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• What is a widely accepted term for a string variable that would probably contain a file path and file name?

  - by Peter Turner

  For functions that need to index files in a directory and rename them FileName0001, FileName0002, etc... I often need to write a function that splits the file name from the file path and rename the file. When I put the file name and file path back together, I don't have a very good name for the variable that contains both of them and I usually just wind up concatenating them every time I want to use them (usually using them as parameters for functions labeled either filename or filepath) so I never really know what I'm doing until I notice a lot of files being written in the same directory as my binaries. Anyway, what do I call a file name and a file path? I don't want to call it File, because that usually means the binary information behind the file. I don't want to call it URI because that usually means I've got some sort of protocol, which I don't. I just want a good way to denote "c:\somedir\somedir\somedir\somefile.txt" so as to deconfuse this mess I've just realized I'm in. Please don't just list your personal preference. I think an excellent answer should "'site its sources". (as in, provide a link to a repository with a good example of the code being used as I described)

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• Using gluLookAt to move camera in 2D iPhone game ?

  - by Mr.Gando

  Hey guys, I'm trying to use gluLookAt to move the camera in my iPhone game, but every time I've tried to use gluLookAt my screen just goes "blank" ( grey in this case ) I'm trying to render a simple triangle and to move the camera, this is my code: to setup my scene I do: glViewport(0, 0, backingWidth, backingHeight); glMatrixMode(GL_PROJECTION); glLoadIdentity(); glRotatef(-90.0, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0); //using iPhone in horizontal mode glOrthof(-240, 240, -160, 160, -1, 1); glMatrixMode(GL_MODELVIEW); then my "triangle rendering" code looks like: GLfloat triangle[] = {0, 100, 100, 0, -100, 0,}; glClearColor(0.7, 0.7, 0.7, 1.0); glClear(GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT | GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT); glEnableClientState(GL_VERTEX_ARRAY); glColor4f(1.0, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0); glVertexPointer(2, GL_FLOAT, 0, &triangle); glDrawArrays(GL_TRIANGLES, 0, 6); glDisableClientState(GL_VERTEX_ARRAY); This draws a red triangle in the middle of the screen, when I try to apply gluLookAt ( I got the implementation of the function from Cocos2D so I asume it's correct ), i do: glMatrixMode(GL_MODELVIEW); glLoadIdentity(); gluLookAt(0,0,1,0,0,0,0,0,1); // try to move the camera a bit ? GLfloat triangle[] = {0, 100, 100, 0, -100, 0,}; glClearColor(0.7, 0.7, 0.7, 1.0); glClear(GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT | GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT); glEnableClientState(GL_VERTEX_ARRAY); glColor4f(1.0, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0); glVertexPointer(2, GL_FLOAT, 0, &triangle); glDrawArrays(GL_TRIANGLES, 0, 6); glDisableClientState(GL_VERTEX_ARRAY); This leads me to grey screen (glClearColor is grey), I've tried all sort of things and read what I've found about gluLookAt on the net, but no luck :(, if someone could explain me or show me how to move to move the camera in a top-down fashion ( zelda, etc ), I would really appreciate it. Thanks!

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• Can anyone explain step-by-step how the as3isolib depth-sorts isometric objects?

  - by Rob Evans

  The library manages to depth-sort correctly, even when using items of non-1x1 sizes. I took a look through the code but it's a big project to go through line by line! There are some questions about the process such as: How are the x, y, z values of each object defined? Are they the center points of the objects or something else? I noticed that the IBounds defines the bounds of the object. If you were to visualise a cuboid of 40, 40, 90 in size, where would each of the IBounds metrics be? I would like to know how as3isolib achieves this although I would also be happy with a generalised pseudo-code version. At present I have a system that works 90% of the time but in cases of objects that are along the same horizontal line, the depth is calculated as the same value. The depth calculation currently works like this: x = object horizontal center point y = object vertical center point originX and Y = the origin point relative to the object so if you want the origin to be the center, the value would be originX = 0.5, originY = 0.5. If you wanted the origin to be vertical center, horizontal far right of the object it would be originX = 1.0, originY = 0.5. The origin adjusts the position that the object is transformed from. AABB_width = The bounding box width. AABB_height = The bounding box height. depth = x + (AABB_width * originX) + y + (AABB_height * originY) - z; This generates the same depth for all objects along the same horizontal x.

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• Semantic Form Markup for Yes or No Questions - Or Should I Tell my Designers to Bugger Off?

  - by sholsinger

  I frequently receive mock-ups of HTML forms with the following prototype: Some long winded yes or no question?   (o) Yes   ( ) No The (o) and ( ) in this prototype represent radio buttons. My personal view is that if the question has only a true or false value then it should be a check box. That said, I have seen this sort of "layout" from almost every designer I've ever worked with. If I were not to question their decision, or question the client's decision, I'd probably mark it up like this: <p class="pseudo_label">Some long winded yes or no question?</p> <input type="radio" name="the_question" id="the_question_yes" value="1"> <label for="the_question_yes" class="after_radio">Yes</label> <input type="radio" name="the_question" id="the_question_no" value="0"> <label for="the_question_no" class="after_radio">No</label> I really don't want to do that. I want to push back and convince them that this should really be a check box and not two radio buttons. But my question is, if I can't convince them – you're welcome to help me try – how should I code that original design requirement such that it is semantic and at least understandable for screen reader users? If I were able to convince my tormentors to change their minds, I would likely code it in the following fashion: <label for="the_question">Some long winded yes or no question?</label> <input type="checkbox" name="the_question" id="the_question" value="1"> What do you think about this issue? Should I push back? Possibly more importantly is either way semantically correct?

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• Javascript form validation - what's lacking?

  - by box9

  I've tried out two javascript form validation frameworks - jQuery validation, and jQuery Tools validator - and I've found both of them lacking. jQuery validation lacks the clear separation between the concepts of "validating" and "displaying validation errors", and is highly inflexible when it comes to displaying dynamic error messages. jQuery Tools on the other hand lacks decent remote validation support (to check if a username exists for example). Even though jQuery validation supports remote validation, the built-in method requires the server to respond in a particular format. In both cases, any sort of asynchronous validation is a pain, as is defining rules for dependencies between multiple inputs. I'm thinking of rolling my own framework to address these shortcomings, but first I want to ask... have others experienced similar annoyances with javascript validation? What did you end up doing? What are some common validation requirements you've had which really should be catered for? And are there other, much better frameworks out there which I've missed? I'm looking primarily at jQuery-based frameworks, though well-implemented frameworks built on other libraries can still provide some useful ideas.

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• .NET vs Windows 8: Rematch!

  - by Simon Cooper

  So, although you will be able to use your existing .NET skills to develop Metro apps, it turns out Microsoft are limiting Visual Studio 2011 Express to Metro-only. From the Express website: Visual Studio 11 Express for Windows 8 provides tools for Metro style app development. To create desktop apps, you need to use Visual Studio 11 Professional, or higher. Oh dear. To develop any sort of non-Metro application, you will need to pay for at least VS Professional. I suspect Microsoft (or at least, certain groups within Microsoft) have a very explicit strategy in mind. By making VS Express Metro-only, developers who don't want to pay for Professional will be forced to make their simple one-shot or open-source application in Metro. This increases the number of applications available for Windows 8 and Windows mobile devices, which in turn make those platforms more attractive for consumers. When you use the free VS 11 Express, instead of paying Microsoft, you provide them a service by making applications for Metro, which in turn makes Microsoft's mobile offering more attractive to consumers, increasing their market share. Of course, it remains to be seen if developers forced to jump onto the Metro bandwagon will simply jump ship to Android or iOS instead. At least, that's what I think is going on. With Microsoft, who really knows?

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• .NET vs Windows 8: Rematch!

  - by simonc

  So, although you will be able to use your existing .NET skills to develop Metro apps, it turns out Microsoft are limiting Visual Studio 2011 Express to Metro-only. From the Express website: Visual Studio 11 Express for Windows 8 provides tools for Metro style app development. To create desktop apps, you need to use Visual Studio 11 Professional, or higher. Oh dear. To develop any sort of non-Metro application, you will need to pay for at least VS Professional. I suspect Microsoft (or at least, certain groups within Microsoft) have a very explicit strategy in mind. By making VS Express Metro-only, developers who don't want to pay for Professional will be forced to make their simple one-shot or open-source application in Metro. This increases the number of applications available for Windows 8 and Windows mobile devices, which in turn make those platforms more attractive for consumers. When you use the free VS 11 Express, instead of paying Microsoft, you provide them a service by making applications for Metro, which in turn makes Microsoft's mobile offering more attractive to consumers, increasing their market share. Of course, it remains to be seen if developers forced to jump onto the Metro bandwagon will simply jump ship to Android or iOS instead. At least, that's what I think is going on. With Microsoft, who really knows? Cross posted from Simple Talk.

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• I'm a student learning C++ and I've recently found out about Ruby. Would learning (some of) Ruby help me with C++ or would it just confuse me?

  - by Von32

  Hi! As the title says, I'm a student that will be starting my second year of C++ very soon. I've discovered Ruby, however. While I've heard much buzz about the language before, I've disregarded it because I always thought it wasn't something that would be useful. However, I've found a number of FANTASTIC tutorials on ruby and am interested in learning it (probably because it seems so straightforward). Would playing around with ruby be a good or bad idea? I understand that there's not such thing as bad knowledge, but I'm afraid that Ruby will only confuse me when dealing with C++. How different from C++ is it? I've read it's based on C in some way, but my google-fu seems to be horrible today. How useful is Ruby in the real world? I'm not specifically asking about jobs- I'm more interested in what sort of applications may come from this language. Any specific examples worth looking at? Going back to Question two- I've read some posts on here that Ruby and C++ can hold hands once in a while. How flexible is this relationship? Is it rarely that this would work? Thank you Very much for your time! EDIT: This has to be the one community on the internet that doesn't suck. Why have I never posted before? You guys are awesome!

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• Are there good resources for leading documentation for an existing software product having none?

  - by Ben Rose

  Hello. I'm a software developer at a technology company. I have been tasked with leading the documentation effort for the product I work on, both internal to developers as well as spilling over into facilitating the business side of requirements documentation. This internal product has been around for at least 6 years. One challenge is that this software application has no form of documentation other than some small, outdated pieces here and there. There are comments in the code, but they are technical and do not convey any over-arching behavior (even on technical side). As a consequence of having little to no documentation, this product is often unnecessarily complex under the covers adding to the challenge. We are very limited on time that will be given to us to work on documentation. Another thing about me is that I've displayed some ability in writing/communication around the office, but I'm not coming from any sort of documentation or formal writing background (beyond my academic career). Please share your advise or recommend resources, book/website/forum/whatever, for helping me come up with a plan with milestones, best practices, task delegation, templates, buy-in, etc. I'm hoping for a resource targeting or giving special mention of introducing good documentation on existing projects where there previously was none. I would be very grateful for your responses. Ben

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• How do search engines handle hyphenated words?

  - by NinjaKC

  I am not sure my title fully explains what I mean. I thought this might be an interesting question. If I had a set of keywords, broken with a dash or 2, will search engines consider the dashed split keyword as maybe a full keyword? Say I have a site that sort of breaks words down, like the dictionary sites do. So a keyword for that page, might end up in the page, and / or the URL, as broken by dashes. Key-word = keyword Co-op-er-at-ive = cooperative Pho-to-gra-phy = Photography www.example.com/key-word/ www.example.com/co-op-er-at-ive/ www.example.com/pho-to-gra-phy/ I know search engines will consider a dash (at least Google) as a space, and understand it as multiple words. But in the English language, a dash can also break a word down (at least I think it can, can't it?), so will search engines also take this into consideration? I did a 'little' research, I Googled some words and placed random dashes, and it returned the words I searched for, but this could be considered a typo from the user on Google's search end, so really I am wondering if I can purposely put a dash in a keyword, and have the search engine spiders still catch that keyword as the real word without dashes? I've done a little Googling and looking here on Stackoverflow, but everything comes down to dashes for multiple words, not really the specific thing I'm trying to figure out. Hopefully that makes sense, I am not an expert in SEO, yet, but get the basics and have been playing, and this is just really a random question to satisfy my knowledge of playing :P

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• Turn-based tile game dynamic item/skill/command script files

  - by user1542

  I want to create a mechanism that could read text script, for example some kind of custom script such as ".skill" or ".item", which maybe contain some sort of simple script like .item Item.Name = "Strength Gauntlet"; Character.STR += 20; .. .skill Skill.Name = "Poison Attack"; Skill.Description = "Steal HP and inflict poison"; Player.HP += 200; Enemy.HP -= 200; Enemy.Status += Status.POISON; It may be different from this, but just want to give some idea of what I desire. However, I do not know how to dynamically parse these things and translate it into working script. For example, in battle scenerio, I should make my game read one of this ".skill" file and apply it to the current enemy, or the current player. How would I do this? Should I go for String parsing? It is like a script engine, but I prefer C# than creating new language, so how would I parse custom files into appropiate status commands? Another problem is, I have also created a command engine which would read String input and parse it into action such as "MOVE (1,2)" would move character to tile (1,2). Each command belong to separate class, and provide generic parsing method that should be implemented by hand. This is for the reason of custom number/type of arguments per each command. However, I think this is not well designed, because I desire it to automatically parse the parameters according to specify list of types. For example, MOVE command in "MOVE 1 2" would automatically parse the parameters into int, int and put it into X and Y. Now, this form can change, and we should be able to manually specify all type of formats. Any suggestion to this problem? Should I change from string parsing to some hardcode methods/classes?

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• How to create single integer index value based on two integers where first is unlimited?

  - by Jan Doggen

  I have table data containing an integer value X ranging from 1.... unknown, and an integer value Y ranging from 1..9 The data need to be presented in order 'X then Y'. For one visual component I can set multiple index names: X;Y But for another component I need a one-dimensional integer value as index (sort order). If X were limited to an upper bound of say 100, the one-dimensional value could simply be X*100 + Y. If the one-dimensional value could have been a real, it could be X + Y/10. But if I want to keep X unlimited, is there a way to calculate a single integer 'indexing' value from X and Y? [Added] Background information: I have a Gantt/TreeList component where the tasks are ordered on a TaskIndex integer. This does not need to be a real database field, I can make it a calculated field in the underlying client dataset. My table data is e.g. as follows: ID Baseline ParentID 1 0 0 (task) 5 2 1 (baseline) 8 1 1 (baseline) 9 0 0 (task) 12 0 0 (task) 16 1 12 (baseline) Task 1 has two baselines numbered 1 and 2 (IDs 8 and 5) Task 9 has no baselines Task 12 has one baseline numbered 1 (ID 16) Baselines number 1-9 (the Y variable from my question); 0 or null identify the tasks ID's are unlimited (the X variable) The user plays with visibility of baselines, e.g. he wants to see all tasks with all baselines labeled 1. This is done by updating a filter on the table. Right now I constantly have to recalculate TaskIndex after changing the filter (looping through records). It would be nice if TaskIndex could be calculated on the fly for each record knowing only the data in the current record (I work in Delphi where a client dataset has an OnCalcFields event handler, that is triggered for each record when necessary). I have no control over the inner workings of the visual component.

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• Web Hosting Advice for Project [duplicate]

  - by Lea Hayes

  Possible Duplicate: How to find web hosting that meets my requirements? I am working on a project that will be released as open source in the latter part of the year. I am starting to think about how the accompanying website will be hosted and would greatly appreciate some advice. Requirements: Domain #1 Information about the project itself (just pages and pictures). Documentation / Wiki Forums Download of project source (approx 3MB archive) Download of various themes and community contributed content (est. sizes 10KB ~ 512KB). Domain #2 Primary company website that offers products and services. This will be primarily pictures and pages. What kind of web hosting would be best for a project like this. I am working on a very tight budget and can only afford to spend up to £250 per year for hosting this. I was considering using some sort of VPS hosting. I found the following companies which seem to offer around this price range, but they have very mixed reviews. http://www.webhosting.uk.com/ http://www.eukhost.com/ Godaddy UK uk2 . net My company is based in the UK, how important is it for me to use UK based hosting? There are plenty of overseas hosting companies that are considerably cheaper. When it comes to bandwidth, how many downloads will bandwidth: 100GB get me? Any advice would be very greatly appreciated!

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• Formal definition for term "pure OO language"?

  - by Yauhen Yakimovich

  I can't think of a better place among SO siblings to pose such a question. Originally I wanted to ask "Is python a pure OO language?" but considering troubles and some sort of discomfort people experience while trying to define the term I decided to start with obtaining a clear definition for the term itself. It would be rather fair to start with correspondence by Dr. Alan Kay, who has coined the term (note the inspiration in biological analogy to cells or other living objects). There are following ways to approach the task: Give a comparative analysis by listing programming languages that exhibits certain properties unique and sufficient to define the term (although Smalltalk and Java are passing examples but IMO this way seems neither really complete or nor fruitful) Give a formal definition (or close to it, e.g. in more academic or mathematical style). Give a philosophical definition that would totally rely on semantical context of concrete language or a priori programming experience (there must be some chance of successful explanation by the community). My current version: "If a certain programing (formal) language that can (grammatically) differentiate between operations and operands as well as infer about the type of each operand whether this type is an object (in sense of OOP) or not then we call such a language an OO-language as long as there is at least one type in this language which is an object. Finally, if all types of the language are also objects we define such language to be pure OO-language." Would appreciate any possible improvement of it. As you can see I just made the definition dependent on the term "object" (often fully referenced as class of objects).

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• Managing flash animations for a game

  - by LoveMeSomeCode

  Ok, I've been writing C# for a while, but I'm new to ActionScript, so this is a question about best practices. We're developing a simple match game, where the user selects tiles and tries to match various numbers - sort of like memory - and when the match is made we want a series of animations to take place, and when they're done, remove the tile and add a new one. So basically it's: User clicks the MC Animation 1 on the MC starts Animation 1 ends Remove the MC from the stage Add a new MC Start the animation on the new MC The problem I run into is that I don't want to make the same timeline motion tween on each and every tile, when the animation is all the same. It's just the picture in the tile that's different. The other method I've come up with is to just apply the tweens in code on the main stage. Then I attach an event handler for MOTION_FINISH, and in that handler I trigger the next animation and listen for that to finish etc. This works too, but not only do I have to do all the tweening in code, I have a seperate event handler for each stage of the animation. So is there a more structured way of chaining these animations together?

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• Virtualbox shared folder mount from fstab fails; works once bootup is complete

  - by Ben

  I've got Ubuntu 13.10 installed in Virtualbox 4.3. The host machine is Windows. I have a couple of Virtualbox shared folders being mounted by /etc/fstab. Until recently this setup worked just fine, but after upgrading from Ubuntu 13.04 and Virtualbox 4.2 (at essentially the same time) the fstab mounting stopped working. I get the following error during boot: An error occurred while mounting /home/benme/Documents. keys:Press S to skip mounting or M for manual recovery Pressing M for manual recovery and then trying to mount manually also fails: root@benme-vb:~# cd /home/benme root@benme-vb:/home/benme# mount Documents /sbin/mount.vboxsf: mounting failed with the error: No such device But if I instead skip mounting during boot, wait for Unity to start and then mount manually in a shell, everything works fine: benme-vb ~ % ls Documents benme-vb ~ % sudo mount Documents [sudo] password for benme: benme-vb ~ % ls Documents # actual file list omitted Note that when I mount manually I'm letting mount take all the options from /etc/fstab, and it works. This suggests to me that it's some sort of timing issue, where Virtualbox isn't "ready" to provide the shared file mounts at the point /etc/fstab mounts are run during bootup. Here's the fstab line, just for completeness: Documents /home/benme/Documents vboxsf uid=benme,gid=benme,dmode=774,fmode=664 0 0 Is there something I can do about this from the Ubuntu side? Or does anyone happen to know more about this from the Virtualbox angle? I've found an old report on the Virtualbox bug-tracker with identical symptoms, but in that case the user had updated Virtualbox without updating their guest additions and resolving that fixed the problem; this isn't happening here, I've definitely got the 4.3 guest additions installed.

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• I'm a student learning C++ and I've recently found out about Ruby. Would learning (some of) Ruby help me with C++ or would it just confuse me?

  - by Von32

  As the title says, I'm a student that will be starting my second year of C++ very soon. I've discovered Ruby, however. While I've heard much buzz about the language before, I've disregarded it because I always thought it wasn't something that would be useful. However, I've found a number of FANTASTIC tutorials on ruby and am interested in learning it (probably because it seems so straightforward). Would playing around with ruby be a good or bad idea? I understand that there's not such thing as bad knowledge, but I'm afraid that Ruby will only confuse me when dealing with C++. How different from C++ is it? I've read it's based on C in some way. I've read some posts on here that Ruby and C++ can hold hands once in a while. How flexible is this relationship? Is it rarely that this would work? How useful is Ruby in the real world? I'm not specifically asking about jobs- I'm more interested in what sort of applications may come from this language. Any specific examples worth looking at?

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• Disable comments / Spam protection

  - by SamIAm

  My client site is built in Silverstripe, there is a news page, and it allows people to leave comments. Unfortunately we've got loads of spam emails. I'm new to this, is there any way we can disable the comment field by default? How do I do it? Alternatively is there easy way for me to install a spam protection? Thanks heaps. Sam Update - Because this is someone else's code, I just realised that they have some sort of spam protection already, so we are trying to disable comments now. I have manage to set no comment as default by changing file BlogEntry.php static $defaults = array( "ProvideComments" => true, 'ShowInMenus' => false ); to static $defaults = array( "ProvideComments" => false, //changed 'ShowInMenus' => false ); Am I on the right track to disable comments by default? Also how can I stop on the news page showing xxx comments link? eg Test Posted by Admin on 21 June 2011 | 3 Comments Tags: P This is a test.... 3 comments | Read the full post Thanks. S:)

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• Design pattern for an automated mechanical test bench

  - by JJS

  Background I have a test fixture with a number of communication/data acquisition devices on it that is used as an end of line test for a product. Because of all the various sensors used in the bench and the need to run the test procedure in near real-time, I'm having a hard time structuring the program to be more friendly to modify later on. For example, a National Instruments USB data acquisition device is used to control an analog output (load) and monitor an analog input (current), a digital scale with a serial data interface measures position, an air pressure gauge with a different serial data interface, and the product is interfaced through a proprietary DLL that handles its own serial communication. The hard part The "real-time" aspect of the program is my biggest tripping point. For example, I need to time how long the product needs to go from position 0 to position 10,000 to the tenth of a second. While it's traveling, I need to ramp up an output of the NI DAQ when it reaches position 6,000 and ramp it down when it reaches position 8,000. This sort of control looks easy from browsing NI's LabVIEW docs but I'm stuck with C# for now. All external communication is done by polling which makes for lots of annoying loops. I've slapped together a loose Producer Consumer model where the Producer thread loops through reading the sensors and sets the outputs. The Consumer thread executes functions containing timed loops that poll the Producer for current data and execute movement commands as required. The UI thread polls both threads for updating some gauges indicating current test progress. Unsure where to start Is there a more appropriate pattern for this type of application? Are there any good resources for writing control loops in software (non-LabVIEW) that interface with external sensors and whatnot?

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• What are the maths behind 'Raiden 2' purple laser?

  - by Aybe

  The path of the laser is affected by user input and enemies present on the screen. Here is a video, at 5:00 minutes the laser in question is shown : Raiden II (PS) - 1 Loop Clear - Part 2 UPDATE Here is a test using Inkscape, ship is at bottom, the first 4 enemies are targeted by the plasma. There seems to be a sort of pattern. I moved the ship first, then the handle from it to form a 45° angle, then while trying to fit the curve I found a pattern of parallel handles and continued so until I reached the last enemy. Update, 5/26/2012 : I started an XNA project using beziers, there is still some work needed, will update the question next week. Stay tuned ! Update : 5/30/2012 : It really seems that they are using Bézier curves, I think I will be able to replicate/imitate a plasma of such grade. There are two new topics I discovered since last time : Arc length, Runge's phenomenon, first one should help in having a linear movement possible over a Bézier curve, second should help in optimizing the number of vertices. Next time I will put a video so you can see the progress 8-)

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• I know fundamental programming. But how do I get started in game development now?

  - by Rohan Menon

  I'm a 20 year old programming student. I know fundamental programming in BASIC, C, C++ and JAVA. What I wanted to ask is, where do I go from here? Are there any books that the community can mention that will help me develop a game or at least learn game development? I've had a lot of ideas and really want to make some sort of prototype to see if I'm suited for the industry. I really don't mind learning any new languages but I need to know what I should begin with. A good book that will help with a little more understanding as I go up will be very helpful. Maybe a tutorial to develop some basic 2D games like a side-scroller, snake or pocket tanks in an easy to understand SDK? I know that to get some credit under your belt, you need to be able to make a few games on your own. Also, what platform should I start on? The PC, iOS or Android (as an introduction) for now. I don't want to get into high level game design just yet. Just something a bit basic to help out in future development. Anything pointing me in the right direction will be really really helpful. Edit: Also, I want to say that I'm looking towards this from a game designer's point of view more than a game programmer. I want suggestions on any SDKs or easy to use programs I can use to understand game design. Then delve deeper into the programming after that. Not as employment but as developing your own games (for now).

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• How do you cope with change in open source frameworks that you use for your projects?

  - by Amy

  It may be a personal quirk of mine, but I like keeping code in living projects up to date - including the libraries/frameworks that they use. Part of it is that I believe a web app is more secure if it is fully patched and up to date. Part of it is just a touch of obsessive compulsiveness on my part. Over the past seven months, we have done a major rewrite of our software. We dropped the Xaraya framework, which was slow and essentially dead as a product, and converted to Cake PHP. (We chose Cake because it gave us the chance to do a very rapid rewrite of our software, and enough of a performance boost over Xaraya to make it worth our while.) We implemented unit testing with SimpleTest, and followed all the file and database naming conventions, etc. Cake is now being updated to 2.0. And, there doesn't seem to be a viable migration path for an upgrade. The naming conventions for files have radically changed, and they dropped SimpleTest in favor of PHPUnit. This is pretty much going to force us to stay on the 1.3 branch because, unless there is some sort of conversion tool, it's not going to be possible to update Cake and then gradually improve our legacy code to reap the benefits of the new Cake framework. So, as usual, we are going to end up with an old framework in our Subversion repository and just patch it ourselves as needed. And this is what gets me every time. So many open source products don't make it easy enough to keep projects based on them up to date. When the devs start playing with a new shiny toy, a few critical patches will be done to older branches, but most of their focus is going to be on the new code base. How do you deal with radical changes in the open source projects that you use? And, if you are developing an open source product, do you keep upgrade paths in mind when you develop new versions?

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• Iphone/Android app – chatroom development – what framework & hosting needs?

  - by MikaelW

  I have some experience regarding IPhone and Android development but I am now struggling to solve a new class of problem: apps that involve a client/server chatroom feature. That is, an app when people can exchange text over the internet, and without having the app to constantly “pull” content from the server. So that problem can’t be solved with a normal php/mysql website, there must be some kind of application running on a server that is able to send message from the server to the phone, rather than having the phone to check for new messages every 10 seconds… So I’m looking for ways to solve the different problems here: What framework should I use on the two sides (phone / server)? It should be some kind of library that doesn’t prevent me to write paid apps. It should also be possible to have the same server for the Iphone and android version of the app. What server / hosting solution do I need with what sort of features, I just have no experience regarding server application that can handle and initiate multiple connections and are hosted on hardware that is always online I tried to find resources online but couldn’t so far, either the libraries had the wrong kind of license/language or I just didn’t understand… Sometimes there were nice tutorial but for different needs such as peer2peer chat over local network… Same with the server and the hosting problem, not sure where to start really, I’m calling for help and I promise I will complete this page with notes about the experience I will get :-) Obviously the ideal would be to find a tutorial I missed that include client code, server code and a free scalable server… That being said, If I see something as good, it probably means that I have eaten the wrong kind of mushroom again… So, failing that, any pointer which might help me toward that quest, would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance. Mikael

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• Distributed transactions and queues, ruby, erlang

  - by chrispanda

  I have a problem that involves several machines, message queues, and transactions. So for example a user clicks on a web page, the click sends a message to another machine which adds a payment to the user's account. There may be many thousands of clicks per second. All aspects of the transaction should be fault tolerant. I've never had to deal with anything like this before, but a bit of reading suggests this is a well known problem. So to my questions. Am I correct in assuming that secure way of doing this is with a two phase commit, but the protocol is blocking and so I won't get the required performance? It appears that DBs like redis and message queuing system like Rescue, RabbitMQ etc don't really help me a lot - even if I implement some sort of two phase commit, the data will be lost if redis crashes because it is essentially memory-only. All of this has led me to look at erlang - but before I wade in and start learning a new language, I would really like to understand better if this is worth the effort. Specifically, am I right in thinking that because of its parallel processing capabilities, erlang is a better choice for implementing a blocking protocol like two phase commit, or am I confused?

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• Good Laptop .NET Developer VM Setup

  - by Steve Brouillard

  I was torn between putting this question on this site or SuperUsers. I've tried to do a good bit of searching on this, and while I find plenty of info on why to go with a VM or not, there isn't much practical advise on HOW to best set things up. Here's what I currently HAVE: HP EliteBook 1540, quad-core, 8GB memory, 500GB 7200 RPM HD, eSATA port. Descent machine. Should work just fine. Windows 7 64-bit Host OS. This also acts as my day-to-day basic stuff (email, Word Docs, etc...) OS. VMWare Desktop Windows 7 64-bit Guest OS with all my .NET dev tools, frameworks, etc loaded on it. It's configured to use 2 cores and up to 6GB of memory. I figure that the dev env will need more than email, word, etc... So, this seemed like a good option to me, but I find with the VM running, things tend to slow down all around on both the host and guest OS. Memory and CPU utilization don't seem to be an issue, but I/O does. I tried running the VM on an external eSATA drive, figuring that the extra channel might pick up the slack. Things only got worse (could be my eSATA enclosure). So, for all of that I have basically two questions in one. Has anyone used this sort of setup and are there any gotchas either around the VMWare configuration or anything else I may have missed here that you can point me to? Is there another option that might work better? For example, I've considered trying a lighter weight Host OS and run both of my environments as VMs? I tried this with Server 2008 Hyper-V, but I lose too much laptop functionality going this route, so I never completed setup. I'm not averse to Linux as a host OS, though I'm no Linux expert. If I'm missing any critical info, feel free to ask. Thanks in advance for your help. Steve

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