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• What is your most preferred method of site pagination?

  - by John Smith

  There seem to be quite a few implementations of this feature. Some sites like like Stackexchange have it laid out like this: [1][2][3][4][5] ... [954][Next] Other sites like game forums may have something like this: [1][2][3] ... [10] ... [50] ... [500] ... [954][Next] Some sites like webcomics (XKCD comes to mind) have it laid out like this: [Last][Prev][Random][Next][First] Reddit has a very simple pagination with only: [Prev][Next] Sites like Stackexchange and Google also allow you to change how many results you want per page. Personally, I have never used this feature. Is it even worth including or does it just further confuse the design with needless features? Personally, I have only ever seen the need for the webcomic style (without the random). If I need to go to a specific page (which is very, very rare) then I can just edit the address bar. Is it good design to make something more complex for rare occasions where it might make save the user some time? Is having to edit the address bar to navigate the site effectively in some circumstances bad design?

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• developers-designers-testers interaction [closed]

  - by user29124

  Sorry for my bad English, and also you may not read this and waste your time, because it is just a lament of layman developer... Seems no one want to learn anything at my workplace. We have Mantis bug tracker, but our testers use google-docs for reports and only developers and team lead report bugs in Mantis. We have SVN for version control and use Smarty as template system, but our designers give us pure HTML (sometimes it's ugly for programmers, but mostly it's OK) in archives, and changes to design made by programmers go nowhere (I mean designers use their own obsolete HTML and CSS most of the time). We have a testing environment but designers don't have access with restricted accounts to it. So we can only ask them where to look for the problem and then investigate the problem by ourselves (and made changes to CSS by ourselves (that go nowhere most of the time...)). I will not mention legacy code without documentation, tests, or any requirements, just an absence of real interaction in triangle programmers-designers-testers. I'm not talking about using HAML, SASS, continuous integration, or something else, just about using basic tools by all participants of the development process. Maybe the absence of communication is not a problem in short-time projects, which will finish up in 2 months time but rather on the types of projects that lasts for years. Any comments please...

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• How to fix a dpkg broken by the Brother MFC-7340 deb driver

  - by Roman A. Taycher

  I'm getting an apt-get error that says E: The package brmfc7340lpr needs to be reinstalled, but I can't find an archive for it. (the brmfc7340lpr is a printer driver) its a local deb file, doing an dpkg or apt-get purge doesn't work, neither does apt-get install -f How do I reinstall a package from a local deb file? P.S. box-name% sudo apt-get upgrade [sudo] password for username: Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done E: The package brmfc7340lpr needs to be reinstalled, but I can't find an archive for it. box-name% sudo apt-get purge brmfc7340lpr Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done E: The package brmfc7340lpr needs to be reinstalled, but I can't find an archive for it. box-name% sudo dpkg --purge brmfc7340lpr dpkg: error processing brmfc7340lpr (--purge): Package is in a very bad inconsistent state - you should reinstall it before attempting a removal. Errors were encountered while processing: brmfc7340lpr box-name% sudo dpkg --install brmfc7340lpr-2.0.2-1.i386.deb Selecting previously deselected package brmfc7340lpr. (Reading database ... 725204 files and directories currently installed.) Preparing to replace brmfc7340lpr 2.0.2-1 (using .../brmfc7340lpr-2.0.2-1.i386.deb) ... Unpacking replacement brmfc7340lpr ... start: Unknown job: lpd dpkg: warning: subprocess old post-removal script returned error exit status 1 dpkg - trying script from the new package instead ... start: Unknown job: lpd dpkg: error processing brmfc7340lpr-2.0.2-1.i386.deb (--install): subprocess new post-removal script returned error exit status 1 start: Unknown job: lpd dpkg: error while cleaning up: subprocess new post-removal script returned error exit status 1 Errors were encountered while processing: brmfc7340lpr-2.0.2-1.i386.deb box-name% sudo apt-get install -f Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done E: The package brmfc7340lpr needs to be reinstalled, but I can't find an archive for it. box-name%

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• Which shopping cart / ecommerce platform to choose?

  - by fabien7474

  I need to build an ecommerce website within a tight budget and schedule. Of course, I have never done that before, so I have googled out what my solutions are and I have concluded that the following were not valid candidates anymore : Magento : Steep learning curve osCommerce : old, bad design, buggy and not user-friendly Zencart, CRE Loaded, CubeCart : based on osCommerce Virtuemart, uberCart, eCart : based on CMS (Joomal, Drupal, WordPress) that is not necessary for my use-case So I finally narrowed down my choices to these solutions : PrestaShop : easy-to-use, great templating engine (smarty) but many modules are not free buy yet indispensable OpenCart : security issues and not a great support from the main developer. See here and here. So, as you can see, I am a little bit confused and if you can help me choosing an easy-to-use, lightweight and cheap (not-necessarily free) ecommerce solution, I would really appreciate. By the way, I am a Java/Grails programmer but I am also familiar with PHP and .NET. (not with Python or Ruby/Rails) EDIT: It seems that this question is more appropriate for the Webmaster StackExchange site. So please move this question to where it belongs (I cannot do that) instead of downvoting it. BTW, I have found out a question quite similar on SO (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3315638/php-ecommerce-system-which-one-is-easiest-to-modify) which is quite popular.

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• Statistical Software Quality Control References

  - by Xodarap

  I'm looking for references about hypothesis testing in software management. For example, we might wonder whether "crunch time" leads to an increase in defect rate - this is a surprisingly difficult thing to do. There are many questions on how to measure quality - this isn't what I'm asking. And there are books like Kan which discuss various quality metrics and their utilities. I'm not asking this either. I want to know how one applies these metrics to make decisions. E.g. suppose we decide to go with critical errors / KLOC. One of the problems we'll have to deal with with that this is not a normally distributed data set (almost all patches have zero critical errors). And further, it's not clear that we really want to examine the difference in means. So what should our alternative hypothesis be? (Note: Based on previous questions, my guess is that I'll get a lot of answers telling me that this is a bad idea. That's fine, but I'd request that it's based on published data, instead of your own experience.)

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• How often does Dreamhost change IP Addresses

  - by pjreddie

  So I just migrated our site to dreamhost because they are free for non-profits. However, right after I switched the nameservers over to them they changed the IP address of the site. So first they propagated out IP address x.x.x.180, then they switched it to x.x.x.178 and had to propagate that out. Point being it meant a lot of downtime since a lot of big DNS servers (like google) thought the address was still x.x.x.180 for up to 5 hours after they switched it. This is compounded by the fact that most our visitors to the site live here in Unalaska and we have local DNS servers that take a LONG time to update (like a day or more) since we get all our internet over satellite. So every time Dreamhost changes our IP address it can mean a day of downtime for us in our community. So my question is, how often do these changes take place? I asked Dreamhost support and they gave me a vague response: I wish I could say, however those changes happen at random times. They're not that frequent, maybe even months between updates, but there's no way to know for sure. First, I hardly believe that they don't know their own system well enough to give me at least some estimate or average. Second, is it worth looking at other providers so that I can get a static IP address? We were hosting the site here originally and hadn't run into this problem since we have a static IP here. We don't get a ton of traffic but usually around 500 hits a day or so, sometimes more if our stories are featured on statewide or national news broadcasts. So hours of downtime every time Dreamhost "randomly" decides to move our server location can be bad for our readership.

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• Dependency injection: what belongs in the constructor?

  - by Adam Backstrom

  I'm evaluating my current PHP practices in an effort to write more testable code. Generally speaking, I'm fishing for opinions on what types of actions belong in the constructor. Should I limit things to dependency injection? If I do have some data to populate, should that happen via a factory rather than as constructor arguments? (Here, I'm thinking about my User class that takes a user ID and populates user data from the database during construction, which obviously needs to change in some way.) I've heard it said that "initialization" methods are bad, but I'm sure that depends on what exactly is being done during initialization. At the risk of getting too specific, I'll also piggyback a more detailed example onto my question. For a previous project, I built a FormField class (which handled field value setting, validation, and output as HTML) and a Model class to contain these fields and do a bit of magic to ease working with fields. FormField had some prebuilt subclasses, e.g. FormText (<input type="text">) and FormSelect (<select>). Model would be subclassed so that a specific implementation (say, a Widget) had its own fields, such as a name and date of manufacture: class Widget extends Model { public function __construct( $data = null ) { $this->name = new FormField('length=20&label=Name:'); $this->manufactured = new FormDate; parent::__construct( $data ); // set above fields using incoming array } } Now, this does violate some rules that I have read, such as "avoid new in the constructor," but to my eyes this does not seem untestable. These are properties of the object, not some black box data generator reading from an external source. Unit tests would progressively build up to any test of Widget-specific functionality, so I could be confident that the underlying FormFields were working correctly during the Widget test. In theory I could provide the Model with a FieldFactory() which could supply custom field objects, but I don't believe I would gain anything from this approach. Is this a poor assumption?

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• Be liberal in what you accept... or not?

  - by Matthieu M.

  [Disclaimer: this question is subjective, but I would prefer getting answers backed by facts and/or reflexions] I think everyone knows about the Robustness Principle, usually summed up by Postel's Law: Be conservative in what you send; be liberal in what you accept. I would agree that for the design of a widespread communication protocol this may make sense (with the goal of allowing easy extension), however I have always thought that its application to HTML / CSS was a total failure, each browser implementing its own silent tweak detection / behavior, making it near impossible to obtain a consistent rendering across multiple browsers. I do notice though that there the RFC of the TCP protocol deems "Silent Failure" acceptable unless otherwise specified... which is an interesting behavior, to say the least. There are other examples of the application of this principle throughout the software trade that regularly pop up because they have bitten developpers, from the top off my head: Javascript semi-colon insertion C (silent) builtin conversions (which would not be so bad if it did not truncated...) and there are tools to help implement "smart" behavior: name matching phonetic algorithms (Double Metaphone) string distances algorithms (Levenshtein distance) However I find that this approach, while it may be helpful when dealing with non-technical users or to help users in the process of error recovery, has some drawbacks when applied to the design of library/classes interface: it is somewhat subjective whether the algorithm guesses "right", and thus it may go against the Principle of Least Astonishment it makes the implementation more difficult, thus more chances to introduce bugs (violation of YAGNI ?) it makes the behavior more susceptible to change, as any modification of the "guess" routine may break old programs, nearly excluding refactoring possibilities... from the start! And this is what led me to the following question: When designing an interface (library, class, message), do you lean toward the robustness principle or not ? I myself tend to be quite strict, using extensive input validation on my interfaces, and I was wondering if I was perhaps too strict.

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• Why doesn't my IDE do background compiling/building?

  - by MKO

  Today I develop on a fairly complex computer, it has multiple cores, SSD drives and what not. Still, most of the time I'm programming the computer is leasurely doing nothing. When I need to compile and run/deploy a somewhat complex project at best it still takes a couple of seconds. Why? Now that we're living more and more in the "age of instant" why can't I press F5 in Visual studio and launch/deploy my application instantly? A couple of seconds might not sound so bad but it's still cognitive friction and time that adds up, and frankly it makes programming less fun. So how could compilation be instant? Well, People tend to edit files in different assemblies, what if Visual Studio/The IDE constantly did compilation/and building of everything that I modified anytime that it might be appropriate. Heck if they wanted to go really advanced they could do per-class compilation. The compilation might not work but then it could just silently do nothing (except adding error messages to the error window). Surely todays computer could dedicate a core or two to this task, and if someone found it annoying it could be disabled by option. I know there's probably a thousand technical issues and some fancy shadow copying that would need to be resolved for this to be seamless and practical but it sure would make programming more seamless. Is there any practical reason why this scenario isn't possible? Would the wear and tear of continually writing binaries be too much? Couldn't assemblies be held in memory until deployed/run?

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• Sneaky Javascript For Loop Bug

  - by Liam McLennan

  Javascript allows you to declare variables simply by assigning a value to an identify, in the same style as ruby: myVar = "some text"; Good javascript developers know that this is a bad idea because undeclared variables are assigned to the global object, usually window, making myVar globally visible. So the above code is equivalent to: window.myVar = "some text"; What I did not realise is that this applies to for loop initialisation as well. for (i = 0; i < myArray.length; i += 1) { } // is equivalent to for (window.i = 0; window.i < myArray.length; window.i += 1) { } Combine this with function calls nested inside of the for loops and you get some very strange behaviour, as the value of i is modified simultaneously by code in different scopes. The moral of the story is to ALWAYS declare javascript variables with the var keyword, even when intialising a for loop. for (var i = 0; i < myArray.length; i += 1) { }

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• Data migration - dangerous or essential?

  - by MRalwasser

  The software development department of my company is facing with the problem that data migrations are considered as potentially dangerous, especially for my managers. The background is that our customers are using a large amount of data with poor quality. The reasons for this is only partially related to our software quality, but rather to the history of the data: Most of them have been migrated from predecessor systems, some bugs caused (mostly business) inconsistencies in the data records or misentries by accident on the customer's side (which our software allowed by error). The most important counter-arguments from my managers are that faulty data may turn into even worse data, the data troubles may awake some managers at the customer and some processes on the customer's side may not work anymore because their processes somewhat adapted to our system. Personally, I consider data migrations as an integral part of the software development and that data migration can been seen to data what refactoring is to code. I think that data migration is an essential for creating software that evolves. Without it, we would have to create painful software which somewhat works around a bad data structure. I am asking you: What are your thoughts to data migration, especially for the real life cases and not only from a developer's perspecticve? Do you have any arguments against my managers opinions? How does your company deal with data migrations and the difficulties caused by them? Any other interesting thoughts which belongs to this topics?

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• how to choose a web framework and javascript library?

  - by Trylks

  I've been procrastinating learning some framework for web apps w/ some library for AJAX, something like django with prototype, or turbogears with mootools, or zeta components with dojo, grok, jquery, symfony... The point is to spend some of my spare time, have "fun" and create cool stuff that hopefully is some useful. I think maybe I wouldn't like something like GWT or pyjamas because I wouldn't like to "get married" with some technology, I want to keep my freedom to add another javascript library, and so on. I didn't decide even the language yet, but I think I'd prefer python. PHP could be fine if there is some framework that is nice enough. Besides that, I don't even know where to start. I don't feel like learning a framework to then realize there is something that I cannot comfortably do, switch to another framework then find that a third framework has something really cool, etc. And the same goes for javascript libraries. So, some guidance would be really appreciated. I don't really know why are so many options available and what do they aim for, I guess some of them focus on some aspects and some on others, but I just want to make cool and nice apps that I can easily maintain, without spending too much time on coding or learning and avoiding the "trapped in the framework" feeling, when doing something is awfully complicated (or even impossible) with compared with the rest of things or doing that same thing on a different framework. I guess in the end I'll go for django and jquery since they are the most widely used options, afaik, but if I was going for the most widely used options I guess I should choose Java or PHP (I don't really like Java for my spare time, but php is not so bad), so I preferred to ask first. I think the question has to consider both, framework and library, since sometimes they are coupled. I think this is the place to ask this kind of things, sorry if not, and thank you.

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• Just started a job with Scrum. Something seems to be missing. I am new to Scrum

  - by punkouter

  The code is a complete mess of a combination of classic ASP/ASP.NET. The scrum consist of us patching up the big mess or making additions to it. We are all too busy doing that to start a rewrite so I am wondering.. Where is the part in Scrum where the developers can have the power to say that enough is enough and demand that they are given time to start the big rewrite ? We seem in an endless loop of just patching old code with 'Stories'. So things are being run by the non-technical people who seem to have no desire to push for a rewrite because they don't understand how bad the code base has gotten.. So who is in charge of making this big rewrite change happen ? The devs? The scrum master? The current strategy is just find time and do it ourselves without the higher ups involved.. since they are mostly to blame for the current mess we are in.. <-insert rant about non-tech people telling tech people what to do here-

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• HTML5 data-* (custom data attribute)

  - by Renso

  Goal: Store custom data with the data attribute on any DOM element and retrieve it. Previously under HTML4 we used to use classes to store custom data, something to the affect of <input class="account void limit-5000 over-4999" /> and then have to parse the data out of the class In a book published by Peter-Paul Koch in 2007, ppk on JavaScript, he explains why and how to use custom attributes to make data more accessible to JavaScript, using name-value pairs. Accessing a custom attribute account-limit=5000 is much easier and more intuitive than trying to parse it out of a class, Plus, what if the class name for example "color-5" has a representative class definition in a CSS stylesheet that hides it away or worse some JavaScript plugin that automatically adds 5000 to it, or something crazy like that, just because it is a valid class name. As you can see there are quite a few reasons why using classes is a bad design and why it was important to define custom data attributes in HTML5. Syntax: You define the data attribute by simply prefixing any data item you want to store with any HTML element with "data-". For example to store our customers account data with a hidden input element: <input type="hidden" data-account="void" data-limit=5000 data-over=4999  /> How to access the data: account  -     element.dataset.account limit    -     element.dataset.limit You can also access it by using the more traditional get/setAttribute method or if using jQuery $('#element').attr('data-account','void') Browser support: All except for IE. There is an IE hack around this at http://gist.github.com/362081. Special Note: Be AWARE, do not use upper-case when defining your data elements as it is all converted to lower-case when reading it, so: data-myAccount="A1234" will not be found when you read it with: element.dataset.myAccount Use only lowercase when reading so this will work: element.dataset.myaccount

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• A Modern Marketing Marvel: Eloqua Experience 2013

  - by kristin.jellison

  Hey there, partners— You’d be hard pressed to find a more convincing example of modern marketing than the one that descended upon San Francisco last week. We’re talking about Eloqua Experience 2013, of course. It is remarkable that a marketing technology conference has become a case study in successful 21st-century marketing practices. Eloqua Experience 2013 (#EE13) was all about customer-focused, targeted messaging, multichannel content, analytics and real-time multiscreen engagement. It made for a busy, yet interactive experience for over 2,000 eager attendees. This year’s event brought together some of the world’s most innovative marketers for three days of immersive sessions covering marketing best practices, customer stories and deep-dive technical classes. With 70 breakout sessions, product announcements, and a special conversation with Vince Gilligan, creator and executive producer of “Breaking Bad,” #EE13 brought a lot of critical marketing news to light. Oracle’s goal: to make sure our partners stay updated. As you know, Eloqua joined Oracle in late 2012, further rounding out our Customer Experience applications platform. Eloqua is a marketing automation solution and marketing cloud centerpiece that partners can use to target the right buyers, easily execute campaigns, bring leads to sales and bring in high ROIs. The resources below will help you stay on top of the industry’s best practices for marketing, plus all the advantages Eloqua can bring to partners. Partner Opportunities and Strategy with Eloqua The latest Eloqua partner strategy. Interview with Oracle Eloqua GM Kevin Akeroyd on Eloqua Experience A short recap of 2013’s Experience. Eloqua Product Announcements John Stetic, VP of Products for Oracle Eloqua, highlights the top product news, including a new profiler app and the ability to integrate display advertising into multichannel campaigns. Eloqua Experience Highlight Reel See what all the bustle was about. Eloqua Experience Session Overviews A quick look at what the keynote and breakout sessions covered, with links to session content. Modern Marketing Essentials Library Tips, blueprints, and strategies for success based on the 5 Tenets of Modern Marketing. Over and out, Your OPN Marketing Allies

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

  - by emcb

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

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• Adding complexity by generalising: how far should you go?

  - by marcog

  Reference question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4303813/help-with-interview-question The above question asked to solve a problem for an NxN matrix. While there was an easy solution, I gave a more general solution to solve the more general problem for an NxM matrix. A handful of people commented that this generalisation was bad because it made the solution more complex. One such comment is voted +8. Putting aside the hard-to-explain voting effects on SO, there are two types of complexity to be considered here: Runtime complexity, i.e. how fast does the code run Code complexity, i.e. how difficult is the code to read and understand The question of runtime complexity is something that requires a better understanding of the input data today and what it might look like in the future, taking the various growth factors into account where necessary. The question of code complexity is the one I'm interested in here. By generalising the solution, we avoid having to rewrite it in the event that the constraints change. However, at the same time it can often result in complicating the code. In the reference question, the code for NxN is easy to understand for any competent programmer, but the NxM case (unless documented well) could easily confuse someone coming across the code for the first time. So, my question is this: Where should you draw the line between generalising and keeping the code easy to understand?

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• ERP/CRM Systems. Desktop Based ? Web based?

  - by Parhs

  Hello guys... I have seen 2-3 ERPs in action. I am wondering what is better. Desktop based application or webbased displayed on a browser. My first expirience was with a web based ERP when i was 14 years old.. It was web based and terribly slow... For most simple task you had to do lots of clicks... no keyboard support ..... Pages took ages to load. Last year i worked for migrating to a newer computer some old terminal based cobol application. The computer that worked till today and still has no problem was from 1993. The user interface ofcourse was textbased.. The speed that guys placed orders was amazing! just typing the name of the customer , then 5-10 keys to add a product to order.... Comparing to this ERP the page for placing orders Link (click sales orders) seems terribly slow to add a product... No keyboard shortcut works to save what you added and generally i believe you need 4 times more time to place an order compared to the text interface... Having to use both mouse and keyboard for this task is BAD and sadistic... So how can tek heck these people ever use a system like that ??? So in the long run desktop application seems the only way... Ofcourse browsers support shortcuts but the way to overide the defaults that browsers uses isnt cross compatible... That is a hudge problem. Finnaly, if we MUST/forced use cloud in near future what about keyboard shortcuts?? I feel confused... I have seen converters of desktop applications to browser applications but are SLOW as hell... The question is what about user friendliness?What kind of application would you use?

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• How can I prevent seams from showing up on objects using lower mipmap levels?

  - by Shivan Dragon

  Disclaimer: kindly right click on the images and open them separately so that they're at full size, as there are fine details which don't show up otherwise. Thank you. I made a simple Blender model, it's a cylinder with the top cap removed: I've exported the UVs: Then imported them into Photoshop, and painted the inner area in yellow and the outer area in red. I made sure I cover well the UV lines: I then save the image and load it as texture on the model in Blender. Actually, I just reload it as the image where the UVs are exported, and change the viewport view mode to textured. When I look at the mesh up-close, there's yellow everywhere, everything seems fine: However, if I start zooming out, I start seeing red (literally and metaphorically) where the texture edges are: And the more I zoom, the more I see it: Same thing happends in Unity, though the effect seems less pronounced. Up close is fine and yellow: Zoom out and you see red at the seams: Now, obviously, for this simple example a workaround is to spread the yellow well outside the UV margins, and its fine from all distances. However this is an issue when you try making a complex texture that should tile seamlessly at the edges. In this situation I either make a few lines of pixels overlap (in which case it looks bad from upclose and ok from far away), or I leave them seamless and then I have those seams when seeing it from far away. So my question is, is there something I'm missing, or some extra thing I must do to have my texture look seamless from all distances?

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• Is micro-optimisation important when coding?

  - by BozKay

  I recently asked a question on stackoverflow.com to find out why isset() was faster than strlen() in php. This raised questions around the importance of readable code and whether performance improvements of micro-seconds in code were worth even considering. My father is a retired programmer, I showed him the responses and he was absolutely certain that if a coder does not consider performance in their code even at the micro level, they are not good programmers. I'm not so sure - perhaps the increase in computing power means we no longer have to consider these kind of micro-performance improvements? Perhaps this kind of considering is up to the people who write the actual language code? (of php in the above case). The environmental factors could be important - the internet consumes 10% of the worlds energy, I wonder how wasteful a few micro-seconds of code is when replicated trillions of times on millions of websites? I'd like to know answers preferably based on facts about programming. Is micro-optimisation important when coding? EDIT : My personal summary of 25 answers, thanks to all. Sometimes we need to really worry about micro-optimisations, but only in very rare circumstances. Reliability and readability are far more important in the majority of cases. However, considering micro-optimisation from time to time doesn't hurt. A basic understanding can help us not to make obvious bad choices when coding such as if (expensiveFunction() && counter < X) Should be if (counter < X && expensiveFunction()) (example from @zidarsk8) This could be an inexpensive function and therefore changing the code would be micro-optimisation. But, with a basic understanding, you would not have to because you would write it correctly in the first place.

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• Penne alla MVP

  - by Valter Minute

  I’m sorry for the long silence on this blog and the long delay in replying to the friends that commented on my articles. I’ve been quite busy in the last weeks and I spent a lot of time traveling around Italy (not for pleasure!). In the meantime I’ve been renewed as an MVP on April the 1st (nice date to renew someone with such a bad sense of humor…). I decided to celebrate my MVP award with a new recipe (to be honest, I celebrated by eating the results of this recipe!) and I decided to call it “penne alla MVP”… just because I’m not good in finding nice names for my recipes. Ingredients (for 4 people): 360g pasta (penne or other short pasta) 300g small shrimps 1 cup of whipped cream 2 tablespoons of olive oil 1 small leek 1 glass of beer (I used Hoegaarden dutch white beer… but just because I like it and I finished the rest of the bootle while cooking) Chives Salt, pepper Prepare the pasta by boiling it in salted water, as usual. In the meantime chop the leek in very small bits, heat the oil inside a pan and when the oil is hot, drop the leek chops and let them cook for a few minutes. Add the shrimps and the glass of beer. Let them cook inside beer until they are cooked (if you used pre-cooked shrimps a couple of minutes would be enough to heat them and gave them the flavour of beer). Add the whipped cream and mix it well with the shrimps and the sauce. Dry the pasta and drop the sauce on top of it and then add the chives finely chopped.

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• How much effort should you put into a junior developer?

  - by Crazy Eddie

  At what point should one give up? I've tried helping them out by having them shadow me. We agree to break a minute, and then they go missing in action for a while...then just go back to their desk. Even when I know they've done this, part of me feels like I shouldn't have to go get them but that they should be showing interest in learning. Frankly, it's a bunch of time I don't have explaining things as I go when I could just do it. Am I expecting too much to expect that if they want to learn they'll make sure I know they're ready and willing? They go to meetings that they where not told they had to, good, but then sit in the corner and sleep...bad. I don't even know what to do with that. Sometimes I give them something small to do and they do it great, so I give them something just a touch harder and they totally fail, hard. Check in things without testing them. Part of me thinks that maybe I should be spending more time with them but at the same time I don't see a lot of interest and I really, honestly don't have time teaching the same things over and over. Sometimes I get asked questions that are really, really easy to answer if you just do a little bit of your own work trying to find out. Other times I'm not asked anything. I'm sure I could be doing better but honestly...I don't really want to anymore.

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• Compiz slow under proprietary nvidia driver

  - by gsedej

  Hi! I am using Ubuntu 10.10 and have problem with proprietary nvidia driver for my GeForce GTS 250. I have issue with poor Compiz performance. And there is also open-source "noueau" driver. Proprietary: I tried many versions but neither works fast on desktop. This means 30 FPS without heavy effects. Currently I am using version 270.18. Even normal desktop use feels bad (moving windows) In games (and 3D benchmark) it is really good! (Unigine Heaven works good!) Open-source "nouveau": Very fast on desktop with heavy effects (blur, ...). I have 300 FPS and more, even in Expo mode. Games were good but not as good as prop. And driver causes xorg to crash even the latest (ppa:xorg-edgers/nouveau), so I switched back to proprietary. I also have computer with Ubuntu 10.04, GeForce 8600GT and drivers around 185.x and Compiz works great there. There is similar question Nvidia proprietary driver performance in 10.10 Which version of nvidia (prop) driver is fast in Compiz in Ubuntu 10.10? How do you install a specific version of nvidia driver? Is it the case that each newer driver works slower on compiz?

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• GWB | Comment Spam On The Rise

  - by Geekswithblogs Administrator

  I don’t know a member on Geekswithblogs.net that is not frustrated with the amount of spam they get. It is a major problem that we have been dealing with for 6+ years and trying to come up with new ways to fight. As spammers get smarter, we have to continue to upgrade the tools we use to combat it. Just like any spam filter, sometimes good comments will get caught up. This has been a huge concern for some bloggers causing us to tame what we call spam and not spam. So this post is here just to state we know the spam problem is like a wave, sometimes it is not so bad, other times it gets worse. Right now it is worse. One measure we will take is a requirement for CAPTCHA soon if it continues since most members don’t clean up their spam via the admin tools (which are not the best tools, I know). Also I want to solicit a better approach from the members, what would you like the spam interface on GWB to be like? Be realistic cause we all want “Zero Spam, Good Comment live”. Related Tags: Geekswithblogs.net, Spam

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• How do I fix a garbled screen on a Gateway LT3103u?

  - by paracaudex

  I've been having garbled screen problems on a Gateway LT3103u on Ubuntu for a while. I just did a fresh install of Ubuntu 11.10 and continue to have issues. I installed xubuntu-desktop in case the issues had to do with the sophisticated GNOME graphics. The problem is less bad, but it's still there. After a few minutes of using XFCE, the screen gets garbled. I assume this has something to do with the graphics card, but I don't know how to go about troubleshooting something like this. Where should I start? Update: Here is the description of the VGA card from lspci -vvv: 01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RS690M [Radeon X1200 Series] (prog-if 00 [VGA controller]) Subsystem: Acer Incorporated [ALI] Device 028c Control: I/O+ Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR- FastB2B- DisINTx- Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B- ParErr- DEVSEL=fast TAbort- SERR- [disabled] Capabilities: [50] Power Management version 2 Flags: PMEClk- DSI- D1+ D2+ AuxCurrent=0mA PME(D0-,D1-,D2-,D3hot-,D3cold-) Status: D0 NoSoftRst- PME-Enable- DSel=0 DScale=0 PME- Capabilities: [80] MSI: Enable- Count=1/1 Maskable- 64bit+ Address: 0000000000000000 Data: 0000 Kernel driver in use: radeon Kernel modules: radeon Update: Setting GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="nomodeset" in /etc/default/grub seems to have fixed it in both Ubuntu and xubuntu-desktop. I will test it for a day or so to see if the problems recur and then post more detail with some links to an explanation. Update 2: It is possible to use this fix for Nvidia card (GTX 260) when graphics is defective after 11.10 upgrade/install? First few restarts was graphic ok, then after few restarts begins suddenly be defective and it stay so. I must returned to 11.04 because this problem and I wait for 12.04. So I hope in this fix.

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