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• .NET vs Windows 8: Rematch!

  - by simonc

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

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• .NET vs Windows 8: Rematch!

  - by Simon Cooper

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

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

  - by Von32

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

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• What would cause SSD to become not detectable?

  - by Balthazar

  I recently purchased an Intel 520 120GB SSD and installed Ubuntu on it. Occasionally my system will freeze and I will have to ALT-PRINT SCREEN-REISUB to reboot. Sometimes it will reboot and work just fine. Other times it just hangs at a flashing prompt. If I boot from a Live USB I can run Boot-Repair and it will usually reboot fine the next go round. I have noticed today that when I am running the live USB and open Nautilus my SSD partitions will sporadically disappear and reappear. Even if they are mounted. I was thinking it was a poor connection, but I have tried a different SATA cable and a different SATA port. Is it possible I have a faulty SSD, or is there something different you have to do with SSDs to make sure they stay mounted (I was thinking like it has some sort of goofy power savings feature that needs to be disabled). I found the place in the bios where the SATA ports are listed. They are all set to AHCI(Chipset - SATA Mode = AHCI) The unmounting/remounting happens all the time. I think this is the relevant part of the syslog: http://pastebin.com/WxHdRAAq

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• Is defining every method/state per object in a series of UML diagrams representative of MDA in general?

  - by Max

  I am currently working on a project where we use a framework that combines code generation and ORM together with UML to develop software. Methods are added to UML classes and are generated into partial classes where "stuff happens". For example, an UML class "Content" could have the method DeleteFromFileSystem(void). Which could be implemented like this: public partial class Content { public void DeleteFromFileSystem() { File.Delete(...); } } All methods are designed like this. Everything happens in these gargantuan logic-bomb domain classes. Is this how MDA or DDD or similar usually is done? For now my impression of MDA/DDD (which this has been called by higherups) is that it severely stunts my productivity (everything must be done The Way) and that it hinders maintenance work since all logic are roped, entrenched, interspersed into the mentioned gargantuan bombs. Please refrain from interpreting this as a rant - I am merely curious if this is typical MDA or some sort of extreme MDA UPDATE Concerning the example above, in my opinion Content shouldn't handle deleting itself as such. What if we change from local storage to Amazon S3, in that case we would have to reimplement this functionality scattered over multiple places instead of one single interface which we can provide a second implementation for.

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• How to learn the math behind the code?

  - by Solomon Wise

  I am a 12 year old who has recently gotten into programming. (Although I know that the number of books you have read does not determine your programming competency or ability, just to paint a "map" of where I am in terms of the content I know...) I've finished the books: Python 3 For Absolute Beginners Pro Python Python Standard Library by Example Beautiful Code Agile Web Development With Rails and am about halfway into Programming Ruby. I have written many small programs (One that finds which files have been updated and deleted in a directory, one that compares multiple players' fantasy baseball value, and some text based games, and many more). Obviously, as I'm not some sort of child prodigy, I can't take a formal Computer Science course until high school. I really want to learn computer science to increase my knowledge about the code, and the how the code runs. I've really become interested in the math part after reading the source code for Python's random module. Is there a place where I can learn CS, or programming math online for free, at a level that would be at least partially understandable to a person my age?

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• .NET Reflector Pro T-shirt contest - and the winner is...

  - by Laila

  Three weeks ago, I kicked off a T-shirt design contest. We've been eagerly poring over the results and today, it's finally announcement time! Although many of you raced to design some great t-shirts for us, we ended up with a clear winner who came up with a nice design and an original slogan that accurately represents what .NET Reflector Pro lets you do: decompile and debug C# and VB.NET code. So, the winner is... Mandeep Sangha! Mandeep sent us the following awesome design via the Twitter account, mss_10: We liked the combination of detective and superhero elements through the magnifying glass and the slogan. Batman (possibly the most eminent of detective-superheroes?) would be proud to wear this under his suit. Mandeep will become the happy owner of a free copy of .NET Reflector Pro and an exciting box of Red Gate goodies... as well as a copy of their very own t-shirt once it's been brought to life by our printing shop! The t-shirts will bear the name of their designer, and will be made available at .NET developer events around the world, such as conferences, tradeshows and user group events. Congratulations, Mandeep! We'll be in touch to sort out the details of your prizes. But that wasn't the only great design we received. We chose three runners-up as well: Sam Beauvois: http://twitpic.com/1vvsi9 Sherwin Rice: http://www.greenwaytechno.com/img/tee-1.png Mathieu Grétry: http://blog.section9.be/public/tshirt_reflector_01.png Thanks to you all for taking part in the contest. You'll all receive a free license for .NET Reflector Pro! We'll get in touch with you individually through twitter, so that we can get you your prizes. Keep an eye out for this T-shirt - it'll soon be making its way to an event near you!

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• Would you refactor this and if so, would you charge your client?

  - by Julius

  I am working on a freelance job at home. The client wants me to write some new functionality for his CMS, but it is taking me a lot of time to figure out what the code is doing, because it is written in a very unreadable style. Below is just an example of what I mean. The previous programmer made extensive use of anonymous functions, of eval(), he uses deeply nested ternary operators, he didn't indent code, didn't use comments, and he uses funny constructions like misusing the behaviour of logical operators || and && for creating if/else conditions (the second condition of && only gets tested if the first one is true, opening the possibility to use && as an if/else construction). All in all it's insane code and it's costing me a lot of time to find out how the current code works. return ($this->main->context != "ajax" || in_array($this->type, $this->definition->ajax)) ? eval('return method_exists($this,"Show'.ucfirst($this->type).'") ? $this->Show'.ucfirst($this->type).'('.(count($args) ? join(",",array_map(create_function('$a','return (is_numeric($a) || preg_match("/^array/",$a)) ? $a : "\"".$a."\"";'),$args)) : "").') : null;') : ''; Would you refactor this code and how would you handle this sort of thing with your client, I mean financially?

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• I've been hired on as a entry-level game developer at a company and have little/no experience in API programming, what should I expect?

  - by Mr. Geneth

  So, I've been hired on as an entry level game developer with little/no experience working with any API other than Win32. This will be an overall learning experience for me as a person and I have gone over this multiple times with the boss and he has no problem with my inexperience. He says that if I'm not worth it now, I will be later. This gives me confidence, but I still feel that I should know a lot more before tackling this position. I would be stupid to pass it up. This is one of my favorite places to come for advice and help and have tried to just accept this, but it just keeps bothering that I can't go in knowing how to at least do the basics. I want to give the company its money's worth. Ya know? My questions are: What should I expect from the other programmers in this project (In terms of patience with me and working together, and being taught)? Is this normal? Any other advice on this sort of thing would be wonderful. I just want to feel comfortable with it.

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• Managing flash animations for a game

  - by LoveMeSomeCode

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

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• Node.JS testing with Jasmine, databases, and pre-existing code

  - by Jim Rubenstein

  I've recently built the start of a core system which is likely going turn into a monster product. I'm building the system with node.js, and decided after I got a small base built, that It'd be a great idea to start using some sort of automated test suite to test the application. I decided to use jasmine, as it seems pretty solid and has a lot of features for stubbing spying and mocking methods and classes. The application has a lot of external data stores and api access (kestrel, mysql, mongodb, facebook, and more). My issue is, I've got a good amount of code written that I want to start testing - as it represents the underpinnings of the application. What are the best practices for testing methods/classes that access external APIs that I may or may not have control over? As an example, I have a data structure that fetches a bunch of data from a MySQL database. I want to test the method that retrieves the data; and I'm not sure how to go about it. I could test the fetch method which is supposed to return an array of objects, but to isolate the method from the database, I need to define my own fixture data. So what I end up doing is stubbing the mysql execution, and returning a static dataset. So, I end up writing a function that returns the dataset that makes my test pass. That doesn't seem to actually test the code, other than verifying a method is being called. I know this is kind of abstract and vague, it seems that the idea of testing is very much abstract though, so hopefully someone has some experience and can guide me in the right direction. Any advice, or reading I can do is more than welcomed. Thanks in advance.

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• Distributed transactions and queues, ruby, erlang

  - by chrispanda

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

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• How can create the smallest possible mirror of the archive?

  - by Registered User

  I need to create an http url at my laptop to have a Ubuntu installation begin within my laptop on a Xen environment. This is how the final thing will look like. The host and client are both going to be my laptop, I Googled and came across apt-mirror and some other packages. I do not want to archive entire 15 GB Ubuntu repositories on my machine. It is not possible to use a CD,ISO,loop mounted disk (reason mentioned below). I have tried using netboot image on local machine which failed because if you are attempting to create a virtual machine on a hardware which does not support VT virt-manager installer necessarily needs a URL of this sort http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/hardy/main/installer-i386/current/images/netboot/ Any other option to create guest OS is simply grayed out. The unfortunate part is my Ethernet connections do not work when I boot with Xen-4.0 and a pv-ops Dom0 kernel from Jeremy's tree. Which is where I have to do this work. So I have to create a URL structure which is similar to Ubuntu mirrors. So how can I do this in bare minimum so that at least the console boots and once the console comes I can do some work.

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

  - by user1542

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

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

  - by Jan Doggen

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

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

  - by Ben

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

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• Whois status "pending delete" with expiration date in November 2011???

  - by Sylver

  A friend of mine is in the process of being scammed by a domain registrar and I am trying to sort out the mess. However I could use a hand understanding some of the details. He paid for 2 years of domain name registration on 6 november 2009. The whois record reads: Domain ID:XXXXXXXXXX Domain Name:XXXXXXXXX.ORG Created On:06-Nov-2009 09:23:12 UTC Last Updated On:17-Dec-2010 00:15:10 UTC Expiration Date:06-Nov-2011 09:23:12 UTC Sponsoring Registrar:OnlineNIC Inc. (R64-LROR) Status:CLIENT TRANSFER PROHIBITED Status:HOLD Status:PENDING DELETE SCHEDULED FOR RELEASE Registrant ID:ONLC-XXXXXXX-X Registrant Name:My friend's name ... Registrant Email:Old email The registrar charged a renewal fee a week ago and is now asking an extra $150 to "reclaim" the domain name, even though the domain name is apparently still in my friend's name and it looks like there is still another 10 months before the expiry date. The expiration date on the WhoIs record looks right (Nov 2011), so I don't understand why the domain status says "PENDING DELETE SCHEDULED FOR RELEASE". Can someone explain me better what the deal is and explain what I need to do get the domain name transfered to a more honest registrar? I already have a registrar for my own domain names, been using them for 10 years without problems, so I know where to transfer the domain names to, I just don't know how to proceed.

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• Bookmark Sentry Scans Your Chrome Bookmarks File For Bad Links and Dupes

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  Chrome: Bookmark Sentry, a free Chrome extension, takes the hard work out of checking your bookmark file for bad links and duplicates. Install it, forget about it, and get scheduled reports on the state of your bookmarks file. It’s that simple. Once you install the extension, open the options to toggle some basic settings to your liking (like the frequency of the scan, how long you want it to wait for a response, and whether you want it to look for bad links and/or duplicates). Once it finishes scanning you’ll get a report indicating the status of the links (why they are marked as missing or duped) and the ability to selectively or mass delete them. The only caveat we’d share is that it will tell you links behind any sort of security are unavailable. If you bookmark pages that you use for work, behind your corporate firewall for example, if the scanner runs when you’re not authenticated then it won’t be able to reach them. Other than that, it works like a charm. Bookmark Sentry is free, Google Chrome only. Bookmark Sentry [via Addictive Tips] How to Own Your Own Website (Even If You Can’t Build One) Pt 1 What’s the Difference Between Sleep and Hibernate in Windows? Screenshot Tour: XBMC 11 Eden Rocks Improved iOS Support, AirPlay, and Even a Custom XBMC OS

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• How to properly diagram lambda expressions or traversals through them in Architecture Explorer?

  - by MainMa

  I'm exploring a piece of code in Architecture Explorer in Visual Studio 2010 to study the relations between methods. I noticed a strange behavior. Take the following source code. It generates a hello message based on a template and a template engine, the template engine being a method (a sort of strategy pattern simplified at a maximum for demo purposes). public string GenerateHelloMessage(string personName) { return this.ApplyTemplate( this.DefaultTemplateEngine, this.GenerateLocalizedHelloTemplate(), personName); } private string GenerateLocalizedHelloTemplate() { return "Hello {0}!"; } public string ApplyTemplate( Func<string, string, string> templateEngine, string template, string personName) { return templateEngine(template, personName); } public string DefaultTemplateEngine(string template, string personName) { return string.Format(template, personName); } The graph generated from this code is this one: Change the first method from this: public string GenerateHelloMessage(string personName) { return this.ApplyTemplate( this.DefaultTemplateEngine, this.GenerateLocalizedHelloTemplate(), personName); } to this: public string GenerateHelloMessage(string personName) { return this.ApplyTemplate( (a, b) => this.DefaultTemplateEngine(a, b), this.GenerateLocalizedHelloTemplate(), personName); } and the graph becomes: While semantically identical, those two versions of code produce different dependency graphs, and Architecture Explorer shows no trace of the lambda expression (while Visual Studio's code coverage, for example, shows them, as well as Code analysis seems to be able to understand that the link exists). How would it be possible, without changing the source code, to: Either force Architecture Explorer to display everything, including lambda expressions, Or make it traverse lambda expressions while drawing a dependency through them (so in this case, drawing the dependency from GenerateHelloMessage to DefaultTemplateEngine in the second example)?

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• Creating country specific twitter/facebook accounts

  - by user359650

  I see many companies that have an international presence trying to localize their social media presence by creating country or language specific accounts. However some seemed to have done so without following a consistent pattern, one example being the World Wildlife Fund when you look at their Twitter accounts: World_Wildlife : verified account with 200K followers WWF : main account with 800K followers www_uk : lower case with underscore between WWF and country indicator WWFCanada : upper case with country indicator attached to WWF ... I am planning to build a website which hopefully will grow global and would like to avoid this sort of inconsistencies. Also, I was comparing what Twitter and Facebook allow in their username and found out that they don't allow the same characters to be used (e.g. for instance that the former doesn't allow . whereas the latter does) making difficult to ensure consistency across social networks. Hence my questions: Are there known naming schemes for creating localized Twitter and Facebook accounts while maintaining a certain consistency between them (best effort)? Are there any researches out there that have proven whether some schemes were better than others in terms of readability and/or SEO?

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

  - by Amy

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

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

  - by Aybe

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

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• Capitalizing on JavaScript's prototypal inheritance

  - by keithjgrant

  JavaScript has a class-free object system in which objects inherit properties directly from other objects. This is really powerful, but it is unfamiliar to classically trained programmers. If you attempt to apply classical design patterns directly to JavaScript, you will be frustrated. But if you learn to work with JavaScript's prototypal nature, your efforts will be rewarded. ... It is Lisp in C's clothing. -Douglas Crockford What does this mean for a game developer working with canvas and HTML5? I've been looking over this question on useful design patterns in gaming, but prototypal inheritance is very different than classical inheritance, and there are surely differences in the best way to apply some of these common patterns. For example, classical inheritance allows us to create a moveableEntity class, and extend that with any classes that move in our game world (player, monster, bullet, etc.). Sure, you can strongarm JavaScript to work that way, but in doing so, you are kind of fighting against its nature. Is there a better approach to this sort of problem when we have prototypal inheritance at our fingertips?

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• Should Professional Development occur on company time?

  - by jshu

  As a first-time part-time software developer at a small consulting company, I'm struggling to organise time to further my own software development knowledge - whether that's reading a book, keeping up with the popular questions on StackOverflow, researching a technology we're using in-depth, or following the front page of Hacker News. I can see results borne from my self-allocated study time, but listing and demonstrating the skills and knowledge gained through Professional Development is difficult. The company does not have any defined PD policy, and there's a lot of pressure to get something deliverable done now! when working for consultants. I've checked what my coworkers do, and they don't appear to allocate any time to self-improvement; they just work at the problems they're given, looking up specific MSDN references, code samples, and the like as they need them. I realise that PD policy is going to vary across companies of different size and culture, and a company like my own is probably a bit of an edge case. I'd love to hear views and experiences from more seasoned developers; especially those who have to make the PD policy choices in their team or company. I'd also like to learn about the more radical approaches to PD, even if they're completely out there; it's always interesting to see what other people are trying. Not quite a summary, but what I'm trying to ask: Is it common or recommended for companies to allocate PD time? Whose responsibility is it to ensure a developer's knowledge and skills are up to date? Should a part-time work schedule inspire a lower ratio of PD time : work? How can a developer show non-developer coworkers that reading blogs and books is net productive? Is reading blogs and books actually net productive? (references welcomed) Is writing blogs effective as a way of PD? (a recent theme on Hacker News) This is sort of a broad question because I don't know exactly which questions I need to ask here, so any thoughts on relevant issues I haven't addressed are very welcome.

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• Formal definition for term "pure OO language"?

  - by Yauhen Yakimovich

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

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