Search Results

Search found 17009 results on 681 pages for 'screen orientation'.

Page 641/681 | < Previous Page | 637 638 639 640 641 642 643 644 645 646 647 648  | Next Page >

• Parner Webcast - Innovations in Products Program

  - by Richard Lefebvre

  We are pleased to invite you to join the Innovations in Products –webcast. Innovations in Products will present Oracle Applications' Product's new functions and features including sales positioning. The key objectives of these webcasts are to inspire System Integrator's implementation personnel to conduct successful after sales in their Customer projects. Innovations in Products will be presented on the 1st Monday of each quarter after the billable day (4:00 to 5:00 PM CET). The webcast is intended for System Integrator's Implementation Certified Specialists but Innovations in Products is open for other interested Oracle Applications system Integrator's personnel as well. At first, two Oracle representatives will discuss Oracle's contribution to Partners. Then you will see product breakout session followed by Q&A with Oracle Experts. Each session will last for maximum 1 hour. A Q&A document covering all questions and answers will be made available after the webcast. What are the Benefits for partners? Find out how Innovations in Products helps you to improve your after sales Discover new functions and features so you can enrich your Customers's solution Learn more about Oracle Applications products, especially sales positioning Hear crucial questions raised by colleague alike, learn from their interest Engage and present your questions to subject experts Be inspired of the richness of Oracle Application portfolio – for your and your customer’s benefit Note: Should you already be familiar with a specific Product, then choose another one. Doing so you would expand your knowledge of the overall Applications portfolio. Some presentations contain product demonstration, although these presentations are not intended to be extremely detailed technical presentations. Note: At the latter part of this email you have also 17 links into the recent Applications Products presentations and 6 links into the Public Sector Value Proposition presentations that were presented in Innovations in Industries -program. Product breakout sessions: Topics Speaker To Register Fusion Applications Technology and Extensibility: A next-generation platform that adapts to client needs. Matthew Johnson, Sr. Director, SCM Product Development, EMEA CLICK HERE Fusion Applications - Transforming your Back-Office Accounting Function: Changing how people work in back office functions to drive value add Liam Nolan, Director, ERP Product Development, EMEA CLICK HERE Fusion HCM & Talent Overview & Extensibility: A more in-depth look into a personalized HCM solution Synco Jonkeren, Vice-President HCM Product Development & Management, EMEA CLICK HERE Fusion HCM Compensation Planning: Compensate To Compete Rosie Warner, Director, HCM Sales Development CLICK HERE Enterprise PLM for the Product Value Chain: Oracle Enterprise PLM offers Industry specific solutions that cover the Product Value Chain Ulf Köster, Sales Development Leader Enterprise PLM, Oracle Western Europe CLICK HERE Oracle's Asset Management and Maintenance Solution: What you need to know to successfully implement Oracle Asset Management solutions within Oracle Installed Base Philip Carey, Asset Management and Maintenance Solution Specialist CLICK HERE For more details please visit Innovations in Products and other breakout sessions on OPN page. Delivery Format Innovations in Products –program is a series of FREE prerecorded Applications product presentations followed by Q&A. It will be delivered over the Web. Participants have the opportunity to submit questions during the web cast via chat and subject matter experts will provide verbal answers live. Innovations in Products consists of several parallel prerecorded product breakout sessions, each lasting for max. 1 hour. At first, two Oracle representatives will discuss Oracle’s contribution to Partners. Then you’ll see the product breakout sessions followed by Q&A with Oracle Experts. A Q&A document covering all questions and answers will be made available after the webcast. You can also see Innovations in Products afterwards as its content will be available online for the next 6-12 months. The next Innovations in Products web casts will be presented as follows: July 2nd 2012 October 1st 2012 January 14th 2013 April 8th 2013. Note: Depending on local network bandwidth please allow some seconds time the presentations to download. You might want to refresh your screen by pressing F5. Duration Maximum 1 hour For further information please contact me Markku Rouhiainen. Recent Innovations in Products presentations Applications Products presented on April the 2nd, 2012 Speaker To Register Fusion CRM: Effective, Efficient and Easy James Penfold , Senior Director, Applications Product Development and Product Management CLICK HERE Fusion HCM: Talent management overview performance, goals, talent review Jaime Losantos Viñolas, Director, HCM Sales Development CLICK HERE Distributed Order Management - Fusion SCM Solution Vikram K Singla, Business Development Director, Supply Chain Management Applications, UK CLICK HERE Oracle Transportation Management Dominic Regan, Senior Director Oracle Transportation Management EMEA CLICK HERE Oracle Value Chain Planning: Demantra Sales & Operation Planning and Demantra Demand Management Lionel Albert, Senior Director Value Chain Planning, EMEA CLICK HERE Oracle CX (Customer Experience) - formerly CEM: Powering Great Customer Experiences Maria Ramirez , CRM Presales Consultant, EPC CLICK HERE EPM 11.1.2.2 Overview Nicholas Cox , EMEA Sales Development Director - Enterprise Performance Management CLICK HERE Oracle Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management, 11.1.2.1 Daniela Lazar , Senior EPM Sales Consultant, EPC CLICK HERE January the 16th 2012 Speaker To Register CRM / ATG: Best-in-Class CRM & Commerce Maria Ramirez , Associate CRM Presales Consultant, EPC CLICK HERE CRM / Automate Business Rules for Maximum Efficiency with OPA (Oracle Policy Automation) Marco Nilo, Associate CRM Presales Consultant, EPC CLICK HERE CRM / InQuira Toby Baker, Principal Sales Consultant, CRM Product Specialist Team CLICK HERE EPM / Business Intelligence Foundation Suite – Sales and Product Updates Liviu Nitescu, Senior BI Sales Consultant, EPC CLICK HERE EPM / Hyperion Planning 11.1.2.1 - Sales & Product Updates Andreea Voinea, EPM Sales Consultant, EPC CLICK HERE ERP / JDE EnterpriseOne Fulfillment Management Overview Mirela Andreea Nasta , ERP Presales Consultant, EPC CLICK HERE ERP / Spotlights on iExpenses Elena Nita ,ERP Presales Consultant, EPC CLICK HERE MDM / Master Data Management Martin Boyd , Senior Director Product Strategy CLICK HERE Product break through session Fusion Applications Human Capital Management Rosie Warner , Director, HCM Sales Development CLICK HERE Recent Innovations in Industries Value Proposition presentations January the 16th 2012 Speaker To Register Process Modernisation Iemke Idsingh Public Sector Solutions Director CLICK HERE Shared Services Ann Smith Business Development Director, Shared Services CLICK HERE Strengthening Financial Discipline Whilst Delivering Cashable Savings Philippa Headley UK Sales Development Director Public Sector - EPM Solutions CLICK HERE Social Welfare Industry Solutions Christian Wernberg-Tougaard Industry Director - Social Welfare CLICK HERE Police Industry Solutions Jeff Penrose Solution Sales Director CLICK HERE Tax and Revenue Management Industry Solutions Andre van der Post Global Director - Tax Solutions and Strategy CLICK HERE  

  Read the article

• ACORD LOMA Session Highlights Policy Administration Trends

  - by [email protected]

  Helen Pitts, senior product marketing manager for Oracle Insurance, attended and is blogging from the ACORD LOMA Insurance Forum this week. Above: Paul Vancheri, Chief Information Officer, Fidelity Investments Life Insurance Company. Vancheri gave a presentation during the ACORD LOMA Insurance Systems Forum about the key elements of modern policy administration systems and how insurers can mitigate risk during legacy system migrations to safely introduce new technologies. When I had a few particularly challenging honors courses in college my father, a long-time technology industry veteran, used to say, "If you don't know how to do something go ask the experts. Find someone who has been there and done that, don't be afraid to ask the tough questions, and apply and build upon what you learn." (Actually he still offers this same advice today.) That's probably why my favorite sessions at industry events, like the ACORD LOMA Insurance Forum this week, are those that include insight on industry trends and case studies from carriers who share their experiences and offer best practices based upon their own lessons learned. I had the opportunity to attend a particularly insightful session Wednesday as Craig Weber, senior vice president of Celent's Insurance practice, and Paul Vancheri, CIO of Fidelity Life Investments, presented, "Managing the Dynamic Insurance Landscape: Enabling Growth and Profitability with a Modern Policy Administration System." Policy Administration Trends Growing the business is the top issue when it comes to IT among both life and annuity and property and casualty carriers according to Weber. To drive growth and capture market share from competitors, carriers are looking to modernize their core insurance systems, with 65 percent of those CIOs participating in recent Celent research citing plans to replace their policy administration systems. Weber noted that there has been continued focus and investment, particularly in the last three years, by software and technology vendors to offer modern, rules-based, configurable policy administration solutions. He added that these solutions are continuing to evolve with the ongoing aim of helping carriers rapidly meet shifting business needs--whether it is to launch new products to market faster than the competition, adapt existing products to meet shifting consumer and /or regulatory demands, or to exit unprofitable markets. He closed by noting the top four trends for policy administration either in the process of being adopted today or on the not-so-distant horizon for the future: Underwriting and service desktops New business automation Convergence of ultra-configurable and domain content-rich systems Better usability and screen design Mitigating the Risk When Making the Decision to Modernize Third-party analyst research from advisory firms like Celent was a key part of the due diligence process for Fidelity as it sought a replacement for its legacy policy administration system back in 2005, according to Vancheri. The company's business opportunities were outrunning system capability. Its legacy system had not been upgraded in several years and was deficient from a functionality and currency standpoint. This was constraining the carrier's ability to rapidly configure and bring new and complex products to market. The company sought a new, modern policy administration system, one that would enable it to keep pace with rapid and often unexpected industry changes and ahead of the competition. A cross-functional team that included representatives from finance, actuarial, operations, client services and IT conducted an extensive selection process. This process included deep documentation review, pilot evaluations, demonstrations of required functionality and complex problem-solving, infrastructure integration capability, and the ability to meet the company's desired cost model. The company ultimately selected an adaptive policy administration system that met its requirements to: Deliver ease of use - eliminating paper and rework, while easing the burden on representatives to sell and service annuities Provide customer parity - offering Web-based capabilities in alignment with the company's focus on delivering a consistent customer experience across its business Deliver scalability, efficiency - enabling automation, while simplifying and standardizing systems across its technology stack Offer desired functionality - supporting Fidelity's product configuration / rules management philosophy, focus on customer service and technology upgrade requirements Meet cost requirements - including implementation, professional services and licenses fees and ongoing maintenance Deliver upon business requirements - enabling the ability to drive time to market for new products and flexibility to make changes Best Practices for Addressing Implementation Challenges Based upon lessons learned during the company's implementation, Vancheri advised carriers to evaluate staffing capabilities and cultural impacts, review business requirements to avoid rebuilding legacy processes, factor in dependent systems, and review policies and practices to secure customer data. His formula for success: upfront planning + clear requirements = precision execution. Achieving a Return on Investment Vancheri said the decision to replace their legacy policy administration system and deploy a modern, rules-based system--before the economic downturn occurred--has been integral in helping the company adapt to shifting market conditions, while enabling growth in its direct channel sales of variable annuities. Since deploying its new policy admin system, the company has reduced its average time to market for new products from 12-15 months to 4.5 months. The company has since migrated its other products to the new system and retired its legacy system, significantly decreasing its overall product development cycle. From a processing standpoint Vancheri noted the company has achieved gains in automation, information, and ease of use, resulting in improved real-time data edits, controls for better quality, and tax handling capability. Plus, with by having only one platform to manage, the company has simplified its IT environment and is well positioned to deliver system enhancements for greater efficiencies. Commitment to Continuing the Investment In the short and longer term future Vancheri said the company plans to enhance business functionality to support money movement, wire automation, divorce processing on payout contracts and cost-based tracking improvements. It also plans to continue system upgrades to remain current as well as focus on further reducing cycle time, driving down maintenance costs, and integrating with other products. Helen Pitts is senior product marketing manager for Oracle Insurance focused on life/annuities and enterprise document automation.

  Read the article

• SQL SERVER – Weekly Series – Memory Lane – #006

  - by pinaldave

  Here is the list of selected articles of SQLAuthority.com across all these years. Instead of just listing all the articles I have selected a few of my most favorite articles and have listed them here with additional notes below it. Let me know which one of the following is your favorite article from memory lane. 2006 This was my very first year of blogging so I was every day learning something new. As I have said many times, that blogging was never an intention. I had really not understood what exactly I am working on or beginning when I was beginning blogging in 2006. I had never knew that my life was going to change forever, once I started blogging. When I look back all of this year, I am happy that we are here together. 2007 IT Outsourcing to India – Top 10 Reasons Companies Outsource Outsourcing is about trust, collaboration and success. Helping other countries in need has been always the course of mankind, outsourcing is nothing different then that. With information technology and process improvements increasing the complexity, costs and skills required to accomplish routine tasks as well as challenging complex tasks, companies are outsourcing such tasks to providers who have the expertise to perform them at lower costs , with greater value and quality outcome. UDF – Remove Duplicate Chars From String This was a very interesting function I wrote in my early career. I am still using this function when I have to remove duplicate chars from strings. I have yet to come across a scenario where it does not work so I keep on using it till today. Please leave a comment if there is any better solution to this problem. FIX : Error : 3702 Cannot drop database because it is currently in use This is a very generic error when DROP Database is command is executed and the database is not dropped. The common mistake user is kept the connection open with this database and trying to drop the database. The database cannot be dropped if there is any other connection open along with it. It is always a good idea to take database in single user mode before dropping it. Here is the quick tutorial regarding how to bring the database in single user mode: Using T-SQL | Using SSMS. 2008 Install SQL Server 2008 – How to Upgrade to SQL Server 2008 – Installation Tutorial This was indeed one of the most popular articles in SQL Server 2008. Lots of people wanted to learn how to install SQL SErver 2008 but they were facing various issues while installation. I build this tutorial which becomes reference points for many. Default Collation of SQL Server 2008 What is the collation of SQL Server 2008 default installations? I often see this question confusing many experienced developers as well. Well the answer is in following image. Ahmedabad SQL Server User Group Meeting – November 2008 User group meetings are fun, now a days I am going to User Group meetings every week but there was a case when I have been just a beginner on this subject. The bug of the community was caught on me years ago when I started to present in Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar SQ LServer User Groups. 2009 Validate an XML document in TSQL using XSD My friend Jacob Sebastian wrote an excellent article on the subject XML and XSD. Because of the ‘eXtensible’ nature of XML (eXtensible Markup Language), often there is a requirement to restrict and validate the content of an XML document to a pre-defined structure and values. XSD (XML Schema Definition Language) is the W3C recommended language for describing and validating XML documents. SQL Server implements XSD as XML Schema Collections. Star Join Query Optimization At present, when queries are sent to very large databases, millions of rows are returned. Also the users have to go through extended query response times when joining multiple tables are involved with such queries. ‘Star Join Query Optimization’ is a new feature of SQL Server 2008 Enterprise Edition. This mechanism uses bitmap filtering for improving the performance of some types of queries by the effective retrieval of rows from fact tables. 2010 These puzzles are very interesting and intriguing – there was lots of interest on this subject. If you have free time this weekend. You may want to try them out. SQL SERVER – Challenge – Puzzle – Usage of FAST Hint (Solution)  SQL SERVER – Puzzle – Challenge – Error While Converting Money to Decimal (Solution)  SQL SERVER – Challenge – Puzzle – Why does RIGHT JOIN Exists (Open)  Additionally, I had great fun presenting SQL Server Performance Tuning seminar at fantastic locations in Hyderabad. Installing AdventeWorks Database This has been the most popular request I have received on my blog. Here is the quick video about how one can install AdventureWorks. 2011 Effect of SET NOCOUNT on @@ROWCOUNT There was an interesting incident once while I was presenting a session. I wrote a code and suddenly 10 hands went up in the air.  This was a bit surprise to me as I do not know why they all got alerted. I assumed that there should be something wrong with either project, screen or my display. However the real reason was very interesting – I suggest you read the complete blog post to understand this interesting scenario. Error: Deleting Offline Database and Creating the Same Name This is very interesting because once a user deletes the offline database the MDF and LDF file still exists and if the user attempts to create a new database with the same name it will give error. I found this very interesting and the blog explains the concept very quickly. Have you ever faced a similar situation? Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Memory Lane, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

  Read the article

• Why would GLCapabilities.setHardwareAccelerated(true/false) have no effect on performance?

  - by Luke

  I've got a JOGL application in which I am rendering 1 million textures (all the same texture) and 1 million lines between those textures. Basically it's a ball-and-stick graph. I am storing the vertices in a vertex array on the card and referencing them via index arrays, which are also stored on the card. Each pass through the draw loop I am basically doing this: gl.glBindBuffer(GL.GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, <buffer id>); gl.glBindBuffer(GL.GL_ELEMENT_ARRAY_BUFFER, <buffer id>); gl.glDrawElements(GL.GL_POINTS, <size>, GL.GL_UNSIGNED_INT, 0); gl.glBindBuffer(GL.GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, <buffer id>); gl.glBindBuffer(GL.GL_ELEMENT_ARRAY_BUFFER, <buffer id>); gl.glDrawElements(GL.GL_LINES, <size>, GL.GL_UNSIGNED_INT, 0); I noticed that the JOGL library is pegging one of my CPU cores. Every frame, the run method internal to the library is taking quite long. I'm not sure why this is happening since I have called setHardwareAccelerated(true) on the GLCapabilities used to create my canvas. What's more interesting is that I changed it to setHardwareAccelerated(false) and there was no impact on the performance at all. Is it possible that my code is not using hardware rendering even when it is set to true? Is there any way to check? EDIT: As suggested, I have tested breaking my calls up into smaller chunks. I have tried using glDrawRangeElements and respecting the limits that it requests. All of these simply resulted in the same pegged CPU usage and worse framerates. I have also narrowed the problem down to a simpler example where I just render 4 million textures (no lines). The draw loop then just doing this: gl.glEnableClientState(GL.GL_VERTEX_ARRAY); gl.glEnableClientState(GL.GL_INDEX_ARRAY); gl.glClear(GL.GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT | GL.GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT); gl.glMatrixMode(GL.GL_MODELVIEW); gl.glLoadIdentity(); <... Camera and transform related code ...> gl.glEnableVertexAttribArray(0); gl.glEnable(GL.GL_TEXTURE_2D); gl.glAlphaFunc(GL.GL_GREATER, ALPHA_TEST_LIMIT); gl.glEnable(GL.GL_ALPHA_TEST); <... Bind texture ...> gl.glBindBuffer(GL.GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, <buffer id>); gl.glBindBuffer(GL.GL_ELEMENT_ARRAY_BUFFER, <buffer id>); gl.glDrawElements(GL.GL_POINTS, <size>, GL.GL_UNSIGNED_INT, 0); gl.glDisable(GL.GL_TEXTURE_2D); gl.glDisable(GL.GL_ALPHA_TEST); gl.glDisableVertexAttribArray(0); gl.glFlush(); Where the first buffer contains 12 million floats (the x,y,z coords of the 4 million textures) and the second (element) buffer contains 4 million integers. In this simple example it is simply the integers 0 through 3999999. I really want to know what is being done in software that is pegging my CPU, and how I can make it stop (if I can). My buffers are generated by the following code: gl.glBindBuffer(GL.GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, <buffer id>); gl.glBufferData(GL.GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, <size> * BufferUtil.SIZEOF_FLOAT, <buffer>, GL.GL_STATIC_DRAW); gl.glVertexAttribPointer(0, 3, GL.GL_FLOAT, false, 0, 0); and: gl.glBindBuffer(GL.GL_ELEMENT_ARRAY_BUFFER, <buffer id>); gl.glBufferData(GL.GL_ELEMENT_ARRAY_BUFFER, <size> * BufferUtil.SIZEOF_INT, <buffer>, GL.GL_STATIC_DRAW); ADDITIONAL INFO: Here is my initialization code: gl.setSwapInterval(1); //Also tried 0 gl.glShadeModel(GL.GL_SMOOTH); gl.glClearDepth(1.0f); gl.glEnable(GL.GL_DEPTH_TEST); gl.glDepthFunc(GL.GL_LESS); gl.glHint(GL.GL_PERSPECTIVE_CORRECTION_HINT, GL.GL_FASTEST); gl.glPointParameterfv(GL.GL_POINT_DISTANCE_ATTENUATION, POINT_DISTANCE_ATTENUATION, 0); gl.glPointParameterfv(GL.GL_POINT_SIZE_MIN, MIN_POINT_SIZE, 0); gl.glPointParameterfv(GL.GL_POINT_SIZE_MAX, MAX_POINT_SIZE, 0); gl.glPointSize(POINT_SIZE); gl.glTexEnvf(GL.GL_POINT_SPRITE, GL.GL_COORD_REPLACE, GL.GL_TRUE); gl.glEnable(GL.GL_POINT_SPRITE); gl.glClearColor(clearColor.getX(), clearColor.getY(), clearColor.getZ(), 0.0f); Also, I'm not sure if this helps or not, but when I drag the entire graph off the screen, the FPS shoots back up and the CPU usage falls to 0%. This seems obvious and intuitive to me, but I thought that might give a hint to someone else.

  Read the article

• About Me

  - by Jeffrey West

  I’m new to blogging.  This is the second blog post that I have written, and before I go too much further I wanted the readers of my blog to know a bit more about me… Kid’s Stuff By trade, I am a programmer (or coder, developer, engineer, architect, etc).  I started programming when I was 12 years old.  When I was 7, we got our first ‘family’ computer – an Apple IIc.  It was great to play games on, and of course what else was a 7-year-old going to do with it.  I did have one problem with it, though.  When I put in my 5.25” floppy to play a game, sometimes, instead loading my game I would get a mysterious ‘]’ on the screen with a flashing cursor.  This, of course, was not my game.  Much like the standard ‘Microsoft fix’ is to reboot, back then you would take the floppy out, shake it, and restart the computer and pray for a different result. One day, I learned at school that I could topple my nemesis – the ‘]’ and flashing cursor – by typing ‘load’ and pressing enter.  Most of the time, this would load my game and then I would get to play.  Problem solved.  However, I began to wonder – what else can I make it do? When I was in 5th grade my dad got a bright idea to buy me a Tandy 1000HX.  He didn’t know what I was going to do with it, and neither did I.  Least of all, my mom wasn’t happy about buying a 5th grader a $1,000 computer.  Nonetheless, Over time, I learned how to write simple basic programs out of the back of my Math book: 10 x=5 20 y=6 30 PRINT x+y That was fun for all of about 5 minutes.  I needed more – more challenges, more things that I could make the computer do.  In order to quench this thirst my parents sent me to National Computer Camps in Connecticut.  It was one of the best experiences of my childhood, and I spent 3 weeks each summer after that learning BASIC, Pascal, Turbo C and some C++.  There weren’t many kids at the time who knew anything about computers, and lets just say my knowledge of and interest in computers didn’t score me many ‘cool’ points.  My experiences at NCC set me on the path that I find myself on now, and I am very thankful for the experience.  Real Life I have held various positions in the past at different levels within the IT layer cake.  I started out as a Software Developer for a startup in the Dallas, TX area building software for semiconductor testing statistical process control and sampling.  I was the second Java developer that was hired, and the ninth employee overall, so I got a great deal of experience developing software.  Since there weren’t that many people in the organization, I also got a lot of field experience which meant that if I screwed up the code, I got yelled at (figuratively) by both my boss AND the customer.  Fun Times!  What made it better was that I got to help run pilot programs in Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia and Malta.  Getting yelled at in Taiwan is slightly less annoying that getting yelled at in Dallas… I spent the next 5 years at Accenture doing systems integration in the ‘SOA’ group.  I joined as a Consultant and left as a Senior Manager.  I started out writing code in WebLogic Integration and left after I wrapped up project where I led a team of 25 to develop the next generation of a digital media platform to deliver HD content in a digital format.  At Accenture, I had the pleasure of working with some truly amazing people – mentoring some and learning from many others – and on some incredible real-world IT projects.  Given my background with the BEA stack of products I was often called in to troubleshoot and tune WebLogic, ALBPM and ALSB installations and have logged many hours digging through thread dumps, running performance tests with SoapUI and decompiling Java classes we didn’t have the source for so I could see what was going on in the code. I am now a Senior Principal Product Manager at Oracle in the Application Grid practice.  The term ‘Application Grid’ refers to a collection of software and hardware products within Oracle that enables customers to build horizontally scalable systems.  This collection of products includes WebLogic, GlassFish, Coherence, Tuxedo and the JRockit/HotSpot JVMs (HotSprocket, maybe?).  Now, with the introduction of Exalogic it has grown to include hardware as well. Wrapping it up… I love technology and have a diverse background ranging from software development to HW and network architecture & tuning.  I have held certifications for being an Oracle Certified DBA, MSCE and Cisco Certified Network Professional (CCNP), among others and I have put those to great use over my career.  I am excited about programming & technology and I enjoy helping people learn and be successful.  If you are having challenges with WebLogic, BPM or Service Bus feel free to reach out to me and I’ll be happy to help as I have time. Thanks for stopping by!   --Jeff

  Read the article

• Weird y offset when using custom frag shader (Cocos2d-x)

  - by Mister Guacamole

  I'm trying to mask a sprite so I wrote a simple fragment shader that renders only the pixels that are not hidden under another texture (the mask). The problem is that it seems my texture has its y-coordinate offset after passing through the shader. This is the init method of the sprite (GroundZone) I want to mask: bool GroundZone::initWithSize(Size size) { // [...] // Setup the mask of the sprite m_mask = RenderTexture::create(textureWidth, textureHeight); m_mask->retain(); m_mask->setKeepMatrix(true); Texture2D *maskTexture = m_mask->getSprite()->getTexture(); maskTexture->setAliasTexParameters(); // Disable linear interpolation on the mask // Load the custom frag shader with a default vert shader as the sprite’s program FileUtils *fileUtils = FileUtils::getInstance(); string vertexSource = ccPositionTextureA8Color_vert; string fragmentSource = fileUtils->getStringFromFile( fileUtils->fullPathForFilename("CustomShader_AlphaMask_frag.fsh")); GLProgram *shader = new GLProgram; shader->initWithByteArrays(vertexSource.c_str(), fragmentSource.c_str()); shader->bindAttribLocation(GLProgram::ATTRIBUTE_NAME_POSITION, GLProgram::VERTEX_ATTRIB_POSITION); shader->bindAttribLocation(GLProgram::ATTRIBUTE_NAME_TEX_COORD, GLProgram::VERTEX_ATTRIB_TEX_COORDS); shader->link(); CHECK_GL_ERROR_DEBUG(); shader->updateUniforms(); CHECK_GL_ERROR_DEBUG(); int maskTexUniformLoc = shader->getUniformLocationForName("u_alphaMaskTexture"); shader->setUniformLocationWith1i(maskTexUniformLoc, 1); this->setShaderProgram(shader); shader->release(); // [...] } These are the custom drawing methods for actually drawing the mask over the sprite: You need to know that m_mask is modified externally by another class, the onDraw() method only render it. void GroundZone::draw(Renderer *renderer, const kmMat4 &transform, bool transformUpdated) { m_renderCommand.init(_globalZOrder); m_renderCommand.func = CC_CALLBACK_0(GroundZone::onDraw, this, transform, transformUpdated); renderer->addCommand(&m_renderCommand); Sprite::draw(renderer, transform, transformUpdated); } void GroundZone::onDraw(const kmMat4 &transform, bool transformUpdated) { GLProgram *shader = this->getShaderProgram(); shader->use(); glActiveTexture(GL_TEXTURE1); glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, m_mask->getSprite()->getTexture()->getName()); glActiveTexture(GL_TEXTURE0); } Below is the method (located in another class, GroundLayer) that modify the mask by drawing a line from point start to point end. Both points are in Cocos2d coordinates (Point (0,0) is down-left). void GroundLayer::drawTunnel(Point start, Point end) { // To dig a line, we need first to get the texture of the zone we will be digging into. Then we get the // relative position of the start and end point in the zone's node space. Finally we use the custom shader to // draw a mask over the existing texture. for (auto it = _children.begin(); it != _children.end(); it++) { GroundZone *zone = static_cast<GroundZone *>(*it); Point nodeStart = zone->convertToNodeSpace(start); Point nodeEnd = zone->convertToNodeSpace(end); // Now that we have our two points converted to node space, it's easy to draw a mask that contains a line // going from the start point to the end point and that is then applied over the current texture. Size groundZoneSize = zone->getContentSize(); RenderTexture *rt = zone->getMask(); rt->begin(); { // Draw a line going from start and going to end in the texture, the line will act as a mask over the // existing texture DrawNode *line = DrawNode::create(); line->retain(); line->drawSegment(nodeStart, nodeEnd, 20, Color4F::RED); line->visit(); } rt->end(); } } Finally, here's the custom shader I wrote. #ifdef GL_ES precision mediump float; #endif varying vec2 v_texCoord; uniform sampler2D u_texture; uniform sampler2D u_alphaMaskTexture; void main() { float maskAlpha = texture2D(u_alphaMaskTexture, v_texCoord).a; float texAlpha = texture2D(u_texture, v_texCoord).a; float blendAlpha = (1.0 - maskAlpha) * texAlpha; // Show only where mask is invisible vec3 texColor = texture2D(u_texture, v_texCoord).rgb; gl_FragColor = vec4(texColor, blendAlpha); return; } I got a problem with the y coordinates. Indeed, it seems that once it has passed through my custom shader, the sprite's texture is not at the right place: Without custom shader (the sprite is the brown thing): With custom shader: What's going on here? Thanks :) EDIT It looks like after passing through the shader when I set the position of the sprite I set it in points, with (0,0) being in the top-right. Indeed, when I do sprite->setPosition(320, 480), the sprite is perfectly placed at the top of the screen.

  Read the article

• Searching for the Perfect Developer&rsquo;s Laptop.

  - by mbcrump

  I have been in the market for a new computer for several months. I set out with a budget of around $1200. I knew up front that the machine would be used for developing applications and maybe some light gaming. I kept switching between buying a laptop or a desktop but the laptop won because: With a Laptop, I can carry it everywhere and with a desktop I can’t. I searched for about 2 weeks and narrowed it down to a list of must-have’s : i7 Processor (I wasn’t going to settle for an i5 or AMD. I wanted a true Quad-core machine, not 2 dual-core fused together). 15.6” monitor SSD 128GB or Larger. – It’s almost 2011 and I don’t want an old standard HDD in this machine. 8GB of DDR3 Ram. – The more the better, right? 1GB Video Card (Prefer NVidia) – I might want to play games with this. HDMI Port – Almost a standard on new Machines. This would be used when I am on the road and want to stream Netflix to the HDTV in the Hotel room. Webcam Built-in – This would be to video chat with the wife and kids if I am on the road. 6-Cell Battery. – I’ve read that an i7 in a laptop really kills the battery. A 6-cell or 9-cell is even better. That is a pretty long list for a budget of around $1200. I searched around the internet and could not buy this machine prebuilt for under $1200. That was even with coupons and my company’s 10% Dell discount. The only way that I would get a machine like this was to buy a prebuilt and replace parts. I chose the  Lenovo Y560 on Newegg to start as my base. Below is a top-down picture of it.   Part 1: The Hardware The Specs for this machine: Color :  GrayOperating System : Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bitCPU Type : Intel Core i7-740QM(1.73GHz)Screen : 15.6" WXGAMemory Size : 4GB DDR3Hard Disk : 500GBOptical Drive : DVD±R/RWGraphics Card : ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5730Video Memory : 1GBCommunication : Gigabit LAN and WLANCard slot : 1 x Express Card/34Battery Life : Up to 3.5 hoursDimensions : 15.20" x 10.00" x 0.80" - 1.30"Weight : 5.95 lbs. This computer met most of the requirements above except that it didn’t come with an SSD or have 8GB of DDR3 Memory. So, I needed to start shopping except this time for an SSD. I asked around on twitter and other hardware forums and everyone pointed me to the Crucial C300 SSD. After checking prices of the drive, it was going to cost an extra $275 bucks and I was going from a spacious 500GB drive to 128GB. After watching some of the SSD videos on YouTube I started feeling better. Below is a pic of the Crucial C300 SSD. The second thing that I needed to upgrade was the RAM. It came with 4GB of DDR3 RAM, but it was slow. I decided to buy the Crucial 8GB (4GB x 2) Kit from Newegg. This RAM cost an extra $120 and had a CAS Latency of 7. In the end this machine delivered everything that I wanted and it cost around $1300. You are probably saying, well your budget was $1200. I have spare parts that I’m planning on selling on eBay or Anandtech.  =) If you are interested then shoot me an email and I will give you a great deal mbcrump[at]gmail[dot]com. 500GB Laptop 7200RPM HDD 4GB of DDR3 RAM (2GB x 2) faceVision HD 720p Camera – Unopened In the end my Windows Experience Rating of the SSD was 7.7 and the CPU 7.1. The max that you can get is a 7.9. Part 2: The Software I’m very lucky that I get a lot of software for free. When choosing a laptop, the OS really doesn’t matter because I would never keep the bloatware pre-installed or Windows 7 Home Premium on my main development machine. Matter of fact, as soon as I got the laptop, I immediately took out the old HDD without booting into it. After I got the SSD into the machine, I installed Windows 7 Ultimate 64-Bit. The BIOS was out of date, so I updated that to the latest version and started downloading drivers off of Lenovo’s site. I had to download the Wireless Networking Drivers to a USB-Key before I could get my machine on my wireless network. I also discovered that if the date on your computer is off then you cannot join the Windows 7 Homegroup until you fix it. I’m aware that most people like peeking into what programs other software developers use and I went ahead and listed my “essentials” of a fresh build. I am a big Silverlight guy, so naturally some of the software listed below is specific to Silverlight. You should also check out my master list of Tools and Utilities for the .NET Developer. See a killer app that I’m missing? Feel free to leave it in the comments below. My Software Essential List. CPU-Z Dropbox Everything Search Tool Expression Encoder Update Expression Studio 4 Ultimate Foxit Reader Google Chrome Infragistics NetAdvantage Ultimate Edition Keepass Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010 Microsoft Security Essentials 2  Mindscape Silverlight Elements Notepad 2 (with shell extension) Precode Code Snippet Manager RealVNC Reflector ReSharper v5.1.1753.4 Silverlight 4 Toolkit Silverlight Spy Snagit 10 SyncFusion Reporting Controls for Silverlight Telerik Silverlight RadControls TweetDeck Virtual Clone Drive Visual Studio 2010 Feature Pack 2 Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate VS KB2403277 Update to get Feature Pack 2 to work. Windows 7 Ultimate 64-Bit Windows Live Essentials 2011 Windows Live Writer Backup. Windows Phone Development Tools That is pretty much it, I have a new laptop and am happy with the purchase. If you have any questions then feel free to leave a comment below.  Subscribe to my feed

  Read the article

• 5 minutes WIF: Make your ASP.NET application use test-STS

  - by DigiMortal

  Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) provides us with simple and dummy STS application we can use to develop our system with no actual STS in place. In this posting I will show you how to add STS support to your existing application and how to generate dummy application that plays you real STS. Word of caution! Although it is relatively easy to build your own STS using WIF tools I don’t recommend you to build it. Identity providers must be highly secure and stable in every means and this makes development of your own STS very complex task. If it is possible then use some known STS solution. I suppose you have WIF and WIF SDK installed on your development machine. If you don’t then here are the links to download pages: Windows Identity Foundation Windows Identity Foundation SDK Adding STS support to your web application Suppose you have web application and you want to externalize authentication so your application is able to detect users, send unauthenticated users to login and work in other terms exactly like it worked before. WIF tools provide you with all you need. 1. Click on your web application project and select “Add STS reference…” from context menu to start adding or updating STS settings for web application. 2. Insert your application URI in application settings window. Note that web.config file is already selected for you. I inserted URI that corresponds to my web application address under IIS Express. This URI must exist (later) because otherwise you cannot use dummy STS service. 3. Select “Create a new STS project in the current solution” and click Next button. 4. Summary screen gives you information about how your site will use STS. You can run this wizard always when you have to modify STS parameters. Click Finish. If everything goes like expected then new web site will be added to your solution and it is named as YourWebAppName_STS. Dummy STS application Image on right shows you dummy STS web site. Yes, it is created as web site project not as web application. But it still works nice and you don’t have to make there any modifications. It just works but it is dummy one. Why dummy STS? Some points about dummy STS web site: Dummy STS is not template for your own custom STS identity provider. Dummy STS is very good and simple replacement of real STS so you have more flexible development environment and you don’t have to authenticate yourself in real service. Of course, you can modify dummy STS web site to mimic some behavior of your real STS. Pages in dummy STS Dummy STS has two pages – Login.aspx and  Default.aspx. Default.aspx is the page that handles requests to STS service. Login.aspx is the page where authentication takes place. Dummy STS authenticates users using FBA. You can insert whatever username you like and dummy STS still works. You can take a look at the code behind these pages to get some idea about how this dummy service is built up. But again – this service is there to simplify your life as developer. Authenticating users using dummy STS If you are using development web server that ships with Visual Studio 2010 I suggest you to switch over to IIS or IIS Express and make some more configuration changes as described in my previous posting Making WIF local STS to work with your ASP.NET application. When you are done with these little modifications you are ready to run your application and see how authentication works. If everything is okay then you are redirected to dummy STS login page when running your web application. Adam Carter is provided as username by default. If you click on submit button you are authenticated and redirected to application page. In my case it looks like this. Conclusion As you saw it is very easy to set up your own dummy STS web site for testing purposes. You coded nothing. You just ran wizard, inserted some data, modified configuration a little bit and you were done. Later, when your application goes to production you can run again this STS configuration utility and it generates correct settings for your real STS service automatically.

  Read the article

• Is this proper OO design for C++?

  - by user121917

  I recently took a software processes course and this is my first time attempting OO design on my own. I am trying to follow OO design principles and C++ conventions. I attempted and gave up on MVC for this application, but I am trying to "decouple" my classes such that they can be easily unit-tested and so that I can easily change the GUI library used and/or the target OS. At this time, I have finished designing classes but have not yet started implementing methods. The function of the software is to log all packets sent and received, and display them on the screen (like WireShark, but for one local process only). The software accomplishes this by hooking the send() and recv() functions in winsock32.dll, or some other pair of analogous functions depending on what the intended Target is. The hooks add packets to SendPacketList/RecvPacketList. The GuiLogic class starts a thread which checks for new packets. When new packets are found, it utilizes the PacketFilter class to determine the formatting for the new packet, and then sends it to MainWindow, a native win32 window (with intent to later port to Qt).1 Full size image of UML class diagram Here are my classes in skeleton/header form (this is my actual code): class PacketModel { protected: std::vector<byte> data; int id; public: PacketModel(); PacketModel(byte* data, unsigned int size); PacketModel(int id, byte* data, unsigned int size); int GetLen(); bool IsValid(); //len >= sizeof(opcode_t) opcode_t GetOpcode(); byte* GetData(); //returns &(data[0]) bool GetData(byte* outdata, int maxlen); void SetData(byte* pdata, int len); int GetId(); void SetId(int id); bool ParseData(char* instr); bool StringRepr(char* outstr); byte& operator[] (const int index); }; class SendPacket : public PacketModel { protected: byte* returnAddy; public: byte* GetReturnAddy(); void SetReturnAddy(byte* addy); }; class RecvPacket : public PacketModel { protected: byte* callAddy; public: byte* GetCallAddy(); void SetCallAddy(byte* addy); }; //problem: packets may be added to list at any time by any number of threads //solution: critical section associated with each packet list class Synch { public: void Enter(); void Leave(); }; template<class PacketType> class PacketList { private: static const int MAX_STORED_PACKETS = 1000; public: static const int DEFAULT_SHOWN_PACKETS = 100; private: vector<PacketType> list; Synch synch; //wrapper for critical section public: void AddPacket(PacketType* packet); PacketType* GetPacket(int id); int TotalPackets(); }; class SendPacketList : PacketList<SendPacket> { }; class RecvPacketList : PacketList<RecvPacket> { }; class Target //one socket { bool Send(SendPacket* packet); bool Inject(RecvPacket* packet); bool InitSendHook(SendPacketList* sendList); bool InitRecvHook(RecvPacketList* recvList); }; class FilterModel { private: opcode_t opcode; int colorID; bool bFilter; char name[41]; }; class FilterFile { private: FilterModel filter; public: void Save(); void Load(); FilterModel* GetFilter(opcode_t opcode); }; class PacketFilter { private: FilterFile filters; public: bool IsFiltered(opcode_t opcode); bool GetName(opcode_t opcode, char* namestr); //return false if name does not exist COLORREF GetColor(opcode_t opcode); //return default color if no custom color }; class GuiLogic { private: SendPacketList sendList; RecvPacketList recvList; PacketFilter packetFilter; void GetPacketRepr(PacketModel* packet); void ReadNew(); void AddToWindow(); public: void Refresh(); //called from thread void GetPacketInfo(int id); //called from MainWindow }; I'm looking for a general review of my OO design, use of UML, and use of C++ features. I especially just want to know if I'm doing anything considerably wrong. From what I've read, design review is on-topic for this site (and off-topic for the Code Review site). Any sort of feedback is greatly appreciated. Thanks for reading this.

  Read the article

• How to label a cuboid?

  - by usha

  Hi this is how my 3dcuboid looks, I have attached the complete code. I want to label this cuboid using different names across sides, how is this possible using opengl on android? public class MyGLRenderer implements Renderer { Context context; Cuboid rect; private float mCubeRotation; // private static float angleCube = 0; // Rotational angle in degree for cube (NEW) // private static float speedCube = -1.5f; // Rotational speed for cube (NEW) public MyGLRenderer(Context context) { rect = new Cuboid(); this.context = context; } public void onDrawFrame(GL10 gl) { // TODO Auto-generated method stub gl.glClear(GL10.GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT | GL10.GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT); gl.glLoadIdentity(); // Reset the model-view matrix gl.glTranslatef(0.2f, 0.0f, -8.0f); // Translate right and into the screen gl.glScalef(0.8f, 0.8f, 0.8f); // Scale down (NEW) gl.glRotatef(mCubeRotation, 1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f); // gl.glRotatef(angleCube, 1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f); // rotate about the axis (1,1,1) (NEW) rect.draw(gl); mCubeRotation -= 0.15f; //angleCube += speedCube; } public void onSurfaceChanged(GL10 gl, int width, int height) { // TODO Auto-generated method stub if (height == 0) height = 1; // To prevent divide by zero float aspect = (float)width / height; // Set the viewport (display area) to cover the entire window gl.glViewport(0, 0, width, height); // Setup perspective projection, with aspect ratio matches viewport gl.glMatrixMode(GL10.GL_PROJECTION); // Select projection matrix gl.glLoadIdentity(); // Reset projection matrix // Use perspective projection GLU.gluPerspective(gl, 45, aspect, 0.1f, 100.f); gl.glMatrixMode(GL10.GL_MODELVIEW); // Select model-view matrix gl.glLoadIdentity(); // Reset } public void onSurfaceCreated(GL10 gl, EGLConfig config) { // TODO Auto-generated method stub gl.glClearColor(0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f); // Set color's clear-value to black gl.glClearDepthf(1.0f); // Set depth's clear-value to farthest gl.glEnable(GL10.GL_DEPTH_TEST); // Enables depth-buffer for hidden surface removal gl.glDepthFunc(GL10.GL_LEQUAL); // The type of depth testing to do gl.glHint(GL10.GL_PERSPECTIVE_CORRECTION_HINT, GL10.GL_NICEST); // nice perspective view gl.glShadeModel(GL10.GL_SMOOTH); // Enable smooth shading of color gl.glDisable(GL10.GL_DITHER); // Disable dithering for better performance }} public class Cuboid{ private FloatBuffer mVertexBuffer; private FloatBuffer mColorBuffer; private ByteBuffer mIndexBuffer; private float vertices[] = { //width,height,depth -2.5f, -1.0f, -1.0f, 1.0f, -1.0f, -1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, -1.0f, -2.5f, 1.0f, -1.0f, -2.5f, -1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, -1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, -2.5f, 1.0f, 1.0f }; private float colors[] = { // R,G,B,A COLOR 0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, 0.5f, 0.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, 0.5f, 0.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f }; private byte indices[] = { // VERTEX 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7 REPRESENTATION FOR FACES 0, 4, 5, 0, 5, 1, 1, 5, 6, 1, 6, 2, 2, 6, 7, 2, 7, 3, 3, 7, 4, 3, 4, 0, 4, 7, 6, 4, 6, 5, 3, 0, 1, 3, 1, 2 }; public Cuboid() { ByteBuffer byteBuf = ByteBuffer.allocateDirect(vertices.length * 4); byteBuf.order(ByteOrder.nativeOrder()); mVertexBuffer = byteBuf.asFloatBuffer(); mVertexBuffer.put(vertices); mVertexBuffer.position(0); byteBuf = ByteBuffer.allocateDirect(colors.length * 4); byteBuf.order(ByteOrder.nativeOrder()); mColorBuffer = byteBuf.asFloatBuffer(); mColorBuffer.put(colors); mColorBuffer.position(0); mIndexBuffer = ByteBuffer.allocateDirect(indices.length); mIndexBuffer.put(indices); mIndexBuffer.position(0); } public void draw(GL10 gl) { gl.glFrontFace(GL10.GL_CW); gl.glVertexPointer(3, GL10.GL_FLOAT, 0, mVertexBuffer); gl.glColorPointer(4, GL10.GL_FLOAT, 0, mColorBuffer); gl.glEnableClientState(GL10.GL_VERTEX_ARRAY); gl.glEnableClientState(GL10.GL_COLOR_ARRAY); gl.glDrawElements(GL10.GL_TRIANGLES, 36, GL10.GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE, mIndexBuffer); gl.glDisableClientState(GL10.GL_VERTEX_ARRAY); gl.glDisableClientState(GL10.GL_COLOR_ARRAY); } } public class Draw3drect extends Activity { private GLSurfaceView glView; // Use GLSurfaceView // Call back when the activity is started, to initialize the view @Override protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) { super.onCreate(savedInstanceState); glView = new GLSurfaceView(this); // Allocate a GLSurfaceView glView.setRenderer(new MyGLRenderer(this)); // Use a custom renderer this.setContentView(glView); // This activity sets to GLSurfaceView } // Call back when the activity is going into the background @Override protected void onPause() { super.onPause(); glView.onPause(); } // Call back after onPause() @Override protected void onResume() { super.onResume(); glView.onResume(); } }

  Read the article

• Rip and Convert DVD’s to an ISO Image

  - by Mysticgeek

  If you own a lot of DVD’s, you might want to convert them to an ISO image for backup and easily playing them on your media center. Today we take a look at ripping your discs using DVDFab, then using ImgBurn to create an ISO image of the ripped DVD files. Rip DVD with DVDFab6 DVDFab will remove copy protection and rip the DVD files for free. Other components in the suite require you to purchase a license after the 30 day trial, but you’ll still be able to rip DVD’s after the trial. Install DVDFab by accepting the defaults (link below)…a system restart is required to complete the install process. The first time you run it, a welcome screen is displayed. If you don’t want to see it again check the box Do not show again, then Start DVDFab.  Pop the DVD in your drive and click Next. Now select your region and check Do not show again, then OK. It will then open the DVD and begin to scan it. Under DVD to DVD you can select either Full Disc or Main Movie depending on what you want to rip. If you want to burn the DVD to a disc after it’s created select the Full Disc option. Now click the Start button to begin the ripping process. After the ripping process has completed, you’ll get a message telling you it’s waiting for you to put in a blank DVD. Since we aren’t burning the disc, just cancel the message. Click Finish and close out of DVDFab or just minimize it if you’re going to keep using it to rip another DVD. By default the temporary directory is in My Documents \ DVDFab \ Temp…however you can change it in settings. If you go to the Temp directory you’ll see the DVD files listed there… Convert Files to ISO with ImgBurn Now that we have the files ripped from the DVD, we need to convert them to an ISO image using ImgBurn (link below). Open it up and from the main menu click on Create image file from files/folders. Click on the folder icon to browse to the location of the ripped DVD files. Browse to the DVDFab temp directory and the VIDEO_TS folder for the source and click Ok. Then choose a destination directory, give the ISO a name, and click Save. In this case we ripped the Unbreakable DVD, so named it that.   So now in ImgBurn you have the source being the ripped DVD files, and the destination for the ISO…then click the Build button. If you don’t create a volume label, ImgBurn is kind enough to create on for you. If everything looks correct, click Ok. Now wait while ImgBurn goes through the process of converting the ripped DVD files to an ISO image. The process has successfully completed. The ISO image of the DVD will be in the output directory you selected earlier. Now you can burn the ISO image to a blank DVD or store it on an external hard drive for safe keeping. When you’re done, you’ll probably want to go into the temp DVDFab folder and delete the VOB and other files in the Video_TS folder as they will take up a lot of space on your hard drive.   Conclusion Although this method requires two programs to make an ISO out of a DVD, it’s extremely quick. When burning DVD’s of various lengths, it took less than 30 minutes to get the final ISO. Now, you’ll have your DVD movies backed up in case something were to happen to the discs and are no longer playable. If you use Windows Media Center to watch your movies, check out our article on how to automatically mount and view ISO files in Windows 7 Media Center. With DVDFab, you get a 30 day fully functional trial for all of its features. You’ll still be able rip DVD’s even after the 30 day trial has ended. The more we’ve been using DVDFab, the more impressed we are with its capabilities, so after the 30 day trial you should consider purchasing a license. We will have a full review of the of it to share with you soon.  Download DVDFab Download ImgBurn Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips How To Rip DVDs with VLCCalculate with Qalculate on LinuxConvert a Row to a Column in Excel the Easy WayEnjoy Quick & Easy Unit Conversion with Convert for WindowsConvert Older Excel Documents to Excel 2007 Format TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Beware Hover Kitties Test Drive Mobile Phones Online With TryPhone Ben & Jerry’s Free Cone Day, 3/23/10 New Stinger from McAfee Helps Remove ‘FakeAlert’ Threats Google Apps Marketplace: Tools & Services For Google Apps Users Get News Quick and Precise With Newser

  Read the article

• Why do my 512x512 bitmaps look jaggy on Android OpenGL?

  - by Milo Mordaunt

  This is sort of driving me nuts, I've googled and googled and tried everything I can think of, but my sprites still look super blurry and super jaggy. Example: Here: https://docs.google.com/open?id=0Bx9Gbwnv9Hd2TmpiZkFycUNmRTA If you click through to the actual full size image you should see what I mean, it's like it's taking and average of every 5*5 pixels or something, the background looks really blurry and blocky, but the ball is the worst. The clouds look all right for some reason, probably because they're mostly transparent. I know the pngs aren't top notch themselves but hey, I'm no artist! I would imagine it's a problem with either: a. How the pngs are made example sprite (512x512): https://docs.google.com/open?id=0Bx9Gbwnv9Hd2a2RRQlJiQTFJUEE b. How my Matrices work This is the relevant parts of the renderer: public void onDrawFrame(GL10 unused) { if(world != null) { dt = System.currentTimeMillis() - endTime; world.update( (float) dt); // Redraw background color GLES20.glClear(GLES20.GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT); Matrix.setIdentityM(mvMatrix, 0); Matrix.translateM(mvMatrix, 0, 0f, 0f, 0f); world.draw(mvMatrix, mProjMatrix); endTime = System.currentTimeMillis(); } else { Log.d(TAG, "There is no world...."); } } public void onSurfaceChanged(GL10 unused, int width, int height) { GLES20.glViewport(0, 0, width, height); Matrix.orthoM(mProjMatrix, 0, 0, width /2, 0, height /2, -1.f, 1.f); } And this is what each Quad does when draw is called: public void draw(float[] mvMatrix, float[] pMatrix) { Matrix.setIdentityM(mMatrix, 0); Matrix.setIdentityM(mvMatrix, 0); Matrix.translateM(mMatrix, 0, xPos, yPos, 0.f); Matrix.multiplyMM(mvMatrix, 0, mvMatrix, 0, mMatrix, 0); Matrix.scaleM(mvMatrix, 0, scale, scale, 0f); Matrix.rotateM(mvMatrix, 0, angle, 0f, 0f, -1f); GLES20.glUseProgram(mProgram); posAttr = GLES20.glGetAttribLocation(mProgram, "vPosition"); texAttr = GLES20.glGetAttribLocation(mProgram, "aTexCo"); uSampler = GLES20.glGetUniformLocation(mProgram, "uSampler"); int alphaHandle = GLES20.glGetUniformLocation(mProgram, "alpha"); GLES20.glVertexAttribPointer(posAttr, COORDS_PER_VERTEX, GLES20.GL_FLOAT, false, 0, vertexBuffer); GLES20.glVertexAttribPointer(texAttr, 2, GLES20.GL_FLOAT, false, 0, texCoBuffer); GLES20.glEnableVertexAttribArray(posAttr); GLES20.glEnableVertexAttribArray(texAttr); GLES20.glActiveTexture(GLES20.GL_TEXTURE0); GLES20.glBindTexture(GLES20.GL_TEXTURE_2D, texture); GLES20.glUniform1i(uSampler, 0); GLES20.glUniform1f(alphaHandle, alpha); mMVMatrixHandle = GLES20.glGetUniformLocation(mProgram, "uMVMatrix"); mPMatrixHandle = GLES20.glGetUniformLocation(mProgram, "uPMatrix"); GLES20.glUniformMatrix4fv(mMVMatrixHandle, 1, false, mvMatrix, 0); GLES20.glUniformMatrix4fv(mPMatrixHandle, 1, false, pMatrix, 0); GLES20.glDrawElements(GLES20.GL_TRIANGLE_STRIP, 4, GLES20.GL_UNSIGNED_SHORT, indicesBuffer); GLES20.glDisableVertexAttribArray(posAttr); GLES20.glDisableVertexAttribArray(texAttr); GLES20.glBindTexture(GLES20.GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0); } c. How my texture loading/blending/shaders setup works Here is the renderer setup: public void onSurfaceCreated(GL10 unused, EGLConfig config) { // Set the background frame color GLES20.glClearColor(0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f); GLES20.glDisable(GLES20.GL_DEPTH_TEST); GLES20.glDepthMask(false); GLES20.glBlendFunc(GLES20.GL_ONE, GLES20.GL_ONE_MINUS_SRC_ALPHA); GLES20.glEnable(GLES20.GL_BLEND); GLES20.glEnable(GLES20.GL_DITHER); } Here is the vertex shader: attribute vec4 vPosition; attribute vec2 aTexCo; varying vec2 vTexCo; uniform mat4 uMVMatrix; uniform mat4 uPMatrix; void main() { gl_Position = uPMatrix * uMVMatrix * vPosition; vTexCo = aTexCo; } And here's the fragment shader: precision mediump float; uniform sampler2D uSampler; uniform vec4 vColor; varying vec2 vTexCo; varying float alpha; void main() { vec4 color = texture2D(uSampler, vec2(vTexCo)); gl_FragColor = color; if(gl_FragColor.a == 0.0) { "discard; } } This is how textures are loaded: private int loadTexture(int rescource) { int[] texture = new int[1]; BitmapFactory.Options opts = new BitmapFactory.Options(); opts.inScaled = false; Bitmap temp = BitmapFactory.decodeResource(context.getResources(), rescource, opts); GLES20.glGenTextures(1, texture, 0); GLES20.glActiveTexture(GLES20.GL_TEXTURE0); GLES20.glBindTexture(GLES20.GL_TEXTURE_2D, texture[0]); GLES20.glTexParameterf(GLES20.GL_TEXTURE_2D, GLES20.GL_TEXTURE_MAG_FILTER, GLES20.GL_LINEAR); GLES20.glTexParameterf(GLES20.GL_TEXTURE_2D, GLES20.GL_TEXTURE_MIN_FILTER, GLES20.GL_LINEAR); GLUtils.texImage2D(GLES20.GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0, temp, 0); GLES20.glGenerateMipmap(GLES20.GL_TEXTURE_2D); GLES20.glBindTexture(GLES20.GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0); temp.recycle(); return texture[0]; } I'm sure I'm doing about 20,000 things wrong, so I'm really sorry if the problem is blindingly obvious... The test device is a Galaxy Note, running a JellyBean custom ROM, if that matters at all. So the screen resolution is 1280x800, which means... The background is 1024x1024, so yeah it might be a little blurry, but shouldn't be made of lego. Thank you so much, any answer at all would be appreciated.

  Read the article

• Official and unofficial apps in the iOS, WP7, and Android marketplaces

  - by Bil Simser

  The last few months have seen people complaining about the lack of "official" apps in the Windows Phone marketplace. In fact a couple of months ago I wrote about this very thing here and if we really needed these official apps or could get by with third-party solutions. Recently a list of "Top 100 Mobile Apps" crossed my desk and it was curious. 40 iPhone apps, 40 Android apps, 10 WP7 apps, and 10 BlackBerry apps. Really? 10 for WP7? So I wondered if the media was just playing this up and maybe continuing to do what I think most vendors are doing which is treating Windows Phone as the red-headed step-child you keep in the basement while all along there's nothing wrong with them. I put together the list and went digging to see how many of the top 40 iOS and Android apps were also on the Windows Phone platform (sorry BlackBerry, you should just shut your doors right now). Here's the results. Note, these are all *free* apps. There might be other pay apps that have official representation across all mobile devices, I just chose to hunt these ones down because I'm cheap. In the top 40, I easily plucked out 20 that had official apps on all three platforms. These were: Amazon Mobile, ESPN Score Centre, Evernote, Facebook, Foursquare, Google Search, IMDB, Kindle, Shazam, Skype (yes, I know, in beta on WP7), SlackerRadio, The Weather Channel, TripIt, Twitter, Yelp, Flixster, Netflix, TuneIn Radio, Dictionary.com, Angry Birds, and Groupon. Hey, that's pretty good IMHO. 20 or so apps, all free, and all fully functional and supported (and in some cases, even better looking on the Windows Phone platform than the other platforms). A dozen or so more apps had official apps on some platforms but not all, so yes, there are gaps here. Here's a rundown of the hangers-on: Adobe Photoshop Express This looks great on the iOS platform and there's even an official version on droid. Hope Adobe brings this to WP7. There are other photo editing programs though if you go looking (maybe we can get Paint.NET to be ported to the phone?) BBC News A few apps offer news feeds but nothing official on the Windows Phone. The feeds are good but without video this app needs some WP7 love. Dropbox Again Windows Phone looses out here with no official app. There are a few third party ones that will help you along and offer most of the functionality that you need but no integration that an official app might bring. Epicurious Droid seems to be the trailer here as there are apps for it but nothing official (from what I can tell). Both iOS and WP7 have them. Flipboard It's sad with Flipboard as it's such a great newsreader. The only offiical app is for iOS but frankly the iPhone version looks horrible so without a tablet the experience here isn't that hot. Maybe with WP8. Currently there's nothing even remotely similar to this on the other platforms. Google+ Is anyone still using this? No official app for WP7 but some clones. Apparently there's no API so people are just screen scraping. Ugh. Mint.com This app has all kinds of buzz and a lot of votes on the application requests site. Official apps for iOS and droid. No WP7 love (yet). TED Quite a few TED apps on WP7 but nothing official. I think the third party ones suffice and some are pretty nice looking, taking advantage of the Metro interface and making for a good show. WebMD There's a third party app on WP7 here but nothing official. It seems to contain all the same information and functionality the official apps do so not sure if an official one is needed but its here for inclusion. The other apps in the top 40 were either very specific to the platform (for example all three of them have a "Find my Phone" app). There are others that are missing out on the WP7 platform like ooVoo, Words With Friends, and some of the Google apps (Google Voice for example). Since you can integrate your GMail account right into the Windows Phone (via linked inboxes) I'm not sure if there's a need for an official GMail app here. Looking at the numbers Windows Phone still gets the worst of the deal here with half a dozen highly popular "offical" apps that exist on the other mobile platforms and in some cases, nothing even remotely similar to the official app to compare. This doesn't include things like Instagram, PInterest, and others (don't get me started on those). Still, with over 20+ highly popular free apps all represented on all three mobile platforms I don't think it's a bad place to be in. The Windows Phone platform could get a little more love from the vendors missing here, or at least open up your APIs so the third party crowd can step in and take up the slack. P.S. these are just my observations and I might have got a few items wrong. Feel free to chime in with missing or incorrect information. I am after all human. Well, most of me is.

  Read the article

• libgdx rotation (animation, arrays) issues and help needed

  - by johnny-b

  well i am a noob at java and libgdx. i got the homing bullet working with the help of someone. now i am smashing my head as to how i can make it rotate so it faces the ball (which is the main character) when it goes around it or when it is coming towards it. the bullet is facing <--- and the code below is what i have done so far. also i used sprites for the bullet and also animation method. Also how do i make it an array/arraylist which is best so i can have multiple bullets at random or placed places. i tried many things nothing workd :( thank you for the help. // below is the bullet or enemy if you want to call it. public class Bullet extends Sprite { public static final float BULLET_HOMING = 6000; public static final float BULLET_SPEED = 300; private Vector2 velocity; private float lifetime; public Bullet(float x, float y) { velocity = new Vector2(0, 0); setPosition(x, y); } public void update(float delta) { float targetX = GameWorld.getBall().getX(); float targetY = GameWorld.getBall().getY(); float dx = targetX - getX(); float dy = targetY - getY(); float distToTarget = (float) Math.sqrt(dx * dx + dy * dy); dx /= distToTarget; dy /= distToTarget; dx *= BULLET_HOMING; dy *= BULLET_HOMING; velocity.x += dx * delta; velocity.y += dy * delta; float vMag = (float) Math.sqrt(velocity.x * velocity.x + velocity.y * velocity.y); velocity.x /= vMag; velocity.y /= vMag; velocity.x *= BULLET_SPEED; velocity.y *= BULLET_SPEED; Vector2 v = velocity.cpy().scl(delta); setPosition(getX() + v.x, getY() + v.y); setOriginCenter(); setRotation(velocity.angle()); lifetime += delta; setRegion(AssetLoader.bulletAnimation.getKeyFrame(lifetime)); } } // this is where i load the images. public class AssetLoader { public static Animation bulletAnimation; public static Sprite bullet1, bullet2; public static void load() { texture = new Texture(Gdx.files.internal("SpriteN1.png")); texture.setFilter(TextureFilter.Nearest, TextureFilter.Nearest); bullet1 = new Sprite(texture, 380, 350, 45, 20); bullet1.flip(false, true); bullet2 = new Sprite(texture, 425, 350, 45, 20); bullet2.flip(false, true); Sprite[] bullets = { bullet1, bullet2 }; bulletAnimation = new Animation(0.06f, aims); bulletAnimation.setPlayMode(Animation.PlayMode.LOOP); } public static void dispose() { // We must dispose of the texture when we are finished. texture.dispose(); } // this is for the rendering of the images etc public class GameRenderer { private Bullet bullet; private Ball ball; public GameRenderer(GameWorld world) { myWorld = world; cam = new OrthographicCamera(); cam.setToOrtho(true, 480, 320); batcher = new SpriteBatch(); // Attach batcher to camera batcher.setProjectionMatrix(cam.combined); shapeRenderer = new ShapeRenderer(); shapeRenderer.setProjectionMatrix(cam.combined); // Call helper methods to initialize instance variables initGameObjects(); initAssets(); } private void initGameObjects() { ball = GameWorld.getBall(); bullet = myWorld.getBullet(); scroller = myWorld.getScroller(); } private void initAssets() { ballAnimation = AssetLoader.ballAnimation; bulletAnimation = AssetLoader.bulletAnimation; } public void render(float runTime) { Gdx.gl.glClearColor(0, 0, 0, 1); Gdx.gl.glClear(GL30.GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT); batcher.begin(); // Disable transparency // This is good for performance when drawing images that do not require // transparency. batcher.disableBlending(); // The ball needs transparency, so we enable that again. batcher.enableBlending(); batcher.draw(AssetLoader.ballAnimation.getKeyFrame(runTime), ball.getX(), ball.getY(), ball.getWidth(), ball.getHeight()); batcher.draw(AssetLoader.bulletAnimation.getKeyFrame(runTime), bullet.getX(), bullet.getY()); // End SpriteBatch batcher.end(); } } // this is to load the image etc on the screen i guess public class GameWorld { public static Ball ball; private Bullet bullet; private ScrollHandler scroller; public GameWorld() { ball = new Ball(480, 273, 32, 32); bullet = new Bullet(10, 10); scroller = new ScrollHandler(0); } public void update(float delta) { ball.update(delta); bullet.update(delta); scroller.update(delta); } public static Ball getBall() { return ball; } public ScrollHandler getScroller() { return scroller; } public Bullet getBullet() { return bullet; } } so there is the whole thing. the images are loaded via the AssetLoader then to the GameRenderer and GameWorld via the Bullet class. i am guessing that is how it is. sorry newbie so still learning. thank you in advace for the help or any advice.

  Read the article

• The JavaOne 2012 Sunday Technical Keynote

  - by Janice J. Heiss

  At the JavaOne 2012 Sunday Technical Keynote, held at the Masonic Auditorium, Mark Reinhold, Chief Architect, Java Platform Group, stated that they were going to do things a bit differently--"rather than 20 minutes of SE, and 20 minutes of FX, and 20 minutes of EE, we're going to mix it up a little," he said. "For much of it, we're going to be showing a single application, to show off some of the great work that's been done in the last year, and how Java can scale well--from the cloud all the way down to some very small embedded devices, and how JavaFX scales right along with it."Richard Bair and Jasper Potts from the JavaFX team demonstrated a JavaOne schedule builder application with impressive navigation, animation, pop-overs, and transitions. They noted that the application runs seamlessly on either Windows or Macs, running Java 7. They then ran the same application on an Ubuntu Linux machine--"it just works," said Blair.The JavaFX duo next put the recently released JavaFX Scene Builder through its paces -- dragging and dropping various image assets to build the application's UI, then fine tuning a CSS file for the finished look and feel. Among many other new features, in the past six months, JavaFX has released support for H.264 and HTTP live streaming, "so you can get all the real media playing inside your JavaFX application," said Bair. And in their developer preview builds of JavaFX 8, they've now split the rendering thread from the UI thread, to better take advantage of multi-core architectures.Next, Brian Goetz, Java Language Architect, explored language and library features planned for Java SE 8, including Lambda expressions and better parallel libraries. These feature changes both simplify code and free-up libraries to more effectively use parallelism. "It's currently still a lot of work to convert an application from serial to parallel," noted Goetz.Reinhold had previously boasted of Java scaling down to "small embedded devices," so Blair and Potts next ran their schedule builder application on a small embedded PandaBoard system with an OMAP4 chip set. Connected to a touch screen, the embedded board ran the same JavaFX application previously seen on the desktop systems, but now running on Java SE Embedded. (The systems can be seen and tried at four of the nearby JavaOne hotels.) Bob Vandette, Java Embedded Architect, then displayed a $25 Rasberry Pi ARM-based system running Java SE Embedded, noting the even greater need for the platform independence of Java in such highly varied embedded processor spaces. Reinhold and Vandetta discussed Project Jigsaw, the planned modularization of the Java SE platform, and its deferral from the Java 8 release to Java 9. Reinhold demonstrated the promise of Jigsaw by running a modularized demo version of the earlier schedule builder application on the resource constrained Rasberry Pi system--although the demo gods were not smiling down, and the application ultimately crashed.Reinhold urged developers to become involved in the Java 8 development process--getting the weekly builds, trying out their current code, and trying out the new features:http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jdk8http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jdk8/spechttp://jdk8.java.netFrom there, Arun Gupta explored Java EE. The primary themes of Java EE 7, Gupta stated, will be greater productivity, and HTML 5 functionality (WebSocket, JSON, and HTML 5 forms). Part of the planned productivity increase of the release will come from a reduction in writing boilerplate code--through the widespread use of dependency injection in the platform, along with default data sources and default connection factories. Gupta noted the inclusion of JAX-RS in the web profile, the changes and improvements found in JMS 2.0, as well as enhancements to Java EE 7 in terms of JPA 2.1 and EJB 3.2. GlassFish 4 is the reference implementation of Java EE 7, and currently includes WebSocket, JSON, JAX-RS 2.0, JMS 2.0, and more. The final release is targeted for Q2, 2013. Looking forward to Java EE 8, Gupta explored how the platform will provide multi-tenancy for applications, modularity based on Jigsaw, and cloud architecture. Meanwhile, Project Avatar is the group's incubator project for designing an end-to-end framework for building HTML 5 applications. Santiago Pericas-Geertsen joined Gupta to demonstrate their "Angry Bids" auction/live-bid/chat application using many of the enhancements of Java EE 7, along with an Avatar HTML 5 infrastructure, and running on the GlassFish reference implementation.Finally, Gupta covered Project Easel, an advanced tooling capability in NetBeans for HTML5. John Ceccarelli, NetBeans Engineering Director, joined Gupta to demonstrate creating an HTML 5 project from within NetBeans--formatting the project for both desktop and smartphone implementations. Ceccarelli noted that NetBeans 7.3 beta will be released later this week, and will include support for creating such HTML 5 project types. Gupta directed conference attendees to: http://glassfish.org/javaone2012 for everything about Java EE and GlassFish at JavaOne 2012.

  Read the article

• A little primer on using TFS with a small team

  - by johndoucette

  The scenario; A small team of 3 developers mostly in maintenance mode with traditional ASP.net, classic ASP, .Net integration services and utilities with the company’s third party packages, and a bunch of java-based Coldfusion web applications all under Visual Source Safe (VSS). They are about to embark on a huge SharePoint 2010 new construction project and wanted to use subversion instead VSS. TFS was a foreign word and smelled of “high cost” and of an “over complicated process”. Since they had no preconditions about the old TFS versions (‘05 & ‘08), it was fun explaining how simple it was to install a TFS server and get the ball rolling, with or without all the heavy stuff one sometimes associates with such a huge and powerful application management lifecycle product. So, how does a small team begin using TFS? 1. Start by using source control and migrate current VSS source trees into TFS. You can take the latest version or migrate the entire version history. It’s up to you on whether you want a clean start or need quick access to all the version notes and history of the bits. 2. Since most shops are mainly in maintenance mode with existing applications, begin using bug workitems for everything. When you receive an issue/bug from your current tracking system, manually enter the workitem in TFS right through Visual Studio. You can automate the integration to the current tracking system later or replace it entirely. Believe me, this thing is powerful and can handle even the largest of help desks. 3. With new construction, begin work with requirements and task workitems and follow the traditional sprint-based development lifecycle. Obviously, some minor training will be needed, but don’t fear, this is very intuitive and MSDN has a ton of lesson based labs and videos. 4. For the java developers, use the new Team Explorer Everywhere 2010 plugin (recently known as Teamprise). There is a seamless interface in Eclipse, but also a good command-line utility for other environments such as Dreamweaver. 5. Wait to fully integrate the whole workitem/project management/testing process until your team is familiar with the integrated workitems for bugs and code. After a while, you will see the team wanting more transparency into the work they are all doing and naturally, everyone will want workitems to help them organize the chaos! 6. Management will be limited in the value of the reports until you have a fully blown implementation of project planning, construction, build, deployment and testing. However, there are some basic “bug rate” reports and current backlog listings that can provide good information. Some notable explanations of TFS; Work Item Tracking and Project Management - A workitem represents the unit of work within the system which enables tracking of all activities produced by a user, whether it is a developer, business user, project manager or tester. The properties of a workitem such as linked changesets (checked-in code), who updated the data and when, the states and reasons for change, are all transitioned to a data warehouse within TFS for reporting purposes. A workitem can be defines as a "bug", "requirement", test case", or a "change request". They drive the work effort by the individual assigned to it and also provide a key role in defining what needs to be done. Workitems are the things the team needs to do to accomplish a goal. Test Case Management - Starting with a workitem known as a "test case", a tester (or developer) can now author and manage test cases within a formal test plan subsystem. Although TFS supports the test case workitem type, there is a new product known as the VS Test Professional 2010 which allows a tester to facilitate manual tests including fast forwarding steps in the process to arrive at the assertion point quickly. This repeatable process provides quick regression tests and can be conducted by the business user to ensure completeness during UAT. In addition, developers no longer can provide a response to a bug with the line "cannot reproduce". With every test run, attachments including the recorded session, captured environment configurations and settings, screen shots, intellitrace (debugging history), and in some cases if the lab manager is being used, a snapshot of the tested environment is available. Version Control - A modern system allowing shared check-in/check-out, excellent merge conflict resolution, Shelvesets (personal check-ins), branching/merging visualization, public workspaces, gated check-ins, security hierarchy capabilities, and changeset/workitem tracking. Knowing what was done with the code by any developer has become much easier to picture and resolve issues. Team Build - Automate the compilation process whether you need it to be whenever a developer checks-in code, periodically such as nightly builds for testers in the morning, or manual builds to be deployed into production. Each build can run through pre-determined tests, perform code analysis to see if the developer conforms to the team standards, and reject the build if either fails. Project Portal & Reporting - Provide management with a dashboard with insight into the project(s). "Where are we" in each step of the way including past iterations and the current burndown rate. Enabling this feature is easy as it seamlessly interfaces with existing SharePoint implementations.

  Read the article

• Cowboy Agile?

  - by Robert May

  In a previous post, I outlined the rules of Scrum.  This post details one of those rules. I’ve often heard similar phrases around Scrum that clue me in to someone who doesn’t understand Scrum.  The phrases go something like this: “We don’t do Agile because the idea of letting people just do whatever they want is wrong.  We believe in a more structured approach.” (i.e. Work is Prison, and I’m the Warden!) “I love Agile.  Agile lets us do whatever we want!” (Cowboy Agile?) “We’re Agile, but we use a process that I’ve created.” (Cowboy Agile?) All of those phrases have one thing in common:  The assumption that Agile, and I mean Scrum, lets you do whatever you want.  This is simply not true. Executing Scrum properly requires more dedication, rigor, and diligence than happens in most traditional development methods. Scrum and Waterfall Compared Since Scrum and Waterfall are two of the most commonly used methodologies, a little bit of contrasting and comparing is in order. Waterfall Scrum A project manager defines all tasks and then manages the tasks that team members are working on. The team members define the tasks and estimates of the stories for the current iteration.  Any team member may work on any task in the iteration. Usually only a few milestones that need to be met, the milestones are measured in months, and these milestones are expected to be missed.  Little work is ever done to improve estimates and poor estimators can hide behind high estimates. Stories must be delivered every iteration, milestones are measured in hours, and the team is expected to figure out why their estimates were wrong, even when they were under.  Repeated misses can get the entire team fired. Partially completed work is normal. Partially completed work doesn’t count. Nobody knows the task you’re working on. Everyone knows what you’re working on, whether or not you’re making progress and how much longer you think its going to take, in hours. Little requirement to show working code.  Prototypes are ok. Working code must be shown each iteration.  No smoke and mirrors allowed.  Testing is done in lengthy cycles at the end of development.  Developers aren’t held accountable. Testing is part of the team.  If the testers don’t accept the story as complete, the team can’t count it.  Complete means that the story’s functionality works as designed.  The team can’t have any open defects on the story. Velocity is rarely truly measured and difficult to evaluate. Velocity is integral to the process and can be seen at a glance and everyone in the company knows what it is. A business analyst writes requirements.  Designers mock up screens.  Developers hide behind “I did it just like the spec doc told me to and made the screen exactly like the picture” Developers are expected to collaborate in real time.  If a design is bad or lacks needed details, the developers are required to get it right in the iteration, because all software must be functional.  Designers and Business Analysts are part of the team and must do their work in iterations slightly ahead of the developers. Upper Management is often surprised.  “You told me things were going well two months ago!” Management receives updates at the end of every iteration showing them exactly what the team did and how that compares to what' is remaining in the backlog.  Managers know every iteration what their money is buying. Status meetings are rare or don’t occur.  Email is a primary form of communication. Teams coordinate every single day with each other and use other high bandwidth communication channels to make sure they’re making progress.  Email is used only as a last resort.  Instead, team members stand up, walk to each other, and talk, face to face.  If that’s not possible, they pick up the phone. IF someone asks what happened, its at the end of a lengthy development cycle measured in months, and nobody really knows why it happened. Someone asks what happened every iteration.  The team talks about what happened, and then adapts to make sure that what happened either never happens again or happens every time.   That’s probably enough for now.  As you can see, a lot is required of Scrum teams! One of the key differences in Scrum is that the burden for many activities is shifted to a group of people who share responsibility, instead of a single person having responsibility.  This is a very good thing, since small groups usually come up with better and more insightful work than single individuals.  This shift also results in better velocity.  Team members can take vacations and the rest of the team simply picks up the slack.  With Waterfall, if a key team member takes a vacation, delays can ensue. Scrum requires much more out of every team member and as a result, Scrum teams outperform non-Scrum teams working 60 hour weeks. Recommended Reading Everyone considering Scrum should read Mike Cohn’s excellent book, User Stories Applied. Technorati Tags: Agile,Scrum,Waterfall

  Read the article

• Limiting Audit Exposure and Managing Risk – Q&A and Follow-Up Conversation

  - by Tanu Sood

  Thanks to all who attended the live ISACA webcast on Limiting Audit Exposure and Managing Risk with Metrics-Driven Identity Analytics. We were really fortunate to have Don Sparks from ISACA moderate the webcast featuring Stuart Lincoln, Vice President, IT P&L Client Services, BNP Paribas, North America and Neil Gandhi, Principal Product Manager, Oracle Identity Analytics. Stuart’s insights given the team’s role in providing IT for P&L Client Services and his tremendous experience in identity management and establishing sustainable compliance programs were true value-add at yesterday’s webcast. And if you are a healthcare organization looking to solve your compliance and security challenges, we recommend you join us for a live webcast on Tuesday, November 29 at 10 am PT. The webcast will feature experts from Kaiser Permanente, PricewaterhouseCoopers and Oracle and the focus of the discussion will be around the compliance challenges a healthcare organization faces and best practices for tackling those. Here are the details: Healthcare IT News Webcast: Managing Risk and Enforcing Compliance in Healthcare with Identity Analytics Tuesday, November 29, 201110:00 a.m. PT / 1:00 p.m. ET Register Today The ISACA webcast replay is now available on-demand and the slides are also available for download. Since we didn’t have time to address all the questions we received during the live Q&A portion of the webcast, we have captured responses to the remaining questions here. Please continue to provide us your feedback and insights from your experience in deploying identity compliance solutions. Q. Can you please clarify the mechanism utilized to populate the Identity Warehouse from each individual application's access management function / files? A. Oracle Identity Analytics (OIA) supports direct imports from applications. Data collection is based on Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) that eliminates the need to write connectors to different applications. Oracle Identity Analytics’ import engine supports complex entitlement feeds saved as either text files or XML. The imports can be scheduled on a periodic basis or triggered as needed. If the applications are synchronized with a user provisioning solution like Oracle Identity Manager, Oracle Identity Analytics has a seamless integration to pull in data from Oracle Identity Manager. Q.  Can you provide a short summary of the new features in your latest release of Oracle Identity Analytics? A. Oracle recently announced availability of enhanced Oracle Identity Analytics. This release focused on easing the certification process by offering risk analytics driven certification, advanced certification screens, business centric views and significant improvement in performance including 3X faster data imports, 3X faster certification campaign generation and advanced auto-certification features, that  will allow organizations to improve user productivity by up to 80%. Closed-loop risk feedback and IT policy monitoring with Oracle Identity Manager, a leading user provisioning solution, allows for more accurate certification reviews. And, OIA's improved performance enables customers to scale compliance initiatives supporting millions of user entitlements across thousands of applications, whether on premise or in the cloud, without compromising speed or integrity. Q. Will ISACA grant a CPE credit for attending this ISACA-sponsored webinar today? A. From ISACA: Hello and thank you for your interest in the 2011 ISACA Webinar Program!  Unfortunately, there are no CPEs offered for this program, archived or live.  We will be looking into the feasibility of offering them in the future.  Q. Would you be able to use this to help manage licenses for software? That is to say - could it track software that is not used by a user, thus eliminating the software license? A. OIA’s integration with Oracle Identity Manager, a leading user provisioning solution, allows organizations to detect ghost accounts or unused accounts via account reconciliation. Based on company’s policies, this could trigger an automated workflow for account deletion or asking for further investigation. Closed-loop feedback between the two solutions would then allow visibility into the complete audit trail of when the account was detected, the action taken, by whom, when and the current status. Q. We have quarterly attestations and .xls mechanisms are not working. Once the identity data is correlated in Identity Analytics, do you then automate access certification? A. OIA’s identity warehouse analyzes and correlates identity data across various resources that allows OIA to determine a user’s risk profile, who the access review request should go to, along with all the relevant access details of the user. The access certification manager gets notification on what to review, when and the relevant data is presented in a business friendly screen. Based on the result of the access certification process, actions are triggered and results recorded and archived. Access review managers have visual risk indicators that also allow them to prioritize access certification tasks and efforts. Q. How does Oracle Identity Analytics work with Cloud Security? A. For enterprises looking to build their own cloud(s), Oracle offers a set of security services that cloud developers can leverage including Oracle Identity Analytics.  For enterprises looking to manage their compliance requirements but without hosting those in-house and instead having a hosting provider offer managed Identity Management services to the organizations, Oracle Identity Analytics can be leveraged much the same way as you’d in an on-premise (within the enterprise) environment. In fact, organizations today are leveraging Oracle Identity Analytics to manage identity compliance in both these ways. Q. Would you recommend this as a cost effective solution for a smaller organization with @ 2,500 users? A. The key return-on-investment (ROI) on Oracle Identity Analytics is derived from automating compliance processes thereby eliminating administrative overhead, minimizing errors, maintaining cost- and time-effective sustainable compliance processes and minimizing audit exposures and penalties.  Of course, there are other tangible benefits that are derived from an Oracle Identity Analytics implementation as outlined in the webcast. For a quantitative analysis of your requirements and potential ROI calculation, we recommend you refer to the Forrester Study on Total Economic Impact of Oracle Identity Analytics. For an in-person discussion, please email Richard Caldwell.

  Read the article

• How do I do JavaScript Array Animation

  - by Henry

  I'm making a game but don't know how to do Array Animation with the png Array and game Surface that I made below. I'm trying to make it so that when the Right arrow key is pressed, the character animates as if it is walking to the right and when the Left arrow key is pressed it animates as if it is walking to the left (kind of like Mario). I put everything on a surface instead of the canvas. Everything is explained in the code below. I couldn't find help on this anywhere. I hope what I got below makes sense. I'm basically a beginner with JavaScript. I'll be back if more is needed: <!doctype html5> <html> <head></head> <script src="graphics.js"></script> <script src="object.js"></script> <body onkeydown ="keyDown(event)" onkeyup ="keyUp(event)" ></body> <script> //"Surface" is where I want to display my animation. It's like the HTML // canvas but it's not that. It's just the surface to where everything in the //game and the game itself will be displayed. var Surface = new Graphics(600, 400, "skyblue"); //here's the array that I want to use for animation var player = new Array("StandsRight.png", "WalksRight.png", "StandsLeft.png","WalksLeft.png" ); //Here is the X coordinate, Y coordinate, the beginning png for the animation, //and the object's name "player." I also turned the array into an object (but //I don't know if I was supposed to do that or not). var player = new Object(50, 100, 40, 115, "StandsRight.png","player"); //When doing animation I know that it requires a "loop", but I don't // know how to connect it so that it works with the arrays so that //it could animate. var loop = 0; //this actually puts "player" on screen. It makes player visible and //it is where I would like the animation to occur. Surface.drawObject(player); //this would be the key that makes "player" animation in the righward direction function keyDown(e) { if (e.keyCode == 39); } //this would be the key that makes "player" animation in the leftward direction function keyUp(e){ if (e.keyCode == 39); } //this is the Mainloop where the game will function MainLoop(); //the mainloop functionized function MainLoop(){ //this is how fast or slow I could want the entire game to go setTimeout(MainLoop, 10); } </script> </html> From here, are the "graphic.js" and the "object.js" files below. In this section is the graphics.js file. This graphics.js part below is linked to the: script src="graphics.js" html script section that I wrote above. Basically, below is a seperate file that I used for Graphics, and to run the code above, make this graphics.js code that I post below here, a separate filed called: graphics.js function Graphics(w,h,c) { document.body.innerHTML += "<table style='position:absolute;font- size:0;top:0;left:0;border-spacing:0;border- width:0;width:"+w+";height:"+h+";background-color:"+c+";' border=1><tr><td> </table>\n"; this.drawRectangle = function(x,y,w,h,c,n) { document.body.innerHTML += "<div style='position:absolute;font-size:0;left:" + x + ";top:" + y + ";width:" + w + ";height:" + h + ";background-color:" + c + ";' id='" + n + "'></div>\n"; } this.drawTexture = function(x,y,w,h,t,n) { document.body.innerHTML += "<img style='position:absolute;font-size:0;left:" + x + ";top:" + y + ";width:" + w + ";height:" + h + ";' id='" + n + "' src='" + t + "'> </img>\n"; } this.drawObject = function(o) { document.body.innerHTML += "<img style='position:absolute;font-size:0;left:" + o.X + ";top:" + o.Y + ";width:" + o.Width + ";height:" + o.Height + ";' id='" + o.Name + "' src='" + o.Sprite + "'></img>\n"; } this.moveGraphic = function(x,y,n) { document.getElementById(n).style.left = x; document.getElementById(n).style.top = y; } this.removeGraphic = function(n){ document.getElementById(n).parentNode.removeChild(document.getElementById(n)); } } Finally, is the object.js file linked to the script src="object.js"" in the html game file above the graphics.js part I just wrote. Basically, this is a separate file too, so thus, in order to run or test the html game code in the very first section I wrote, a person has to also make this code below a separate file called: object.js I hope this helps: function Object(x,y,w,h,t,n) { this.X = x; this.Y = y; this.Velocity_X = 0; this.Velocity_Y = 0; this.Previous_X = 0; this.Previous_Y = 0; this.Width = w; this.Height = h; this.Sprite = t; this.Name = n; this.Exists = true; } In all, this game is made based on a tutorial on youtube at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2kUzgFM4lY&feature=relmfu I'm just trying to learn how to add animations with it now. I hope the above helps. If not, let me know. Thanks

  Read the article

• Best way to store a large amount of game objects and update the ones onscreen

  - by user3002473

  Good afternoon guys! I'm a young beginner game developer working on my first large scale game project and I've run into a situation where I'm not quite sure what the best solution may be (if there is a lone solution). The question may be vague (if anyone can think of a better title after having read the question, please edit it) or broad but I'm not quite sure what to do and I thought it would help just to discuss the problem with people more educated in the field. Before we get started, here are some of the questions I've looked at for help in the past: Best way to keep track of game objects Elegant way to simulate large amounts of entities within a game world What is the most efficient container to store dynamic game objects in? I've also read articles about different data structures commonly used in games to store game objects such as this one about slot maps, but none of them are really what I'm looking for. Also, if it helps at all I'm using Python 3 to design the game. It has to be Python 3, if I could I would use C++ or Unityscript or something else, but I'm restricted to having to use Python 3. My game will be a form of side scroller shooter game. In said game the player will traverse large rooms with large amounts of enemies and other game objects to update (think some of the larger areas in Cave Story or Iji). The player obviously can't see the entire room all at once, so there is a viewport that follows the player around and renders only a selection of the room and the game objects that it contains. This is not a foreign concept. The part that's getting me confused has to do with how certain game objects are updated. Some of them are to be updated constantly, regardless of whether or not they can be seen. Other objects however are only to be updated when they are onscreen (for example, an enemy would only be updated to react to the player when it is onscreen or when it is in a certain range of the screen). Another problem is that game objects have to be easily referable by other game objects; something that happens in the player's update() method may affect another object in the world. Collision detection in games is always a serious problem. I need a way of containing the game objects such that it minimizes the number of cases when testing for collisions against one another. The final problem is that of creating and destroying game objects. I think this problem is pretty self explanatory. To store the game objects then I've considered a number of different methods. The original method I had was to simply store all the objects in a hash table by an id. This method was simple, and decently fast as it allows all the objects to be looked up in O(1) complexity, and also allows them to be deleted fairly easily. Hash collisions would not be a major problem; I wasn't originally planning on using computer generated ids to store the game objects I was going to rely on them all using ids given to them by the game designer (such names would be strings like 'Player' or 'EnemyWeapon4'), and even if I did use computer generated ids, if I used a decent hashing algorithm then the chances of collisions would be around 1 in 4 billion. The problem with using a hash table however is that it is inefficient in checking to see what objects are in range of the viewport. Considering the fact that certain game objects move (as well as the viewport itself), the only solution I could think of in order to only update objects that are in the viewport would be to iterate through every object in the hash table and check if it is in the viewport or not, updating only the ones that are in the valid area. This would be incredibly slow in scenarios where the amount of game objects exceeds 500, or even 200. The second solution was to store everything in a 2-d list. The world is partitioned up into cells (a tilemap essentially), where each cell or tile is the same size and is square. Each cell would contain a list of the game objects that are currently occupying it (each game object would be inserted into a cell depending on the center of the object's collision mask). A 2-d list would allow me to take the top-left and bottom-right corners of the viewport and easily grab a rectangular area of the grid containing only the cells containing entities that are in valid range to be updated. This method also solves the problem of collision detection; when I take an entity I can find the cell that it is currently in, then check only against entities in it's cell and the 8 cells around it. One problem with this system however is that it prohibits easy lookup of game objects. One solution I had would be to simultaneously keep a hash table that would contain all the positions of the objects in the 2-d list indexed by the id of said object. The major problem with a 2-d list is that it would need to be rebuilt every single game frame (along with the hash table of object positions), which may be a serious detriment to game speed. Both systems have ups and downs and seem to solve some of each other's problems, however using them both together doesn't seem like the best solution either. If anyone has any thoughts, ideas, suggestions, comments, opinions or solutions on new data structures or better implementations of the existing data structures I have in mind, please post, any and all criticism and help is welcome. Thanks in advance! EDIT: Please don't close the question because it has a bad title, I'm just bad with names!

  Read the article

• Manage Your Amazon S3 Account with CloudBerry Explorer

  - by Mysticgeek

  If you have an Amazon S3 account you’re using to backup your data, you might want an easy way to manage it. CloudBerry Explorer is a free app that runs on your desktop an provides an easy way to manage your S3 account. Installation and Setup Just download and install the application with the defaults. When the application launches you’ll be prompted to enter in your username and email to get a registration key. Or you can continue on by clicking Register later. Now you will want to set up your Amazon S3 account. Click on File \ Amazon S3 Accounts. Double-click on the New Account icon.   Next enter in your Amazon account Access and Secret keys, select SSL if you want, then click the Test Connection button. Provided everything was entered correctly, you’ll see the Connection Success screen, just close out of it. Browse and Manage files Once you have your account setup through the Explorer, you can start viewing and managing your files on S3. The left pane shows your S3 buckets and stored files, while the right side shows your local computer. This allows you to manage your files in your Amazon S3 buckets directly from your desktop! It’s very easy to use, and you can drag and drop files from your computer to the S3 account or vice versa. There is also the ability to transfer files between Amazon S3 accounts from within the explorer. Go into Tools and Content Types and you can control the file types by adding, removing, or editing them. If you end up messing something up along the lines, you can always select Reset to defaults and everything will be back to normal. There is a multiple tabbed view so you can easily keep track of your different accounts and local machine. It allows the ability to create new storage buckets directly in the Explorer. Or you can delete buckets as well… Different actions can be accessed from the toolbars or by right-clicking and selecting from the context menu. Here we see a cool option that lets you move your data inside Amazon S3. It is faster and doesn’t cost money by moving the files to your computer first, then to another account. However, if you want data moved to your local machine first, you have that option as well.   Not all features are available in the free version, and if it’s not, you’ll be prompted to purchase a license for the Pro version. We will have a comprehensive review of the Pro version in the near future.    If you ever need help with CloudBerry Explorer, go to Tools \ Diagnostics. It will run a quick diagnostics check and you can send the information to the CloudBerry team for assistance. Delete Files from Amazon S3 To delete a file from you Amazon S3 account, simply highlight the files or folder you want to get rid of then click Delete on the toolbar. You can also right-click the file and select Delete from the Context Menu. Click Yes to the confirmation dialog box… Then you can watch the progress as your files are deleted in the bottom section of the explorer. Conclusion CloudBerry Explorer free version has several neat features that will allow you easy and basic control over you Amazon S3 account. The free version may be enough for basic users, but power users will want to upgrade to the pro version, as it includes a lot more features. Using the free version allows you to get a feel for what CloudBerry Explorer has to offer, and is a good starting point. Keep in mind that Amazon S3 is introducing Reduced Redundancy Storage which will lower the price of data stored. The price drops from $0.15 per GB to only $0.10 per GB. If you’re a Windows Home Server user, check out our review of CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for WHS. Download CloudBerry Explorer Free for Amazon S3 Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home ServerReopen Closed Tabs in Internet ExplorerPreview and Purchase Ebooks with Kindle for PCTroubleshoot and Manage Addons in Internet Explorer 8Beginner Geek: Delete User Accounts in Windows 7 TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 VMware Workstation 7 Google TV The iPod Revolution Ultimate Boot CD can help when disaster strikes Windows Firewall with Advanced Security – How To Guides Sculptris 1.0, 3D Drawing app AceStock, a Tiny Desktop Quote Monitor

  Read the article

• C#/.NET Little Wonders &ndash; Cross Calling Constructors

  - by James Michael Hare

  Just a small post today, it’s the final iteration before our release and things are crazy here!  This is another little tidbit that I love using, and it should be fairly common knowledge, yet I’ve noticed many times that less experienced developers tend to have redundant constructor code when they overload their constructors. The Problem – repetitive code is less maintainable Let’s say you were designing a messaging system, and so you want to create a class to represent the properties for a Receiver, so perhaps you design a ReceiverProperties class to represent this collection of properties. Perhaps, you decide to make ReceiverProperties immutable, and so you have several constructors that you can use for alternative construction: 1: // Constructs a set of receiver properties. 2: public ReceiverProperties(ReceiverType receiverType, string source, bool isDurable, bool isBuffered) 3: { 4: ReceiverType = receiverType; 5: Source = source; 6: IsDurable = isDurable; 7: IsBuffered = isBuffered; 8: } 9: 10: // Constructs a set of receiver properties with buffering on by default. 11: public ReceiverProperties(ReceiverType receiverType, string source, bool isDurable) 12: { 13: ReceiverType = receiverType; 14: Source = source; 15: IsDurable = isDurable; 16: IsBuffered = true; 17: } 18:  19: // Constructs a set of receiver properties with buffering on and durability off. 20: public ReceiverProperties(ReceiverType receiverType, string source) 21: { 22: ReceiverType = receiverType; 23: Source = source; 24: IsDurable = false; 25: IsBuffered = true; 26: } Note: keep in mind this is just a simple example for illustration, and in same cases default parameters can also help clean this up, but they have issues of their own. While strictly speaking, there is nothing wrong with this code, logically, it suffers from maintainability flaws.  Consider what happens if you add a new property to the class?  You have to remember to guarantee that it is set appropriately in every constructor call. This can cause subtle bugs and becomes even uglier when the constructors do more complex logic, error handling, or there are numerous potential overloads (especially if you can’t easily see them all on one screen’s height). The Solution – cross-calling constructors I’d wager nearly everyone knows how to call your base class’s constructor, but you can also cross-call to one of the constructors in the same class by using the this keyword in the same way you use base to call a base constructor. 1: // Constructs a set of receiver properties. 2: public ReceiverProperties(ReceiverType receiverType, string source, bool isDurable, bool isBuffered) 3: { 4: ReceiverType = receiverType; 5: Source = source; 6: IsDurable = isDurable; 7: IsBuffered = isBuffered; 8: } 9: 10: // Constructs a set of receiver properties with buffering on by default. 11: public ReceiverProperties(ReceiverType receiverType, string source, bool isDurable) 12: : this(receiverType, source, isDurable, true) 13: { 14: } 15:  16: // Constructs a set of receiver properties with buffering on and durability off. 17: public ReceiverProperties(ReceiverType receiverType, string source) 18: : this(receiverType, source, false, true) 19: { 20: } Notice, there is much less code.  In addition, the code you have has no repetitive logic.  You can define the main constructor that takes all arguments, and the remaining constructors with defaults simply cross-call the main constructor, passing in the defaults. Yes, in some cases default parameters can ease some of this for you, but default parameters only work for compile-time constants (null, string and number literals).  For example, if you were creating a TradingDataAdapter that relied on an implementation of ITradingDao which is the data access object to retreive records from the database, you might want two constructors: one that takes an ITradingDao reference, and a default constructor which constructs a specific ITradingDao for ease of use: 1: public TradingDataAdapter(ITradingDao dao) 2: { 3: _tradingDao = dao; 4:  5: // other constructor logic 6: } 7:  8: public TradingDataAdapter() 9: { 10: _tradingDao = new SqlTradingDao(); 11:  12: // same constructor logic as above 13: }   As you can see, this isn’t something we can solve with a default parameter, but we could with cross-calling constructors: 1: public TradingDataAdapter(ITradingDao dao) 2: { 3: _tradingDao = dao; 4:  5: // other constructor logic 6: } 7:  8: public TradingDataAdapter() 9: : this(new SqlTradingDao()) 10: { 11: }   So in cases like this where you have constructors with non compiler-time constant defaults, default parameters can’t help you and cross-calling constructors is one of your best options. Summary When you have just one constructor doing the job of initializing the class, you can consolidate all your logic and error-handling in one place, thus ensuring that your behavior will be consistent across the constructor calls. This makes the code more maintainable and even easier to read.  There will be some cases where cross-calling constructors may be sub-optimal or not possible (if, for example, the overloaded constructors take completely different types and are not just “defaulting” behaviors). You can also use default parameters, of course, but default parameter behavior in a class hierarchy can be problematic (default values are not inherited and in fact can differ) so sometimes multiple constructors are actually preferable. Regardless of why you may need to have multiple constructors, consider cross-calling where you can to reduce redundant logic and clean up the code.   Technorati Tags: C#,.NET,Little Wonders

  Read the article

• Why does calling CreateDXGIFactory prevent my program from exiting?

  - by smoth190

  I'm using CreateDXGIFactory to get the graphics adapters and display modes. When I call it, it works fine and I get all the data. However, when I exit my program, the main Win32 thread exits, but something stays open because it keeps debugging. Does CreateDXGIFactory create an extra thread and I'm not closing it? I don't understand. The only thing I would suspect is that in the documentation it says it doesn't work if it's called from DllMain. It is in a DLL, but it's not called from DllMain. And it doesn't fail, either. I'm using DirectX 11. Here is the function that initializes DirectX. I haven't gotten past retrieving the refresh rate because of this problem. I commented everything out to pinpoint the problem. bool CGraphicsManager::InitDirectX(HWND hWnd, int width, int height) { HRESULT result; IDXGIFactory* factory; IDXGIOutput* output; IDXGIAdapter* adapter; DXGI_MODE_DESC* displayModes; DXGI_ADAPTER_DESC adapterDesc; unsigned int modeCount = 0; unsigned int refreshNum = 0; unsigned int refreshDen = 0; //First, we need to get the monitors refresh rater result = CreateDXGIFactory(__uuidof(IDXGIFactory), (void**)&factory); //if(FAILED(result)) //{ //MemoryUtil::MessageBoxError(TEXT("InitDirectX"), 0, 0, TEXT("Failed to create DXGI factory\nError:\n%s"), DXGetErrorDescription(result)); //return false; //} /*//Create a graphics card adapter result = factory->EnumAdapters(0, &adapter); if(FAILED(result)) { MemoryUtil::MessageBoxError(TEXT("InitDirectX"), 0, 0, TEXT("Failed to get graphics adapters\nError:\n%s"), DXGetErrorDescription(result)); return false; } //Get the output result = adapter->EnumOutputs(0, &output); if(FAILED(result)) { MemoryUtil::MessageBoxError(TEXT("InitDirectX"), 0, 0, TEXT("Failed to get adapter output\nError:\n%s"), DXGetErrorDescription(result)); return false; } //Get the modes result = output->GetDisplayModeList(DXGI_FORMAT_R8G8B8A8_UNORM, DXGI_ENUM_MODES_INTERLACED, &modeCount, 0); if(FAILED(result)) { MemoryUtil::MessageBoxError(TEXT("InitDirectX"), 0, 0, TEXT("Failed to get mode count\nError:\n%s"), DXGetErrorDescription(result)); return false; } displayModes = new DXGI_MODE_DESC[modeCount]; result = output->GetDisplayModeList(DXGI_FORMAT_R8G8B8A8_UNORM, DXGI_ENUM_MODES_INTERLACED, &modeCount, displayModes); if(FAILED(result)) { MemoryUtil::MessageBoxError(TEXT("InitDirectX"), 0, 0, TEXT("Failed to get display modes\nError:\n%s"), DXGetErrorDescription(result)); return false; } //Now we need to find one for our screen size for(unsigned int i = 0; i < modeCount; i++) { if(displayModes[i].Width == (unsigned int)width) { if(displayModes[i].Height == (unsigned int)height) { refreshNum = displayModes[i].RefreshRate.Numerator; refreshDen = displayModes[i].RefreshRate.Denominator; break; } } } //Store the video card data result = adapter->GetDesc(&adapterDesc); if(FAILED(result)) { MemoryUtil::MessageBoxError(TEXT("InitDirectX"), 0, 0, TEXT("Failed to get adapter description\nError:\n%s"), DXGetErrorDescription(result)); return false; } m_videoCard = new CVideoCard(); MemoryUtil::CreateGameObject(m_videoCard); m_videoCard->VideoCardMemory = (unsigned int)(adapterDesc.DedicatedVideoMemory); wcstombs_s(0, m_videoCard->VideoCardDescription, 128, adapterDesc.Description, 128);*/ //ReleaseCOM(output); //ReleaseCOM(adapter); ReleaseCOM(factory); //DeletePointerArray(displayModes); return true; } Also, I don't know if this means anything, but this is some of the output log when the function is commented out: //... 'LostRock.exe': Loaded 'C:\Windows\SysWOW64\msvcr100d.dll', Symbols loaded. 'LostRock.exe': Loaded 'C:\Windows\SysWOW64\imm32.dll', Cannot find or open the PDB file 'LostRock.exe': Loaded 'C:\Windows\SysWOW64\msctf.dll', Cannot find or open the PDB file 'LostRock.exe': Loaded 'C:\Windows\SysWOW64\uxtheme.dll', Cannot find or open the PDB file 'LostRock.exe': Loaded 'C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\microsoft shared\ink\tiptsf.dll', Cannot find or open the PDB file 'LostRock.exe': Loaded 'C:\Windows\SysWOW64\ole32.dll', Cannot find or open the PDB file 'LostRock.exe': Loaded 'C:\Windows\SysWOW64\oleaut32.dll', Cannot find or open the PDB file 'LostRock.exe': Loaded 'C:\Windows\SysWOW64\clbcatq.dll', Cannot find or open the PDB file 'LostRock.exe': Loaded 'C:\Windows\SysWOW64\oleacc.dll', Cannot find or open the PDB file The program '[6560] LostRock.exe: Native' has exited with code 0 (0x0). And when it isn't commented out... //... 'LostRock.exe': Loaded 'C:\Windows\SysWOW64\cfgmgr32.dll', Cannot find or open the PDB file 'LostRock.exe': Loaded 'C:\Windows\SysWOW64\devobj.dll', Cannot find or open the PDB file 'LostRock.exe': Loaded 'C:\Windows\SysWOW64\wintrust.dll', Cannot find or open the PDB file 'LostRock.exe': Loaded 'C:\Windows\SysWOW64\crypt32.dll', Cannot find or open the PDB file 'LostRock.exe': Loaded 'C:\Windows\SysWOW64\msasn1.dll', Cannot find or open the PDB file 'LostRock.exe': Unloaded 'C:\Windows\SysWOW64\setupapi.dll' 'LostRock.exe': Unloaded 'C:\Windows\SysWOW64\devobj.dll' 'LostRock.exe': Unloaded 'C:\Windows\SysWOW64\cfgmgr32.dll' 'LostRock.exe': Loaded 'C:\Windows\SysWOW64\clbcatq.dll', Cannot find or open the PDB file 'LostRock.exe': Loaded 'C:\Windows\SysWOW64\oleacc.dll', Cannot find or open the PDB file The thread 'Win32 Thread' (0xb94) has exited with code 0 (0x0). The program '[8096] LostRock.exe: Native' has exited with code 0 (0x0). //This is called when I click "Stop Debugging" P.S. I know it is CreateDXGIFactory because if I comment it out, the program exits correctly.

  Read the article

• Creating the Business Card Request InfoPath Form

  - by JKenderdine

  Business Card Request Demo Files Back in January I spoke at SharePoint Saturday Virginia Beach about InfoPath forms and Web Part deployment.  Below is some of the information and details regarding the form I created for the session.  There are many blogs and Microsoft articles on how to create a basic form so I won’t repeat that information here.   This blog will just explain a few of the options I chose when creating the solutions for SPS Virginia Beach.  The above link contains the zipped package files of the two InfoPath forms(no code solution and coded solution), the list template for the Location list I used, and the PowerPoint deck.  If you plan to use these templates, you will need to update the forms to work within your own environments (change data connections, code links, etc.).  Also, you must have the SharePoint Enterprise version, with InfoPath Services configured in order to use the Web Browser enabled forms. So what are the requirements for this template? Business Card Request Form Template Design Plan: Gather user information and requirements for card Pull in as much user information as possible. Use data from the user profile web services as a data source Show and hide fields as necessary for requirements Create multiple views – one for those submitting the form and Another view for the executive assistants placing the orders. Browser based form integrated into SharePoint team site Submitted directly to form library The base form was created using the blank template.  The table and rows were added using Insert tab and selecting Custom Table.  The use of tables is a great way to make sure everything lines up.  You do have to split the tables from time to time.  If you’ve ever split cells and then tried to re-align one to find that you impacted the others, you know why.  Here is what the base form looks like in InfoPath.   Show and hide fields as necessary for requirements You will notice I also used Sections within the form.  These show or hide depending on options selected or whether or not fields are blank.  This is a great way to prevent your users from feeling overwhelmed with a large form (this one wouldn’t apply).  Although not used in this one, you can also use various views with a tab interface.  I’ll show that in another post. Gather user information and requirements for card Pull in as much user information as possible. Use data from the user profile web services as a data source Utilizing rules you can load data when the form initiates (Data tab, Form Load).  Anything you can automate is always appreciated by the user as that is data they don’t have to enter.  For example, loading their user id or other user information on load: Always keep in mind though how much data you load and the method for loading that data (through rules, code, etc.).  They have an impact on form performance.  The form will take longer to load if you bring in a ton of data from external sources.  Laura Rogers has a great blog post on using the User Information List to load user information.   If the user has logged into SharePoint, then this can be used quite effectively and without a huge performance hit.   What I have found is that using the User Profile service via code behind or the Web Service “GetUserProfileByName” (as above) can take more time to load the user data.  Just food for thought. You must add the data connection in order for the above rules to work.  You can connect to the data connection through the Data tab, Data Connections or select Manage Data Connections link which appears under the main data source.  The data connections can be SharePoint lists or libraries, SQL data tables, XML files, etc.  Create multiple views – one for those submitting the form and Another view for the executive assistants placing the orders. You can also create multiple views for the users to enhance their experience.  Once they’ve entered the information and submitted their request for business cards, they don’t really need to see the main data input screen any more.  They just need to view what they entered. From the Page Design tab, select New View and give the view a name.  To review the existing views, click the down arrow under View: The ReviewView shows just what the user needs and nothing more: Once you have everything configured, the form should be tested within a Test SharePoint environment before final deployment to production.  This validates you don’t have any rules or code that could impact the server negatively. Submitted directly to form library   You will need to know the form library that you will be submitting to when publishing the template.  Configure the Submit data connection to connect to this library.  There is already one configured in the sample,  but it will need to be updated to your environment prior to publishing. The Design template is different from the Published template.  While both have the .XSN extension, the published template contains all the “package” information for the form.  The published form is what is loaded into Central Admin, not the design template. Browser based form integrated into SharePoint team site In Central Admin, under General Settings, select Manage Form Templates.  Upload the published form template and Activate it to a site collection. Now it is available as a content type to select in the form library.  Some documentation on publishing form templates:  Technet – Manage administrator approved form templates And that’s all our base requirements.  Hope this helps to give a good start.

  Read the article

• How to Apply a Business Card Template to a Contact and Customize it in Outlook 2013

  - by Lori Kaufman

  If you want to add a business card template to an existing contact in Outlook, you can do so without having to enter all of the information again. We will also show you how to customize the layout and format of the text on the card. Microsoft provides a couple of business card templates you can use. We will use their Blue Sky template as an example. To open the archive file for the template you downloaded, double-click on the .cab file. NOTE: You can also use a tool like 7-Zip to open the archive. A new Extract tab becomes available under Compressed Folder Tools and the files in the archive are listed. Select the .vcf file in the list of files. This automatically activates the Extract tab. Click Extract To and select a location or select Choose location if the desired location is not on the drop-down menu. Select a folder in which you want to save the .vcf file on the Copy Items dialog box and click Copy. NOTE: Use the Make New Folder button to create a new folder for the location, if desired. Double-click on the .vcf file that you copied out of the .cab archive file. By default, .vcf files are associated with Outlook so, when you double-click on a .vcf file, it automatically opens in a Contact window in Outlook. Change the Full Name to match the existing contact to which you want to apply this template. Delete the other contact info from the template. If you want to add any additional information not in the existing contact, enter it. Click Save & Close to save the contact with the new template. The Duplicate Contact Detected dialog box displays. To update the existing contact, select the Update information of selected Contact option. Click Update. NOTE: If you want to create a new contact from this template, select the Add new contact option. With the Contacts folder open (the People link on the Navigation Bar), click Business Card in the Current View section of the Home tab. You may notice that not all the fields from your contact display on the business card you just updated. Double-click on the contact to update the contact and the business card. On the Contact window, right-click on the image of the business card and select Edit Business Card from the popup menu. The Edit Business Card dialog box displays. You can change the design of the card, including changing he background color or image. The Fields box allows you to specify which fields display on the business card and in what order. Notice, in our example, that Company is listed below the Full Name, but no text displays on the business card below the name. That’s because we did not enter any information for Company in the Contact. We have information in Job Title. So, we select Company and click Remove to remove that field. Now, we want to add Job Title. First, select the field below which you want to add the new field. We select Full Name to add the Job Title below that. Then, we click Add and select Organization | Job Title from the popup menu to insert the Job Title. To make the Job Title white like the name, we select Job Title in the list of Fields and click the Font Color button in the Edit section. On the Color dialog box, select the color you want to use for the text in the selected field. Click OK. You can also make text bold, italic, or underlined. We chose to make the Job Title bold and the Full Name bold and italic. We also need to remove the Business Phone because this contact only has a mobile phone number. So, we add a Mobile Phone from the Phone submenu. Then, we need to remove enough blank lines so the Mobile Phone is visible on the card. We also added a website and email address and removed more blank lines so they are visible. You can also move text to the right side of the card or make it centered on the card. We also changed the color of the bottom three lines to blue. Click OK to accept your changes and close the dialog box. Your new business card design displays on the Contact window. Click Save & Close to save the changes you made to the business card for this contact and close the Contact window. The final design of the business card displays in the Business Card view on the People screen. If you have a signature that contains the business card for the contact you just updated, you will also need to update the signature by removing the business card and adding it again using the Business Card button in the Signature editor. You can also add the updated Business Card to a signature without the image or without the vCard (.vcf) file.     

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 637 638 639 640 641 642 643 644 645 646 647 648  | Next Page >