some performance testing or problem diagnosis). At any rate, disabling the cache will cause every attempt to retrieve data from the cache, resulting in a cache miss and returning null. If you are using the ICacheProvider with the delegate/Func<T> syntax to populate the cache, this delegate method will get executed every single time. For example, when the cache is disabled, the following delegate/Func<T> code will be executed every time: var data1 = cacheProvider.Get<SomeData>("cache-key", DateTime.Now.AddHours(1), () => { // With the cache disabled, this data access code is executed every attempt to // get this data via the CacheProvider. var someData = new SomeData() { SomeText = "cache example1", SomeNumber = 1 }; return someData; }); One final note: If you access the cache directly via the ICache instance, instead of the higher level ICacheProvider API, you bypass this setting and still access the underlying cache implementation. Only the ICacheProvider instance observes the IsCacheEnabled setting. Thanks to those individuals who have used this library and provided feedback. Ifyou have any suggestions or ideas, please submit them to the issue register on bitbucket (which is where you can grab all the source code from too)

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  • Analytics in an Omni-Channel World

    - by David Dorf
    Retail has been around ever since mankind started bartering.  The earliest transactions were very specific to the individuals buying and selling, then someone had the bright idea to open a store.  Those transactions were a little more generic, but the store owner still knew his customers and what they wanted.  As the chains rolled out, customer intimacy was sacrificed for scale, and retailers began to rely on segments and clusters.  But thanks to the widespread availability of data and the technology to convert said data into information, retailers are getting back to details. The retail industry is following a maturity model for analytics that is has progressed through five stages, each delivering more value than the previous. Store Analytics Brick-and-mortar retailers (and pure-play catalogers as well) that collect anonymous basket-level data are able to get some sense of demand to help with allocation decisions.  Promotions and foot-traffic can be measured to understand marketing effectiveness and perhaps focus groups can help test ideas.  But decisions are influenced by the majority, using faceless customer segments and aggregated industry data points.  Loyalty programs help a little, but in many cases the cost outweighs the benefits. Web Analytics The Web made it much easier to collect data on specific, yet still anonymous consumers using cookies to track visits. Clickstreams and product searches are analyzed to understand the purchase journey, gauge demand, and better understand up-selling opportunities.  Personalization begins to allow retailers target market consumers with recommendations. Cross-Channel Analytics This phase is a minor one, but where most retailers probably sit today.  They are able to use information from one channel to bolster activities in another. However, there are technical challenges combining data silos so its not an easy task.  But for those retailers that are able to perform analytics on both sources of data, the pay-off is pretty nice.  Revenue per customer begins to go up as customers have a better brand experience. Mobile & Social Analytics Big data technologies are enabling a 360-degree view of the customer by incorporating psychographic data from social sites alongside traditional demographic data.  Retailers can track individual preferences, opinions, hobbies, etc. in order to understand a consumer's motivations.  Using mobile devices, consumers can interact with brands anywhere, anytime, accessing deep product information and reviews.  Mobile, combined with a loyalty program, presents an opportunity to put shopping into geographic context, understanding paths to the store, patterns within the store, and be an always-on advertising conduit. Omni-Channel Analytics All this data along with the proper technology represents a new paradigm in which the clock is turned back and retail becomes very personal once again.  Rich, individualized data better illuminates demand, allows for highly localized assortments, and helps tailor up-selling.  Interactions with all channels help build an accurate profile of each consumer, and allows retailers to tailor the retail experience to meet the heightened expectations of today's sophisticated shopper.  And of course this culminates in greater customer satisfaction and business profitability.

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

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

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  • Multitenant Design for SQL Azure: White Paper Available

    - by Herve Roggero
    Cloud computing is about scaling out all your application tiers, from web application to the database layer. In fact, the whole promise of Azure is to pay for just what you need. You need more IIS servers? No problemo... just spin another web server. You expect to double your storage needs for Azure Tables? No problemo; you are covered there too... just pay for your storage needs. But what about the database tier, SQL Azure? How do you add new databases easily, and transparently, so that your application simply uses more of SQL Azure if its needs to? Without changing a single line of code? And what if you need to scale back down? Welcome to the world of database scalability. There are many terms that describe database scalability, including data federation, multitenant designs, and even NoSQL depending on the technical solution you are implementing.  Because SQL Azure is a transactional database system, NoSQL is not really an option. However data federation and multitenant designs offer some very interesting scalability options that are worth considering. Data federation, a feature of SQL Azure that will be offered in the future, offers very interesting capabilities available natively on the SQL Azure platform. More to come in a few weeks... Multitenant designs on the other hand are design practices and technologies designed to help you reach flexible scalability options not available otherwise. The first incarnation of such a method was made available on CodePlex as an open source project (http://enzosqlshard.codeplex.com).  This project was an attempt to provide a sharding library for educational purposes.  All that sounds really cool... and really esoteric... almost a form of database "voodoo"... However after being on multiple Azure projects I am starting to see a real need. Customers want to be able to free themselves from the database tier, so that if they have 10 new customers tomorrow, all they need to do is add 2 more SQL Azure instances. It's that simple. How you achieve this, and suggested application design guidelines, are available in a white paper I just published.  The white paper offers two primary sections. The first section describes the business and technical problem at hand, and how to classify it according to specific design patterns. For example, I discuss compressed shards through schema separation. The second section offers a method for addressing the needs of a multitenant design using a new library, the big bother of the codeplex project mentioned previously (that I created earlier this year), complete with management interface and such. A Beta of this platform will be made available within weeks; as soon as the documentation will be ready.   I would like to ask you to drop me a quick email at [email protected] if you are going to download the white paper. It's not required, but it would help me get in touch with you for feedback.  You can download this white paper here:   http://www.bluesyntax.net/files/EnzoFramework.pdf . Thank you, and I am looking for feedback, thoughts and implementation opportunities.

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  • What DX level does my graphics card support? Does it go to 11?

    - by Daniel Moth
    Recently I run into a situation that I have run into quite a few times. Someone encounters a machine and the question arises: "Is there a DirectX 11 card in this machine?". Typically the reason you are interested in that is because cards with DirectX 11 drivers fully support DirectCompute (and by extension C++ AMP) for GPGPU programming. The driver specifically is WDDM (1.1 on Windows 7 and Windows 8 introduces WDDM 1.2 with cool new capabilities). There are many ways for figuring out if you have a DirectX11 card, so here are the approaches that you can use, with a bonus right at the end of the post. Run DxDiag WindowsKey + R, type DxDiag and hit Enter. That is the DirectX diagnostic tool, which unfortunately, only tells you on the "System" tab what is the highest version of DirectX installed on your machine. So if it reports DirectX 11, that doesn't mean you have a DX11 driver! The "Display" tab has a promising "DDI version" label, but unfortunately that doesn't seem to be accurate on the machines I've tested it with (or I may be misinterpreting its use). Either way, this tool is not the one you want for this purpose, although it is good for telling you the WDDM version among other things. Use the Microsoft hardware page There is a Microsoft Windows 7 compatibility center, that lists all hardware (tip: use the advanced search) and you could try and locate your device there… good luck. Use Wikipedia or the hardware vendor's website Use the Wikipedia page for the vendor cards, for both nvidia and amd. Often this information will also be in the specifications for the cards on the IHV site, but is is nice that wikipedia has a single page per vendor that you can search etc. There is a column in the tables for API support where you can see the DirectX version. Check if it is one of these recommended DX11 cards You may not have a DirectX 11 card and are interested in purchasing one. While I am in no position to make recommendations, I will list here some cards from two big IHVs that we know are DirectX 11 capable. Some AMD (aka ATI) cards Low end, inexpensive DX11 hardware: Radeon 5450, 5550, 6450, 6570 Mid range (decent perf, single precision): Radeon 5750, 5770, 6770, 6790 High end (capable of double precision): Radeon 5850, 5870, 6950, 6970 Single precision APUs: AMD E-Series APUs AMD A-Series APUs Some NVIDIA cards Low end, inexpensive DX11 hardware: GeForce GT430, GT 440, GT520, GTS 450 Quadro 400, 600 Mid-range (decent perf, single precision): GeForce GTX 460, GTX 550 Ti, GTX 560, GTX 560 Ti Quadro 2000 High end (capable of double precision): GeForce GTX 480, GTX 570, GTX 580, GTX 590, GTX 595 Quadro 4000, 5000, 6000 Tesla C2050, C2070, C2075 Get the DirectX SDK and run DirectX Caps Viewer Download and install the June 2010 DirectX SDK. As part of that you now have the DirectX Capabilities Viewer utility (find it in your start menu by searching for "DirectX Caps Viewer", the filename is DXCapsViewer.exe). It will list all your devices (emulated, and real hardware ones) under the first node. Expand the hardware entries and then expand again the Direct3D 11 folder. If you see D3D_FEATURE_LEVEL_11_ under that, then your card supports feature level 11 which means it supports DirectCompute and C++ AMP. In the following screenshot of one of my old laptops, the card only goes to feature level 10. Run a utility from the web that just tells you! Of course, writing some C++ AMP code that enumerates accelerators and lists the ones that are capable is trivial. However that requires that you have redistributed the runtime, so a more broadly applicable approach is to use the DX APIs directly to enumerate the DX11 capable cards. That is exactly what the development lead for C++ AMP has done and he describes and shares that utility at this post. Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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  • Authenticating your windows domain users in the cloud

    - by cibrax
    Moving to the cloud can represent a big challenge for many organizations when it comes to reusing existing infrastructure. For applications that drive existing business processes in the organization, reusing IT assets like active directory represent good part of that challenge. For example, a new web mobile application that sales representatives can use for interacting with an existing CRM system in the organization. In the case of Windows Azure, the Access Control Service (ACS) already provides some integration with ADFS through WS-Federation. That means any organization can create a new trust relationship between the STS running in the ACS and the STS running in ADFS. As the following image illustrates, the ADFS running in the organization should be somehow exposed out of network boundaries to talk to the ACS. This is usually accomplish through an ADFS proxy running in a DMZ. This is the official story for authenticating existing domain users with the ACS.  Getting an ADFS up and running in the organization, which talks to a proxy and also trust the ACS could represent a painful experience. It basically requires  advance knowledge of ADSF and exhaustive testing to get everything right.  However, if you want to get an infrastructure ready for authenticating your domain users in the cloud in a matter of minutes, you will probably want to take a look at the sample I wrote for talking to an existing Active Directory using a regular WCF service through the Service Bus Relay Binding. You can use the WCF ability for self hosting the authentication service within a any program running in the domain (a Windows service typically). The service will not require opening any port as it is opening an outbound connection to the cloud through the Relay Service. In addition, the service will be protected from being invoked by any unauthorized party with the ACS, which will act as a firewall between any client and the service. In that way, we can get a very safe solution up and running almost immediately. To make the solution even more convenient, I implemented an STS in the cloud that internally invokes the service running on premises for authenticating the users. Any existing web application in the cloud can just establish a trust relationship with this STS, and authenticate the users via WS-Federation passive profile with regular http calls, which makes this very attractive for web mobile for example. This is how the WCF service running on premises looks like, [ServiceBehavior(Namespace = "http://agilesight.com/active_directory/agent")] public class ProxyService : IAuthenticationService { IUserFinder userFinder; IUserAuthenticator userAuthenticator;   public ProxyService() : this(new UserFinder(), new UserAuthenticator()) { }   public ProxyService(IUserFinder userFinder, IUserAuthenticator userAuthenticator) { this.userFinder = userFinder; this.userAuthenticator = userAuthenticator; }   public AuthenticationResponse Authenticate(AuthenticationRequest request) { if (userAuthenticator.Authenticate(request.Username, request.Password)) { return new AuthenticationResponse { Result = true, Attributes = this.userFinder.GetAttributes(request.Username) }; }   return new AuthenticationResponse { Result = false }; } } Two external dependencies are used by this service for authenticating users (IUserAuthenticator) and for retrieving user attributes from the user’s directory (IUserFinder). The UserAuthenticator implementation is just a wrapper around the LogonUser Win Api. The UserFinder implementation relies on Directory Services in .NET for searching the user attributes in an existing directory service like Active Directory or the local user store. public UserAttribute[] GetAttributes(string username) { var attributes = new List<UserAttribute>();   var identity = UserPrincipal.FindByIdentity(new PrincipalContext(this.contextType, this.server, this.container), IdentityType.SamAccountName, username); if (identity != null) { var groups = identity.GetGroups(); foreach(var group in groups) { attributes.Add(new UserAttribute { Name = "Group", Value = group.Name }); } if(!string.IsNullOrEmpty(identity.DisplayName)) attributes.Add(new UserAttribute { Name = "DisplayName", Value = identity.DisplayName }); if(!string.IsNullOrEmpty(identity.EmailAddress)) attributes.Add(new UserAttribute { Name = "EmailAddress", Value = identity.EmailAddress }); }   return attributes.ToArray(); } As you can see, the code is simple and uses all the existing infrastructure in Azure to simplify a problem that looks very complex at first glance with ADFS. All the source code for this sample is available to download (or change) in this GitHub repository, https://github.com/AgileSight/ActiveDirectoryForCloud

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, October 30, 2011

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, October 30, 2011Popular ReleasesKoober: Koober - The Ebook Creator 0.2: The official release of Koober as Open source. Koober is a ebook creator for Windows, and Koob Reader is the reader.?????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????VidCoder: 1.2.0: Updated to HandBrake svn 4311. Refactored to read in list of encoders from HandBrake itself. Added ffaac, FLAC audio and ffmpeg2 video. Reworked audio encoding UI: removed grid and gave each encoding more vertical space. Added audio quality targeting and compression. Added status messages. Added messages for a few events (encode start/stop, playing a preview clip, update available, update download finished). Made source and destination path UI elements smarter about what parts they cut ...patterns & practices: Enterprise Library Contrib: Enterprise Library Contrib - 5.0 (Oct 2011): This release of Enterprise Library Contrib is based on the Microsoft patterns & practices Enterprise Library 5.0 core and contains the following: Common extensionsTypeConfigurationElement<T> - A Polymorphic Configuration Element without having to be part of a PolymorphicConfigurationElementCollection. AnonymousConfigurationElement - A Configuration element that can be uniquely identified without having to define its name explicitly. Data Access Application Block extensionsMySql Provider - ...Network Monitor Open Source Parsers: Network Monitor Parsers 3.4.2748: The Network Monitor Parsers packages contain parsers for more than 400 network protocols, including RFC based public protocols and protocols for Microsoft products defined in the Microsoft Open Specifications for Windows and SQL Server. NetworkMonitor_Parsers.msi is the base parser package which defines parsers for commonly used public protocols and protocols for Microsoft Windows. In this release, NetowrkMonitor_Parsers.msi continues to improve quality and fix bugs. It has included the fo...Duckworth Lewis Professional Edition Calculator: DLcalc 3.0: DLcalc 3.0 can perform Duckworth/Lewis Professional Edition calculations 100% accurately. It also produces over-by-over and ball-by-ball PAR score tables.Folder Bookmarks: Folder Bookmarks 2.2.0.1: In this version: Custom Icons - now you can change the icons of the bookmarks. By default, whenever an image is added, the icon is automatically changed to a thumbnail of the picture. This can be turned off in the settings (Options... > Settings) Ability to remove items from the 'Recent' category Bugfixes - 'Choose' button in 'Edit Bookmark' now works Another bug fix: another problem in the 'Edit Bookmark' windowMedia Companion: MC 3.420b Weekly: Ensure .NET 4.0 Full Framework is installed. (Available from http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=17718) Ensure the NFO ID fix is applied when transitioning from versions prior to 3.416b. (Details here) Movies Fixed: Fanart and poster scraping issues TV Shows (Re)Added: Rebuild single show Fixed: Issue when shows are moved from original location Ability to handle " for actor nicknames Crash when episode name contains "<" (does not scrape yet) Clears fanart when switch...patterns & practices - Unity: Unity 3.0 for .NET4.5 Preview: The Unity 3.0.1026.0 Preview enables Unity to work on .NET 4.5 with both the WinRT and desktop profiles. The major changes include: Unity projects updated to target .NET 4.5. Dynamic build plans modified to use compiled lambda expressions instead of Reflection.Emit Converting reflection to use the new TypeInfo for reflection. Projects updated to work with the Microsoft Visual Studio 2011 Preview Notes/Known Issues: The Microsoft.Practices.Unity.UnityServiceLocator class cannot be use...Managed Extensibility Framework: MEF 2 Preview 4: Detailed information on this release is available on the BCL team blog.Image Converter: Image Converter 0.3: New Features: - English and German support Technical Improvements: - Microsoft All Rules using Code Analysis Planned Features for future release: 1. Unit testing 2. Command line interface 3. Automatic UpdatesAcDown????? - Anime&Comic Downloader: AcDown????? v3.6: ?? ● AcDown??????????、??????,??????????????????????,???????Acfun、Bilibili、???、???、???、Tucao.cc、SF???、?????80????,???????????、?????????。 ● AcDown???????????????????????????,???,???????????????????。 ● AcDown???????C#??,????.NET Framework 2.0??。?????"Acfun?????"。 ????32??64? Windows XP/Vista/7 ????????????? ??:????????Windows XP???,?????????.NET Framework 2.0???(x86)?.NET Framework 2.0???(x64),?????"?????????"??? ??????????????,??????????: ??"AcDown?????"????????? ?? v3.6?? ??“????”...Path Copy Copy: 8.0: New version that mostly adds lots of requested features: 11340 11339 11338 11337 This version also features a more elaborate Settings UI that has several tabs. I tried to add some notes to better explain the use and purpose of the various options. The Path Copy Copy documentation is also on the way, both to explain how to develop custom plugins and to explain how to pre-configure options if you're a network admin. Stay tuned.MVC Controls Toolkit: Mvc Controls Toolkit 1.5.0: Added: The new Client Blocks feaure of Views A new "move" js method for the TreeViews The NewHtmlCreated js event to the DataGrid Improved the ChoiceList structure that now allows also the selection list of a dropdown to be chosen with a lambda expression Improved the AcceptViewHintAttribute controller filter. Now a client can specify not only the name of a View or Partial View it prefers, but also to receive just the rough data in Json format. Now the the SMinimum and SMaximum par...Free SharePoint Master Pages: Buried Alive (Halloween) Theme: Release Notes *Created for Halloween, you will find theme file, custom css file and images. *Created by Al Roome @AlstarRoome Features: Custom styling for web part Custom background *Screenshot https://s3.amazonaws.com/kkhipple/post/sharepoint-showcase-halloween.pngDevForce Application Framework: DevForce AF 2.0.3 RTW: PrerequisitesWPF 4.0 Silverlight 4.0 DevForce 2010 6.1.3.1 Download ContentsDebug and Release Assemblies API Documentation Source code License.txt Requirements.txt Release HighlightsNew: EventAggregator event forwarding New: EntityManagerInterceptor<T> to intercept EntityManger events New: IHarnessAware to allow for ViewModel setup when executed inside of the Development Harness New: Improved design time stability New: Support for add-in development New: CoroutineFns.To...NicAudio: NicAudio 2.0.5: Minor change to accept special DTS stereo modes (LtRt, AB,...)NDepend TFS 2010 integration: version 0.5.0 beta 1: Only the activity and the VS plugin are avalaible right now. They basically work. Data types that are logged into tfs reports are subject to change. This is no big deal since data is not yet sent into the warehouse.Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone: Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone v1.3.1: Upgraded Windows Azure projects to Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 1.5 – September 2011 Upgraded the tools tools to support the Windows Phone Developer Tools RTW Update SQL Azure only scenarios to use ASP.NET Universal Providers (through the System.Web.Providers v1.0.1 NuGet package) Changed Shared Access Signature service interface to support more operations Refactored Blobs API to have a similar interface and usage to that provided by the Windows Azure SDK Stor...DotNetNuke® FAQ: 05.00.00: FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) 05.00.00 will work for any DNN version 5.6.1 and up. It is the first version which is rewritten in C#. The scope of this update is to fix all known issues and improve user interface. Please review and rate this release... (stars are welcome)BUG FIXESManage Categories button text was not localized Edit/Add FAQ Entry: button text was not localized ENHANCEMENTSAdded an option to select the control for category display: Listbox with checkboxes (flat category ...New ProjectsalphaCards: Digitale LernkarteiBinary Code Interpreter: The Binary Code Interpreter is a small and funny programming languaage. This interpreter works a bit like a Turing Machine.Buscar ciudades: This is the source code for the application "Buscar ciudades" published in the Windows Phone Marketplace. CamOnWeb - Componente para WebCam: Este projeto tem como objetivo o desenvolvimento um componente para captura e exibição de videos da webcam. Compare.Net: Compare.Net is a configurable application to compare and reconclie from different sources. C# WPF applcation targeting .Net 4CSGame: Academic project for our studies. Subject "Client -server technology"curbside: curbsideDanish Language Pack for Community Server: Danish Language Packs for Community Server 2.1 and 2007. At its inception, this project contains quite incomplete translations to Danish. This project provides a common resource where all interested parties can gradually improve on this language pack. Please join to improve the contents. The source code tree contains two major folders: One for Community Server 2.1 and one for Community Server 2007.Dependency Variable Lib: ??????????????????、?????????????????????。(???????、?????????????w) ???、「??×??=??」???????????????、????????、????????、???「??×??」????????????????????????????????????。 FreedBack: FreedBack allows you to quickly and easily embed a configurable feedback form into any web application. It can be a standalone application that you install and deploy, then embed a bit of script into existing apps to implement feedback, or you can make it part of your MVC App.Hageveld - NieuwsModule (Chris' Tutorial: A news article manager made for educational purposes.Idea Resto: Aplicación para restaurantes.jqgridmvcgeneration: codesmith template that creates js, html and asp.net mvc server side json server for a jqgrid -based table on a arbitratrary database table. The code includes pagination and server side sorting. Jqgrid is a great jquery extension that provides an ajax-enabled fully customizable interactive table based on server side data. However, the actual coding can be a bit tedious and cryptic. This project provides a template base approach that basically performs two tasks: 1. creates a client si...MyClassMapper: A simple configurable classmapper for mapping ClassA to ClassB and vice versa, the ideas are borrowed from the Dozer project (http://dozer.sourceforge.net). Most code is based on 'Dynamic Access' code from Hongju Cao <hjcao_wei@hotmail.com> (All that code is located in the "DynamicAccess" sub-directory from the project.)NavigateTo Providers: This project is a collection of NavigateTo providers for Visual Studio 2010. NObsidian: A proxy component to access Obisidian Portal API from .NetNSession: The objective of this project is to allow ASP Classic to access ASP.NET out-of-process session stores in the same way that ASP.NET accesses them, and thus share the session state with ASP.NET.NTextile: NTextile is a lightweight, humane web compatible markup generator. It generates valid XHTML output using simple easy to remember conventions and text characters (a.k.a modifiers), to markup plain text. NTextile is especially useful to provide quick and valid markup for .NET web applications. For e.g. wikis, blogs, online forums, content management systems etc. This project was inspired by Dean Allen’s original Textile features, as included in the Textpattern content management application. T...OpenTasksBehaviorsLibrary for Windows Phone: Open Tasks Behavior for Windows Phone *OpenWebBrowserTask *OpenMediaLauncherTaskPowerShell Cmdlet Sample: PowerShell Cmdlet SamplePrismEx: PrismEx is a library of helpers and extension methods to allow developers to more easily develop and test Prism applications. QuickDelete: A Windows Explorer add-on to delete files and folders very quickly, much more so than the usual Explorer command. Works on Windows XP or later. Currently in EXPERIMENTAL state. No releases have been produced yet.Quiz Module for DotNetNuke: This is a module that allows you to quickly and easily provide a quiz that can be taken by the visitors on your DotNetNuke website.RaptorDB - The Key Value Store: Smallest, fastest embedded nosql persisted dictionary using b+tree or MurMur hash indexing. (Now with Hybrid WAH bitmap indexes)Rockin CMS-LMS Combo: RockinCmsLms Combo provides a great way for users to build their content and training sites with one great tool. It will be developed with C# 4.0-4.5, Silverlight, JQuery, and ASP.Net and MVC 3.0 with Razor. This project will demonstrate how to use todays technologies to build solutions that last. We may have 2 versions - one with a local db and one with a Windows Azure storage solution. Suggest using the Web Platform Installer to get all of the components.SandKeeper - Time Tracking Addin for Outlook 2010 tasks: SandKeeper is an Outlook Addin that enables you to track time for your tasks.Share: Share is a new web-based content management system. For more information about this project, please visit http://blog.aphysoft.com.SharePoint 2010 ViewEdit Group By Content Type: A simple project that injects JavaScript into the ribbon bar area to add "Content Type" as a choice on the ViewEdit.aspx page. With this, users can once again create views that group by Content Type without having to use SharePoint Designer 2010.Simple Merge Sort: This is a simple implementation of Merge-Sort, using to sort an Array of Integers.UKag: Unity3D?Kr2/KAG3??moduleUsingLinq: TestUtec Logger: Utec Logger is meant to be used the Turbo XS UTEC and UTEC Delta. It is simply a data logger application, it will auto logged based on pre defined conditionals. It also takes this information and displays it in a two dimensional table, averaging the values appropriately to ease of log analysis.WOXalizer: Fork of WOX project. http://woxserializer.sourceforge.net/Zeta Backup Validator: A small .NET 3.5 console application that helps you verifying whether your backups succeed by checking files and folders with various configurable rules (folder size, file age, etc.).Zeta Links: A web application for generating and measuring shortcut hyperlinks, similar to bit.ly.Zombie Slayer v1.0: Zombie Slayer v1.0 is an action first person shooter where players can try and survive a never-ending wave of zombies for as long as they can while a timer keeps track of how long they survived and posts times online from longest to shortest.?????????????: ??????????????????,????。

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  • Problem with Assimp 3D model loader

    - by Brendan Webster
    In my game I have model loading functions for Assimp model loading library. I can load the model and render it, but the model displays incorrectly. The models load in as if they were using a seperate projection matrix. I have looked over my code over and over again, but I probably keep on missing the obvious reason why this is happening. Here is an image of my game: It's simply a 6 sided cube, but it's off big time! Here are my code snippets for rendering the cube to the screen: void C_MediaLoader::display(void) { float tmp; glTranslatef(0,0,0); // rotate it around the y axis glRotatef(angle,0.f,0.f,1.f); glColor4f(1,1,1,1); // scale the whole asset to fit into our view frustum tmp = scene_max.x-scene_min.x; tmp = aisgl_max(scene_max.y - scene_min.y,tmp); tmp = aisgl_max(scene_max.z - scene_min.z,tmp); tmp = (1.f / tmp); glScalef(tmp/5, tmp/5, tmp/5); // center the model //glTranslatef( -scene_center.x, -scene_center.y, -scene_center.z ); // if the display list has not been made yet, create a new one and // fill it with scene contents if(scene_list == 0) { scene_list = glGenLists(1); glNewList(scene_list, GL_COMPILE); // now begin at the root node of the imported data and traverse // the scenegraph by multiplying subsequent local transforms // together on GL's matrix stack. recursive_render(scene, scene->mRootNode); glEndList(); } glCallList(scene_list); } void C_MediaLoader::recursive_render (const struct aiScene *sc, const struct aiNode* nd) { unsigned int i; unsigned int n = 0, t; struct aiMatrix4x4 m = nd->mTransformation; // update transform aiTransposeMatrix4(&m); glPushMatrix(); glMultMatrixf((float*)&m); // draw all meshes assigned to this node for (; n < nd->mNumMeshes; ++n) { const struct aiMesh* mesh = scene->mMeshes[nd->mMeshes[n]]; apply_material(sc->mMaterials[mesh->mMaterialIndex]); if(mesh->mNormals == NULL) { glDisable(GL_LIGHTING); } else { glEnable(GL_LIGHTING); } for (t = 0; t < mesh->mNumFaces; ++t) { const struct aiFace* face = &mesh->mFaces[t]; GLenum face_mode; switch(face->mNumIndices) { case 1: face_mode = GL_POINTS; break; case 2: face_mode = GL_LINES; break; case 3: face_mode = GL_TRIANGLES; break; default: face_mode = GL_POLYGON; break; } glBegin(face_mode); for(i = 0; i < face->mNumIndices; i++) { int index = face->mIndices[i]; if(mesh->mColors[0] != NULL) glColor4fv((GLfloat*)&mesh->mColors[0][index]); if(mesh->mNormals != NULL) glNormal3fv(&mesh->mNormals[index].x); glVertex3fv(&mesh->mVertices[index].x); } glEnd(); } } // draw all children for (n = 0; n < nd->mNumChildren; ++n) { recursive_render(sc, nd->mChildren[n]); } glPopMatrix(); } Sorry there is so much code to look through, but I really cannot find the problem, and I would love to have help.

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  • #iPad at One Week: A Great Device Made with a Heavy Hand

    - by andrewbrust
    I have now had my iPad for a little over a week. In that time, Apple introduced the world to its iPhone OS 4 (and the SDK agreement’s draconian new section 3.3.1), HP introduced is Slate, and Microsoft got ready to launch Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0. And through it all I have used my iPad. I've used it for email, calendar, controlling my Sonos, and writing an essay. I've used it for getting on TripIt and Twitter, and surfing the Web. I've used it for online banking, and online ordering and delivery of food. And the verdict? Honestly? I think it's a great device and I thoroughly enjoy using it. The screen is bright and vibrant. I am surprisingly fast and accurate when I type on it. The touch screen's responsiveness is nearly flawless. The software, including a number of third party applications, include pleasing animations and use of color that make it fun to get work done. And speaking of work, the Exchange integration is, dare I say it, robust. Not as full-featured as on a PC or Windows Mobile device, but still offering core functionality and, so far at least, without bugs. The UI is intuitive, not just to me, but also to my 5 1/2 year old, and also to my nearly-3-year-old son. They picked it up and, with just just a few pointers from me, they almost immediately knew what to do, whether they were looking at photos (and swiping/flicking along as they did so), using a drawing program, playing a game, or watching YouTube videos. The younger of the two of them even tried to get up on a chair and grab the thing today. He dropped it, from about 4 feet off the ground. And it's still fine. (Meanwhile, I'll be keeping it on a higher shelf.) I cannot fully describe yet what makes this form factor and this product so appealing. Maybe it's that it's an always-on device. Maybe it's just being able to hold such a nice, relatively large display so close. Maybe it's the design sensibility, that seems to pervade throughout the app ecosystem. Or maybe it's that one's fingers, and not pens or mice, are the software's preferred input device. Whatever the attraction, it's strong. And no matter how much I tend to root for Microsoft and against Apple, Cupertino has, in my mind, scored big, Can Microsoft compete? Yes, but not with the Windows 7 standard UI (nor with individual OEMs’ own UIs on top). I hope Microsoft builds a variant of the Windows Phone 7 specifically for tablet devices. And I hope they make it clear that all developers, and programming languages, are welcome to the platform. Once that’s established, the OEMs have to build great hardware with fast, responsive touch screens, under Microsoft's watchful eye. That may be the hardest part of getting this right. No matter what, Microsoft's got a fight on its hands. I don't know if it can count on winning that fight, either. But Silverlight and Live Tiles could certainly help. And so can treating developers like adults.  Apple seems intent on treating their devs like kids, and then giving the kids a curfew.  For that, dev-friendly Microsoft may one day give thanks.

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  • Is a university education really worth it for a good programmer?

    - by Jon Purdy
    The title says it all, but here's the personal side of it: I've been doing design and programming for about as long as I can remember. If there's a programming problem, I can figure it out. (Though admittedly StackOverflow has allowed me to skip the figuring out and get straight to the doing in many instances.) I've made games, esoteric programming languages, and widgets and gizmos galore. I'm currently working on a general-purpose programming language. There's nothing I do better than programming. However, I'm just as passionate about design. Thus when I felt leaving high school that my design skills were lacking, I decided to attend university for New Media Design and Imaging, a digital design-related major. For a year, I diligently studied art and programmed in my free time. As the next year progressed, however, I was obligated to take fewer art and design classes and more technical classes. The trouble was of course that these classes were geared toward non-technical students, and were far beneath my skill level at the time. No amount of petitioning could overcome the institution's reluctance to allow me to test out of such classes, and the major offered no promise for any greater challenge in the future, so I took the extreme route: I switched into the technical equivalent of the major, New Media Interactive Development. A lot of my credits moved over into the new major, but many didn't. It would have been infeasible to switch to a more rigorous technical major such as Computer Science, and having tutored Computer Science students at every level here, I doubt I would be exposed to anything that I haven't already or won't eventually find out on my own, since I'm so involved in the field. I'm now on track to graduate perhaps a year later than I had planned, which puts a significant financial strain on my family and my future self. My schedule continues to be bogged down with classes that are wholly unnecessary for me to take. I'm being re-introduced to subjects that I've covered a thousand times over, simply because I've always been interested in it all. And though I succeed in avoiding the cynical and immature tactic of failing to complete work out of some undeserved sense of superiority, I'm becoming increasingly disillusioned by the lack of intellectual stimulation. Further, my school requires students to complete a number of quarters of co-op work experience proportional to their major. My original major required two quarters, but my current requires three, delaying my graduation even more. To top it all off, college is putting a severe strain on my relationship with my very close partner of a few years, so I've searched diligently for co-op jobs in my area, alas to no avail. I'm now in my third year, and approaching that point past which I can no longer handle this. Either I keep my head down, get a degree no matter what it takes, and try to get a job with a company that will pay me enough to do what I love that I can eventually pay off my loans; or I cut my losses now, move wherever there is work, and in six months start paying off what debt I've accumulated thus far. So the real question is: is a university education really more than just a formality? It's a big decision, and one I can't make lightly. I think this is the appropriate venue for this kind of question, and I hope it sticks around for the sake of others who might someday find themselves in similar situations. My heartfelt thanks for reading, and in advance for your help.

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  • June is going to be a busy month!

    - by Monica Kumar
    Who says things slow down in summer? Well, maybe for school kids, but certainly not for Oracle's Virtualization team! June is turning out to be one of the busiest months for us. We are going to be participating in a number of industry events. If you happen to be at any of these, please stop by the Oracle booth and our session/s. Let's go through a run down of these events. 1. 13th Annual Call Center Week June 4-8 Ceasar's Palace, Las Vegas  Event website You're now wondering...why are we at this call center show. It's really simple, Oracle's Desktop Virtualization solutions offer the best way for call center to reliably and securely access enterprise apps using a variety of endpoint devices such as an iPad or a Sun Ray Client. Provisioning new employees becomes a breeze. We'll be jointly showcasing our solution with Oracle's CRM team. Come check us out.  2. Gartner Infrastructure & Management, Florida June 5-7 Orlando, FL  Event website Oracle is a Premier sponsor of the Gartner IOM Summit this June 5 – 7, 2012 in Orlando, FL.  Attendees will have the opportunity to meet with Oracle experts in a variety of sessions, including demonstrations during the showcase receptions. 3. Cloud Expo East Check out our website for details of our participation. Stop by at booth 511 to talk to our Cloud, Virtualization and Big Data experts. In addition, we're delivering a number of sessions at Cloud Expo. The one I want to highlight is the following: Session: Borderless Applications in the Cloud with Oracle VM and Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder Abstract: As virtualization adoption progresses beyond server consolidation, this is also transforming how enterprise applications are deployed and managed in an agile environment. The traditional method of business-critical application deployment where administrators have to contend with an array of unrelated tools, custom scripts to deploy and manage applications, OS and VM instances into a fast changing cloud computing environment can no longer scale effectively to achieve response time and desired efficiency. Oracle VM and Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder allow applications, associated components, deployment metadata, management policies and best practices to be encapsulated into ready-to-run VMs for rapid, repeatable deployment and ease of management. Join us in this Cloud Expo session to see how Oracle VM and Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder allow you to deploy complex multi-tier applications in minutes and enables you to easily onboard existing applications to cloud environments.  Get your free Cloud Expo pass now!  We're offering complimentary VIP Gold Passes. Go to https://www.blueskyz.com/v3/Login.aspx?ClientID=19&EventID=56&sg=177, click “Continue” if you are a New User or log-in if you have already created an account. Once there, you can view the Agenda or Register for Cloud Expo. To register - fill out the basic business card questions and then enter oracleVIPgold in the Priority Code field to change the price from $2,000 to $0. 4. CiscoLive 2012  June 10-14 San Diego, CA Event website Our Oracle VM and Oracle Linux experts will talk about joint collaboration with Cisco on UCS. We'll also highlight customer use cases. 5. Gartner Infrastructure & Operations Management Summit, EMEA Dates: June 11-12 Frankfurt, Germany Event website Meet experts from our Virtualization and Linux team in EMEA. Stop by our booth and find out what's new in Oracle VM Server for x86 and Oracle Linux. June is going to be busy.

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  • 45 minutes to talk about C# [closed]

    - by Philip
    I have the opportunity to give a 45 minute talk on C# in the theory of programming languages class I'm taking. The college teaches Java almost exclusively, so that's what all the students are most familiar with. (There's a little C, assembly, Prolog and LISP as well.) I decide what to talk about. It seems to me the best approach is to focus on a few of the big, obvious differences between C# and Java. I don't intend it to be a recommendation to use C# -- there are reasons to use each, mostly because of their ecosystems. So I want to focus on C# as a language. I don't want to go too fast and end up listing a whole bunch of features without showing their usefulness. My current plan is this: Functions as first class objects. This is, in my opinion, one of the biggest differences between C# and Java. The professor briefly mentioned this notion and showed a LISP example, but many of the students have probably never used it. I can show real world examples where it's made my code more readable. Lambda expressions as concise syntax for anonymous functions. Obviously with examples to show how this is useful. The real hit-home examples will be at the end when it's combined with the rest. I don't see an advantage to first showing the old delegate syntax and then replacing it with lambdas -- most of us won't have ever seen delegates anyway so it would just be confusing. The yield keyword and how it's different from returning an array. I have the impression that a lot of C# developers aren't familiar with how to use this. It will likely be very foreign to Java developers. I have some examples from my own work where it was really useful, such as iterating over a tree traversal, or iterating over neighbors in a graph where the neighbors aren't stored in memory. In both cases, doing it in Java would likely mean returning a complete list -- with yield I can stop iterating if I find what I want early on, without using memory for superfluous lists or arrays. Extension methods as a way to write implementation on interfaces. We'll all be familiar with how interfaces don't allow method implementation, and how this leads to code duplication. I'll show a specific example of this and how the extension method can solve the problem. Demonstrate how the above can be combined by implementing some simple Linq methods and using them. Where, Select, First, maybe more depending on how much time is left. Ideas on which ones might 'hit home' the best? There are other things I could talk about such as generics, value types, properties and more. I haven't yet though of good ways to incorporate these. In the case of generics and value types, the advantages might not be obvious or as relevant. Properties are obviously useful, particularly since we're taught strict JavaBeans here, but I don't know if I could integrate it with the "path to Linq" discussion above without it feeling tacked on. So I'm looking for thoughts on how to talk about C#, and what to talk about. Even minor details. I'm sure there are more experienced C# developers than me here who have good insight about what's really important in the language, and what would miss the point.

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  • How to prepare for a programming competition? Graphs, Stacks, Trees, oh my! [closed]

    - by Simucal
    Last semester I attended ACM's (Association for Computing Machinery) bi-annual programming competition at a local University. My University sent 2 teams of 3 people and we competed amongst other schools in the mid-west. We got our butts kicked. You are given a packet with about 11 problems (1 problem per page) and you have 4 hours to solve as many as you can. They'll run your program you submit against a set of data and your output must match theirs exactly. In fact, the judging is automated for the most part. In any case.. I went there fairly confident in my programming skills and I left there feeling drained and weak. It was a terribly humbling experience. In 4 hours my team of 3 people completed only one of the problems. The top team completed 4 of them and took 1st place. The problems they asked were like no problems I have ever had to answer before. I later learned that in order to solve them some of them effectively you have to use graphs/graph algorithms, trees, stacks. Some of them were simply "greedy" algo's. My question is, how can I better prepare for this semesters programming competition so I don't leave there feeling like a complete moron? What tips do you have for me to be able to answer these problems that involve graphs, trees, various "well known" algorithms? How can I easily identify the algorithm we should implement for a given problem? I have yet to take Algorithm Design in school so I just feel a little out of my element. Here are some examples of the questions asked at the competitions: ACM Problem Sets Update: Just wanted to update this since the latest competition is over. My team placed 1st for our small region (about 6-7 universities with between 1-5 teams each school) and ~15th for the midwest! So, it is a marked improvement over last years performance for sure. We also had no graduate students on our team and after reviewing the rules we found out that many teams had several! So, that would be a pretty big advantage in my own opinion. Problems this semester ranged from about 1-2 "easy" problems (ie bit manipulation, string manipulation) to hard (graph problems involving fairly complex math and network flow problems). We were able to solve 4 problems in our 5 hours. Just wanted to thank everyone for the resources they provided here, we used them for our weekly team practices and it definitely helped! Some quick tips that I have that aren't suggested below: When you are seated at your computer before the competition starts, quickly type out various data structures that you might need that you won't have access to in your languages libraries. I typed out a Graph data-structure complete with floyd-warshall and dijkstra's algorithm before the competition began. We ended up using it in our 2nd problem that we solved and this is the main reason why we solved this problem before anyone else in the midwest. We had it ready to go from the beginning. Similarly, type out the code to read in a file since this will be required for every problem. Save this answer "template" someplace so you can quickly copy/paste it to your IDE at the beginning of each problem. There are no rules on programming anything before the competition starts so get any boilerplate code out the way. We found it useful to have one person who is on permanent whiteboard duty. This is usually the person who is best at math and at working out solutions to get a head start on future problems you will be doing. One person is on permanent programming duty. Your fastest/most skilled "programmer" (most familiar with the language). This will save debugging time also. The last person has several roles between assessing the packet of problems for the next "easiest" problem, helping the person on the whiteboard work out solutions and helping the person programming work out bugs/issues. This person needs to be flexible and be able to switch between roles easily.

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  • Day 5 - Tada! My Game Menu Screen Graphics

    - by dapostolov
    So, tonight I took some time to mash up some graphics for my game menu screen. My artistic talent sucks...but here goes nothing...voila, my menu screen!! The Menu Screen The screen above is displaying 4 sprites, even though it looks like maybe 7... I guess one of the first things for me to test in the future is ... is it more memory efficient (and better frame rate) to draw one big background image OR tp paint the screen black, and place each sprite in set locations? To display the 4 sprites above, I borrowed my code from yesterday ... I know, tacky, but...I wanted to see it, feel it. Do you feel it? FEEL IT! (homer voice & shakes fist) Note: the menu items won't scale properly as it stands with this code, well pretty much they do nothing except look pretty... Paint.Net & Google Fun So how did I create that image above? Well, to create the background and 3 menu items I used Paint.Net. Basically, I scoured Google images for: a stone doorway, a stone pillar, an old book, a wizards hat, and...that's it pretty much it! I'll let you type in those searches and see if you can locate the images I used. I know, bad developer...but I figured since I modified the images considerably it doesn't count...well for a personal project it shouldn't count...*shrug* Anyhow, I extracted each key assest I wanted from each image and applied lots of matting, blurring, color changes, glow effects and such. Then, using my vivid imagination I placed / composed each of the layered assets into the mashed up the "scene" above. Pretty cool, eh? Hey, did you know, the cool mist effect is actually a fire rendition in Paint.net? I set it to black & white with opacity set next to nothing. I'm also very proud of the yellow "light" in the stone doorway. I drew that in and then applied gausian blur to it to give it the effect of light creeping out around the door and into the room...heheh. So did I achieve the dark, mysterious ritual as I stated in my design doc? I think I had a great stab at it! Maybe down the road I can get a real artist to crank out some quality graphics for the game... =) So, What's Next? Well, I don't have that animated brazier yet...however, I thought it would be even cooler if I can get that door pulsing that yellow light and it would be extremely cool to have the smoke / mist moving across the screen! Make the creative ideas stop!! (clutches head) haha! I'm having great fun working on this project =) I recommend others giving something like this a try, it's really fulfilling. OK. Tomorrow... I think I'm going to start creating some game / menu objects as per the design doc, maybe even get a custom mouse cursor up on the screen and handle a couple of mouse events, and lastly, maybe a feature to toggle a framerate display... D.

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  • Desktop Applications Versus Web Applications

    Up until the advent of the internet programmers really only developed one type of application used by end-users.  This type of application was called a desktop application. As the name implies, these applications ran strictly from a desktop computer, and were limited by the resources available to the computer. Initially, this type of applications did not need resources outside of the scope of the computer in which they installed. The problem with this type of application is that if multiple end-users need to access the same desktop application, then the application must be installed on the end-user’s computer. In this age of software development security was not as big of a concern as it is today with other types of applications. This is primarily due to the fact that an end-user must have access to the computer where the software is installed in order for them to access the application. In addition, developers could also password protect the application just in case an authorized end-user was able to gain access to the computer. With the birth of the internet a second form of application emerged because developers were trying to solve inherent issues with the preexisting desktop application. One of the solutions to overcome some of the short comings of desktop applications is the web application. Web applications are hosted on a centralized server and clients only need to have network access and a web browser in order to access the application. Because a web application can be installed on a remote server it removes the need for individual installations of the same application on each end-user’s computer.  The main benefits to an application being hosted on a server is increased accessibility to the application due to the fact that nothing has to be installed on a desktop computer for an end-user to be able to access the application. In addition, web applications are much easier to maintain because any change to the application is applied on the server and is inherently applied to any end-user trying to use the application. This removes the time needed to install and maintain individual installations of a desktop application. However with the increased accessibility there are additional costs that are incurred compared to a desktop application because of the additional cost and maintenance of a server hosting the application. Typically, after a desktop application is purchased there are no additional reoccurring fees associated with the application.  When developing a web based application there are additional considerations that must be addressed compared to a desktop application. The added benefit of increased accessibility also now adds a new failure point when trying to gain access to an application. An end-user now must have network connectivity in order to access the application. This issue is not a concern for desktop applications because there resources are typically bound to the computer in which they run. Since the availability of an application is increased with the use of the client-server model in a web based application, additional security concerns now come in to play. As stated before a, desktop application is bound to the accessibility of the end-user to the computer that the application is installed. This is not the case with web based applications because they potentially could have access from anywhere with the proper internet/network connection. Additional security steps are required to insure the integrity of the application and its data. Examples of these steps include and are not limited to the following: Restricted/Password Areas This form of security is used when specific information can only be accessed by end-users based on a set of accessibility rules. IP Restrictions This form of security is used when only specific locations need to access an application. This form of security is applied from within the web server or a firewall. Network Restrictions (Firewalls) This form of security is used to contain access to an application within a specific sub set of a network. Data Encryption This form of security is used transform personally identifiable information in to something unreadable so that it can be stored for future use. Encrypted Protocols (HTTPS) This form of security is used to prevent others from reading messages being sent between applications over a network.

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  • How to Speed Up Any Android Phone By Disabling Animations

    - by Chris Hoffman
    Android phones — and tablets, too — display animations when moving between apps and screens. These animations look very slick, but they waste time — especially on fast phones, which could switch between apps instantly if not for the animations. Disabling these animations will speed up navigating between different apps and interface screens on your phone, saving you time. You can also speed up the animations if you’d rather see them. Access the Developer Options Menu First, we’ll need to access the Developer Options menu. It’s hidden by default so Android users won’t stumble across it unless they’re actually looking for it. To access the Developer Options menu, open the Settings screen, scroll down to the bottom of the list, and tap the About phone or About tablet option. Scroll down to the Build number field and tap it repeatedly. Eventually, you’ll see a message appear saying “You are now a developer!”. The Developer options submenu now appears on the Settings screen. You’ll find it near the bottom of the list, just above the About phone or About tablet option. Disable Interface Animations Open the Developer Options screen and slide the switch at the top of the screen to On. This allows you to change the hidden options on this screen. If you ever want to re-enable the animations and revert your changes, all you have to do is slide the Developer Options switch back to Off. Scroll down to the Drawing section. You’ll find the three options we want here — Window animation scale, Transition animation scale, and Animator duration scale. Tap each option and set it to Animation off to disable the associated animations. If you’d like to speed up the animations without disabling them entirely, select the Animation .5x option instead. If you’re feeling really crazy, you can even select longer animation durations. You can make the animations take as much as ten times longer with the Animation 10x setting. The Animator duration scale option applies to the transition animation that appears when you tap the app drawer button on your home screen.  Your change here won’t take effect immediately — you’ll have to restart Android’s launcher after changing the Animator duration scale setting. To restart Android’s launcher, open the Settings screen, tap Apps, swipe over to the All category, scroll down, and tap the Launcher app. Tap the Force stop button to forcibly close the launcher, then tap your device’s home button to re-launch the launcher. Your app drawer will now open immediately, too. Now whenever you open an app or transition to a new screen, it will pop up as quickly as possible — no waiting for animations and wasting processing power rendering them. How much of a speed improvement you’ll see here depends on your Android device and how fast it is. On our Nexus 4, this change makes many apps appear and become usable instantly if they’re running in the background. If you have a slower device, you may have to wait a moment for apps to be usable. That’s one of the big reasons why Android and other operating systems use animations. Animations help paper over delays that can occur while the operating system loads the app.     

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  • Why Is Hibernation Still Used?

    - by Jason Fitzpatrick
    With the increased prevalence of fast solid-state hard drives, why do we still have system hibernation? Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites. The Question SuperUser reader Moses wants to know why he should use hibernate on a desktop machine: I’ve never quite understood the original purpose of the Hibernation power state in Windows. I understand how it works, what processes take place, and what happens when you boot back up from Hibernate, but I’ve never truly understood why it’s used. With today’s technology, most notably with SSDs, RAM and CPUs becoming faster and faster, a cold boot on a clean/efficient Windows installation can be pretty fast (for some people, mere seconds from pushing the power button). Standby is even faster, sometimes instantaneous. Even SATA drives from 5-6 years ago can accomplish these fast boot times. Hibernation seems pointless to me [on desktop computers] when modern technology is considered, but perhaps there are applications that I’m not considering. What was the original purpose behind hibernation, and why do people still use it? Quite a few people use hibernate, so what is Moses missing in the big picture? The Answer SuperUser contributor Vignesh4304 writes: Normally hibernate mode saves your computer’s memory, this includes for example open documents and running applications, to your hard disk and shuts down the computer, it uses zero power. Once the computer is powered back on, it will resume everything where you left off. You can use this mode if you won’t be using the laptop/desktop for an extended period of time, and you don’t want to close your documents. Simple Usage And Purpose: Save electric power and resuming of documents. In simple terms this comment serves nice e.g (i.e. you will sleep but your memories are still present). Why it’s used: Let me describe one sample scenario. Imagine your battery is low on power in your laptop, and you are working on important projects on your machine. You can switch to hibernate mode – it will result your documents being saved, and when you power on, the actual state of application gets restored. Its main usage is like an emergency shutdown with an auto-resume of your documents. MagicAndre1981 highlights the reason we use hibernate everyday: Because it saves the status of all running programs. I leave all my programs open and can resume working the next day very easily. Doing a real boot would require to start all programs again, load all the same files into those programs, get to the same place that I was at before, and put all my windows in exactly the same place. Hibernating saves a lot of work pulling these things back up again. It’s not unusual to find computers around the office here that have been hibernated day in and day out for months without an actual full system shutdown and restart. It’s enormously convenient to freeze your work space at the exact moment you stopped working and to turn right around and resume there the next morning. Have something to add to the explanation? Sound off in the the comments. Want to read more answers from other tech-savvy Stack Exchange users? Check out the full discussion thread here.     

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  • Building a personal website using Silverlight.

    - by mbcrump
    I’ve always believed that as a developer you should always have a hobby project going on. I think a hobby project needs to contain at least one of following things: Something that you have never done before. Something that you are interested in. Something that you can work on in your spare time without affecting your *paying* job. I decided my hobby project would be an entire web application written in Silverlight that could be used as a self-promotion/marketing tool. This goal of the site is to provide information on the work that I’ve done to conferences, future employers and anyone else that wanted to learn more about me. Before I go any further, if you just want to check out the site then it is located at http://michaelcrump.info. So, what did I use to create it? MVVM Light – I’m a big fan of this software. The item and project templates plus code snippets make this a huge win for any SL/WPF/WP7 application. Jetpack Theme by Microsoft – I suck at designing so I used this template to help speed up this project. ComponentOne 3rd Party Controls – I have a license and really like several of their products. A User Control that Jeremy Likness created called DynamicXaml (used with his permission). I had created my own version of this a while back, but Jeremy’s implementation was simply better. Main Page – Designed to create my “brand”. This was built for a quick glimpse of who I am and what do I do.  Blog – The best marketing tool for a developer is their blog. I decided to go with an HTML page displaying my site and the user could pop into full-screen if desired. I also included my feed and Silverlight-Zone. (Another site I work on) Online – This page links to sites that I have been featured on as well as community involvement and awards. I also have a web service that I can update this information without re-compiling the Silverlight App. Projects – I’ve been wanting to use a CoverFlow for a really long time now. =) This page list several hobby projects as well as a few professional projects.  Resume Page – This page only exist because I got tired of sending companies my resume in e-mail. I can now provide a deep link to this page and the recruiter can print, search or save my resume. The PDF of my resume exist in a folder that I can easily update without recompiling the app. Contact Page – Just a contact page with a web service that sends the email. The Send button becomes disabled after a successful send. I thought of adding captcha to this page but in the end didn’t think it was worth it. Looking back at this app, I’m happy with how it turned out. I love Silverlight and I am already thinking of my next hobby project. (Thinking another Windows Phone 7 app or MVC3).  Subscribe to my feed

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  • 13 MORE Things from the Oracle Social Summit You Should Know

    - by Mike Stiles
    In our previous blog, we started giving those of you who couldn’t make it just a sampling of the valuable takeaways from the first annual Oracle Social Summit, held Nov 14 and 15 in Las Vegas. And while yes, 13 items is a pretty healthy sampling, we wanted to go the extra mile and give you 13 more, an indication of just how much great information came out of it.  Follow the arrow, and come on in as if you were there with us. 1. Weber Shandwick takes a 70/20/10 approach when advising clients how to allocate resources to paid social opportunities. 70% of spend should go toward paid opportunities the agency and client both know work, 20% should go toward paid social the agency knows works, and 10% should go toward experimentation. (Matt Dickman – Weber Shandwick) 2. By 2017, the technically competent CMO will spend more on IT than the CIO. (Gartner Study) 3. CIOs are focused on infrastructure. As the roles of the CMO and CIO continue coming together, those CIOs have to make a very conscious decision to get CMOs what they need. 4. It’s now harder for brands to differentiate based on product. The advantage will go to the brands that are successful in garnering customer trust. 5. More and more, enterprise software is going to start looking like the software consumers are used to seeing and using. 6. You will see brands prioritizing mobile and dropping investments in www, HTML, POS systems, etc. 7. The social graph has to be added to brands’ customer data for a more holistic view. Customers will give you the information you need if the reward is appropriate. 8. Viacom did a study that showed viewers are most honest on social. Not so much on surveys or other feedback vehicles. 9. How are you determining your influencers? Influence isn’t about reach. It’s about getting people to change behavior. 10. A mix of skills is becoming critically important in a social staff. It shouldn’t be a mixture of several disciplines, not just a bunch of “social experts.” 11. If senior management isn’t engaged, the social team is forced into guessing what might be considered a “success” by the C-suite. 12. Mobile customization will be getting big investments from brands in 2013. Brands need to provide shoppers utility, not just information. 75% will use mobile this holiday season to avoid in-store madness. 13. Data becomes information, information becomes insight, and insight becomes actionable. The Oracle Social Summit brought together brands, agencies, Oracle social experts and industry thought leaders to take a serious look at where social stands today, and where it’s headed in the near future. Given the speed of social’s evolution, attending such events (or at least reading nifty summary blogs) is a good investment in making sure your enterprise isn’t falling gradually behind.

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  • Lessons Building KeyRef (a .NET developer learning Rails)

    - by Liam McLennan
    Just because I like to build things, and I like to learn, I have been working on a keyboard shortcut reference site. I am using this as an opportunity to improve my ruby and rails skills. The first few days were frustrating. Perhaps the learning curve of all the fun new toys was a bit excessive. Finally tonight things have really started to come together. I still don’t understand the rails built-in testing support but I will get there. Interesting Things I Learned Tonight RubyMine IDE Tonight I switched to RubyMine instead of my usual Notepad++. I suspect RubyMine is a powerful tool if you know how to use it – but I don’t. At the moment it gives me errors about some gems not being activated. This is another one of those things that I will get to. I have also noticed that the editor functions significantly differently to the editors I am used to. For example, in visual studio and notepad++ if you place the cursor at the start of a line and press left arrow the cursor is sent to the end of the previous line. In RubyMine nothing happens. Haml Haml is my favourite view engine. For my .NET work I have been using its non-union Mexican CLR equivalent – nHaml. Multiple CSS Classes To define a div with more than one css class haml lets you chain them together with a ‘.’, such as: .span-6.search_result contents of the div go here Indent Consistency I also learnt tonight that both haml and nhaml complain if you are not consistent about indenting. As a consequence of the move from notepad++ to RubyMine my haml views ended up with some tab indenting and some space indenting. For the view to render all of the indents within a view must be consistent. Sorting Arrays I guessed that ruby would be able to sort an array alphabetically by a property of the elements so my first attempt was: Application.all.sort {|app| app.name} which does not work. You have to supply a comparer (much like .NET). The correct sort is: Application.all.sort {|a,b| a.name.downcase <=> b.name.downcase} MongoMapper Find by Id Since document databases are just fancy key-value stores it is essential to be able to easily search for a document by its id. This functionality is so intrinsic that it seems that the MongoMapper author did not bother to document it. To search by id simply pass the id to the find method: Application.find(‘4c19e8facfbfb01794000002’) Rails And CoffeeScript I am a big fan of CoffeeScript so integrating it into this application is high on my priorities. My first thought was to copy Dr Nic’s strategy. Unfortunately, I did not get past step 1. Install Node.js. I am doing my development on Windows and node is unix only. I looked around for a solution but eventually had to concede defeat… for now. Quicksearch The front page of the application I am building displays a list of applications. When the user types in the search box I want to reduce the list of applications to match their search. A quick googlebing turned up quicksearch, a jquery plugin. You simply tell quicksearch where to get its input (the search textbox) and the list of items to filter (the divs containing the names of applications) and it just works. Here is the code: $('#app_search').quicksearch('.search_result'); Summary I have had a productive evening. The app now displays a list of applications, allows them to be sorted and links through to an application page when an application is selected. Next on the list is to display the set of keyboard shortcuts for an application.

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  • How would you gather client's data on Google App Engine without using Datastore/Backend Instances too much?

    - by ruslan
    I'm relatively new to StackExchange and not sure if it's appropriate place to ask design question. Site gives me a hint "The question you're asking appears subjective and is likely to be closed". Please let me know. Anyway.. One of the projects I'm working on is online survey engine. It's my first big commercial project on Google App Engine. I need your advice on how to collect stats and efficiently record them in DataStore without bankrupting me. Initial requirements are: After user finishes survey client sends list of pairs [ID (int) + PercentHit (double)]. This list shows how close answers of this user match predefined answers of reference answerers (which identified by IDs). I call them "target IDs". Creator of the survey wants to see aggregated % for given IDs for last hour, particular timeframe or from the beginning of the survey. Some surveys may have thousands of target/reference answerers. So I created entity public class HitsStatsDO implements Serializable { @Id transient private Long id; transient private Long version = (long) 0; transient private Long startDate; @Parent transient private Key parent; // fake parent which contains target id @Transient int targetId; private double avgPercent; private long hitCount; } But writing HitsStatsDO for each target from each user would give a lot of data. For instance I had a survey with 3000 targets which was answered by ~4 million people within one week with 300K people taking survey in first day. Even if we assume they were answering it evenly for 24 hours it would give us ~1040 writes/second. Obviously it hits concurrent writes limit of Datastore. I decided I'll collect data for one hour and save that, that's why there are avgPercent and hitCount in HitsStatsDO. GAE instances are stateless so I had to use dynamic backend instance. There I have something like this: // Contains stats for one hour private class Shard { ReadWriteLock lock = new ReentrantReadWriteLock(); Map<Integer, HitsStatsDO> map = new HashMap<Integer, HitsStatsDO>(); // Key is target ID public void saveToDatastore(); public void updateStats(Long startDate, Map<Integer, Double> hits); } and map with shard for current hour and previous hour (which doesn't stay here for long) private HashMap<Long, Shard> shards = new HashMap<Long, Shard>(); // Key is HitsStatsDO.startDate So once per hour I dump Shard for previous hour to Datastore. Plus I have class LifetimeStats which keeps Map<Integer, HitsStatsDO> in memcached where map-key is target ID. Also in my backend shutdown hook method I dump stats for unfinished hour to Datastore. There is only one major issue here - I have only ONE backend instance :) It raises following questions on which I'd like to hear your opinion: Can I do this without using backend instance ? What if one instance is not enough ? How can I split data between multiple dynamic backend instances? It hard because I don't know how many I have because Google creates new one as load increases. I know I can launch exact number of resident backend instances. But how many ? 2, 5, 10 ? What if I have no load at all for a week. Constantly running 10 backend instances is too expensive. What do I do with data from clients while backend instance is dead/restarting? Thank you very much in advance for your thoughts.

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  • dynamic? I'll never use that ... or then again, maybe it could ...

    - by adweigert
    So, I don't know about you, but I was highly skeptical of the dynamic keywork when it was announced. I thought to myself, oh great, just another move towards VB compliance. Well after seeing it being used in things like DynamicXml (which I use for this example) I then was working with a MVC controller and wanted to move some things like operation timeout of an action to a configuration file. Thinking big picture, it'd be really nice to have configuration for all my controllers like that. Ugh, I don't want to have to create all those ConfigurationElement objects... So, I started thinking self, use what you know and do something cool ... Well after a bit of zoning out, self came up with use a dynamic object duh! I was thinking of a config like this ...<controllers> <add type="MyApp.Web.Areas.ComputerManagement.Controllers.MyController, MyApp.Web"> <detail timeout="00:00:30" /> </add> </controllers> So, I ended up with a couple configuration classes like this ...blic abstract class DynamicConfigurationElement : ConfigurationElement { protected DynamicConfigurationElement() { this.DynamicObject = new DynamicConfiguration(); } public DynamicConfiguration DynamicObject { get; private set; } protected override bool OnDeserializeUnrecognizedAttribute(string name, string value) { this.DynamicObject.Add(name, value); return true; } protected override bool OnDeserializeUnrecognizedElement(string elementName, XmlReader reader) { this.DynamicObject.Add(elementName, new DynamicXml((XElement)XElement.ReadFrom(reader))); return true; } } public class ControllerConfigurationElement : DynamicConfigurationElement { [ConfigurationProperty("type", Options = ConfigurationPropertyOptions.IsRequired | ConfigurationPropertyOptions.IsKey)] public string TypeName { get { return (string)this["type"]; } } public Type Type { get { return Type.GetType(this.TypeName, true); } } } public class ControllerConfigurationElementCollection : ConfigurationElementCollection { protected override ConfigurationElement CreateNewElement() { return new ControllerConfigurationElement(); } protected override object GetElementKey(ConfigurationElement element) { return ((ControllerConfigurationElement)element).Type; } } And then had to create the meat of the DynamicConfiguration class which looks like this ...public class DynamicConfiguration : DynamicObject { private Dictionary<string, object> properties = new Dictionary<string, object>(StringComparer.CurrentCultureIgnoreCase); internal void Add<T>(string name, T value) { this.properties.Add(name, value); } public override bool TryGetMember(GetMemberBinder binder, out object result) { var propertyName = binder.Name; result = null; if (this.properties.ContainsKey(propertyName)) { result = this.properties[propertyName]; } return true; } } So all being said, I made a base controller class like a good little MVC-itizen ...public abstract class BaseController : Controller { protected BaseController() : base() { var configuration = ManagementConfigurationSection.GetInstance(); var controllerConfiguration = configuration.Controllers.ForType(this.GetType()); if (controllerConfiguration != null) { this.Configuration = controllerConfiguration.DynamicObject; } } public dynamic Configuration { get; private set; } } And used it like this ...public class MyController : BaseController { static readonly string DefaultDetailTimeout = TimeSpan.MaxValue.ToString(); public MyController() { this.DetailTimeout = TimeSpan.Parse(this.Configuration.Detail.Timeout ?? DefaultDetailTimeout); } public TimeSpan DetailTimeout { get; private set; } } And there I have an actual use for the dynamic keyword ... never thoguht I'd see the day when I first heard of it as I don't do much COM work ... oh dont' forget this little helper extension methods to find the controller configuration by the controller type.public static ControllerConfigurationElement ForType<T>(this ControllerConfigurationElementCollection collection) { Contract.Requires(collection != null); return ForType(collection, typeof(T)); } public static ControllerConfigurationElement ForType(this ControllerConfigurationElementCollection collection, Type type) { Contract.Requires(collection != null); Contract.Requires(type != null); return collection.Cast<ControllerConfigurationElement>().Where(element => element.Type == type).SingleOrDefault(); } Sure, it isn't perfect and I'm sure I can tweak it over time, but I thought it was a pretty cool way to take advantage of the dynamic keyword functionality. Just remember, it only validates you did it right at runtime, which isn't that bad ... is it? And yes, I did make it case-insensitive so my code didn't have to look like my XML objects, tweak it to your liking if you dare to use this creation.

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  • Remove box2d bodies after collision deduction android?

    - by jubin
    Can any one explain me how to destroy box2d body when collide i have tried but my application crashed.First i have checked al collisions then add all the bodies in array who i want to destroy.I am trying to learning this tutorial My all the bodies are falling i want these bodies should destroy when these bodies will collide my actor monkey but when it collide it destroy but my aplication crashed.I have googled and from google i got the application crash reasons we should not destroy body in step funtion but i am removing body in the last of tick method. could any one help me or provide me code aur check my code why i am getting this prblem or how can i destroy box2d bodies. This is my code what i am doing. Please could any one check my code and tell me what is i am doing wrong for removing bodies. The code is for multiple box2d objects falling on my actor monkey it should be destroy when it will fall on the monkey.It is destroing but my application crahes. static class Box2DLayer extends CCLayer { protected static final float PTM_RATIO = 32.0f; protected static final float WALK_FACTOR = 3.0f; protected static final float MAX_WALK_IMPULSE = 0.2f; protected static final float ANIM_SPEED = 0.3f; int isLeft=0; String dir=""; int x =0; float direction; CCColorLayer objectHint; // protected static final float PTM_RATIO = 32.0f; protected World _world; protected static Body spriteBody; CGSize winSize = CCDirector.sharedDirector().winSize(); private static int count = 200; protected static Body monkey_body; private static Body bodies; CCSprite monkey; float animDelay; int animPhase; CCSpriteSheet danceSheet = CCSpriteSheet.spriteSheet("phases.png"); CCSprite _block; List<Body> toDestroy = new ArrayList<Body>(); //CCSpriteSheet _spriteSheet; private static MyContactListener _contactListener = new MyContactListener(); public Box2DLayer() { this.setIsAccelerometerEnabled(true); CCSprite bg = CCSprite.sprite("jungle.png"); addChild(bg,0); bg.setAnchorPoint(0,0); bg.setPosition(0,0); CGSize s = CCDirector.sharedDirector().winSize(); // Use scaled width and height so that our boundaries always match the current screen float scaledWidth = s.width/PTM_RATIO; float scaledHeight = s.height/PTM_RATIO; Vector2 gravity = new Vector2(0.0f, -30.0f); boolean doSleep = false; _world = new World(gravity, doSleep); // Create edges around the entire screen // Define the ground body. BodyDef bxGroundBodyDef = new BodyDef(); bxGroundBodyDef.position.set(0.0f, 0.0f); // The body is also added to the world. Body groundBody = _world.createBody(bxGroundBodyDef); // Register our contact listener // Define the ground box shape. PolygonShape groundBox = new PolygonShape(); Vector2 bottomLeft = new Vector2(0f,0f); Vector2 topLeft = new Vector2(0f,scaledHeight); Vector2 topRight = new Vector2(scaledWidth,scaledHeight); Vector2 bottomRight = new Vector2(scaledWidth,0f); // bottom groundBox.setAsEdge(bottomLeft, bottomRight); groundBody.createFixture(groundBox,0); // top groundBox.setAsEdge(topLeft, topRight); groundBody.createFixture(groundBox,0); // left groundBox.setAsEdge(topLeft, bottomLeft); groundBody.createFixture(groundBox,0); // right groundBox.setAsEdge(topRight, bottomRight); groundBody.createFixture(groundBox,0); CCSprite floorbg = CCSprite.sprite("grassbehind.png"); addChild(floorbg,1); floorbg.setAnchorPoint(0,0); floorbg.setPosition(0,0); CCSprite floorfront = CCSprite.sprite("grassfront.png"); floorfront.setTag(2); this.addBoxBodyForSprite(floorfront); addChild(floorfront,3); floorfront.setAnchorPoint(0,0); floorfront.setPosition(0,0); addChild(danceSheet); //CCSprite monkey = CCSprite.sprite(danceSheet, CGRect.make(0, 0, 48, 73)); //addChild(danceSprite); monkey = CCSprite.sprite("arms_up.png"); monkey.setTag(2); monkey.setPosition(200,100); BodyDef spriteBodyDef = new BodyDef(); spriteBodyDef.type = BodyType.DynamicBody; spriteBodyDef.bullet=true; spriteBodyDef.position.set(200 / PTM_RATIO, 300 / PTM_RATIO); monkey_body = _world.createBody(spriteBodyDef); monkey_body.setUserData(monkey); PolygonShape spriteShape = new PolygonShape(); spriteShape.setAsBox(monkey.getContentSize().width/PTM_RATIO/2, monkey.getContentSize().height/PTM_RATIO/2); FixtureDef spriteShapeDef = new FixtureDef(); spriteShapeDef.shape = spriteShape; spriteShapeDef.density = 2.0f; spriteShapeDef.friction = 0.70f; spriteShapeDef.restitution = 0.0f; monkey_body.createFixture(spriteShapeDef); //Vector2 force = new Vector2(10, 10); //monkey_body.applyLinearImpulse(force, spriteBodyDef.position); addChild(monkey,10000); this.schedule(tickCallback); this.schedule(createobjects, 2.0f); objectHint = CCColorLayer.node(ccColor4B.ccc4(255,0,0,128), 200f, 100f); addChild(objectHint, 15000); objectHint.setVisible(false); _world.setContactListener(_contactListener); } private UpdateCallback tickCallback = new UpdateCallback() { public void update(float d) { tick(d); } }; private UpdateCallback createobjects = new UpdateCallback() { public void update(float d) { secondUpdate(d); } }; private void secondUpdate(float dt) { this.addNewSprite(); } public void addBoxBodyForSprite(CCSprite sprite) { BodyDef spriteBodyDef = new BodyDef(); spriteBodyDef.type = BodyType.StaticBody; //spriteBodyDef.bullet=true; spriteBodyDef.position.set(sprite.getPosition().x / PTM_RATIO, sprite.getPosition().y / PTM_RATIO); spriteBody = _world.createBody(spriteBodyDef); spriteBody.setUserData(sprite); Vector2 verts[] = { new Vector2(-11.8f / PTM_RATIO, -24.5f / PTM_RATIO), new Vector2(11.7f / PTM_RATIO, -24.0f / PTM_RATIO), new Vector2(29.2f / PTM_RATIO, -14.0f / PTM_RATIO), new Vector2(28.7f / PTM_RATIO, -0.7f / PTM_RATIO), new Vector2(8.0f / PTM_RATIO, 18.2f / PTM_RATIO), new Vector2(-29.0f / PTM_RATIO, 18.7f / PTM_RATIO), new Vector2(-26.3f / PTM_RATIO, -12.2f / PTM_RATIO) }; PolygonShape spriteShape = new PolygonShape(); spriteShape.set(verts); //spriteShape.setAsBox(sprite.getContentSize().width/PTM_RATIO/2, //sprite.getContentSize().height/PTM_RATIO/2); FixtureDef spriteShapeDef = new FixtureDef(); spriteShapeDef.shape = spriteShape; spriteShapeDef.density = 2.0f; spriteShapeDef.friction = 0.70f; spriteShapeDef.restitution = 0.0f; spriteShapeDef.isSensor=true; spriteBody.createFixture(spriteShapeDef); } public void addNewSprite() { count=0; Random rand = new Random(); int Number = rand.nextInt(10); switch(Number) { case 0: _block = CCSprite.sprite("banana.png"); break; case 1: _block = CCSprite.sprite("backpack.png");break; case 2: _block = CCSprite.sprite("statue.png");break; case 3: _block = CCSprite.sprite("pineapple.png");break; case 4: _block = CCSprite.sprite("bananabunch.png");break; case 5: _block = CCSprite.sprite("hat.png");break; case 6: _block = CCSprite.sprite("canteen.png");break; case 7: _block = CCSprite.sprite("banana.png");break; case 8: _block = CCSprite.sprite("statue.png");break; case 9: _block = CCSprite.sprite("hat.png");break; } int padding=20; //_block.setPosition(CGPoint.make(100, 100)); // Determine where to spawn the target along the Y axis CGSize winSize = CCDirector.sharedDirector().displaySize(); int minY = (int)(_block.getContentSize().width / 2.0f); int maxY = (int)(winSize.width - _block.getContentSize().width / 2.0f); int rangeY = maxY - minY; int actualY = rand.nextInt(rangeY) + minY; // Create block and add it to the layer float xOffset = padding+_block.getContentSize().width/2+((_block.getContentSize().width+padding)*count); _block.setPosition(CGPoint.make(actualY, 750)); _block.setTag(1); float w = _block.getContentSize().width; objectHint.setVisible(true); objectHint.changeWidth(w); objectHint.setPosition(actualY-w/2, 460); this.addChild(_block,10000); // Create ball body and shape BodyDef ballBodyDef1 = new BodyDef(); ballBodyDef1.type = BodyType.DynamicBody; ballBodyDef1.position.set(actualY/PTM_RATIO, 480/PTM_RATIO); bodies = _world.createBody(ballBodyDef1); bodies.setUserData(_block); PolygonShape circle1 = new PolygonShape(); Vector2 verts[] = { new Vector2(-11.8f / PTM_RATIO, -24.5f / PTM_RATIO), new Vector2(11.7f / PTM_RATIO, -24.0f / PTM_RATIO), new Vector2(29.2f / PTM_RATIO, -14.0f / PTM_RATIO), new Vector2(28.7f / PTM_RATIO, -0.7f / PTM_RATIO), new Vector2(8.0f / PTM_RATIO, 18.2f / PTM_RATIO), new Vector2(-29.0f / PTM_RATIO, 18.7f / PTM_RATIO), new Vector2(-26.3f / PTM_RATIO, -12.2f / PTM_RATIO) }; circle1.set(verts); FixtureDef ballShapeDef1 = new FixtureDef(); ballShapeDef1.shape = circle1; ballShapeDef1.density = 10.0f; ballShapeDef1.friction = 0.0f; ballShapeDef1.restitution = 0.1f; bodies.createFixture(ballShapeDef1); count++; //Remove(); } @Override public void ccAccelerometerChanged(float accelX, float accelY, float accelZ) { //Apply the directional impulse /*float impulse = monkey_body.getMass()*accelY*WALK_FACTOR; Vector2 force = new Vector2(impulse, 0); monkey_body.applyLinearImpulse(force, monkey_body.getWorldCenter());*/ walk(accelY); //Remove(); } private void walk(float accelY) { // TODO Auto-generated method stub direction = accelY; } private void Remove() { for (Iterator<MyContact> it1 = _contactListener.mContacts.iterator(); it1.hasNext();) { MyContact contact = it1.next(); Body bodyA = contact.fixtureA.getBody(); Body bodyB = contact.fixtureB.getBody(); // See if there's any user data attached to the Box2D body // There should be, since we set it in addBoxBodyForSprite if (bodyA.getUserData() != null && bodyB.getUserData() != null) { CCSprite spriteA = (CCSprite) bodyA.getUserData(); CCSprite spriteB = (CCSprite) bodyB.getUserData(); // Is sprite A a cat and sprite B a car? If so, push the cat // on a list to be destroyed... if (spriteA.getTag() == 1 && spriteB.getTag() == 2) { //Log.v("dsfds", "dsfsd"+bodyA); //_world.destroyBody(bodyA); // removeChild(spriteA, true); toDestroy.add(bodyA); } // Is sprite A a car and sprite B a cat? If so, push the cat // on a list to be destroyed... else if (spriteA.getTag() == 2 && spriteB.getTag() == 1) { //Log.v("dsfds", "dsfsd"+bodyB); toDestroy.add(bodyB); } } } // Loop through all of the box2d bodies we want to destroy... for (Iterator<Body> it1 = toDestroy.iterator(); it1.hasNext();) { Body body = it1.next(); // See if there's any user data attached to the Box2D body // There should be, since we set it in addBoxBodyForSprite if (body.getUserData() != null) { // We know that the user data is a sprite since we set // it that way, so cast it... CCSprite sprite = (CCSprite) body.getUserData(); // Remove the sprite from the scene _world.destroyBody(body); removeChild(sprite, true); } // Destroy the Box2D body as well // _contactListener.mContacts.remove(0); } } public synchronized void tick(float delta) { synchronized (_world) { _world.step(delta, 8, 3); //_world.clearForces(); //addNewSprite(); } CCAnimation danceAnimation = CCAnimation.animation("dance", 1.0f); // Iterate over the bodies in the physics world Iterator<Body> it = _world.getBodies(); while(it.hasNext()) { Body b = it.next(); Object userData = b.getUserData(); if (userData != null && userData instanceof CCSprite) { //Synchronize the Sprites position and rotation with the corresponding body CCSprite sprite = (CCSprite)userData; if(sprite.getTag()==1) { //b.applyLinearImpulse(force, pos); sprite.setPosition(b.getPosition().x * PTM_RATIO, b.getPosition().y * PTM_RATIO); sprite.setRotation(-1.0f * ccMacros.CC_RADIANS_TO_DEGREES(b.getAngle())); } else { //Apply the directional impulse float impulse = monkey_body.getMass()*direction*WALK_FACTOR; Vector2 force = new Vector2(impulse, 0); b.applyLinearImpulse(force, b.getWorldCenter()); sprite.setPosition(b.getPosition().x * PTM_RATIO, b.getPosition().y * PTM_RATIO); animDelay -= 1.0f/60.0f; if(animDelay <= 0) { animDelay = ANIM_SPEED; animPhase++; if(animPhase > 2) { animPhase = 1; } } if(direction < 0 ) { isLeft=1; } else { isLeft=0; } if(isLeft==1) { dir = "left"; } else { dir = "right"; } float standingLimit = (float) 0.1f; float vX = monkey_body.getLinearVelocity().x; if((vX > -standingLimit)&& (vX < standingLimit)) { // Log.v("sasd", "standing"); } else { } } } } Remove(); } } Sorry for my english. Thanks in advance.

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  • What DX level does my graphics card support? Does it go to 11?

    - by Daniel Moth
    Recently I run into a situation that I have run into quite a few times. Someone encounters a machine and the question arises: "Is there a DirectX 11 card in this machine?". Typically the reason you are interested in that is because cards with DirectX 11 drivers fully support DirectCompute (and by extension C++ AMP) for GPGPU programming. The driver specifically is WDDM (1.1 on Windows 7 and Windows 8 introduces WDDM 1.2 with cool new capabilities). There are many ways for figuring out if you have a DirectX11 card, so here are the approaches that you can use, with a bonus right at the end of the post. Run DxDiag WindowsKey + R, type DxDiag and hit Enter. That is the DirectX diagnostic tool, which unfortunately, only tells you on the "System" tab what is the highest version of DirectX installed on your machine. So if it reports DirectX 11, that doesn't mean you have a DX11 driver! The "Display" tab has a promising "DDI version" label, but unfortunately that doesn't seem to be accurate on the machines I've tested it with (or I may be misinterpreting its use). Either way, this tool is not the one you want for this purpose, although it is good for telling you the WDDM version among other things. Use the Microsoft hardware page There is a Microsoft Windows 7 compatibility center, that lists all hardware (tip: use the advanced search) and you could try and locate your device there… good luck. Use Wikipedia or the hardware vendor's website Use the Wikipedia page for the vendor cards, for both nvidia and amd. Often this information will also be in the specifications for the cards on the IHV site, but is is nice that wikipedia has a single page per vendor that you can search etc. There is a column in the tables for API support where you can see the DirectX version. Check if it is one of these recommended DX11 cards You may not have a DirectX 11 card and are interested in purchasing one. While I am in no position to make recommendations, I will list here some cards from two big IHVs that we know are DirectX 11 capable. Some AMD (aka ATI) cards Low end, inexpensive DX11 hardware: Radeon 5450, 5550, 6450, 6570 Mid range (decent perf, single precision): Radeon 5750, 5770, 6770, 6790 High end (capable of double precision): Radeon 5850, 5870, 6950, 6970 Single precision APUs: AMD E-Series APUs AMD A-Series APUs Some NVIDIA cards Low end, inexpensive DX11 hardware: GeForce GT430, GT 440, GT520, GTS 450 Quadro 400, 600 Mid-range (decent perf, single precision): GeForce GTX 460, GTX 550 Ti, GTX 560, GTX 560 Ti Quadro 2000 High end (capable of double precision): GeForce GTX 480, GTX 570, GTX 580, GTX 590, GTX 595 Quadro 4000, 5000, 6000 Tesla C2050, C2070, C2075 Get the DirectX SDK and run DirectX Caps Viewer Download and install the June 2010 DirectX SDK. As part of that you now have the DirectX Capabilities Viewer utility (find it in your start menu by searching for "DirectX Caps Viewer", the filename is DXCapsViewer.exe). It will list all your devices (emulated, and real hardware ones) under the first node. Expand the hardware entries and then expand again the Direct3D 11 folder. If you see D3D_FEATURE_LEVEL_11_ under that, then your card supports feature level 11 which means it supports DirectCompute and C++ AMP. In the following screenshot of one of my old laptops, the card only goes to feature level 10. Run a utility from the web that just tells you! Of course, writing some C++ AMP code that enumerates accelerators and lists the ones that are capable is trivial. However that requires that you have redistributed the runtime, so a more broadly applicable approach is to use the DX APIs directly to enumerate the DX11 capable cards. That is exactly what the development lead for C++ AMP has done and he describes and shares that utility at this post. Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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