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• Why is testing MVC Views frowned upon?

  - by Peter Bernier

  I'm currently setting the groundwork for an ASP.Net MVC application and I'm looking into what sort of unit-tests I should be prepared to write. I've seen in multiple places people essentially saying 'don't bother testing your views, there's no logic and it's trivial and will be covered by an integration test'. I don't understand how this has become the accepted wisdom. Integration tests serve an entirely different purpose than unit tests. If I break something, I don't want to know a half-hour later when my integration tests break, I want to know immediately. Sample Scenario : Lets say we're dealing with a standard CRUD app with a Customer entity. The customer has a name and an address. At each level of testing, I want to verify that the Customer retrieval logic gets both the name and the address properly. To unit-test the repository, I write an integration test to hit the database. To unit-test the business rules, I mock out the repository, feed the business rules appropriate data, and verify my expected results are returned. What I'd like to do : To unit-test the UI, I mock out the business rules, setup my expected customer instance, render the view, and verify that the view contains the appropriate values for the instance I specified. What I'm stuck doing : To unit-test the repository, I write an integration test, setup an appropriate login, create the required data in the database, open a browser, navigate to the customer, and verify the resulting page contains the appropriate values for the instance I specified. I realize that there is overlap between the two scenarios discussed above, but the key difference it time and effort required to setup and execute the tests. If I (or another dev) removes the address field from the view, I don't want to wait for the integration test to discover this. I want is discovered and flagged in a unit-test that gets multiple times daily. I get the feeling that I'm just not grasping some key concept. Can someone explain why wanting immediate test feedback on the validity of an MVC view is a bad thing? (or if not bad, then not the expected way to get said feedback)

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• Game Resource Generation

  - by Darthg8r

  I am currently building a game that has a "City" entity. These cities generate and consume resources such as food variably over a period of time. I need to be able query the server often to find exactly how much food the city at any given point. These queries can take place multiple times per minute. There could also be 400,000 cities to track at a given time. How would you handle tracking these resources? Would you do it in real time, keeping an instance of the city in memory on the server, with some sort of a snapshot in time of the resources, then computing the growth/consumption from that snapshot time for subsequent queries? Would you work exclusively with a database, using a similar "snapshoting" scheme? Maybe a mixture of the 2, caching recently queried cities in memory for a period of time? There is also a lot of other data that each city needs to track. A player can queue units to build in a barrack. The armies available in the city will need to be updated as units complete. I'm interested in everyone's input on where/when/how you'd manage the real time data.

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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 I draw a point sprite using OpenGL ES on Android?

  - by nbolton

  Edit: I'm using the GL enum, which is incorrect since it's not part of OpenGL ES (see my answer). I should have used GL10, GL11 or GL20 instead. Here's a few snippets of what I have so far... void create() { renderer = new ImmediateModeRenderer(); tiles = Gdx.graphics.newTexture( Gdx.files.getFileHandle("res/tiles2.png", FileType.Internal), TextureFilter.MipMap, TextureFilter.Linear, TextureWrap.ClampToEdge, TextureWrap.ClampToEdge); } void render() { Gdx.gl.glClear(GL10.GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT | GL10.GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT); Gdx.gl.glClearColor(0.6f, 0.7f, 0.9f, 1); } void renderSprite() { int handle = tiles.getTextureObjectHandle(); Gdx.gl.glBindTexture(GL.GL_TEXTURE_2D, handle); Gdx.gl.glEnable(GL.GL_POINT_SPRITE); Gdx.gl11.glTexEnvi(GL.GL_POINT_SPRITE, GL.GL_COORD_REPLACE, GL.GL_TRUE); renderer.begin(GL.GL_POINTS); renderer.vertex(pos.x, pos.y, pos.z); renderer.end(); } create() is called once when the program starts, and renderSprites() is called for each sprite (so, pos is unique to each sprite) where the sprites are arranged in a sort-of 3D cube. Unfortunately though, this just renders a few white dots... I suppose that the texture isn't being bound which is why I'm getting white dots. Also, when I draw my sprites on anything other than 0 z-axis, they do not appear -- I read that I need to crease my zfar and znear, but I have no idea how to do this using libgdx (perhaps it's because I'm using ortho projection? What do I use instead?). I know that the texture is usable, since I was able to render it using a SpriteBatch, but I guess I'm not using it properly with OpenGL.

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• A Cautionary Tale About Multi-Source JNDI Configuration

  - by scott.s.nelson(at)oracle.com

  Here's a bit of fun with WebLogic JDBC configurations.  I ran into this issue after reading that p13nDataSource and cgDataSource-NonXA should not be configured as multi-source. There were some issues changing them to use the basic JDBC connection string and when rolling back to the bad configuration the server went "Boom".  Since one purpose behind this blog is to share lessons learned, I just had to post this. If you write your descriptors manually (as opposed to generating them using the WLS console) and put a comma-separated list of JNDI addresses like this: <jdbc-data-source-params> <jndi-name>weblogic.jdbc.jts.commercePool,contentDataSource, contentVersioningDataSource,portalFrameworkPool</jndi-name> <algorithm-type>Load-Balancing</algorithm-type> <data-source-list>portalDataSource-rac0,portalDataSource-rac1</data-source-list> <failover-request-if-busy>false</failover-request-if-busy> </jdbc-data-source-params> so long as the first address resolves, it will still work. Sort of.  If you call this connection to do an update, only one node of the RAC instance is updated. Other wonderful side-effects include the server refusing to start sometimes. The proper way to list the JNDI sources is one per node, like this: <jdbc-data-source-params> <jndi-name>weblogic.jdbc.jts.commercePool</jndi-name> <jndi-name>contentDataSource</jndi-name> <jndi-name>contentVersioningDataSource</jndi-name> <jndi-name>portalFrameworkPool</jndi-name> <algorithm-type>Load-Balancing</algorithm-type> <data-source-list>portalDataSource-rac0, portalDataSource-rac1, portalDataSource-rac2 </data-source-list> <failover-request-if-busy>false</failover-request-if-busy> </jdbc-data-source-params>(Props to Sandeep Seshan for locating the root cause)

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• Game-a-Week One

  - by Matt Christian

  Anyone who chats with me on a semi-regular basis knows I am absolutely horrible at completing something from beginnning to end.  Often times I'll begin something, lose interest at some point, and end up moving onto the next thing.  For example, I have 1/2 a full game created, 1/3 of a novel written, and half of a model set created.  Needless to say, unless I have some sort of pressure to finish something I don't stick to it. Recently however one of my online buddies challenged me to create a simple game.  The start date was last Thursday and the final game needed to be delivered by this next Sunday (giving me just over a week).  However, I am going out of town this Friday so will need to deliver it by Thursday, giving me exactly 1 week to develop a game.  Here is what the game needed to include: The player should be able to shoot Shooting things should score points Sounds very simple, but given a single week to produce all art assets plus the game isn't an easy task.  So far I've developed: An animated Main Menu that loads via script files, allows the user to start a new game or exit the game The game is 3D and the player can move around the play area with an 'over-the-shoulder' camera HUD elements are drawn to display the player's current score When the player presses Esc they are shown a pause menu where they can resume the game by pressing Esc again, or quit the game by pressing Space There are also 2 items implemented that don't work perfectly: JigLibX physics library implementation On the main menu there is an arrow symbol that rotates to always point at your mouse I've got 2 days of development left so hopefully I can get collision working, some of the art cleaned up, and some more of the camera functionality working.  Also, I'll need to take some time to package the game up which hopefully shouldn't take too long.

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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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• How to hire support people?

  - by Martin

  I manage a tech support team at a mid-sized software company. We are the last line of support, so issues that we can't fix need to be escalated to the development team. When I joined the company, our team wasn't capable of much beyond using a specific set of troubleshooting steps to solve known issues and escalating anything else to the developers. It's always been a goal of mine for our team to shoulder as much of the support burden as possible without ever bothering a developer. Over the past few years, I, along with several new hires I've made, have made pretty good progress in that direction. We've coded our own troubleshooting tools which now ship with several of our products. When users have never-before-seen issues, we analyze stack traces and troubleshoot down to the code level, and if we need to submit a bug, half the time we've already identified in the code where in the code the bug is and offered a patch to fix it. Here's the problem I've always had: finding support people capable of the work I've described above is really difficult. I've hired 3 people in the past 3 years, and I've probably looked at several thousand resumes and conducted several hundred phone screens to do so. I know it's pretty well accepted that hiring good people is tough in the tech industry, but it seems that support is especially difficult -- there are clearly thousands of people walking around calling themselves support analysts, but 99%+ of them seemingly aren't capable of anything beyond reading a script. I'm curious if anyone has experience recruiting the sort of folks I'm talking about, and if you have any suggestions to share. We've tried all sorts of things -- different job titles/descriptions, using headhunters, etc. And while we've managed to hire a few good folks, it's basically taken us a year to find an appropriate candidate for each opening we've had, and I can't help but wonder if there's something we could be doing differently.

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• Should I have seperate business and personal websites?

  - by Thomas Clowes

  I have my business website - I am a web designer and developer, and also buy/sell websites/domain names. As such my website links to 'Our sites' = the websites which we design and run as well as a variety of tools such as a domain whois tool. These are obviously relevant to the business. As an individual, I like to travel and do white water kayaking as a hobby. I also have a degree in economics. I have thus created a blog on my business website where I write about domain names, web design, kayaking, travelling and economics. I've just begun researching SEO and am looking into optimizing my business website. I don't actually directly offer any services to clients at the moment, my main aim is to have a business website which supports my websites. If for example a potential advertise on one of my sites checks out the business website, I want them to think professional, down to earth, quirky. Given this is having my business/personal interests intertwined a problem? For SEO.. on my homepage for example when I'm writing a headline and a paragraph about what we do.. what do I put? and how do I optimize for SEO with keywords and the like? Further to the above, my company sponsors me and a group of accquantances as a kayaking team.. as such my personal interests do sort of overlap (just to add a complexity :))

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• Graduated transition from Green - Yellow - Red

  - by GoldBishop

  I have am having algorithm mental block in designing a way to transition from Green to Red, as smoothly as possible with a, potentially, unknown length of time to transition. For testing purposes, i will be using 300 as my model timespan but the methodology algorithm design needs to be flexible enough to account for larger or even smaller timespans. Figured using RGB would probably be the best to transition with, but open to other color creation types, assuming its native to .Net (VB/C#). Currently i have: t = 300 x = t/2 z = 0 low = Green (0, 255, 0) mid = Yellow (255, 255, 0) high = Red (255, 0, 0) Lastly, sort of an optional piece, is to account for the possibility of the low, mid, and high color's to be flexible as well. I assume that there would need to be a check to make sure that someone isnt putting in low = (255,0,0), mid=(254,0,0), and high=(253,0,0). Outside of this anomaly, which i will handle myself based on the best approach to evaluate a color. Question: What would be the best approach to do the transition from low to mid and then from mid to high? What would be some potential pitfalls of implementing this type of design, if any?

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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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• MDX needs a function or macro syntax

  - by Darren Gosbell

  I was having an interesting discussion with a few people about the impact of named sets on performance (the same discussion noted by Chris Webb here: http://cwebbbi.wordpress.com/2011/03/16/referencing-named-sets-in-calculations). And apparently the core of the performance issue comes down to the way named sets are materialized within the SSAS engine. Which lead me to the thought that what we really need is a syntax for declaring a non-materialized set or to take this even further a way of declaring an MDX expression as function or macro so that it can be re-used in multiple places. Because sometimes you do want the set materialised, such as when you use an ordered set for calculating rankings. But a lot of the time we just want to make our MDX modular and want to avoid having to repeat the same code over and over. I did some searches on connect and could not find any similar suggestions so I posted one here: https://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/details/651646/mdx-macro-or-function-syntax Although apparently I did not search quite hard enough as Chris Webb made a similar suggestion some time ago, although he also included a request for true MDX stored procedures (not the .Net style stored procs that we have at the moment): https://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/details/473694/create-parameterised-queries-and-functions-on-the-server Chris also pointed out this post that he did last year http://cwebbbi.wordpress.com/2010/09/13/iccube/ where he pointed out that the icCube product already has this sort of functionality. So if you think either or both of these suggestions is a good idea then I would encourage you to click on the links and vote for them.

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• Newly installed Ubuntu 12.10 and weird graphics

  - by Benji Marshall

  My machine: 2 GB RAM Intel Pentium Dual core E2180 @ 2 GHz NVIDIA GeForce 6200 LE My friend had recommended Ubuntu to me and I thought I might as well get used to Linux in anticipation for my Raspberry Pi. He said that Wubi was the easiest way to install and I installed it using Wubi. On my first ever boot up of Ubuntu from the Windows Bootloader started normally, and I logged on in a normal fashion, and my desktop loaded normally. I then pressed the Windows key/Power key and everything went wrong. Random lines of yellow and blue appeared on my screen, and changed location when I moved my mouse. The lines stayed for a few seconds and then partially went to I could sort of use my computer. I tried moving my mouse and the entire desktop looked like it broke apart, fragments of it just scatter across my screen at random angles. I could move my mouse and the pointer would move but clicking did nothing. I had to turn off my machine by removing the plug. I would love to get off Windows, but at least the doesn't completely mess up the graphics, and is relatively usable. Please help me solve this....

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• Understanding Service Compensation part of Industrial SOA series

  - by JuergenKress

  Some of the most important SOA design patterns that we have successfully applied in projects will be described in this article. These include the Compensation pattern and the UI mediator pattern, the Common Data Format pattern and the Data Access pattern. All of these patterns are included in Thomas Erl's book, "SOA Design Patterns", and are presented here in detail, together with our practical experiences. We begin our "best of" SOA pattern collection with the Compensation pattern. Compensation is required in error situations in an SOA, as multiple atomic service operations cannot generally be linked with classic transactions this would violate the principle of loose coupling. An error situation of this sort will occur, particularly if service operations are combined into processes or new services during orchestration or by applying the Composite pattern, and the transaction bracket has to be expanded as a result. We need mechanisms to undo the effects of individual services (the status changes in the overall system) and to ensure that a consistent system state is maintained at all times, so as to preserve system integrity. For the Compensation pattern, we would like to address the following questions: Why is compensation important in relation to SOA? How is the topic of compensation linked with the topic of transactions? What are the challenges with regard to compensation... Read the full article in the Service Technology Magazine or at OTN. Share your comments and feedback on the Industrial SOA series by using the hashtag #industrialsoa. Missed an article of the Industrial SOA series visit the overview at OTN. SOA & BPM Partner Community For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Facebook Wiki Mix Forum Technorati Tags: Industrial SOA,SOA,SOA Service Compensation,Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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• Adding sub-entities to existing entities. Should it be done in the Entity and Component classes?

  - by Coyote

  I'm in a situation where a player can be given the control of small parts of an entity (i.e. Left missile battery). Therefore I started implementing sub entities as follow. Entities are Objects with 3 arrays: pointers to components pointers to sub entities communication subscribers (temporary implementation) Now when an entity is built it has a few components as you might expect and also I can attach sub entities which are handled with some dedicated code in the Entity and Component classes. I noticed sub entities are sharing data in 3 parts: position: the sub entities are using the parent's position and their own as an offset. scrips: sub entities are draining ammo and energy from the parent. physics: sub entities add weight to the parent I made this to quickly go forward, but as I'm slowly fixing current implementations I wonder if this wasn't a mistake. Is my current implementation something commonly done? Will this implementation put me in a corner? I thought it might be a better thing to create some sort of SubEntityComponent where sub entities are attached and handled. But before changing anything I wanted to seek the community's wisdom.

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• Is it common to lie in job ads regarding the technologies in use?

  - by Desolate Planet

  Wanted: Experienced Delphi programmer to maintain ginormous legacy application and assist in migration to C# Later on, as the new hire settles into his role... "Oh, that C# migration? Yeah, we'd love to do that. But management is dead-set against it. Good thing you love Pascal, eh?" I've noticed quite a lot of this where I live (Scotland) and I'm not sure how common this is across IT: a company is using a legacy technology and they know that most developers will avoid them to keep mainstream technology on their resumes. So, they will put out a advertisement saying they are looking to move their product to some hip new tech (C#, Ruby, FORTRAN 99) and require someone who has exposure to both - but the migration is just a carrot on a stick, perpetually hung in front of the hungry developer as he spends each day maintaining the legacy app. I've experienced this myself, and heard far too many similar stories to the point where it seems like common practice. I've learned over time that every company has legacy problems of some sort, but I fail to see why they can't be honest about it. It should be common sense to any developer that the technology in place is there to support the business and not the other way round. Unless the technology is hurting the business in someway, I hardly see any just cause for reworking the software stack to be made up whatever is currently vogue in the industry. Would you say that this is commonplace? If so, how can I detect these kinds of leading advertisements beforehand?

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• Clear edged sprite

  - by Ananth

  I am a newbie to cocos2d. I would like make user to draw similar to what a painting brush would do. I am using CCSprite for that. I almost implemented the velocity, color and opacity factors for that tool, but I couldn't get the Sprite to be as clear as it should be. I can draw only in the below image http://i.imgur.com/KBe0L.png which has blunt edges. But I want it to be harder / clear outside edges as in http://i.stack.imgur.com/GrFlv.png. I am getting no idea to make it clear edged. The piece of code Im using is glEnable(GL_BLEND); [brush.texture setAliasTexParameters]; [brush setBlendFunc:(ccBlendFunc){GL_ONE, GL_ONE_MINUS_SRC_ALPHA}]; [brush visit]; I suspect the problem would be on blending mode. I tried some blending modes, but with no expected results. I am trying this for the past five days and so confused. Can some one help me sort this out? Thanks in advance.

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• Unity Launcher only runs once - requires lightdm restart before it runs again

  - by Don

  I have an intermittent problem that just started showing up several days ago. I am running 11.10 and all updates are current. I first saw the symptom with a custom version of the "Home" nautilus-home.desktop file I created in ~/.local.share/applications. I added a few static shortcuts to specific folders. What I found was, clikcing the icon once would open up my home folder, but after closing that nautilus window, clicking the icon again did nothing (did not even show icon backlight animation). However, I could right click on the same icon and access my short cuts as many times as I want. Symptom persisted until restarting lightdm. Just yesterday I saw the same sort of symptom happen with a custom launcher I created for a chromium-borwser to open a specific URL (with a few short cuts to other URLs). Click the icon - it works once. Then never again. Right click the icon and I can use the short cuts over and over - no problem. Note - at one point I assumed I might have a problem with my custom .desktop file, so I did a test by removing my custom nautilus-home.desktop. However, even after restarting lightdm, and verifying the home icon was the standard one from /opt/share/applications (all my custom shortcuts were gone) I saw the same symptom re-appear - it runs once and then not again until restarting lightdm. It seems to be intermittent and seems to move between various launchers. Not sure what to do or even what background data to gather. Attempt to improve question after the first answer: I tried the following: 1) remove all custom launchers 2) reboot 3) add custom lauchers back 4) reboot 5) attempt to use .... still have "runs once and never again" symptom with several launchers

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• A fresh install and clean up?

  - by wdypdx22

  I started with Ubuntu around 3 years ago and have been a dedicated user ever since. During that time I tried out lots of apps, themes, etc. And, I've updated every version as it has come along so now I'm running Lucid. Basically, my system has gotten sort of "messy" and I'm planning a vigorous clean up and a fresh install. My /home is on a separate partition from everything else, so I can preserve that. I want to find and remove unused, unneeded apps (which I pretty much understand how to do). Also, I want to get back to the default desktop theme and build back up from there. And other messes surely exist. So, my question is, What is a good, logical plan to clean up and freshly reinstall my system? (One note is that I have found many links in searches on this issue. There are many links on this topic and many are out of date. So, it's gotten rather confusing to say the least.) Thanks.

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• Automatic Appointment Conflict Resolution

  - by Thomas

  I'm trying to figure out an algorithm for resolving appointment times. I currently have a naive algorithm that pushes down conflicting appointments repeatedly, until there are no more appointments. # The appointment list is always sorted on start time appointment_list = [ <Appointment: 10:00 -> 12:00>, <Appointment: 11:00 -> 12:30>, <Appointment: 13:00 -> 14:00>, <Appointment: 13:30 -> 14:30>, ] Constraints are that appointments: cannot be after 15:00 cannot be before 9:00 This is the naive algorithm for i, app in enumerate(appointment_list): for possible_conflict in appointment_list[i+1:]: if possible_conflict.start < app.end: difference = app.end - possible_conflict.start possible_conflict.end += difference possible_conflict.start += difference else: break This results in the following resolution, which obviously breaks those constraints, and the last appointment will have to be pushed to the following day. appointment_list = [ <Appointment: 10:00 -> 12:00>, <Appointment: 12:00 -> 13:30>, <Appointment: 13:30 -> 14:30>, <Appointment: 14:30 -> 15:30>, ] Obviously this is sub-optimal, It performs 3 appointment moves when the confict could have been resolved with one: if we were able to push the first appointment backwards, we could avoid moving all the subsequent appointments down. I'm thinking that there should be a sort of edit-distance approach that would calculate the least number of appointments that should be moved in order to resolve the scheduling conflict, but I can't get the a handle on the methodology. Should it be breadth-first or depth first solution search. When do I know if the solution is "good enough"?

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• Cost effective way to provide static media content

  - by james

  I'd like to be able to deliver around 50MB of static content, either in about 30 individual files up to 10MB or grouped into 3 compressed files, around 5k to 20k times a day. Ideally I'd like to put some sort of very basic security around providing the data to ensure that a request is from the expected source, but if tossing the security for a big reduction in price is possible then it's an option. Does anyone have any suggestions other than what I've found: Google AppEngine is $0.12/GB & I believe has a file size limit of 10MB so I'd have to break the data up a bit. So a rough calculation would seem to be that this would cost me about $30 to $120 a day. Or I've seen something like what seems to be just public static content delivery with no type of logic capabilities like Usenet.nl at what I think calculates to about $0.025/GB which would cost me about $6 to $25 a day. Any idea if I'm going about these calculations right & if there might be a better option for just static content on a decently high volume delivery? Again some basic security would be great but if cost is greatly reduced without it then I'm up for that.

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• What types of programming contest problems are there?

  - by Alex

  Basically, I want to make a great reference for use with programming contests that would have all of the algorithms that I can put together that I would need during a contest as well as sample useage for the code. I'm planning on making this into a sort of book that I could print off and take with me to competitions. I would like to do this rather than simply bringing other books (such as Algorithms books) because I think that I will learn a lot more by going over all of the algorithms myself as well as I would know exactly what I have in the book, making it more efficient to have and use. So, I've been doing research to determine what types of programming problems and algorithms are common on contests, and the only thing I can really find is this (which I have seen referenced a few times): Hal Burch conducted an analysis over spring break of 1999 and made an amazing discovery: there are only 16 types of programming contest problems! Furthermore, the top several comprise almost 80% of the problems seen at the IOI. Here they are: Dynamic Programming Greedy Complete Search Flood Fill Shortest Path Recursive Search Techniques Minimum Spanning Tree Knapsack Computational Geometry Network Flow Eulerian Path Two-Dimensional Convex Hull BigNums Heuristic Search Approximate Search Ad Hoc Problems The most challenging problems are Combination Problems which involve a loop (combinations, subsets, etc.) around one of the above algorithms - or even a loop of one algorithm with another inside it. These seem extraordinarily tricky to get right, even though conceptually they are ``obvious''. Now that's good and all, but that study was conducted in 1999, which was 13 years ago! One thing I know is that there are no BigNums problems any more (as Java has a BigInteger class, they have stopped making those problems). So, I'm wondering if anyone knows of any more recent studies of the types of problems that may be seen in a programming contest? Or what the most helpful algorithms on contests would be?

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• What's so bad about pointers in C++?

  - by Martin Beckett

  To continue the discussion in Why are pointers not recommended when coding with C++ Suppose you have a class that encapsulates objects which need some initialisation to be valid - like a network socket. // Blah manages some data and transmits it over a socket class socket; // forward declaration, so nice weak linkage. class blah { ... stuff TcpSocket *socket; } ~blah { // TcpSocket dtor handles disconnect delete socket; // or better, wrap it in a smart pointer } The ctor ensures that socket is marked NULL, then later in the code when I have the information to initialise the object. // initialising blah if ( !socket ) { // I know socket hasn't been created/connected // create it in a known initialised state and handle any errors // RAII is a good thing ! socket = new TcpSocket(ip,port); } // and when i actually need to use it if (socket) { // if socket exists then it must be connected and valid } This seems better than having the socket on the stack, having it created in some 'pending' state at program start and then having to continually check some isOK() or isConnected() function before every use. Additionally if TcpSocket ctor throws an exception it's a lot easier to handle at the point a Tcp connection is made rather than at program start. Obviously the socket is just an example, but I'm having a hard time thinking of when an encapsulated object with any sort of internal state shouldn't be created and initialised with new.

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• Learning Electronics & the Arduino Microcontroller

  - by Chris Williams

  Lately, I've had a growing interest in Electronics & Microcontrollers. I'm a loyal reader of Make Magazine and thoroughly enjoy seeing all the various projects in each issue, even though I rarely try to make any of them. I've been reading and watching videos about the Arduino, which is an open source Microcontroller and software project that the people at Make (and a lot of other folks) are pretty hot about. Even the prebuilt hardware is remarkably inexpensive , although there are kits available to build one from the base components. (Full disclosure: I bought my first soldering iron... EVER... just last week, so I fully acknowledge the likelihood of making some mistakes. That's why I'm not trying to do the "build it yourself" kit just yet. It's also another reason to be happy the hardware is so cheap.) There are a number of different Arduino boards available, but the two that have really piqued my interest are the Arduino UNO and the NETduino. The UNO is a very popular board, with a number of features and is under $35 which means I won't hurl myself off a bridge when I inevitably destroy it. The NETduino is very similar to the Arduino UNO and has the added advantage of being programmable with... you guessed it... C#. I'm actually ordering both boards and some miscellaneous other doodads to go with them.  There are a few good websites for this sort of thing, including www.makershed.com and www.adafruit.com. The price difference is negligible, so in my case, I'm ordering from Maker Shed (the Make Magazine people) because I want to support them. :) I've also picked up a few O'Reilly books on the subject which I am looking forward to reading & reviewing: Make: Electronics, Arduino: A Quick Start Guide and Getting Started With Arduino (all three of which arrived on my doorstep today.) This ties in with my "learn more about robotics" goals as well, since I'll need a good understanding of Electronics if I want to move past Lego Mindstorms eventually.

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• Are Intel compilers really better than Microsoft ones?

  - by Rocket Surgeon

  Years ago I was surprised when discovered that Intel sells Studio compatible compilers. I tried it in particular for C/C++ as well as fantastic diagnostic tools. But the code was simply not that computationally intensive to notice the difference. The only impression was: did Intel really did it for me just now, Wow, amazing tools with nanoseconds resolution, unbeleivable. But the trial ended and team never seriously considered a purchase. From your experience, if license cost does not matter, which vendor is a winner ? It is not broad or vague question or attemt to spark a holy war. This sort of question about 2 very visible tools. Nobody likes when tools have any mysteries or surprises. And choices between best and best are always the pain. I also understand the "grass greener" argument. I want to hear all "what ifs" stories. What if Intel just locally optimizes it for the chip stepping of the month, and not every hardware target will actually work as well as Microsoft compiled ? What if AMD hardware is the target and everything will slow down for no reason ? Or on other hand, what if Intel's hardware has so many unnoticable opportunities, that Microsoft compiler writers are too slow to adopt and never implement in the compiler ? What if both are the same exactly, actually a single codebase just wrapped into 2 different boxes and licensed to both vendors by some 3rd party shop? And so on. But someone knows some answers.

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