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• NVIDIA proprietary driver logging me to console instead of GUI

  - by Woozie

  Firstly i want to apologise for any mistakes, English is not my native language. My problem is I can't get NVIDIA proprietary drivers to work. I tried to install it on Ubuntu 12.04.1 32 and 64 bits, Ubuntu 12.10 Beta 2, Linux Mint 13 Cinnamon 64 bits and openSUSE 12.2 64 bits and the error code and symptoms (logging to tty1 instead of GUI logging, low-res bootscreen) are the same for all of these distros. Right, I didn't tell what's the error code. It appears on sudo startx. NVIDIA: could not open the device file /dev/nvidia0 (Input/output error). I know that's the common problem, but I tried to blacklist or even remove the noveau drivers, install NVIDIA driver from repo/from official script/in "Additional drivers", editing xorg.conf and using Xorg -configurate and nvidia-xconfig, actualizing the kernel and entire distro and many, many things that I don't remember. But the problem is even better: entire Cinnamon (Mint) is freezing during the work. I found the error code, which appears during the freeze: Oct 1 20:57:17 WoozieLaptop kernel: [ 308.120176] [drm] nouveau 0000:01:00.0: PFIFO_CACHE_ERROR - Ch 4/1 Mthd 0z0060 Data 0xbcef0201 My Xorg.0.log is here. It was made on Ubuntu 12.04.1 after installing NVIDIA drivers (obviously). inxi -G from Mint: Graphics: Card: NVIDIA GT216 [GeForce GT 240M] X.org: 1.11.3 drivers: (unloaded: nvidia) FAILED: nouveau,vesa,fbdev tty size: 80x25 Advanced Data: N/A for root out of X lspci -k | grep -A2 VGA from Mint: 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GT216 [GeForce GT 240M] (rev a2) Subsystem: Lenovo Device 38ff Kernel driver in use: nvidia My hardware is: Lenovo IdeaPad Y550 Intel C2D T6600 NVIDIA GeForce GT 240M 4 GB of RAM Any help will be appreciated. This problem totally disabled my laptop from daily using. Cheers, Woozie

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• Running multiple box2D world objects on a server

  - by CharbelAbdo

  I'm creating a multiplayer game using LibGdx (with Box2d) and Kryonet. Since this is the first time I work on multiplayer games, I read a bit about server - client implementations, and it turns out that the server should handle important tasks like collision detection, hits, characters dying etc... Based on some articles (like the excellent Gabriel Gambetta Fast paced multiplayer series), I also know that the client should work in parallel to avoid the lag while the server responds to commands. Physics wise, each game will have 2 players, and any projectiles fired. What I'm thinking of doing is the following: Create a physics world on the client When the game is signaled to start, I create the same physics world on the server (without any rendering obviously). Whenever the player issues a command (move or fire), I send the command to the server and immediately start processing it on the client. When the server receives the command, it applies it on the server's world (set velocity etc...) Each 100ms, the server sends the new state to the client which corrects what was calculated locally. Any critical action (hit, death, level up) is calculated only on the server and sent to the client. Essentially, I would have a Box2d World object running on the server for each game in progress, in sync with the worlds running on the clients. The alternative would be to do my own calculations on the server instead of relying on Box2D to do them for me, but I'm trying to avoid that. My question is: Is it wise to have, for example, 1000 instances of the World object running and executing steps on the server? Tomcat used around 750 MBytes of memory when trying it without any object added to the world. Anybody tried that before? If not, is there any alternative? Google did not help me, are there any guidelines to use when you want to have physics on both the client and the server? Thanks for any help.

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• How to manage drawing loop when changing render targets

  - by George Duckett

  I'm managing my game state by having a base GameScreen class with a Draw method. I then have (basically) a stack of GameScreens that I render. I render the bottom one first, as screens above might not completely cover the ones below. I now have a problem where one GameScreen changes render targets while doing its rendering. Anything the previous screens have drawn to the backbuffer is lost (as XNA emulates what happens on the xbox). I don't want to just set the backbuffer to preserve its contents as I want this to work on the xbox as well as PC. How should I manage this problem? A few ideas I've had: Render every GameScreen to its own render target, then render them all to the backbuffer. Create some kind of RenderAction queue where a game screen (and anything else I guess) could queue something to be rendered to the back buffer. They'd render whatever they wanted to any render target as normal, but if they wanted to render to the backbuffer they'd stick that in a queue which would get processed once all rendertarget rendering was done. Abstract away from render targets and backbuffers and have some way of representing the way graphics flows and transforms between render targets and have something manage/work out the correct rendering order (and render targets) given what rendering process needs as input and what it produces as output. I think each of my ideas have pros and cons and there are probably several other ways of approaching this general problem so I'm interested in finding out what solutions are out there.

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• 14.04 LTS Unity no longer boots after last 94 MB update

  - by Harryg123

  I am running 14.04 LTS, Unity, on an HP Pavillion 15, 4GBRAM, 750 GB hdd, I-5 machine, with AMD 8600M graphics card built in. I have disabled the dash and all Ubuntu spyware. I have been faithfully loading all updates as they appear. This morning it asked for a 94 MB update (bringing kernel to .27, I think. Now, I can boot, get to login screen, but it freezes after that. Keyboard doesn't work at that point, but mouse does. I booted into recovery mode, tried to run in generic graphics mode, -- system again froze. I also pressed [esc] during boot, but saw nothing strange; then text disappeared and was replaced by login screen. I am not a hobbyist; this is a production machine and I have a lot of work to do today. Having a standard software update render my machine completely useless... sigh. Perhaps the simplest thing to do would be to revert to the previous configuration. How do I do that? I can boot into recovery mode. But I have no idea how to proceed. TIA for all help. -Harry

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• GPG Invalid Signature

  - by user46421

  I am having problems with the following (in an attempt to remove hyperlinks, I have removed one of the "/" from the addresses): W: GPG error: http://archive.ubuntu.com oneiric Release: The following signatures were invalid: BADSIG 40976EAF437D05B5 Ubuntu Archive Automatic Signing Key <[email protected]> W: GPG error: http://ppa.launchpad.net oneiric Release: The following signatures were invalid: BADSIG B725097B3ACC3965 Launchpad lffl W: GPG error: http://ppa.launchpad.net oneiric Release: The following signatures were invalid: BADSIG 4874D3686E80C6B7 Launchpad PPA for Banshee Team W: GPG error: http://archive.getdeb.net jaunty-getdeb Release: The following signatures were invalid: BADSIG A8A515F046D7E7CF GetDeb Archive Automatic Signing Key <[email protected]> W: GPG error: http://badgerports.org lucid Release: The following signatures were invalid: BADSIG C90F9CB90E1FAD0C Jo Shields <[email protected]> W: GPG error: http://ppa.launchpad.net oneiric Release: The following signatures were invalid: BADSIG 976B5901365C5CA1 Launchpad PPA for transmissionbt W: Failed to fetch http://ppa.launchpad.net/dlecan/openjdk/ubuntu/dists/oneiric/main/source/Sources 404 Not Found W: Failed to fetch http://ppa.launchpad.net/dlecan/openjdk/ubuntu/dists/oneiric/main/binary-i386/Packages 404 Not Found W: Failed to fetch http://ppa.launchpad.net/sevenmachines/flash/ubuntu/dists/oneiric/main/binary-i386/Packages 404 Not Found W: Failed to fetch http://ppa.launchpad.net/sun-java-community-team/sun-java6/ubuntu/dists/oneiric/main/source/Sources 404 Not Found W: Failed to fetch http://ppa.launchpad.net/sun-java-community-team/sun-java6/ubuntu/dists/oneiric/main/binary-i386/Packages 404 Not Found I have tried the following solutions which were in a closed case titled "The following signatures were invalid": First of all try sudo apt-get clean sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade Some ISPs cache the packages and errors like these are reported then. If the above commands don't work, try sudo apt-get update -o Acquire::http::No-Cache=True and again sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade If it still doesn't work, sudo apt-get update -o Acquire::BrokenProxy=true sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

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• Metaphor for task synchronization [closed]

  - by nkint

  I'm looking for a metaphor. A friend of mine taught me to use metaphors from nature, everyday life, math, and use them to design my projects. They can help in creating a better design or better understanding or the problem, and they are cool. Now I'm working on a project with hardware and micro-controllers in C. For convenience, I have decided to use multiple micro-controllers as co-processor units for real-time (the slaves) and a master. This has saved me a lot of headache: I can code the main logic in the master without paying too much attention to super optimizing everything; I don't care if I need some blocking-call; I don't worry about serial communication with the computer. I just send messages to the slaves and they are super fast super in real time. I like my design and it seems to work well. So here are the important concepts that I'm trying capture in the metaphor: hierarchy of processing Not using one big brain but rather several small, distributed brain units using distributed power or resources I'm looking for a good metaphor for this concept of having one unit synchronize the work of all the others. Preferably, the metaphor would come from nature, biology, or zoology.

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• git for personal (one-man) projects. Overkill?

  - by Anto

  I know, and use, two version control systems: Subversion and git. Subversion, as of now, gets used for personal projects where I am the only developer and git gets used for open source projects and projects where I believe others will also work on the project. This is mostly because of git's amazing forking and merging capabilities, where everyone may work on their own branch; very handy. Now, I use Subversion for personal projects, as I think git makes little sense there. It seems to be a little bit of overkill. It is OK for me if it is centralized (on my home server, usually) when I am the only developer; I take regular backups anyway. I don't need the ability to make my own branch, the main branch is my branch. Yes, SVN has simple support for branching, but much more powerful support for it makes no sense, I think. Merging can be a pain with it, or at least from my little experience. Is there any good reason for me to use git on personal projects, or is it just simply overkill?

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• Why is Javascript used in MongoDB and CouchDB instead of other languages such as Java, C++?

  - by startup007

  I asked this question on SO but was suggested to try here. So here it goes: My understanding of Javascript so far has been that it is a client-side language that capture events and makes a web-page dynamic. But on reading the comparison between MongoDB and CouchDB I noticed that both are using Javascript. This makes me wonder the reason behind the choice of JavaScript over other conventional languages. I guess I am trying to understand the role of JavaScript and its advantages over other languages. Update: I am not asking about the languages / drivers supported by the two databases. The comparison says: Both CouchDB and MongoDB make use of Javascript. CouchDB uses Javascript extensively including in the building of views. MongoDB also supports running arbitrary javascript functions server-side and uses javascript for map/reduce operations. My lack of understanding pertains to why is Javascript being used at all for the backend work. Why is it preferred for building views in CouchDB, or for using map/reduce operations? Why C/C++ or Java were not used? What are the advantages in using Javascript for such back-end work?

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• What features are helpful when performing remote debugging / diagnostics?

  - by Pemdas

  Obviously, the easiest way to solve a bug is to be able to reproduce it in-house. However, sometimes that is not practical. For starters, users are often not very good at providing you with useful information. Customer Service: "what seems to be the issue?" User: "It crashed!" To further compound that, sometimes the bug only occurs under certain environmentally conditions that can not be adequately replicated in-house. With that in mind, it is important to build some sort of diagnostic framework into your product. What types of built-in diagnostic tools have you used or seen used? Logging seems to be the predominate method, which makes sense. We have a fairly sophisticated logging frame work in place with different levels of verbosity and the ability to filter on specific modules (actually we can filter down to the granularity of a single file). Error logs are placed strategically to manufacture a pretty good representation of a stack trace when an error occurs. We don't have the luxury of 10 million terabytes of disk space since I work on embedded platforms, so we have two ways of getting them off the system: a serial port and a syslog server. However, an issue we run into sometimes is actually getting the user to turn the logs on. Our current framework often requires some user interaction.

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• Mono is frequently used to say "Yes, .NET is cross-platform". How valid is that claim?

  - by Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen

  In What would you choose for your project between .NET and Java at this point in time ? I say that I would consider the "Will you always deploy to Windows?" the single most important decision to make up front in a new web project, and if the answer is "no", I would recommend Java instead of .NET. A very common counter-argument is that "If we ever want to run on Linux/OS X/Whatever, we'll just run Mono", which is a very compelling argument on the surface, but I don't agree for several reasons. OpenJDK and all the vendor supplied JVM's have passed the official Sun TCK ensuring things work correctly. I am not aware of Mono passing a Microsoft TCK. Mono trails the .NET releases. What .NET-level is currently fully supported? Does all GUI elements (WinForms?) work correctly in Mono? Businesses may not want to depend on Open Source frameworks as the official plan B. I am aware that with the new governance of Java by Oracle, the future is unsafe, but e.g. IBM provides JDK's for many platforms, including Linux. They are just not open sourced. So, under which circumstances is Mono a valid business strategy for .NET-applications?

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• RESTFul: state changing actions

  - by Miro Svrtan

  I'am planning to build RESTfull API but there are some architectural questions that are creating some problems in my head. Adding backend bussiness logic to clients is option that I would like to avoid since updating multiple client platforms is hard to maintain in real time when bussiness logic can rapidly change. Lets say we have article as a resource ( api/article ), how should we implement actions like publish, unpublish,activate or deactivate and so on but to try to keep it as simple as possible? 1) Should we use api/article/{id}/{action} since a lot of backend logic can happen there like pushing to remote locations or change of multiple properties. Probably the hardest thing here is that we need to send all article data back to API for updating and multiuser work could not be implemented. For instance editor could send 5 seconds older data and overwrite fix that some other journalist just did 2 seconds ago and there is no way that I could explain to clients this since those publishing an article is really not in any way connected to updating the content. 2) Creating new resource can also be an option, api/article-{action}/id , but then returned resource would not be article-{action} but article which I'am not sure if this is proper. Also in server side code article class is handling actuall work on both resource and I'm not sure if this goes against RESTfull thinking Any suggestions are welcomed..

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• C++ and system exceptions

  - by Abyx

  Why standard C++ doesn't respect system (foreign or hardware) exceptions? E.g. when null pointer dereference occurs, stack isn't unwound, destructors aren't called, and RAII doesn't work. The common advice is "to use system API". But on certain systems, specifically Win32, this doesn't work. To enable stack unwinding for this C++ code // class Foo; // void bar(const Foo&); bar(Foo(1, 2)); one should generate something like this C code Foo tempFoo; Foo_ctor(&tempFoo); __try { bar(&tempFoo); } __finally { Foo_dtor(&tempFoo); } Foo_dtor(&tempFoo); and it's impossible to implement this as C++ library. Upd: Standard doesn't forbid handling system exceptions. But it seems that popular compilers like g++ doesn't respect system exceptions on any platforms just because standard doesn't require this. The only thing that I want - is to use RAII to make code readable and program reliable. I don't want to put hand-crafted try\finally around every call to unknown code. For example in this reusable code, AbstractA::foo is such unknown code: void func(AbstractA* a, AbstractB* b) { TempFile file; a->foo(b, file); } Maybe one will pass to func such implementation of AbstractA, which every Friday will not check if b is NULL, so access violation will happen, application will terminate and temporary file will not be deleted. How many months uses will suffer because of this issue, until either author of func or author of AbstractA will do something with it? Related: Is `catch(...) { throw; }` a bad practice?

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• GlassFish Extension for Oracle JDeveloper

  - by Shay Shmeltzer

  We just release a new version of Oracle JDeveloper - 11.1.2.3. One new feature here is built-in support for GlassFish. This include the ability to create an "application server" connection to GlassFish and then deploy to that server with one click from inside JDeveloper. You can use this for deploying Oracle ADF Essentials application on Glassfish, but you can also use it to deploy any Java EE application you build in JDeveloper on GlassFish. However, if you are planning to work with GlassFish and JDeveloper on a more regular basis as your development server, then you might find my new extension useful. The new extension allows you to start and stop an external GlassFish instance, as well as start it in debug mode (which will allow JDeveloper to remotely debug your application as it runs on the server. I also added a button that will invoke the web admin console of Glassfish. Here is a quick demo that will show you how to work with the extension: The extension is available from help->check for updates, or you can download it directly from here, and then use help->check for updates pointing to the local zip file.

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• Must developers understand the business domain or should the specification be sufficient?

  - by Jerome C.

  I work for a company for which the domain is really difficult to understand because it is high technology in electronics, but this is applicable to any software development in a complex domain. The application that I work on displays a lot of information, charts, and metrics which are difficult to understand without experience in the domain. The developer uses a specification to describe what the software must do, such as specifing that a particular chart must display this kind of metrics and this metric is the following arithmetic formula. This way, the developer doesn't really understand the business and what/why he is doing this task. This can be OK if specification is really detailled but when it isn't or when the author has forgotten a use case, this is quite hard for the developer to find a solution. At the other hand, training every developer to all the business aspects can be very long and difficult. Should we give more importance to detailled specification (but as we know, perfect specification does not exist) or should we train all the developers to understand the business domain? EDIT: keep in mind in your answer that the company could used external developpers.

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• What to do when you're the interviewer and you don't like your job?

  - by emcb

  I'm in a sorta strange predicament, and I could use some advice. When I was interviewing for my current job, the job description I was given seemed pretty darn nice to me. Without going into the details, the job hasn't quite turned out the way it was advertised. The company is great and takes care of its employees, but for someone who cares about the code they write and the work they do, it's a bad environment - effectively, we operate between 0.5 and 1.0 on the Joel test, and due to political issues we're not going to move beyond that any time soon. Bitter? Maybe. OK...so I'm in the market for a new job. But that's not where my dilemma is. The problem that I see coming is that I will be participating in interviewing some candidates for a position on my team, and I'm not sure what to do. I've heard through the grapevine that we have some really solid, promising, fresh-out-of-college prospects coming in to interview, and I honestly dread the thought of somebody having their first experience of engineering in this department. So I'm wondering: what should I do if/when the interviewee asks me "Do you like your job?" (no) "What kind of projects would I be working on?" (mostly static HTML/CSS changes) Anything else that would elicit a negative answer if told truthfully Do I tell the truth, to give the candidate a real picture of the job? What if this scares them away, and what if it gets blamed on me? Do I fib or lie, saying we work on exciting projects with lots of flexibility, like the pitch my boss will give when the reality is quite different? Should I feel any kind of moral responsibility to let a promising young developer know that this isn't the job for them, or should I shut up and be loyal 100% to the company? Any approaches or advice is appreciated. I hope I don't come across as overly dramatic - I honestly struggle with this question.

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• I Blame SNMP!

  - by brendonpage

  Anyone who has been reading my blog would have noticed that I have deviated slightly from my original post plan! This post was meant to be on uploading files in Silverlight, so what happened you may ask? Well last weekend I had some friends over for a LAN and one of them brought a managed switch with, which he had just been purchased for work. He proceeded show me how cool it was, how he planned on improving his work network and how it can be monitored remotely via SNMP. After this explanation he started to google for a free SNMP graphing tool. After a few hours of hearing disgruntled mutterings from him I asked what was wrong, he proceeded to rant about how he couldn’t find any tools that suited his needs. It was at this point I though the most dangerous thing a programmer can ever think “I wonder how hard it would be to make one”, of course the answer at the time is always “It can’t be that hard”, and so started my journey into SNMP. I am still in the early stages of this journey so I don’t have to much to report yet, but once I have finished the first version of my SNMP graphing tool I will definitely be posting about it! For now if there are any of you who are interested in doing any SNMP development in C# I would recommend looking at the #Sharp project on CodePlex (http://sharpsnmplib.codeplex.com/), it is the SNMP library I have decided to use and thus far it works beautifully.

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• VNC grey screen and start on boot 12.04

  - by Siriss

  I have 12.04 LTS installed and I am trying to get VNC to work. I want to be able to connect to existing sessions, and have it start on boot. I followed this guide and have left a comment to try and fix my problems but no dice. I have also tried all solutions I have found on google, including the one here, but I could not get it to work (I am missing something easy I am sure). When I connect to the VNC session I get a grey screen with three checkboxes: Accept clipboard from viewers Send clipboard to viewers Send primary selection to viewers Here is my xstartup: #!/bin/sh # Uncomment the following two lines for normal desktop: unset SESSION_MANAGER # exec /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc gnome-session -session=gnome-classic & [ -x /etc/vnc/xstartup ] && exec /etc/vnc/xstartup [ -r $HOME/.Xresources ] && xrdb $HOME/.Xresources xsetroot -solid grey vncconfig -iconic & #x-terminal-emulator -geometry 80x24+10+10 -ls -title "$VNCDESKTOP Desktop" & #x-window-manager & I have also edited my to include: /usr/bin/vncserver -geometry 1024x768 It does not start on boot, but when I run the command it starts, but I get the grey screen. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!!

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• How can I reduce the amount of time it takes to fully regression test an application ready for release?

  - by DrLazer

  An app I work on is being developed with a modified version of scrum. If you are not familiar with scrum, it's just an alternative approach to a more traditional watefall model, where a series of features are worked on for a set amount of time known as a sprint. The app is written in C# and makes use of WPF. We use Visual C# 2010 Express edition as an IDE. If we work on a sprint and add in a few new features, but do not plan to release until a further sprint is complete, then regression testing is not an issue as such. We just test the new features and give the app a good once over. However, if a release is planned that our customers can download - a full regression test is factored in. In the past this wasn't a big deal, it took 3 or 4 days and the devs simply fix up any bugs found in the regression phase, but now, as the app is getting larger and larger and incorporating more and more features, the regression is spanning out for weeks. I am interested in any methods that people know of or use that can decrease this time. At the moment the only ideas I have are to either start writing Unit Tests, which I have never fully tried out in a commercial environment, or to research the possibilty of any UI Automation API's or tools that would allow me to write a program to perform a series of batch tests. I know literally nothing about the possibilities of UI automation so any information would be valuable. I don't know that much about Unit testing either, how complicated can the tests be? Is it possible to get Unit tests to use the UI? Are there any other methods I should consider? Thanks for reading, and for any advice in advance. Edit: Thanks for the information. Does anybody know of any alternatives to what has been mentioned so far (NUnit, RhinoMocks and CodedUI)?

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• OpenGL ES 2.0 texture distortion on large geometry

  - by Spruce

  OpenGL ES 2.0 has serious precision issues with texture sampling - I've seen topics with a similar problem, but I haven't seen a real solution to this "distorted OpenGL ES 2.0 texture" problem yet. This is not related to the texture's image format or OpenGL color buffers, it seems like it's a precision error. I don't know what specifically causes the precision to fail - it doesn't seem like it's just the size of geometry that causes this distortion, because simply scaling vertex position passed to the the vertex shader does not solve the issue. Here are some examples of the texture distortion: Distorted Texture (on OpenGL ES 2.0): http://i47.tinypic.com/3322h6d.png What the texture normally looks like (also on OpenGL ES 2.0): http://i49.tinypic.com/b4jc6c.png The texture issue is limited to small scale geometry on OpenGL ES 2.0, otherwise the texture sampling appears normal, but the grainy effect gradually worsens the further the vertex data is from the origin of XYZ(0,0,0) These texture issues do not occur on desktop OpenGL (works fine under Windows XP, Windows 7, and Mac OS X) I've only seen the problem occur on Android, iPhone, or WebGL(which is similar to OpenGL ES 2.0) All textures are power of 2 but the problem still occurs Scaling the vertex data - The values of a vertex's X Y Z location are in the range of: -65536 to +65536 floating point I realized this was large, so I tried dividing the vertex positions by 1024 to shrink the geometry and hopefully get more accurate floating point precision, but this didn't fix or lessen the texture distortion issue Scaling the modelview or scaling the projection matrix does not help Changing texture filtering options does not help Disabling mipmapping, or using GL_NEAREST/GL_LINEAR does nothing Enabling/disabling anisotropic does nothing The banding effect still occurs even when using GL_CLAMP Dividing the texture coords passed to the vertex shader and then multiplying them back to the correct values in the fragment shader, also does not work precision highp sampler2D, highp float, highp int - in the fragment or the vertex shader didn't change anything (lowp/mediump did not work either) I'm thinking this problem has to have been solved at one point - Seeing that OpenGL ES 2.0 -based games have been able to render large-scale, highly detailed geometry

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• School vs Self-Taught [duplicate]

  - by Joan Venge

  This question already has an answer here: Do I need a degree in Computer Science to get a junior Programming job? [closed] 8 answers Do you think university is a good learning environment or is it better to be autodidact? [closed] 3 answers Do you think formal education is necessary to gain strong programming skills? There are a lot of jobs that aren't programming but involves programming, such as tech artists in games, fx tds in film for example. I see similar patterns in the people I work where the best ones I have seen were self-taught, because of being artists primarily. But I also see that while the software, programming knowledge is varied and deep, hardware knowledge is very basic, including me, again due to lack of formal education. But I also work with a lot of programmers who possess both skills in general (software and hardware). Do you think it's necessary to have a formal education to have great programming skills? Would you think less of someone if he didn't have a degree in computer science, or software engineering, etc in terms of job opportunities? Would you trust him to do a software engineering job, i.e. writing a complex tool? Basically I feel the self-taught programmer doesn't know a lot of things, i.e. not knowing a particular pattern or a particular language, etc. But I find that the ability to think outside the box much more powerful. As "pure" programmers what's your take on it?

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• Finally! Entity Framework working in fully disconnected N-tier web app

  - by oazabir

  Entity Framework was supposed to solve the problem of Linq to SQL, which requires endless hacks to make it work in n-tier world. Not only did Entity Framework solve none of the L2S problems, but also it made it even more difficult to use and hack it for n-tier scenarios. It’s somehow half way between a fully disconnected ORM and a fully connected ORM like Linq to SQL. Some useful features of Linq to SQL are gone – like automatic deferred loading. If you try to do simple select with join, insert, update, delete in a disconnected architecture, you will realize not only you need to make fundamental changes from the top layer to the very bottom layer, but also endless hacks in basic CRUD operations. I will show you in this article how I have  added custom CRUD functions on top of EF’s ObjectContext to make it finally work well in a fully disconnected N-tier web application (my open source Web 2.0 AJAX portal – Dropthings) and how I have produced a 100% unit testable fully n-tier compliant data access layerfollowing the repository pattern. http://www.codeproject.com/KB/linq/ef.aspx In .NET 4.0, most of the problems are solved, but not all. So, you should read this article even if you are coding in .NET 4.0. Moreover, there’s enough insight here to help you troubleshoot EF related problems. You might think “Why bother using EF when Linq to SQL is doing good enough for me.” Linq to SQL is not going to get any innovation from Microsoft anymore. Entity Framework is the future of persistence layer in .NET framework. All the innovations are happening in EF world only, which is frustrating. There’s a big jump on EF 4.0. So, you should plan to migrate your L2S projects to EF soon.

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• Collision Detection with SAT: False Collision for Diagonal Movement Towards Vertical Tile-Walls?

  - by Macks

  Edit: Problem solved! Big thanks to Jonathan who pointed me in the right direction. Sean describes the method I used in a different thread. Also big thanks to him! :) Here is how I solved my problem: If a collision is registered by my SAT-method, only fire the collision-event on my character if there are no neighbouring solid tiles in the direction of the returned minimum translation vector. I'm developing my first tile-based 2D-game with Javascript. To learn the basics, I decided to write my own "game engine". I have successfully implemented collision detection using the separating axis theorem, but I've run into a problem that I can't quite wrap my head around. If I press the [up] and [left] arrow-keys simultaneously, my character moves diagonally towards the upper left. If he hits a horizontal wall, he'll just keep moving in x-direction. The same goes for [up] and [left] as well as downward-diagonal movements, it works as intended: http://i.stack.imgur.com/aiZjI.png Diagonal movement works fine for horizontal walls, for both left and right-movement However: this does not work for vertical walls. Instead of keeping movement in y-direction, he'll just stop as soon as he "enters" a new tile on the y-axis. So for some reason SAT thinks my character is colliding vertically with tiles from vertical walls: http://i.stack.imgur.com/XBEKR.png My character stops because he thinks that he is colliding vertically with tiles from the wall on the right. This only occurs, when: Moving into top-right direction towards the right wall Moving into top-left direction towards the left wall Bottom-right and bottom-left movement work: the character keeps moving in y-direction as intended. Is this inherited from the way SAT works or is there a problem with my implementation? What can I do to solve my problem? Oh yeah, my character is displayed as a circle but he's actually a rectangular polygon for the collision detection. Thank you very much for your help.

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• Register now for the UK Windows Azure Self-paced Interactive Learning Course starting May 10th

  - by Eric Nelson

  [Suggested twitter tag #selfpacedazure] We (myself and David Gristwood) have been working in the UK to create a fantastic opportunity to get yourself up to speed on the Windows Azure Platform over a 6 week period starting May 10th – without ever needing to leave the comfort of your home/office.  The course is derived from the internal training Microsoft gives on Azure which is both fun and challenging in equal parts – and we felt was just too good to keep to ourselves! We will be releasing more details nearer the date but hopefully the following is enough to convince you to register and … recommend it to a colleague or three :-) What we have produced is the “Microsoft Azure Self-paced Learning Course”. This is a free, interactive, self-paced, technical training course covering the Windows Azure platform – Windows Azure, SQL Azure and the Azure AppFabric. The course takes place over a six week period finishing on June 18th. During the course you will work from your own home or workplace, and get involved via interactive Live Meetings session, watch on-line videos, work through hands-on labs and research and complete weekly coursework assignments. The mentors and other attendees on the course will help you in your research and learning, and there are weekly Live Meetings where you can raise questions and interact with them. This is a technical course, aimed at programmers, system designers, and architects who want a solid understanding of the Microsoft Windows Azure platform, hence a prerequisite for this course is at least six months programming in the .NET framework and Visual Studio. Check out the full details of the event or go straight to registration.   The course outline is: Week 1 - Windows Azure Platform Week 2 - Windows Azure Storage Week 3 - Windows Azure Deep Dive and Codename "Dallas" Week 4 - SQL Azure Week 5 - Windows Azure Platform AppFabric Access Control Week 6 - Windows Azure Platform AppFabric Service Bus If you have any questions about the course and its suitability, please email [email protected].

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• Need help eliminating dead code paths and variables from C source code

  - by Anjum Kaiser

  I have a legacy C code on my hands, and I am given the task to filter dead/unused symbols and paths from it. Over the time there were many insertions and deletions, causing lots of unused symbols. I have identified many dead variables which were only being written to once or twice, but were never being read from. Both blackbox/whitebox/regression testing proved that dead code removal did not affected any procedures. (We have a comprehensive test-suite). But this removal was done only on a small part of code. Now I am looking for some way to automate this work. We rely on GCC to do the work. P.S. I'm interested in removing stuff like: variables which are being read just for the sake of reading from them. variables which are spread across multiple source files and only being written to. For example: file1.c: int i; file2.c: extern int i; .... i=x;

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• How to Deliberately Practice Software Engineering?

  - by JasCav

  I just finished reading this recent article. It's a very interesting read, and it makes some great points. The point that specifically jumped out at me was this: The difference was in how they spent this [equal] time. The elite players were spending almost three times more hours than the average players on deliberate practice — the uncomfortable, methodical work of stretching your ability. This article (if you care not to read it) is discussing violin players. Of course, being a software engineer, my mind turned towards software ability. Granted, there are some very naturally talented individuals out there, but time and time again, it is those folks who stretch their abilities through deliberate practice that really become exceptional at their craft. My question is - how would one go about practicing the "scales" of software engineering and computer science? When I practice the piano, I will spend more of my time on scales and less on a fun song. How can I do the same in developing software? To head off early answers, I don't feel that "work on an open source project," and similar answers, is really right. Sure...that can improve your skills, but you could just as easily get stuck focusing on something that is unimportant to your craft as a whole. It can become the equivalent of learning "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" and never being able to play Chopin. So, again, I ask - how would you suggest that someone deliberately practice software engineering?

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