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• Creating a 2D Line Branch

  - by Danran

  I'm looking into creating a 2D line branch, something for a "lightning effect". I did ask this question before on creating a "lightning effect" (mainly though referring to the process of the glow & after effects the lightning has & to whether it was a good method to use or not); Methods of Creating a "Lightning" effect in 2D However i never did get around to getting it working. So i've been trying today to get a seconded attempt going but i'm getting now-were :/. So to be clear on what i'm trying to-do, in this article posted; http://drilian.com/2009/02/25/lightning-bolts/ I'm trying to create the line segments seen in the images on the site. I'm confused mainly by this line in the pseudo code; // Offset the midpoint by a random amount along the normal. midPoint += Perpendicular(Normalize(endPoint-startPoint))*RandomFloat(-offsetAmount,offsetAmount); If someone could explain this to me it would be really grateful :).

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• How to have Windows 7 remember a password for a Domain

  - by Kelly Jones

  About eighteen months ago, I wrote a post covering how to clear saved passwords in Windows XP.  This week at work I was reminded how useful it is to not only deleted saved passwords, but to also setup wildcard credentials using this same interface. The scenario that I run into as consultant working at a client site, is that my laptop is not a member of the Windows Domain that my client uses to secure their network. So, when I need to access file shares, shared printers, or even the clients internal websites, I’m prompted for a name and password.  By creating a wildcard entry on my laptop (for the user account that the client issued to me), I avoid this prompt and can seamlessly access these resources.  (This also works when you’ve configured Outlook to access Exchange via RPC over HTTP.) How to create a credential wild card entry in Windows 7: Go to your Start Menu --> Type "user" into the Search box Click on the “Manage your credentials” in the column on the left Click on the “Add a Windows credential” link Enter the Domain (in my case my client’s domain), something like this: *.contoso.com Enter the username and password That’s it.  You should now be able to access resources in that Domain without being prompted for your name and password.  Please note: if you are required to change your password periodically for that domain, you’ll need to update your saved password as well.

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• Object construction design

  - by James

  I recently started to use c# to interface with a database, and there was one part of the process that appeared odd to me. When creating a SqlCommand, the method I was lead to took the form: SqlCommand myCommand = new SqlCommand("Command String", myConnection); Coming from a Java background, I was expecting something more similar to SqlCommand myCommand = myConnection.createCommand("Command String"); I am asking, in terms of design, what is the difference between the two? The phrase "single responsibility" has been used to suggest that a connection should not be responsible for creating SqlCommands, but I would also say that, in my mind, the difference between the two is partly a mental one of the difference between a connection executing a command and a command acting on a connection, the latter of which seems less like what I have been lead to believe OOP should be. There is also a part of me wondering if the two should be completely separate, and should only come together in some sort of connection.execute(command) method. Can anyone help clear up these differences? Are any of these methods "more correct" than the others from an OO point of view? (P.S. the fact that c# is used is completely irrelevant. It just highlighted to me that different approaches were used)

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• Ask the Readers: What Do You Have Set as Your Homepage?

  - by Mysticgeek

  When if comes to setting a homepage in your browser, it’s really based on personal preference. Today we want to know what you have set as your homepage in your favorite browser. Browser Homepage There are a lot of search sites that allow you to customize your homepage such as iGoogle, MSN, and Yahoo. Some people enjoy having a homepage set up as a dashboard of sorts. While others like simplicity and set it to Google or leave it blank. Not surprisingly in a small office or corporation you will see a lot of workstations set to MSN or the company SharePoint site. Unfortunately, a lot of free software tries to change you default homepage as well, like in this example when installing Windows Live Essentials. Make sure to avoid this by not rushing through software install wizards, and carefully opt out of such options. What is set as your homepage in your favorite web browser…both for work and at home? Leave us a comment and join in the discussion! Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Ask the Readers: Which Web Browser Do You Use?How-To Geek Comment PolicyMysticgeek Blog: A Look at Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 on Windows XPSet the Default Browser on Ubuntu From the Command LineAnnouncing the How-To Geek Forums 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 Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 Get a free copy of WinUtilities Pro 2010 World Cup Schedule Boot Snooze – Reboot and then Standby or Hibernate Customize Everything Related to Dates, Times, Currency and Measurement in Windows 7 Google Earth replacement Icon (Icons we like) Build Great Charts in Excel with Chart Advisor

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• Search ranking for important keywords has gone down drastically [duplicate]

  - by Vaivhav

  This question already has an answer here: How to diagnose a search engine ranking drop? 5 answers Firstly, we are a small entrepreneurial team of 3 persons and I am more like an amateur webmaster of the company's website as we cannot really afford a technical guy/department right now. A few weeks earlier, our website traffic and rankings for most keywords decreased overnight. I did a lot of reading henceforth and learned about Penguin 2.1 which people said is the reason for the drop. Something like this had never happened before. Now, I have gone through the entire Google webmaster help section. It says there that if a manual penalty is taken against us, we would notice a message in Manual Actions page. So far, we haven't received any notice from Google for web spam. Some SEO guys I contacted said they found spam links in our backlink profile. I do believe I had mistakenly purchased a cheap link/SEO scheme when I was yet very new to SEO. This was more than a year back but since then we have been legitimate. Moreover, how do I find out which is a spam link and which is not? Our content is all original, refreshing and the best you will find in our niche. We also have a blog but on a different domain (wordpress.com) from where we send out anchored links to our business website. Is this a good thing to do? Now, how should we proceed and recover our traffic/rankings. I tried searching in webmasters for a way to reach google and ask them why the traffic has decreased suddenly, but I couldn't find a contact form or something. Can someone please go through our website and help in making things more clear regarding the reason for the drop, along with a solution. Will really appreciate this as I can't get to figure this out and its taking a lot of time. Vaivhav

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• Breaking up classes and methods into smaller units

  - by micahhoover

  During code reviews a couple devs have recommended I break up my methods into smaller methods. Their justification was (1) increased readability and (2) the back trace that comes back from production showing the method name is more specific to the line of code that failed. There may have also been some colorful words about functional programming. Additionally I think I may have failed an interview a while back because I didn't give an acceptable answer about when to break things up. My inclination is that when I see a bunch of methods in a class or across a bunch of files, it isn't clear to me how they flow together, and how many times each one gets called. I don't really have a good feel for the linearity of it as quickly just by eye-balling it. The other thing is a lot of people seem to place a premium of organization over content (e.g. 'Look at how organized my sock drawer is!' Me: 'Overall, I think I can get to my socks faster if you count the time it took to organize them'). Our business requirements are not very stable. I'm afraid that if the classes/methods are very granular it will take longer to refactor to requirement changes. I'm not sure how much of a factor this should be. Anyway, computer science is part art / part science, but I'm not sure how much this applies to this issue.

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• Advantage of Software Development [on hold]

  - by user93319

  The worth of a brand that a corporation carries is way too high than its physical presence. If you are venturing into an online business, you need to take special care about the corporate image of your business. Nowadays, it is very important for every organization to have its own website. To enhance the online presence of a company it is important to have a good website design as well as the blueprint of the design. A quality site can enhance organizational growth and it can lend a hand an in achieving company’s goals promptly. When websites have gained so much meaning, it is advisable for an organization to seek professional support for the construction of its own exclusive portals. Expert help may again is essential when one needs for a complete renovation on the Web. Any group is necessary to do a bit of introspection before it make a decision to look for the services of a professional web software development company. It is good to be completely clear-headed regarding one’s requirements. To start with, a business should be familiar with who its potential clientele are. Once this main factor has been give consideration, an association can go ahead and get its website designed accordingly. On approaching a corporation that offers software development services India to its customers, a client can make sure that their site is ready with all the most up-to-date features. Professional Assistance Matters Professional service supplier is identified to furnish a site with easy to use features that prompt visitors to come back again and again. Yet one more benefit of receiving aid from professionals is that they can let you know of the type of content that you should place on display over your site. For example, a business that wants to draw the interest of experts belong to the corporate world must make sure that the language used on its website is crisp and official.

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• List<T>.AddRange is causing a brief Update/Draw delay

  - by Justin Skiles

  I have a list of entities which implement an ICollidable interface. This interface is used to resolve collisions between entities. My entities are thus: Players Enemies Projectiles Items Tiles On each game update (about 60 t/s), I am clearing the list and adding the current entities based on the game state. I am accomplishing this via: collidableEntities.Clear(); collidableEntities.AddRange(players); collidableEntities.AddRange(enemies); collidableEntities.AddRange(projectiles); collidableEntities.AddRange(items); collidableEntities.AddRange(camera.VisibleTiles); Everything works fine until I add the visible tiles to the list. The first ~1-2 seconds of running the game loop causes a visible hiccup that delays drawing (so I can see a jitter in the rendering). I can literally remove/add the line that adds the tiles and see the jitter occur and not occur, so I have narrowed it down to that line. My question is, why? The list of VisibleTiles is about 450-500 tiles, so it's really not that much data. Each tile contains a Texture2D (image) and a Vector2 (position) to determine what is rendered and where. I'm going to keep looking, but from the top of my head, I can't understand why only the first 1-2 seconds hiccups but is then smooth from there on out. Any advice is appreciated.

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• Two Cloudy Observations from Oracle OpenWorld

  - by GeneEun

  Now that the dust has settled from another amazing Oracle OpenWorld, I wanted to reflect back on a couple of key observations I made during the event. First, it was pretty clear that Cloud was again a big deal at this year's conference. Yes, the Oracle Database 12c announcement was also huge, but for most it was hard to not notice that Oracle continues to be "all-in" with respect to cloud computing. Just to give you an idea of the emphasis on Cloud, there were over 300 Cloud-related sessions at this year's OpenWorld. If you caught some of the demo booths in the Oracle Red Lounge, then you saw some of the great platform, application, and social services that are now part of Oracle Cloud, as well as numerous demos of private cloud products that Oracle offers. Second, during Thomas Kurian's keynote presentation on Oracle Cloud, he announced the Preview Availability of a new service called Oracle Developer Cloud Service. This new platform service will provide developers with instant access to environments to better manage the application development lifecycle in the cloud. It provides development project teams access to favorite tools like Hudson, Git, Github, wikis, and tasks to help make innovation faster, more collaborative, and more effective. There's also integration with IDEs like Eclipse, NetBeans, and JDeveloper. If you're a developer, it's an awesome addition to Oracle Cloud's platform services! Want more details about Oracle Developer Cloud Service? Click here.

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• Server-side Architecture for Online Game

  - by Draiken

  basically I have a game client that has communicate with a server for almost every action it takes, the game is in Java (using LWJGL) and right now I will start making the server. The base of the game is normally one client communicating with the server alone, but I will require later on for several clients to work together for some functionalities. I've already read how authentication server should be sepparated and I intend on doing it. The problem is I am completely inexperienced in this kind of server-side programming, all I've ever programmed were JSF web applications. I imagine I'll do socket connections for pretty much every game communication since HTML is very slow, but I still don't really know where to start on my server. I would appreciate reading material or guidelines on where to start, what architecture should the game server have and maybe some suggestions on frameworks that could help me getting the client-server communication. I've looked into JNAG but I have no experience with this kind of thing, so I can't really tell if it is a solid and good messaging layer. Any help is appreciated... Thanks ! EDIT: Just a little more information about the game. It is intended to be a very complex game with several functionalities, making some functionalities a "program" inside the program. It is not an usual game, like FPS or RPG but I intend on having a lot of users using these many different "programs" inside the game. If I wasn't clear enough, I'd really appreciate people that have already developed games with java client/server architecture, how they communicated, any frameworks, apis, messaging systems, etc. It is not a question of lack of knowledge of language, more a question for advice, so I don't end up creating something that works, but in the later stages will have to be rewriten for any kind of limiting reason. PS: sorry if my english is not perfect...

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• Hobbyist programmer releasing software with a donate button

  - by espais

  I'd like to start this with a disclaimer that I realize that a full, clear-cut answer should be sought out by a lawyer. I am more so curious about what other users of this community have done Say that I had a small program that I had developed for fun, that I wished to release to the public. I'll drop it out there with one of the various open-source licenses, and probably put it up on SourceForge or Git in case if anybody should ever want to fork/maintain/check out code. Also say that I wanted to accept donations for the project, with absolutely 0 expectation that people will send any money. However, if somebody donated in order to buy me a beer or a pizza for the work that they liked, I would accept gladly. The question, then, is what are the general requirements of accepting donations? Can it go into a personal account with no questions asked as a "gift," or do I need to setup an LLC to avoid any taxation issues? (US citizen here). Again, yes this should be lawyer discussed, but I also know that many projects that I see have the ability to donate, and assume that the community probably has a decent amount of experience in this regard.

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• Dealing with bad/incomplete/unclear specifications?

  - by eagerMoose

  I'm working on a project where our dev team gets the specifications from the business part of the company. Both the business management and the IT management require estimates and deadline projections, as they should. The good thing is that estimates are mostly made by the actual developers who get to do the required features. The bad thing is that the specifications are usually either too simple (it turns out you're left with a lot of question marks over your head because a lot of information seems to be missing) or too complex(up to the point that you can't even visualize where everything would "fit" in the app). More often than not, the business part of the specs are either incomplete or unaware of what can and can't be done (given the previously implemented business logic). Dev team is given about a day per new spec to give an estimate and we do try to clear uncertainties, usually by meeting up with whoever did the spec. Most of the times it turns out that spec writers haven't really thought everything through, and it's usually only when we start designing and developing that we end up in trouble, as a lot of the spec seems to have holes. How do you deal with this? Are you generous on estimates in advance?

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• Rails: The Law of Demeter [duplicate]

  - by user2158382

  This question already has an answer here: Rails: Law of Demeter Confusion 4 answers I am reading a book called Rails AntiPatterns and they talk about using delegation to to avoid breaking the Law of Demeter. Here is their prime example: They believe that calling something like this in the controller is bad (and I agree) @street = @invoice.customer.address.street Their proposed solution is to do the following: class Customer has_one :address belongs_to :invoice def street address.street end end class Invoice has_one :customer def customer_street customer.street end end @street = @invoice.customer_street They are stating that since you only use one dot, you are not breaking the Law of Demeter here. I think this is incorrect, because you are still going through customer to go through address to get the invoice's street. I primarily got this idea from a blog post I read: http://www.dan-manges.com/blog/37 In the blog post the prime example is class Wallet attr_accessor :cash end class Customer has_one :wallet # attribute delegation def cash @wallet.cash end end class Paperboy def collect_money(customer, due_amount) if customer.cash < due_ammount raise InsufficientFundsError else customer.cash -= due_amount @collected_amount += due_amount end end end The blog post states that although there is only one dot customer.cash instead of customer.wallet.cash, this code still violates the Law of Demeter. Now in the Paperboy collect_money method, we don't have two dots, we just have one in "customer.cash". Has this delegation solved our problem? Not at all. If we look at the behavior, a paperboy is still reaching directly into a customer's wallet to get cash out. EDIT I completely understand and agree that this is still a violation and I need to create a method in Wallet called withdraw that handles the payment for me and that I should call that method inside the Customer class. What I don't get is that according to this process, my first example still violates the Law of Demeter because Invoice is still reaching directly into Customer to get the street. Can somebody help me clear the confusion. I have been searching for the past 2 days trying to let this topic sink in, but it is still confusing.

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• How do I left-click a Java Application on a WeTab running Ubuntu 12.10? (workaround defect in Onboard)

  - by Kat Amsterdam

  I installed Ubuntu 12.10 on my weTab. Everything works perfectly (albeit slowly) and I can touch and use every application execpt ones written in Java. When I start any Java Application the touchscreen does not recognize the left click. I believe it's a problem in OnBoard (the onscreen keyboard) because when I touch the mouse icon on the OnBoard and then the Java Application the left click works. This is very cumbersome for every click to first hit OnBoard mouse icon and then button in the Java app I would like to click. It defeats the purpose of a touchscreen. The Java Application is definitly touchable as it's running on 10 other machines with Elo Touchscreen. How do I get Ubuntu to recognize the left click in a java application automatically when I touch the screen? Or a way to dignose this so I can make a clear bug report? This happens in all the desktop environments (Gnome/Unity, XFCE4 and LXDE) I tried with openjdk-6-* and openjdk-7-* Stats: WeTab 32GB 3G 2GB RAM Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU N450 @ 1.66GHz - 64-bit Ubuntu 12.10 - 64 bit Unity Desktop environment Xubuntu Desktop environment Lubuntu Desktop environment The real touchscreen driver from EETI (eGalaxy) (also didn't work with the Ubuntu standard touchscreen driver)

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• How to add a new developer to the team

  - by lortabac

  I run a small company composed of only 2 developers. For one of our clients we are building a very big application, whose development has gone on for 1.5 years. Now this client has found an important sponsorship, and they are organizing some events related to this project, so we have a deadline in 2 months and we can't miss it. We are thinking of adding a new developer to the team, and I am wondering what we can do to help his integration. This is the situation: We are approaching the threshhold of Brooks's law, the point when adding new developers will be counter-productive. The application is relatively well designed, but the implementation is chaotic in some points (especially older code). There are unit tests only for more recent code. When this project started, we didn't have the habit of doing tests. Documentation and comments are incomplete. The application is both large and complex. The client has written down almost every detail about his project, in a very clear and "programmer-friendly" way. Is it a good idea to add a person now? If so, what can we do in order to help the new developer integrate into the team?

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• "Oracle Coherence 3.5" Book - My Humble Review

  - by [email protected]

    After reviewing the book in more detail I say again that it is a great guide for sure. Lots of important concepts that sometimes can be somewhat confusing are deeply reviewed, including all types of caching schemes and backing maps, and the cache topologies with their corresponding performances and very useful "When to use it?" sections. Some functionalities that are very desirable or used a lot are reviewed with examples and best practices of implementation, including: Data affinity Querying Pagination Indexes Aggregations Event processing, listening and triggering Data persistence Security Regarding the networking and architecture topics, Coherence*Extend is exhaustively reviewed, including C++ and .NET clients, with very good tips and examples, even including source codes. Personally, I am also glad to see that the address providers (<address-provider> tag), new feature in Coherence 3.5 which is a way to programmatically provide well-known addresses in order to connect to the cluster, is mentioned on the book, because it provides new functionalities to satisfy some special configuration requirements for example: Provide a way to switch extend nodes in cases of failure Implement custom load balancing algorithms and/or dynamic discovery of TCP/IP connection acceptors Dynamically assign TCP address and port settings when binding to a server socket Another very interesting and useful section is the "Coherent Bank Sample Application", which is a great tutorial, useful to understand how Coherence interacts with third party products establishing a clear integration with them, including the use of non-Oracle products like MS Visual Studio.  

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• Reformatting and version control

  - by l0b0

  Code formatting matters. Even indentation matters. And consistency is more important than minor improvements. But projects usually don't have a clear, complete, verifiable and enforced style guide from day 1, and major improvements may arrive any day. Maybe you find that SELECT id, name, address FROM persons JOIN addresses ON persons.id = addresses.person_id; could be better written as / is better written than SELECT persons.id, persons.name, addresses.address FROM persons JOIN addresses ON persons.id = addresses.person_id; while working on adding more columns to the query. Maybe this is the most complex of all four queries in your code, or a trivial query among thousands. No matter how difficult the transition, you decide it's worth it. But how do you track code changes across major formatting changes? You could just give up and say "this is the point where we start again", or you could reformat all queries in the entire repository history. If you're using a distributed version control system like Git you can revert to the first commit ever, and reformat your way from there to the current state. But it's a lot of work, and everyone else would have to pause work (or be prepared for the mother of all merges) while it's going on. Is there a better way to change history which gives the best of all results: Same style in all commits Minimal merge work ? To clarify, this is not about best practices when starting the project, but rather what should be done when a large refactoring has been deemed a Good Thing™ but you still want a traceable history? Never rewriting history is great if it's the only way to ensure that your versions always work the same, but what about the developer benefits of a clean rewrite? Especially if you have ways (tests, syntax definitions or an identical binary after compilation) to ensure that the rewritten version works exactly the same way as the original?

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• Managed Cloud Services Wins Another Prestigious Industry Award

  - by Dori DiMassimo-Oracle

  Over the last 90 days, Oracle Managed Cloud Services has been the proud recipient of TWO prestigious industry awards for service excellence and customer value leadership.  The most recent award is last month's 2014 Frost & Sullivan Best Practice Award - North America Managed Cloud Customer Value Leadership Award, which rated Oracle Managed Cloud Services as the clear leader versus other providers; Managed Cloud received an "exceptional" rating in 9 of 10 evaluation categories.  The research report  is an excellent look at our industry and what is valued by cloud customers looking for a managed solution.   In April, Managed Cloud was a repeat winner of the Outsourcing Excellence Award - 2014 Outsourcing Excellence Award - Best ITO Infrastructure (Sony Computer Entertainment America).  Last year we won the award for Best Cloud: 2013 Outsourcing Excellence Award - Best Cloud (Take-Two Interactive)  These awards are a great testimony of the transformation of Managed Cloud Services to a true Cloud-based business and a strategic and relevant part of the Oracle Cloud Solutions portfolio.  Frost & Sullivan, in particular, recognizes our vision and our capability of successfully managing business transactions in the cloud.

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• Have Windows Automatically Login Without Entering Your Password

  - by deadlydog

  If you are like me and don't want to have to enter your password each time Windows loads, you can have Windows start up without prompting you to enter a user name or password.  The simple (and BAD) way to do this is to simply not have a password on your user account, but that’s a big security risk and will allow people to easily remote desktop into your computer. So, first set a password on your windows account if you don’t already have one.  Then select Run... from the start menu (or use Windows Key + R to open the Run window) and type control userpasswords2, which will open the user accounts application.   On the Users tab, clear the box for Users must enter a user name and password to use this computer, and click on OK. An Automatically Log On dialog box will appear; enter the user name and password for the account you want to use to automatically log into Windows.  That's it.    You may also want to make sure your screen saver is not set to prompt you for a password when it exits either. Now your computer is secure without getting in your way.

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• Can I use a 302 redirect to serve up static content from a url with escaped_fragment?

  - by Starfs

  We would like to serve up seo-friendly ajax-driven content. We are following this documentation. Has anyone ever tried to write a 302 redirect into the htaccess file, that takes the '?_escaped_fragment=' string and send that to a static page? For example /snapshot/yourfilename/ How will Google react to this? I've gone through the documentation and it's not very clear. The below quote is from Google's documentation this is what I find. I'm not sure if they are saying that you can redirect the _escaped_fragment_ url to a different static page, or if this is to redirect the hashtag URL to static content? Thoughts? From Google's site: Question: Can I use redirects to point the crawler at my static content? Redirects are okay to use, as long as they eventually get you to a page that's equivalent to what the user would see on the #! version of the page. This may be more convenient for some webmasters than serving up the content directly. If you choose this approach, please keep the following in mind: Compared to serving the content directly, using redirects will result in extra traffic because the crawler has to follow redirects to get the content. This will result in a somewhat higher number of fetches/second in crawl activity. Note that if you use a permanent (301) redirect, the url shown in our search results will typically be the target of the redirect, whereas if a temporary (302) redirect is used, we'll typically show the #! url in search results. Depending on how your site is set up, showing #! may produce a better user experience, because the user will be taken straight into the AJAX experience from the Google search results page. Clicking on a static page will take them to the static content, and they may experience avoidable extra page load time if the site later wants to switch them to the AJAX experience.

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• How should we deal with multiple transaction-report requests?

  - by Mithir

  We are developing a system for the retail market which one of it's features will enable clients(actually consumer clubs) to go through all transactions made by end-clients. One of the ways to get this information will be via an API. The idea is that there will be requests for reports with a start date and an end date, and a response will have all the transactions between those dates. We are worry that some reports may be very large, and that some clients will repeatedly request for reports, in this case the DB and CPU will be very overloaded. The same server that will service those requests, also takes care the the actual retail transactions (received by proprietary devices) and a Web application. We are not sure about how to limit the report requests from the API so that it won't affect the system too much. So, how should we deal with this scenario? any thoughts? EDIT: just to make clear: When I mentioned proprietary devices I meant "On-Location" devices which are used during sales with end-clients, this means that these requests shouldn't get delayed, and this is the main concern.

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• People != Resources

  - by eddraper

  Ken Tabor’s blog post “They Are not Resources – We Are People” struck a chord with me.  I distinctly remember hearing the term “resources” within the context of “people” for the first time back in the late 90’s.  I was in a meeting at Compaq and a manager had been faced with some new scope for an IT project he was managing.  His response was that he needed more “resources” in order to get the job done.  As I knew the timeline for the project was fixed and the process for acquiring additional funding would almost certainly extend beyond his expected delivery date, I wondered what he meant.  After the meeting, I asked him what he meant… his response was that he needed some more “bodies” to get the job done.  For a minute, my mind whirred… why is it so difficult to simply say “people?”  This particular manager was neither a bad person nor a bad manager… quite the contrary.  I respected him quite a bit and still do.  Over time, I began to notice that he was what could be termed an “early adopter” of many “Business speak” terms – such as “sooner rather than later,” “thrown a curve,” “boil the ocean” etcetera.  Over time, I’ve discovered that much of this lexicon can actually be useful, though cliché and overused.  For example, “Boil the ocean” does serve a useful purpose in distilling a lot of verbiage and meaning into three simple words that paint a clear mental picture.  The term “resources” would serve a similar purpose if it were applied to the concept of time, funding, or people.  The problem is that this never happened.  “Resources”, “bodies”, “ICs” (individual contributors)… this is what “people” have become in the IT business world.  Why?  We’re talking about simple word choices here.  Why have human beings been deliberately dehumanized and abstracted in this manner? What useful purpose does it serve other than to demean and denigrate?

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• Count function on tree structure (non-binary)

  - by Spevy

  I am implementing a tree Data structure in c# based (largely on Dan Vanderboom's Generic implementation). I am now considering approach on handling a Count property which Dan does not implement. The obvious and easy way would be to use a recursive call which Traverses the tree happily adding up nodes (or iteratively traversing the tree with a Queue and counting nodes if you prefer). It just seems expensive. (I also may want to lazy load some of my nodes down the road). I could maintain a count at the root node. All children would traverse up to and/or hold a reference to the root, and update a internally settable count property on changes. This would push the iteration problem to when ever I want to break off a branch or clear all children below a given node. Generally less expensive, and puts the heavy lifting what I think will be less frequently called functions. Seems a little brute force, and that usually means exception cases I haven't thought of yet, or bugs if you prefer. Does anyone have an example of an implementation which keeps a count for an Unbalanced and/or non-binary tree structure rather than counting on the fly? Don't worry about the lazy load, or language. I am sure I can adjust the example to fit my specific needs. EDIT: I am curious about an example, rather than instructions or discussion. I know this is not technically difficult...

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• Strategies for managing use of types in Python

  - by dave

  I'm a long time programmer in C# but have been coding in Python for the past year. One of the big hurdles for me was the lack of type definitions for variables and parameters. Whereas I totally get the idea of duck typing, I do find it frustrating that I can't tell the type of a variable just by looking at it. This is an issue when you look at someone else's code where they've used ambiguous names for method parameters (see edit below). In a few cases, I've added asserts to ensure parameters comply with an expected type but this goes against the whole duck typing thing. On some methods, I'll document the expected type of parameters (eg: list of user objects), but even this seems to go against the idea of just using an object and let the runtime deal with exceptions. What strategies do you use to avoid typing problems in Python? Edit: Example of the parameter naming issues: If our code base we have a task object (ORM object) and a task_obj object (higher level object that embeds a task). Needless to say, many methods accept a parameter named 'task'. The method might expect a task or a task_obj or some other construct such as a dictionary of task properties - it is not clear. It is them up to be to look at how that parameter is used in order to work out what the method expects.

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• License validation and calling home

  - by VitalyB

  I am developing an application that, when bought, can be activated using a license. Currently I am doing offline validation which is a bit troubling to me. I am aware there is nothing to do against cracks (i.e modified binaries), however, I am thinking to trying to discourage license-key pirating. Here is my current plan: When the user activates the software and after offline validation is successful, it tries to call home and validate the license. If home approves of the license or if home is unreachable, or if the user is offline, the license gets approved. If home is reached and tells the license is invalid, validation fails. Licensed application calls home the same way every time during startup (in background). If license is revoked (i.e pirated license or generated via keygen), the license get deactivated. This should help with piracy of licenses - An invalid license will be disabled and a valid license that was pirated can be revoked (and its legal owner supplied with new license). Pirate-users will be forced to use cracked version which are usually version specific and harder to reach. While it generally sounds good to me, I have some concerns: Users tend to not like home-calling and online validation. Would that kind of validation bother you? Even though in case of offline/failure the application stays licensed? It is clear that the whole scheme can be thwarted by going offline/firewall/etc. I think that the bother to do one of these is great enough to discourage casual license sharing, but I am not sure. As it goes in general with licensing and DRM variations, I am not sure the time I spend on that kind of protection isn't better spent by improving my product. I'd appreciate your input and thoughts. Thanks!

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