Learning to Fly with Force.com

In this article by Ankit Arora and Abhinav Gupta, the authors of the book Force.com Tips and Tricks, we will focus on the basics of cloud computing and briefly go over the following:

• Principles and constructs of Force.com

• Benefits and building blocks of Force.com

• When to choose this platform

• Which edition is right for you?

• A cursory overview of how to manage your Salesforce.com org

Advanced Hadoop MapReduce Administration

In this article by Srinath Perera and Thilina Gunarathne, authors of Hadoop MapReduce Cookbook, we will cover:

• Tuning Hadoop configurations for cluster deployments

• Running benchmarks to verify the Hadoop installation

• Reusing Java VMs to improve the performance

• Fault tolerance and speculative execution

• Debug scripts – analyzing task failures

• Setting failure percentages and skipping bad records

• Shared-user Hadoop clusters – using fair and other schedulers

• Hadoop security – integrating with Kerberos

• Using the Hadoop Tool interface

Creating weapons for your game using UnrealScript

In this article by Dave Voyles, author of UnrealScript Game Programming Cookbook, we will learn how we can create a gun that fires homing missiles, a gun that heals pawns, and a weapon that can damage over time.

Creating a Lazarus Component

In this article by Roderick Person, author of Getting Started with Lazarus IDE, we are going to look at creating new components for Lazarus. We will do this by:

• Creating a message-logging component

• Adding properties to the components that appear in the Object Inspector window when a component is used in design time

• Adding events of the components that appear in the Object Inspector window when a component is used in design time

• Learning the basics of creating a Property Editor window

• Learning the basics of creating a Component Editor window and looking at the TCheckListBoxComponentEditor component are some examples

So let's begin.

Creating your first VM using vCloud technology

This article by Daniel Langenhan, author of Instant VMware vCloud Starter [Instant] explains how we can create our first VM in vCloud using VMware vCloud Director.

We first have to get vCloud Director installed then we can start playing with it. Our first aim is obviously to deploy a VM inside our vCloud. To do that, we have to assign resources (CPU memory and disk) to vCD for consumption. In step 1 we will learn about all the different types of resources, and in steps 2 to 5, we will build them. Step 6 finally builds a vApp. Last but not least, I will give you some ideas about what to explore next.

Creating a Custom HUD

In this article by John P. Doran, the author of the book, Mastering UDK Game Development, we will guide us in creating a HUD that can be used within a Medieval RPG and will fit nicely into the provided Epic Citadel map making use of Scaleform and ActionScript 3.0 using Adobe Flash CS6.

We can have the most fun game in the world, but if the player has no idea what's going on it is next to impossible for that fun to be experienced by anyone other than the creator. One of the main tools that we use within the game industry to pass on information to the user is a heads—up display, more commonly referred to as a HUD.

The tool that most modern—day games use for doing user—interface (UI) work, such as HUDs, is Scaleform. Scaleform has been used with great success in Unreal games such as Borderlands 2, Mass Effect 3, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, and Bioshock Infinite.

Scaleform allows users to bring in Flash animation files to UDK to be rendered directly on the screen or rendered onto textures that can be used within the game world. We can interact with these movies using both Kismet and UnrealScript to create whatever kind of interface you can dream of.

Inventorying Servers with PowerShell

This article explains how to inventory the hardware and software configurations of Windows 8 Servers and create a detailed inventory and configuration report. Additionally, this article will cover methods to track configuration changes over time, export the configuration report via Word. This article should cover everything necessary to create a centralized hardware and software inventory of all servers in the enterprise.

This article by Ed Goad, author of Windows Server 2012 Automation with PowerShell Cookbook, covers the following topics:

• Inventorying hardware with PowerShell

• Inventorying the installed software

• Inventorying system configuration

• Reporting on system security

• Creating a change report

• Exporting a configuration report to Word