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• How to refactor when all your development is on branches?

  - by Mark

  At my company, all of our development (bug fixes and new features) is done on separate branches. When it's complete, we send it off to QA who tests it on that branch, and when they give us the green light, we merge it into our main branch. This could take anywhere between a day and a year. If we try to squeeze any refactoring in on a branch, we don't know how long it will be "out" for, so it can cause many conflicts when it's merged back in. For example, let's say I want to rename a function because the feature I'm working on is making heavy use of this function, and I found that it's name doesn't really fit its purpose (again, this is just an example). So I go around and find every usage of this function, and rename them all to its new name, and everything works perfectly, so I send it off to QA. Meanwhile, new development is happening, and my renamed function doesn't exist on any of the branches that are being forked off main. When my issue gets merged back in, they're all going to break. Is there any way of dealing with this? It's not like management will ever approve a refactor-only issue so it has to be squeezed in with other work. It can't be developed directly on main because all changes have to go through QA and no one wants to be the jerk that broke main so that he could do a little bit of non-essential refactoring.

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• When mapping the surface of a sphere with tiles, how might you deal with polar distortion?

  - by clweeks

  It's easy to deal with the way locations interact on a clean Cartesian grid. It's just vanilla math. And you can kind of ignore the geometry of the sphere's surface for a bunch of it if you want to just truncate the poles or something. But I keep coming up with ideas for games where the polar space matters. Geo-coded ARGs and global roguelikes and stuff. I want square(ish?) locations -- reasonably representable by square tiles of the same size across the globe, anyway. This has to be a solved problem, right? What are the solutions? ETA: At the equator -- and assuming that your square locations are reasonably small, it's close enough to true that you can get away with having one square in the rows north and south of the most equatorial row. And you could probably get away with that by just hand-waving the difference up to like 45-degrees or so. But eventually, you need to have fewer squares in a pole-ward circumferential row. If I reduce the length of the row by one and offset the squares by 1/2 then they're just like hexes and it's relatively easy to do the coding to keep track of the connections. But as you get pole-ward, it gets more and more extreme. Projecting the surface of the world onto the surface of a cube is tempting. But I figured there must be more elegant solutions already in use. If I did the cube thing (not dissecting it further through geodesy) Are there any pros and cons related to placing the pole at the center of a face or at the vertex of three sides?

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• How to Deal with an out of touch "Project manager"

  - by Joe

  This "manager" is 70+ yrs old and a math genius. We were tasked with creating a web application. He loves SQL and stored procedures. He first created this in MS access. For the web app I had to take his DB migrate to SQL server. His first thought was to have a master stored procedure with a WAITFOR Handling requests from users. I eventually talked him out of that and use asp.net mvc. Then eventually use the asp.net membership. Now the web app is a mostly handles requests from the pages that is passed to stored procedures. It is all stored procedure driven. The business logic as well. Now we are having an one open DB connection per user logged in plus 1. I use linq to sql to check 2 tables and return the values thats it period. So 25 users is a load. He complains why my code is bad cause his test driver stored procedure simulates over 100 users with no issue. What are the best arguments for not having the business logic not all in stored procedures?? How should I deal with this?? I am giving an abbreviated story of course. He is a genius part owner of the company all the other owners trust him because he is a genius. and quoting -"He gets things done. old school".

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• Is an event loop just a for/while loop with optimized polling?

  - by Alan

  I'm trying to understand what an event loop is. Often the explanation is that in the event loop, you do something until you're notified that an event occurred. You than handle the event and continue doing what you did before. To map the above definition with an example. I have a server which 'listens' in a event loop, and when a socket connection is detected, the data from it gets read and displayed, after which the server goes to the listening it did before. However, this event happening and us getting notified 'just like that' are to much for me to handle. You can say: "It's not 'just like that' you have to register an event listener". But what's an event listener but a function which for some reason isn't returning. Is it in it's own loop, waiting to be notified when an event happens? Should the event listener also register an event listener? Where does it end? Events are a nice abstraction to work with, however just an abstraction. I believe that in the end, polling is unavoidable. Perhaps we are not doing it in our code, but the lower levels (the programming language implementation or the OS) are doing it for us. It basically comes down to the following pseudo code which is running somewhere low enough so it doesn't result in busy waiting: while(True): do stuff check if event has happened (poll) do other stuff This is my understanding of the whole idea, and i would like to hear if this is correct. I am open in accepting that the whole idea is fundamentally wrong, in which case I would like the correct explanation. Best regards

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• How to Change the Cmd+Q Shortcut Key in OS X (to Stop Accidentally Closing Apps)

  - by The Geek

  If you’ve spent any time using Mac OS X, you’ve figured out that the Cmd+W shortcut key closes a window or tab, while the Cmd+Q key quits the entire app. The problem? The keys are right next to each other, and way too easy to accidentally hit! Here’s how to change it. This problem is compounded even more when you’re using an application like Google Chrome, Safari, or Firefox, where you’re opening or closing tabs all the time, and probably using the Cmd+W key to close just the current tab. If you aren’t careful, you’ll accidentally hit Cmd+Q instead, and your entire browser gets closed. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC How to Use the Avira Rescue CD to Clean Your Infected PC The Complete List of iPad Tips, Tricks, and Tutorials Is Your Desktop Printer More Expensive Than Printing Services? 20 OS X Keyboard Shortcuts You Might Not Know HTG Explains: Which Linux File System Should You Choose? HTG Explains: Why Does Photo Paper Improve Print Quality? Awesome WebGL Demo – Flight of the Navigator from Mozilla Sunrise on the Alien Desert Planet Wallpaper Add Falling Snow to Webpages with the Snowfall Extension for Opera [Browser Fun] Automatically Keep Up With the Latest Releases from Mozilla Labs in Firefox 4.0 A Look Back at 2010 Through Infographics Monitor the Weather with the Weather Forecast Extension for Opera

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• Want to tap into a niche market. Do I create new site or bolt on to existing site?

  - by nitbuntu

  Hi, After a lot of heard work and a few years of perseverance, I'm seeing regular sales on my website which have been steadily growing over the past year. However, the entrepreneur in me wants tap into a niche market which I've become very interested in. It's possible to bolt on this niche onto my existing site as an additional category, without it looking too out of place; my new category of products would also benefit from the ranking my current site gets. The kind of people who would purchase these new niche products, however, are very particular and obsessive about detail. So, for example, many Vegetarians would not eat in KFC even if they were to introduce a new range of Veggie burgers. So, I thought it best to create a new website and since my existing site was created using an 'old-school' shopping cart and there are many more up-to-date, feature-rich, ones available now, I wanted to use a different shopping cart system. My dilemma is that I already have 2 websites (1 b2c and another b2b site) and maintaining a 2nd b2c site would end up vastly increasing my workload and I fear that I would not be able to pay adequate attention to all the sites. Moreover, the additional customer service work (e.g. answering emails from many separate email accounts) could end up being too confusing and difficult to maintain. The easy answer would be to take on an employee, but I'm just not earning enough to justify this yet. If anyone has any tips or experience they'd like to share, which could help me answer this question, I'd be highly grateful.

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• Screen doesn't turn back on after resume on a Lenovo Thinkpad T420

  - by Wojtek

  Every time I suspend my notebook (Lenovo Thinkpad T420 - Intel HD graphic card) on Oneiric Ocelot 11.10 and turn it back on, the screen is black. The backlight is on and the system itself loads fine, but the display somehow doesn't get back. The first time after a fresh reboot the screen isn't black, it is mostly white/light-gray and it looks a bit like a distorted image. The pixels fade in until it gets almost completely light-gray. I've got a workaround for this: I switch to the first terminal (CTRL+ALT+F1) and back to X (CTRL+ALT+F7). In most cases that helps. Sometimes, when there's still a problem, I log in on the first terminal and run "unity --reset". Then go back to X - this helps always. I can tell that the system comes back, because I can log in with my fingerprint reader (or wait a bit and put in the password) "blindly", then do the workaround - I am logged in after the screen comes back. So it's only the display that is not working. Any help or advice where to look would be appreciated.

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• Architecture a for a central renderer rather than self-rendering

  - by The Communist Duck

  For the architectural side of rendering, there's two main ways: having each object render itself, and having a single renderer which renders everything. I'm currently aiming for the second idea, for the following reasons: The list can be sorted to only use shaders once. Else each object would have to bind the shader, because it's not sure if it's active. The objects could be sorted and grouped. Easier to swap APIs. With a few macro lines, it can be easy to swap between a DirectX renderer and an OpenGL renderer (not a reason for my project, but still a good point) Easier to manage rendering code Of course, if anyone has strong recommendations for the first method, I will listen to them. But I was wondering how make this work. First idea The renderer has a list of pointers to the renderable components of each entity, which register themselves on RenderCompoent creation. However, I'm worrying that this may end up as a lot of extra pointer weight. But I can sort the list of pointers every so often. Second idea The entire list of entities is passed to the renderer each render call. The renderer then sorts the list (each call, or maybe once?) and gets what it wants. That's a lot of passing and/or sorting, however. Other ideas ??? PROFIT Anyone got ideas? Thank you.

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• Java keyboard input [on hold]

  - by dØd

  I'm trying to implement a input system that can detect whether a certain key was held or was only pressed briefly. So far I have this: KEY_INTERACTION_TRESHOLD = 400ms //inside a constructor shouldMeasure = true; @Override public void keyPressed(KeyEvent e) { if (shouldMeasure) { startTime = System.currentTimeMillis(); shouldMeasure = false; return; } System.out.println("Button is held down"); e.consume(); } @Override public void keyReleased(KeyEvent e) { if (System.currentTimeMillis() - startTime < KEY_INTERACTION_TRESHOLD) { System.out.println("Button was only pressed briefly"); } startTime = 0; shouldMeasure = true; e.consume(); } Now this works, but the problem is that there is this delay between when I press a key to hold and when the message 'Button is held down' gets displayed. I understand why this delay occurs (for example when you press and hold a letter there will be a similar delay between the first and the second letter printed out), but I would like to somehow avoid it. I'm using only the Java API.

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• How can I improve my isometric tile-picking algorithm?

  - by Cypher

  I've spent the last few days researching isometric tile-picking algorithms (converting screen-coordinates to tile-coordinates), and have obviously found a lot of the math beyond my grasp. I have come fairly close and what I have is workable, but I would like to improve on this algorithm as it's a little off and seems to pick down and to the right of the mouse pointer. I've uploaded a video to help visualize the current implementation: http://youtu.be/EqwWcq1zuaM My isometric rendering algorithm is based on what is found at this stackoverflow question's answer, with the exception that my x and y axis' are inverted (x increased down-right, while y increased up-right). Here is where I am converting from screen to tiles: // these next few lines convert the mouse pointer position from screen // coordinates to tile-grid coordinates. cameraOffset captures the current // mouse location and takes into consideration the camera's position on screen. System.Drawing.Point cameraOffset = new System.Drawing.Point( 0, 0 ); cameraOffset.X = mouseLocation.X + (int)camera.Left; cameraOffset.Y = ( mouseLocation.Y + (int)camera.Top ); // the camera-aware mouse coordinates are then further converted in an attempt // to select only the "tile" portion of the grid tiles, instead of the entire // rectangle. this algorithm gets close, but could use improvement. mouseTileLocation.X = ( cameraOffset.X + 2 * cameraOffset.Y ) / Global.TileWidth; mouseTileLocation.Y = -( ( 2 * cameraOffset.Y - cameraOffset.X ) / Global.TileWidth ); Things to make note of: mouseLocation is a System.Drawing.Point that represents the screen coordinates of the mouse pointer. cameraOffset is the screen position of the mouse pointer that includes the position of the game camera. mouseTileLocation is a System.Drawing.Point that is supposed to represent the tile coordinates of the mouse pointer. If you check out the above link to youtube, you'll notice that the picking algorithm is off a bit. How can I improve on this?

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• Writing Acceptance test cases

  - by HH_

  We are integrating a testing process in our SCRUM process. My new role is to write acceptance tests of our web applications in order to automate them later. I have read a lot about how tests cases should be written, but none gave me practical advices to write test cases for complex web applications, and instead they threw conflicting principles that I found hard to apply: Test cases should be short: Take the example of a CMS. Short test cases are easy to maintain and to identify the inputs and outputs. But what if I want to test a long series of operations (eg. adding a document, sending a notification to another user, the other user replies, the document changes state, the user gets a notice). It rather seems to me that test cases should represent complete scenarios. But I can see how this will produce overtly complex test documents. Tests should identify inputs and outputs:: What if I have a long form with many interacting fields, with different behaviors. Do I write one test for everything, or one for each? Test cases should be independent: But how can I apply that if testing the upload operation requires that the connect operation is successful? And how does it apply to writing test cases? Should I write a test for each operation, but each test declares its dependencies, or should I rewrite the whole scenario for each test? Test cases should be lightly-documented: This principles is specific to Agile projects. So do you have any advice on how to implement this principle? Although I thought that writing acceptance test cases was going to be simple, I found myself overwhelmed by every decision I had to make (FYI: I am a developer and not a professional tester). So my main question is: What steps or advices do you have in order to write maintainable acceptance test cases for complex applications. Thank you.

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• Synaptics touchpad problem when disabling it and then enabling it

  - by CYREX

  My girlfriend has an HP dv6000. In ubuntu 10.10 32bit i use the synaptic on it and all is good but when i disable it and enable it the problem starts. when i press the disable button in the synaptics touchpad it disables the mouse AND the keyboard. After enabled the Keyboard keys and Mouse clicks do not work. If i click on the panel below, for example the Applications, Places or System buttons the focus gets stuck there forever. I can open nautilus by clicking on it but i can not use the menus, the ALT+F2 function, see the wireless connections, lower the sound through the panel, etc.. Here comes the weird part. If i press CTRL+ALT+F1 (or any other tty for that matter) and then come back to CTRL+ALT+F7 where the gui is everything works perfect again. This started about a week ago but she told me right now. i checked dmesg which is for sometime now throwing some warnings about Skipping EDID probe do to cached edid but for what i could find out this did not create the problem in the start. NOTE: I do not need to login when i do CTRL+ALT+F1 i just need to change to another tty then come back to F7. What could be causing this problem?

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• How to manage and estimate unstructured requirements received from customers

  - by user20358

  A lot of the times I receive a software system's requirements from our customers in a very unstructured format. It is usually a bunch of "product development" guys from the customer's who come up with these "proposed solutions" to the business problems they have. While they are the experts at the business domain, a lot of the times they don't have the solutions right. This results in multiple versions of the same requirement mixing up of two requirements into one a few versions of the requirement later down the line, the requirements which were combined together get separated out again, each taking with it some of the new additions How do you work with such requirements coming in and sort them out into proper use cases and before development begins? What tools can we use to track a particular requirement's history, from the first time it was conceived till the time it gets crystallized into a proper use case? Estimating work against requirements received in such a fashion is a nightmare which ends up in making mistakes in understanding the requirement correctly and estimating the effort against it correctly. Any tips, tools, tricks to make this activity more manageable? I'm just trying to get some insights from someone more experienced than I am in requirements management and effort estimation.

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• Working with Reporting Services Filters–Part 5: OR Logic

  - by smisner

  When you combine multiple filters, Reporting Services uses AND logic. Once upon a time, there was actually a drop-down list for selecting AND or OR between filters which was very confusing to people because often it was grayed out. Now that selection is gone, but no matter. It wouldn’t help us solve the problem that I want to describe today. As with many problems, Reporting Services gives us more than one way to apply OR logic in a filter. If I want a filter to include this value OR that value for the same field, one approach is to set up the filter is to use the IN operator as I explained in Part 1 of this series. But what if I want to base the filter on two different fields? I  need a different solution. Using the AdventureWorksDW2008R2 database, I have a report that lists product sales: Let’s say that I want to filter this report to show only products that are Bikes (a category) OR products for which sales were greater than $1,000 in a year. If I set up the filter like this: Expression Data Type Operator Value [Category] Text = Bikes [SalesAmount]   > 1000 Then AND logic is used which means that both conditions must be true. That’s not the result I want. Instead, I need to set up the filter like this: Expression Data Type Operator Value =Fields!EnglishProductCategoryName.Value = "Bikes" OR Fields!SalesAmount.Value > 1000 Boolean = =True The OR logic needs to be part of the expression so that it can return a Boolean value that we test against the Value. Notice that I have used =True rather than True for the value. The filtered report appears below. Any non-bike product appears only if the total sales exceed $1,000, whereas Bikes appear regardless of sales. (You can’t see it in this screenshot, but Mountain-400-W Silver, 38 has sales of $923 in 2007 but gets included because it is in the Bikes category.)

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• How to prevent duplicate data access methods that retrieve similar data?

  - by Ronald Wildenberg

  In almost every project I work on with a team, the same problem seems to creep in. Someone writes UI code that needs data and writes a data access method: AssetDto GetAssetById(int assetId) A week later someone else is working on another part of the application and also needs an AssetDto but now including 'approvers' and writes the following: AssetDto GetAssetWithApproversById(int assetId) A month later someone needs an asset but now including the 'questions' (or the 'owners' or the 'running requests', etc): AssetDto GetAssetWithQuestionsById(int assetId) AssetDto GetAssetWithOwnersById(int assetId) AssetDto GetAssetWithRunningRequestsById(int assetId) And it gets even worse when methods like GetAssetWithOwnerAndQuestionsById start to appear. You see the pattern that emerges: an object is attached to a large object graph and you need different parts of this graph in different locations. Of course, I'd like to prevent having a large number of methods that do almost the same. Is it simply a matter of team discipline or is there some pattern I can use to prevent this? In some cases it might make sense to have separate methods, i.e. getting an asset with running requests may be expensive so I do not want to include these all the time. How to handle such cases?

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• New Dell Vostro 3550 will not boot into Live CD

  - by rich97

  I've been trying to install Ubuntu and/or it's derivatives on my new Dell Vostro 3550 but I'm finding it impossible to boot into the live CD environment. Here are the things I've already tried: Booting from multiple versions of multiple distributions (Ubuntu 10.10, Ubuntu 11.04, Mint 11, Mint 10) Booting from a Live USB created with unetbootin, the Linux Mint startup disk creator, the universal USB creator and dd of=linuxmint.***.iso if if=/dev/sdx. Burning a CD and booting from the internal CD drive. In the case of the USB keys with the latest versions of Ubuntu it gets to the page where I can select a boot option, but after selecting an option the screen goes black, even the back light turns off. With the older distributions the screen stays on but it starts loading and then just hangs. The CDs don't even try to boot. It starts spinning but then falls back to the default Windows install. The only way I've got it to work so far is with Wubi, but that's hardly ideal. I'd like to have two separate physical partitions with a /home and /. Any help is appreciated. Thank you.

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• Why do programmers write closed source applications and then make them free? [closed]

  - by Ken

  As an entrepreneur/programmer who makes a good living from writing and selling software, I'm dumbfounded as to why developers write applications and then put them up on the Internet for free. You've found yourself in one of the most lucrative fields in the world. A business with 99% profit margin, where you have no physical product but can name your price; a business where you can ship a buggy product and the customer will still buy it. Occasionally some of our software will get a free competitor, and I think, this guy is crazy. He could be making a good living off of this but instead chose to make it free. Do you not like giant piles of money? Are you not confident that people would pay for it? Are you afraid of having to support it? It's bad for the business of programming because now customers expect to be able to find a free solution to every problem. (I see tweets like "is there any good FREE software for XYZ? or do I need to pay $20 for that".) It's also bad for customers because the free solutions eventually break (because of a new OS or what have you) and since it's free, the developer has no reason to fix it. Customers end up with free but stale software that no longer works and never gets updated. Customer cries. Developer still working day job cries in their cubicle. What gives? PS: I'm not looking to start an open-source/software should be free kind of debate. I'm talking about when developers make a closed source application and make it free.

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• Update kernel patch for VMware Player 4.0.3

  As I stated some days ago, after upgrading to Ubuntu Precise Pangolin, aka 12.04 LTS, I had a minor obstacle with VMware products. Today, VMware offered to upgrade to Player 4.0.3 due to security-related reasons. Initially, I thought that this update might have the patch for kernel 3.2.0 integrated but sadly that is not the case. 'Hacking' the kernel patch My first intuitive try to run the existing patch against the sources of VMware Player 4.0.3 failed, as the patch by Stefano Angeleri (weltall) is originally written explicitely against Workstation 8.0.2 and Player 4.0.2. But this is nothing to worry about seriously. Just fire up your favourite editor of choice and modify the version signature for VMware Player, like so: nano patch-modules_3.2.0.sh And update line 8 for the new version: plreqver=4.0.3 Save the shell script and run it as super-user (root): sudo ./patch-modules_3.2.0.sh In case that you previously patched your VMware sources you have to remove some artifacts beforehand. Otherwise, the patch script will inform you like so: /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source/.patched found. You have already patched your sources. Exiting In that case, simply remove the 'hidden' file and run the shell script again: sudo rm /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source/.patchedsudo ./patch-modules_3.2.0.sh To finalise your installation either restart the vmware service or reboot your machine. On first start VMware will present you their EULA which you have to accept, and everything gets back to normal operation mode. Currently, I would assume that in case of VMware Workstation 8.0.3 you can follow the same steps as just described.

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• How to configure ubuntu ldap client to get password policies from server?

  - by Rafaeldv

  I have a ldap server on CentOS, 389-ds. I configured the client, ubuntu 12.04, to authenticate on that base and it works very well. But it don't gets the password policies from server. For example, if i set the policy to force user to change the password on first login, ubuntu ignores it and logs him in, always. How can i setup the client to get the policies? Here are the client files: /etc/nsswitch.conf passwd: files ldap group: files ldap shadow: files ldap hosts: files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns mdns4 networks: files protocols: db files services: db files ethers: db files rpc: db files netgroup: nis sudoers: ldap files common-auth auth [success=2 default=ignore] pam_unix.so nullok_secure auth [success=1 default=ignore] pam_ldap.so use_first_pass auth requisite pam_deny.so auth required pam_permit.so auth optional pam_cap.so common-account account [success=2 new_authtok_reqd=done default=ignore] pam_unix.so account [success=1 default=ignore] pam_ldap.so account requisite pam_deny.so account required pam_permit.so common-password password requisite pam_cracklib.so retry=3 minlen=8 difok=3 password [success=2 default=ignore] pam_unix.so obscure use_authtok try_first_pass sha512 password [success=1 user_unknown=ignore default=die] pam_ldap.so use_authtok try_first_pass password requisite pam_deny.so password required pam_permit.so password optional pam_gnome_keyring.so common-session session [default=1] pam_permit.so session requisite pam_deny.so session required pam_permit.so session optional pam_umask.so session required pam_unix.so session optional pam_ldap.so session optional pam_ck_connector.so nox11 session optional pam_mkhomedir.so skel=/etc/skel umask=0022 /etc/ldap.conf base dc=a,dc=b,dc=c uri ldaps://a.b.c/ ldap_version 3 rootbinddn cn=directory manager pam_password md5 sudoers_base ou=SUDOers,dc=a,dc=b,dc=c pam_lookup_policy yes pam_check_host_attr yes nss_initgroups_ignoreusers avahi,avahi-autoipd,backup,bin,colord,daemon,games,gnats,hplip,irc,kernoops,libuuid,lightdm,list,lp,mail,man,messagebus,news,proxy,pulse,root,rtkit,saned,speech-dispatcher,sshd,sync,sys,syslog,usbmux,uucp,whoopsie,www-data /etc/ldap/ldap.conf BASE dc=a,dc=b,dc=c URI ldaps://a.b.c/ ssl on use_sasl no tls_checkpeer no sudoers_base ou=SUDOers,dc=a,dc=b,dc=c sudoers_debug 2 pam_lookup_policy yes pam_check_host_attr yes pam_lookup_policy yes pam_check_host_attr yes TLS_CACERT /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt TLS_REQCERT never

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• The Bing Sting - an alternative opinion

  - by Charles Young

  I know I'm a bit of an MS fanboy at times, but please, am I missing something here? Microsoft, with permission of users, exploits clickstream data gathered by observing user behaviour. One use for this data is to improve Bing queries. Google equips twenty of its engineers with laptops and installs the widgets required to provide Microsoft with clickstream data. It then gets their engineers to repeatedly (I assume) type in 'synthetic' queries which bring back 'doctored' hits. It asks its engineers to then click these results (think about this!). So, the behaviour of the engineers is observed and the resulting clickstream data goes off to Microsoft. It is processed and 'improves' Bing results accordingly.   What exactly did Microsoft do wrong here?   Google's so-called 'Bing sting' is clearly a very effective attack from a propaganda perspective, but is poor practice from a company that claims to do no evil. Generating and sending clickstream data deliberately so that you can then subsequently claim that your competitor 'copied' that data from you is neither fair nor reasonable, and suggests to me a degree of desperation in the face of real competition.   Monopolies are undesirable, whether they are Microsoft monopolies or Google monopolies.    Personally, I'm glad Microsoft has technology in place to observe user behaviour (with permission, of course) and improve their search results using such data. I can only assume Google doesn't implement similar capabilities. Sounds to me as if, at least in this respect, Microsoft may offer the better technology.

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• TDD with SQL and data manipulation functions

  - by Xophmeister

  While I'm a professional programmer, I've never been formally trained in software engineering. As I'm frequently visiting here and SO, I've noticed a trend for writing unit tests whenever possible and, as my software gets more complex and sophisticated, I see automated testing as a good idea in aiding debugging. However, most of my work involves writing complex SQL and then processing the output in some way. How would you write a test to ensure your SQL was returning the correct data, for example? Then, say if the data wasn't under your control (e.g., that of a 3rd party system), how can you efficiently test your processing routines without having to hand write reams of dummy data? The best solution I can think of is making views of the data that, together, cover most cases. I can then join those views with my SQL to see if it's returning the correct records and manually process the views to see if my functions, etc. are doing what they're supposed to. Still, it seems excessive and flakey; particularly finding data to test against...

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• The Correct Usage of DLLs with a DirectX Game?

  - by smoth190

  I'm using DirectX 10 (in C++) to make a game engine, and a test driver program on top of it. Now that I've written many messy rough drafts of an engine, I want to make the final (or sorta final) clean version. I choose to follow how I've seen other engines do it, and that's to have all the core nasty messy crap in a DLL, and then you can create games with just a few functions (well, not really :D). However, I'm unsure of what nasty messy crap to put in that DLL. I don't know about speed restrictions with DLLs. What I've done is put my winproc in the DLL, and have a class that takes the messages, and sends them through to the program using the DLL. Then that program does what it needs to do, and calls a rendering functions back in the DLL that renders everything. Only problem is it gets very low FPS (2, to be exact...). I've looked through everything, and I don't know if the way I'm using DLLs in causing this, or its something different. Whether it's the DLLs or not, I still want to know how to use a DLL correctly with a game engine. I like being neat, I hate having to see all those long names of DirectX classes. I use typedef a lot.

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• Input/Output console window in XNA

  - by Will Bagley

  I am currently making a simple game in XNA but am at a point where testing various aspect gets a bit tricky, especially when you have to wait till you have 1000 score to see if your animation is playing correctly etc. Of course i could just edit the starting variable in the code before I launched but I have recently been interested in trying to implement a console style window which can print out values and take input to alter public variables during run-time. I am aware that VS has the immediate window which achieves a similar thing but i would prefer mine is an actual part of the game with the intention that the user may have limited access to it in the future. Some of the key things i have yet to find an answer to after looking around for a while are: how i would support free text entry how i would access variables during runtime how i would edit these variable I have also read about using a property grid from windows form aps (and partially reflection) which looked like it could simplify a lot of things but i am not sure how I would get that running inside my XNA game window or how i would get it to not look out of place (as the visual aspect of is seems to be aimed just for development time viewing). All in all I'm quite open to any suggestions on how to approach this task as currently I'm not sure where to start. Thanks in advance.

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• How to avoid game objects accidentally deleting themselves in C++

  - by Tom Dalling

  Let's say my game has a monster that can kamikaze explode on the player. Let's pick a name for this monster at random: a Creeper. So, the Creeper class has a method that looks something like this: void Creeper::kamikaze() { EventSystem::postEvent(ENTITY_DEATH, this); Explosion* e = new Explosion; e->setLocation(this->location()); this->world->addEntity(e); } The events are not queued, they get dispatched immediately. This causes the Creeper object to get deleted somewhere inside the call to postEvent. Something like this: void World::handleEvent(int type, void* context) { if(type == ENTITY_DEATH){ Entity* ent = dynamic_cast<Entity*>(context); removeEntity(ent); delete ent; } } Because the Creeper object gets deleted while the kamikaze method is still running, it will crash when it tries to access this->location(). One solution is to queue the events into a buffer and dispatch them later. Is that the common solution in C++ games? It feels like a bit of a hack, but that might just be because of my experience with other languages with different memory management practices. In C++, is there a better general solution to this problem where an object accidentally deletes itself from inside one of its methods?

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• How to use mount points in MilkShape models?

  - by vividos

  I have bought the Warriors & Commoners model pack from Frogames and the pack contains (among other formats) two animated models and several non-animated objects (axe, shield, pilosities, etc.) in MilkShape3D format. I looked at the official "MilkShape 3D Viewer v2.0" (msViewer2.zip at http://www.chumba.ch/chumbalum-soft/ms3d/download.html) source code and implemented loading the model, calculating the joint matrices and everything looks fine. In the model there are several joints that are designated as the "mount points" for the static objects like axe and shield. I now want to "put" the axe into the hand of the animated model, and I couldn't quite figure out how. I put the animated vertices in a VBO that gets updated every frame (I know I should do this with a shader, but I didn't have time to do this yet). I put the static vertices in another VBO that I want to keep static and not updated every frame. I now tried to render the animated vertices first, then use the joint matrix for the "mount joint" to calculate the location of the static object. I tried many things, and what about seems to be right is to transpose the joint matrix, then use glMatrixMult() to transform the modelview matrix. For some objects like the axe this is working, but not for others, e.g. the pilosities. Now my question: How is this generally implemented when using bone/joint models, and especially with MilkShape3D models? Am I on the right track?

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