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• Is having 'Util' classes a cause for concern? [closed]

  - by Matt Fenwick

  I sometimes create 'Util' classes which primarily serve to hold methods and values that don't really seem to belong elsewhere. But every time I create one of these classes, I think "uh-oh, I'm gonna regret this later ...", because I read somewhere that it's bad. But on the other hand, there seem to be two compelling (at least for me) cases for them: implementation secrets that are used in multiple classes within a package providing useful functionality to augment a class, without cluttering its interface Am I on the way to destruction? What you say !! Should I refactor?

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• Designing and refactoring of payment logic

  - by jokklan

  Im currently working on an application that helps users to coordinate dinner clubs and all related accounting. (A dinner club is where people in a group, take turns to cook for the rest and then you pay a small amount to participate. This is pretty normal in dorms and colleges where im from). However there is some different models that all have a price and the accounting aspect is therefore a little spread. We both have DinnerClub, ShoppingItem and are about to implement the third Payment when users pay their debts (or get refunded for expenses). Each of these have a "price" attribute and a users expense (that he or she needs refunded) is calculated by the total of these "prices" minus what other users have bought and he or she have used/participated in. My question is then if someone have some hints to refactor this bring all this behavior together in one place? For now have i thought about a Transaction class that are responsible for this behaviour, but I'm a little worried about the performance impact on having to query for another polymorphic record each time i want to show the price on dinner clubs and shopping items (i have a standard index page with a list for both so it's a lot of extra records being queried)...

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• Why don't languages include implication as a logical operator?

  - by Maciej Piechotka

  It might be a strange question, but why there is no implication as a logical operator in many languages (Java, C, C++, Python Haskell - although as last one have user defined operators its trivial to add it)? I find logical implication much clearer to write (particularly in asserts or assert-like expressions) then negation with or: encrypt(buf, key, mode, iv = null) { assert (mode != ECB --> iv != null); assert (mode == ECB || iv != null); assert (implies(mode != ECB, iv != null)); // User-defined function }

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• Managing accounts on a private website for a real-life community

  - by Smudge

  I'm looking at setting-up a walled-in website for a real-life community of people, and I was wondering if anyone has any experience with managing member accounts for this kind of thing. Some conditions that must be met: This community has a set list of real-life members, each of whom would be eligible for one account on the website. We don't expect or require that they all sign-up. It is purely opt-in, but we anticipate that many of them would be interested in the services we are setting up. Some of the community members emails are known, but some of them have fallen off the grid over the years, so ideally there would be a way for them to get back in touch with us through the public-facing side of the site. (And we'd want to manually verify the identity of anyone who does so). Their names are known, and for similar projects in the past we have assigned usernames derived from their real-life names. This time, however, we are open to other approaches, such as letting them specify their own username or getting rid of usernames entirely. The specific web technology we will use (e.g. Drupal, Joomla, etc) is not really our concern right now -- I am more interested in how this can be approached in the abstract. Our database already includes the full member roster, so we can email many of them generated links to a page where they can create an account. (And internally we can require that these accounts be paired with a known member). Should we have them specify their own usernames, or are we fine letting them use their registered email address to log-in? Are there any paradigms for walled-in community portals that help address security issues if, for example, one of their email accounts is compromised? We don't anticipate attempted break-ins being much of a threat, because nothing about this community is high-profile, but we do want to address security concerns. In addition, we want to make the sign-up process as painless for the members as possible, especially given the fact that we can't just make sign-ups open to anyone. I'm interested to hear your thoughts and suggestions! Thanks!

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• Who can change the View in MVC?

  - by Luke

  I'm working on a thick client graph displaying and manipulation application. I'm trying to apply the MVC pattern to our 3D visualization component. Here is what I have for the Model, View, and Controller: Model - The graph and it's metadata. This includes vertices, edges, and the attributes of each. It does not contain position information, icons, colors, or anything display related. View - This would commonly be called a scene graph. It includes the 3D display information, texture information, color information, and anything else that is related specifically to the visualization of the model. Controller - The controller takes the view and displays it in a Window using OpenGL (but it could potentially be any 3D graphics package). The application has various "layouts" that change the position of the vertices in the display. For instance, one layout may arrange the vertices in a circle. Is it common for these layouts to access and change the view directly? Should they go through the Controller to access the View? If they go through the Controller, should they just ask for direct access to the View or should each change go through the controller? I realize this is a bit different from the standard MVC example where there a finite number of Views. In this case, the View can change in an infinite number of ways. Perhaps I'm shattering some basic principle of MVC here. Thanks in advance!

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• What are good ways to find collaborators for a coding weekend?

  - by tarrasch

  Not sure if this belongs here, feel free to push it somewhere else if needed. When i was at university we would sometimes come together into a room full of beer and fast food and crank out software in a weekend. Unfortunately the group has kind of split up and its just not possible any more. My question is now: Where can i find like-minded people on the Internet that would like to do something like this? I have an idea what i wanted to do next, but of course other people have ideas too.

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• Where to hire a scenario writer for a small interactive story game?

  - by Alexander Gladysh

  I need a scenario for a small dialog-based game / interactive story. The game would be used as an example for a middleware tool we're developing. I would like to buy an existing story (it should be dynamic of course — with branching dialogs etc.), or hire someone to write a new one. Please advise, where to go to find such person / service? We're based in Russia, so getting a talented enough native English writer locally is a bit of a problem. Update: To be extra clear: We must get all necessary rights to reuse the story and make a derived work (i.e. the game we're talking about) from it. This is a commercial product. Borrowing someone else's work at random and using it just not going to work.

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• Should developers make their games easier with new versions?

  - by Gil Kalai

  It seems that the game Angry Birds is becoming gradually easier with new versions. Maybe so people get the illusion of progress and satisfaction of breaking new records? I would like to know if gradual small modifications of games to enhance the sense of improvement and learning by users is known/common/standard practice in game developing. (I don't mean to say that there is anything wrong with such a practice.)

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• How should I architect a personal schedule manager that runs 24/7?

  - by Crawford Comeaux

  I've developed an ADHD management system for myself that's attempting to change multiple habits at once. I know this is counter to conventional wisdom, but I've tried the conventional for years & am now trying it my way. (just wanted to say that to try and prevent it from distracting people from the actual question) Anyway, I'd like to write something to run on a remote server that monitors me, helps me build/avoid certain habits, etc. What this amounts to is a system that: runs 24/7 may have multiple independent tasks to run at once may have tasks that require other tasks to run first lets tasks be scheduled by specific time, recurrence (ie. "run every 5 mins"), or interval (ie. "run from 2pm to 3pm") My first naive attempt at this was just a single PHP script scheduled to run every minute by cron (language was chosen in order to use a certain library, but no longer necessary). The logic behind when to run this or that portion of code got hairy pretty quick. So my question is how should I approach this from here? I'm not tied to any one language, though I'm partial to python/javascript. Thoughts: Could be done as a set of scripts that include a scheduling mechanism with one script per bit of logic...but the idea just feels wrong to me. Building it as a daemon could be helpful, but still unsure what to do about dozens of if-else statements for detecting the current time

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• Have you worked with a well designed application?

  - by Vilx-

  Inspired by this question, I started wondering - is there or has there ever been such a thing as a "well designed application"? One where the architecture would be perfect and no refactoring would ever be needed; code would be easy to read and understand even for someone new to the project; changes could be done with a 100% certainty that they won't break anything; etc? I must admit that whatever codebases I've worked with, they've all been more or less a mess. Even code that I start myself only stays organized at the start, and then slowly deteriorates as the time passes. I'm even starting to accept this as part of life and can't figure out whether I should be worried about that or not. So... is there such a thing as a "well designed application"? Or is all our code so shitty that there isn't even a point in trying to make it better, because it will never be good anyway?

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• Is it a good approach to rely on 3rd party software ( not library )?

  - by gunbuster363

  We have program using a call to a winzip program or 7zip commandline tool to zip some files. Once I accidentally uninstall winzip on my computer and making one of our program( created by the programmer already left ) crashed. So we cannot uninstall the winzip program. Now I've come to a point which I need to decide a external tool for gzip in windows or I make a java program which I can call to gzip the file. Obviously a external tool such as 7z is convenient and we can avoid some extra coding with java. On the contrary, if 7z is uninstalled accidentally, our program will crash. What do you think?

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• What are some internet trends that you've noticed over the past ~10 years? [closed]

  - by Michael

  I'll give an example of one that I've noticed: the number of web sites that ask for your email address (GOOG ID, YAHOO! ID, etc.) has skyrocketed. I can come up with no legitimate reason for this other than (1) password reset [other ways to do this], or (2) to remind you that you have an account there, based upon the time of your last visit. Why does a web site need to know your email address (Google ID, etc.) if all you want to do is... download a file (no legit reason whatsoever) play a game (no legit reason whatsoever) take an IQ test or search a database (no legit reason whatsoever) watch a video or view a picture (no legit reason whatsoever) read a forum (no legit reason whatsoever) post on a forum (mildly legit reason: password reset) newsletter (only difference between a newsletter and a blog is that you're more likely to forget about the web site than you are to forget about your email address -- the majority of web sites do not send out newsletters, however, so this can't be the justification) post twitter messages or other instant messaging (mildly legit reason: password reset) buy something (mildly legit reasons: password reset + giving you a copy of a receipt that they can't delete, as receipts stored on their server can be deleted) On the other hand, I can think of plenty of very shady reasons for asking for this information: so the NSA, CIA, FBI, etc. can very easily track what you do by reading your email or asking GOOG, etc. what sites you used your GOOG ID at to use the password that you provide for your account in order to get into your email account (most people use the same password for all of their accounts), find all of your other accounts in your inbox, and then get into all of those accounts sell your email address to spammers These reasons, I believe, are why you are constantly asked to provide your email address. I can come up with no other explanations whatsoever. Question 1: Can anyone think of any legitimate or illegitimate reasons for asking for someone's email address? Question 2: What are some other interesting internet trends of the past ~10 years?

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• Options for Application Registry

  - by Matt Felzani

  I work for a small software company (about 200 people building 8-10 applications) and I was hoping to get some advice on products that might be out there to manage the information of which clients are using which versions of our products? The most fundamental relationship would be that a "product" has "versions" and a given "version" is used by a "client." Uses would be: Determine which clients use which products Determine which clients are on which versions of a product Determine which clients are exposed to which vulnerabilities because of the version they use Determine which clients cannot move to a new version because of a vulnerability in the new version that they may hit Determine which clients should be approached for an upgrade Any thoughts or product reviews would be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance.

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• Implementing new required feature after software release

  - by TiagoBrenck

  Fake Scenario There is a software that was released 1 year ago. The software is to map and register all kind of animals on our planet. When the software was released, the client only needed to know the scientific name of the animal, a flag if it is in risk of extinction and a scale of dangerous(that is a fake software and specification, I don't want to discuss this here). There are already 100.000 animals records saved on DB. New Feature One year later, the client wants a new feature. It is really important to him to know the animals classes, and this is a required field. So he asks me to put a field to input the animal class, and this field is required. Or maybe where this animal was discovered. Problem I have already 100.000 recorded animals without a class or where it was discovered, but I need to insert a new column to storage this information and this column can't be null. I don't have a default value for this situation (there isn't a default animal class or where it was discovered). I don't want to keep the requirement rule only on my software, my DB must have this requirement too(I like to keep business rules on DB too). What are the alternatives to solve this situation? I am on a situation that this new feature cannot be previewed or reviewed for the existing records. The time already passed and I can't go back on time to get it

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• Ubiquitous Language and Custom types

  - by EdvRusj

  Note that my question is referring to those attributes that even on their own already represent a concept ( ie on their own provide a cohesive meaning ). Thus such attribute needs no additional functional support and as such is self-contained. I'm also well-aware that even with self-contained attributes the custom types may prove beneficial ( for example, they give the ability to add new behavior later, when business requirements change ). Thus, my question focuses only on whether custom types for self-contained attributes really enrich Ubiquitous Language UL a) I've read that in most cases, even simple, self-contained attributes should have custom, more descriptive types rather than basic value types ( double, string ... ), because among other things, descriptive types add to the UL, while the use of basic types instead weakens the language. I understand the importance of UL, but how does having a basic type for a self-contained attribute weaken the language, since with self-contained attributes the name of the attribute already adequately describes the concept and thus contributes to the UL vocabulary? For example, the term person_age already adequately explains the concept of quantifying the number of years a person has: class Person { string person_age; } so what could we possibly gain by also introducing the term ThingAge to the UL: class person { ThingAge person_age; } thanks

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• Is premature optimization really the root of all evil?

  - by Craig Day

  A colleague of mine today committed a class called ThreadLocalFormat, which basically moved instances of Java Format classes into a thread local, since they are not thread safe and "relatively expensive" to create. I wrote a quick test and calculated that I could create 200,000 instances a second, asked him was he creating that many, to which he answered "nowhere near that many". He's a great programmer and everyone on the team is highly skilled so we have no problem understanding the resulting code, but it was clearly a case of optimizing where there is no real need. He backed the code out at my request. What do you think? Is this a case of "premature optimization" and how bad is it really?

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• How to had operation with character/items on binary with concrete operations on C++?

  - by Piperoman

  I have the next problem. A item can had a lot of states: NORMAL = 0000000 DRY = 0000001 HOT = 0000010 BURNING = 0000100 WET = 0001000 COLD = 0010000 FROZEN = 0100000 POISONED= 1000000 A item can had some states at same time but not all of them Is impossible to be dry and wet at same time. If you COLD a WET item, it turns into FROZEN. If you HOT a WET item, it turns into NORMAL A item can be BURNING and POISON Etc. I have try to set binary flags to states, and use AND to set operation to combine different states, checking before if is possible or not to do it, or change to another status. Exist a concrete patron to solve this problem efficiently without had a interminable switch that check every states with everynew states? It is relative easy to check 2 different states, but if exist a third state it is not trivial to do.

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• Does MVC apply only to web

  - by Deeptechtons

  It is almost and instantaneous whenever I talk to developers about Model View Controller (MVC) they say you make a request to a url the server builds a entity (MODEL) and provides you with visual representation of that model. So does this mean MVC is only for the web or have I been meeting people who are just developers who employ MVC for writing web applications? Are there usages for MVC on desktop style applications? I for one am new to paradigm and would like to know of any super-set to MVC

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• How to implement "bullet time" in a multiplayer game?

  - by Tom

  I have never seen such a feature before, but it should provide an interesting gameplay opportunity. So yes, in a multiplayer/real-time environment (imagine FPS), how could I implement a slow motion/bullet time effect? Something like an illusion for the player that's currently slo-mo'ed. So everybody sees him "real-time", but he sees everything slowed down. Update A sidenote: keep in mind that a FPS game has to be balanced in order for it to be fun. So yes, this bullet time feature has to be solid, giving a small advantage to the "player", while not taking away from other players. Plus, there is a possibility that two players could activate their bullet time at the same time. Furthermore: I'm going to implement this in the future no matter what it takes. And, the idea is to build a whole new game engine for all this. If that gives new options, I'm more then interested in hearing the ideas. Meanwhile, here with my team we're thinking about this too, when our theory will be crafted, I'm going to share it here. Is this even possible? So, the question on "is this even possible" has been answered, now it's time to find the best solution. I'm keeping the "answer" until something exceptionally good comes up, like a prototype theory with something close to working pseudo code.

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• Questioning one of the arguments for dependency injection: Why is creating an object graph hard?

  - by oberlies

  Dependency injection frameworks like Google Guice give the following motivation for their usage (source): To construct an object, you first build its dependencies. But to build each dependency, you need its dependencies, and so on. So when you build an object, you really need to build an object graph. Building object graphs by hand is labour intensive (...) and makes testing difficult. But I don't buy this argument: Even without dependency injection, I can write classes which are both easy to instantiate and convenient to test. E.g. the example from the Guice motivation page could be rewritten in the following way: class BillingService { private final CreditCardProcessor processor; private final TransactionLog transactionLog; // constructor for tests, taking all collaborators as parameters BillingService(CreditCardProcessor processor, TransactionLog transactionLog) { this.processor = processor; this.transactionLog = transactionLog; } // constructor for production, calling the (productive) constructors of the collaborators public BillingService() { this(new PaypalCreditCardProcessor(), new DatabaseTransactionLog()); } public Receipt chargeOrder(PizzaOrder order, CreditCard creditCard) { ... } } So there may be other arguments for dependency injection (which are out of scope for this question!), but easy creation of testable object graphs is not one of them, is it?

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• Why is facebook cache buggy?

  - by IAdapter

  I just started using facebook and I see that many times when I add something to my profile and visit it later its not there. I bet the reason is that the page is cached and not updated very often. Is this on purpose or is it a bug? P.S. For example I added the music I like and later I see that I did not add it, but next day when I visit again its there. I saw it in two web-browsers, so its a facebook bug. Does it has something to do with scalability?

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• Should a web designer know server-side coding?

  - by Rasoul Zabihi

  We're implementing an CMS based on ASP.NET MVC. Now, any designer should be able to provide themes for this CMS. But to write a theme, they need to be able to modify the generated HTML, thus the concept of View. In other words, they should be capable to either modify current views, or create new views from scratch, to fit their requirements. However, now we're not sure that we're taking the right path. Should a web designer (HTML, CSS, JavaScript + Photoshop) really know about server-side platforms like Razor or PHP, or classic ASP, or anything else?

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• Rails: The Law of Demeter [duplicate]

  - by user2158382

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

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• When to use functional programming approach and when not? (in Java)

  - by john smith optional

  let's assume I have a task to create a Set of class names. To remove duplication of .getName() method calls for each class, I used org.apache.commons.collections.CollectionUtils and org.apache.commons.collections.Transformer as follows: Snippet 1: Set<String> myNames = new HashSet<String>(); CollectionUtils.collect( Arrays.<Class<?>>asList(My1.class, My2.class, My3.class, My4.class, My5.class), new Transformer() { public Object transform(Object o) { return ((Class<?>) o).getName(); } }, myNames); An alternative would be this code: Snippet 2: Collections.addAll(myNames, My1.class.getName(), My2.class.getName(), My3.class.getName(), My4.class.getName(), My5.class.getName()); So, when using functional programming approach is overhead and when it's not and why? Isn't my usage of functional programming approach in snippet 1 is an overhead and why?

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• share distribution question

  - by facebook-100000781341887

  Hi, I just developed a facebook game(mifia like), but the graphic I make is not good, because it is reference with some existing photo, trace with AI, and coloring it. Therefore, I invite my friend to join me, he is a graphic designer, own a company with his friend (I know both of them), for the share, I expect at least 70% for me, and at most 30% for them (both of them want to join). Therefore, they give me a counter offer, 60% for me and 40% for them, of course, I feel their counter offer is unacceptable because they only build the image in part time, and all the other work just like coding, webhosting...etc, is what I do in full time. Why they said they worth 40% is that they will make a good graphic, they can provide a advertise channel(on local magazine), etc... Actually, I don't think the game need advertisement on local magazine because the game is not target for local... Please give me some comments on this issue(is the share fair? what is the importance of the image of the game, is it worth more than 30%), or can anyone share the experience on this. Thanks in advance.

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