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• JavaOne Countdown, Are you ready?

  - by Angela Caicedo

  This is a great time of the year!  Not only does the weather start cooling down a bit, but it's time to get ready for JavaOne 2012.  It feels so long since my last JavaOne (last year I missed it because I was on a mom duty), so this year I couldn't be happier to be this close to the action again.  Have you ever been at JavaOne?  There are a million great reasons to love JavaOne, and the most important for me is the atmosphere of the conference: The Java community is there, and Java is in the air! This year we have more than 450 sessions, and there are HOLs (Hands on labs) to get your hands dirty with code.  In addition, there will be very cool demos, an exhibition hall. and a DEMOground.  During the whole time, you will have the opportunity to interact with the speakers, discuss topics and concerns, and even have a drink! Oh yes, I almost forgot, there will be lots of fun even apart from the technology!  For example there will be a Geek Bike Ride, a Thirsty Bear party, and the Appreciation Party with Pearl Jam and Kings of Leon.  How can this get any better! So, are you ready yet?  Have you registered?  If not, just follow this "Register for JavaOne" link and we'll see you there! P.S.  Little known fact: If you are a student you can get your pass for free!!!

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• How to sync client and server at the first frame

  - by wheelinlight

  I'm making a game where an authoritative server sends information to all clients about states and positions for objects in a 3d world. The player can control his character by clicking on the screen to set a destination for the character, much like in the Diablo series. I've read most information I can find online about interpolation, reconciliation, and general networking architecture (Valve's for instance). I think I understand everything but one thing seems to be missing in every article I read. Let say we have an interpolation delay of 100ms, server tickrate=50ms, latency=200ms; How do I know when 100ms has past on the client? If the server sends the first update on t=0, can I assume it arrives at t=200, therefore assuming that all packets takes the same amount of time to reach the client? What if the first packet arrives a little quick, for instance at t=150. I would then be starting the client with t=150 and at t=250 it will think it has past 100ms since its connect to the server when it in fact only 50ms has past. Hopefully the above paragraph is understandable. The summarized question would be: How do I know at what tick to start simulating the client? EDIT: This is how I ended up doing it: The client keeps a clock (approximately) in sync with the server. The client then simulates the world at simulationTime = syncedTime - avg(RTT)/2 - interpolationTime The round-trip time can fluctuate so therefore I average it out over time. By only keeping the most recent values when calculating the average I hope to adapt to more permanent changes in latency. It's still to early to draw any conclusion. I'm currently simulating bad network connections, but it's looking good so far. Anyone see any possible problems?

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• How can state changes be batched while adhering to opaque-front-to-back/alpha-blended-back-to-front?

  - by Sion Sheevok

  This is a question I've never been able to find the answer to. Batching objects with similar states is a major performance gain when rendering many objects. However, I've been learned various rules when drawing objects in the game world. Draw all opaque objects, front-to-back. Draw all alpha-blended objects, back-to-front. Some of the major parameters to batch by, as I understand it, are textures, vertex buffers, and index buffers. It seems that, as long as you are adhering to the above two rules, there's little to be done in regards to batching. I see one possibility to batch, while still adhering to the above two rules. Opaque objects can still be drawn out of depth-order, because drawing them front-to-back is merely a fillrate optimization, meanwhile state changes may very well be far more expensive than the overdraw of drawing out of depth-order. However, non-opaque objects, those that require alpha-blending at least, must be drawn back-to-front in order to avoid rendering artifacts. Is the loss of the fillrate optimization for opaques worth the state batching optimization?

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• Weekend Project: Build a Fireball Launcher

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  What’s more fun than playing with fire? Shooting it from your hands. Put on your robe and wizard hat, make a stop at the hardware store, and spend the weekend trying to convince your friends you’ve acquired supernatural powers. Over at MAKE Magazine, Joel Johnson explains the impetus for his project: A stalwart of close-quarter magicians for years, the electronic flash gun is a simple device: a battery-powered, hand-held ignitor that uses a “glo-plug” to light a bit of flash paper and cotton, shooting a fireball a few feet into the air. You can buy one from most magic shops for around $50, but if you build one on your own, you’ll not only save a few bucks, you’ll also learn how easy it is to add fire effects to almost any electronics project. (And what gadget couldn’t stand a little more spurting flame?) The parts list is minimal but the end effect is pretty fantastic. Hit up the link below for the full build guide, plenty of warnings, and a weekend project that’s sure to impress. How to Own Your Own Website (Even If You Can’t Build One) Pt 3 How to Sync Your Media Across Your Entire House with XBMC How to Own Your Own Website (Even If You Can’t Build One) Pt 2

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• For an inexperienced VPS administrator, is Nginx a suitable alternative to Apache?

  - by James

  I couldn't think of the best way to set the title, so if somebody wants to edit it to something more appropriate, I'd be grateful ;) I'm what I would consider to be an inexperienced user/ administrator when it comes to running my VPS. I can get by with a few CLI commands, I can set up Webmin and I can set up Yum repos, but beyond the very basic stuff, I'm out of my depth. So far, I'm running Apache. I don't know it particularly well, but I can get by with editing httpd.conf if I'm told what to edit. I've heard good things about Nginx and that it's not as resource-hungry as Apache. I'd like to give it a go, but I can't find any information about its suitability for administrators like me, with little experience of sysadmin or web server config. Webmin now has support for Nginx, so getting it installed and running probably won't be too much of a problem. What I'm wondering is, from a site adminstrator perspective, is running Nginx as transparent as running Apache? IE, at the moment, I can just throw up Wordpress and Drupal sites without having much to worry about or having to make any config changes to Apache. Would Nginx be as transparent?

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• Computer suddenly won't boot - stops at a flashing prompt

  - by Dave M G

  I have been running Ubuntu on my computer for a long time, and I have been using 11.10 since it became available in October. Suddenly, this morning, when I rebooted, the computer would not reach the log in screen. I go through the standard POST boot sequence, and I also get a splash screen for my Nvidia graphics card, so at least most of the hardware seems to be working. After that, all I get is a flashing text prompt - one blinking white underline character on a screen that is otherwise completely blank. I don't think it is even reaching GRUB. No key input is possible. I have tried various key combinations to try and initiate some kind of interface, be it command line or anything else. The only key combination that works is [CTRL]+[ALT]+[Delete] to reboot. I realize this is likely to be a hardware problem, but it could be an Ubuntu problem(?), so I'm hoping for a specific set of troubleshooting steps so I can diagnose and repair this issue. My current suspicion is that one of the drives in my 2 disk software RAID has failed (even though they should be too new for that). However, this computer is critical to my work, so I'd like to invite advice on any possibilities so as to waste as little time as possible in fixing this machine.

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• Why is CS never a topic of conversation of the layman? [closed]

  - by hydroparadise

  Granted, every profession has it's technicalities. If you are an MD, you better know the anatomy of the human body, and if you are astronomer, you better know your calculus. Yet, you don't have to know these more advance topics to know that smoking might give you lung cancer because of carcinogens or the moon revolves around the earth because of gravity (thank you Discovery Channel). There's sort of a common knowledge (at least in more developed countries) of these more advanced topics. With that said, why are things like recursive descent parsing, BNF, or Turing machines hardly ever mentioned outsided 3000 or 4000 level classes in a university setting or between colleagues? Even back in my days before college in my pursuit of knowledge on how computers work, these very important topics (IMHO) never seem to get the light of day. Many different sources and sites go into "What is a processor?" or "What is RAM?", or "What is an OS?". You might get lucky and discover something about programming languages and how they play a role in how applications are created, but nothing about the tools for creating the language itself. To extend this idea, Dennis Ritchie died shortly after Steve Jobs, yet Dennis Ritchie got very little press compared to Steve Jobs. So, the heart of my question: Does the public in general not care to hear about computer science topics that make the technology in their lives work, or does the computer science community not lend itself to the general public to close the knowledge gap? Am I wrong to think the general public has the same thirst for knowledge on how things work as I do? Please consider the question carefully before answering or vote closing please.

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• What is the best way to exploit multicores when making multithread games?

  - by Keeper

  Many people suggest to write a program, and then start optimizing it. But I think that when it's coming to multithreading with multicore, a little think ahead is required. I've read about using threads, and experienced it myself during some courses at the university (still a student). The big question is simple, but a bit abstract: What thread related steps in game design do I need to take, before implementation? Now trying to be more specific. Let's say, as an example, that I'm making a small board game (like Monopoly) that I want to be multithreaded. My goal Is that this multithreaded game will exploit the best of the multicore system, lets say 4-6 cores (like in i7 processors). My answer to this question at the moment is, one thread for each of these four basic components: GUI User Input / Output AI (computer rival) Other game related calculations (like shortest path from A to B, or level up status change) I'm not an expert (yet!), and I'm sure there are better answers out there. Any suggestion, answer, different approach will be helpful. Some thoughts: Maybe splitting the main database is a good way.. (or total disaster.. )

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• Calculating the correct particle angle in an outwards explosion

  - by Sun

  I'm creating a simple particle explosion but am stuck in finding the correct angle to rotate my particle. The effect I'm going for is similar to this: Where each particle is going outwards from the point of origin and at the correct angle. This is what I currently have: As you can see, each particle is facing the same angle, but I'm having a little difficulty figuring out the correct angle. I have the vector for the point of emission and the new vector for each particle, how can I use this to calculate the angle? Some code for reference: private Particle CreateParticle() { ... Vector2 velocity = new Vector2(2.0f * (float)(random.NextDouble() * 2 - 1), 2.0f * (float)(random.NextDouble() * 2 - 1)); direction = velocity - ParticleLocation; float angle = (float)Math.Atan2(direction.Y, direction.X); ... return new Particle(texture, position, velocity, angle, angularVelocity, color, size, ttl, EmitterLocation); } I am then using the angle created as so in my particles Draw method: spriteBatch.Draw(Texture, Position, null, Color, Angle, origin, Size, SpriteEffects.None, 0f);

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• Plugged in, not charging&ndash;Windows 7

  - by Kelly Jones

  Just a quick post on something I ran into lately with my Dell Precision M4500 laptop (monster laptop!).  I noticed the little icon in the system tray for the power options was stating that it was “plugged in, not charging”.  I don’t know why it was stating this, but I quickly found a fix for it on the net. I found the fix in this forum on CNET.  Here’s the fix: In order to correct problems with the battery's power management software, follow the steps below. 1. Click Start and type device in the search field, then select Device Manager . 2. Expand the Batteries category. 3. Under the Batteries category, right-click the Microsoft ACPI Compliant Control Method Battery listing, and select Uninstall . WARNING: Do not remove the Microsoft AC Adapter driver or any other ACPI compliant driver. 4. On the Device Manager taskbar, click Scan for hardware changes . Alternately, select Action > Scan for hardware changes . Windows will scan your computer for hardware that doesn't have drivers installed, and will install the drivers needed to manage your battery's power. The notebook should now indicate that the battery is charging.   And it did work.

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• Today's Links (6/27/2011)

  - by Bob Rhubart

  2011 Entrepreneurs of the Year, Northern California Region Drake Martinet reports on the new batch of entrepreneurs joining the ranks of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz and eBay co-founder Pierre Omidyar as the Norther California Region winners of Ernst & Young's Entrepreneurs of the Year awards. Technical Article: Caching Strategies for Oracle Service Bus 11g William Markito Oliveira illustrates how the right caching strategy can make a big difference in application performance. Kscope 11 - Day 1 and 2 Oracle ACE Director Markus Eisele checks in from Long Beach. Kaleidoscope 2011: Sunday’s Symposium And so does Oracle ACE Director Marco Gralike. Yet another GlassFish 3.1.1 promoted build | The Aquarium "This version was carefully designed to be highly compatible with the previous 3.x versions," says Alexis, "thus leaving you with little reasons not to upgrade as soon as it comes out this summer." Using NoSQL database in your Java EE 6 Applications on GlassFish - MongoDB for now! "The NoSQL databases are not intended to be a replacement for the mainstream RDBMS," says Arun Gupta. I have a performance problem | Alan Hargreaves Good (and entertaining) advice from an Australian Solaris and Network Domain TSC* Principal Field Technologist.

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• System in low graphics, deleted linux, grub rescue, can't access windows

  - by First timer

  So I'm pretty new to Ubuntu but I managed to install it with no big problems on both my desktop and netbook. When I installed it on my brother's netbook everything went horribly wrong and now I fear the system is close to beyond repair. The problem was first that it said it did not have any space left (seemed ridiculous since it had a lot). Then Ubuntu began booting into a "System is running in low graphics mode error" which I then tried to fix, using all the tips I could find in here but nothing helped. I think the graphics error and lack of space might have been related but I can't be sure. Finally I gave up repairing Ubuntu and went for a reinstall. Shouldn't have done that! I read that I should simply open Ubuntu through a live usb and choose GParted to delete the Linux partitions so I did and rebooted accordingly. Next, I was to install Ubuntu but now I am only given the option to wipe the whole disk for Ubuntu, not install along with windows 7. If I access GParted I can still see the ntfs partitions that hold windows 7 (there are 2: one labeled RECOVERY and another labeled OS and boot) so why can't I access them? Btw. the OS and boot has a little red mark with a warning that 1 cluster is referenced to multiple times, don't know what that means. If I boot without the live usb I am sent directly into a grub rescue "black screen of the computer will follow no orders". Please, I know that the easiest might be to simply wipe the whole thing clean but there are important files and programs on windows 7. Is there a way to just access windows? It is a dell inspiron 1018 mini netbook, so I have no cd input and no windows 7 installation cd.

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• Kickstarter and 2D smartphone games

  - by mm24

  I am about to launch a Kickstarter project as, after 14 months of full time development on my first iOS game, I run out of money. I developed an iOS game that needs few more months to be ready (the game structure is there but haven't yet worked on balancing the difficulty of the various levels). I have a feeling that most of the computer games founded on Kickstarter are for console, PC or Mac and not for smartphones. The category that many people seem to like is RPG style games. I have done tons of work over a year and collaborated with musicians and illustrators to get top quality graphics and music. The game looks cool to be an iOS 2D game but, compared to what I've seen on Kickstarter, I feel so little and humbled. I have searched for smartphone game projects on Kickstarter but haven't found many. I believe that the reason is that people are not keen in backing an APP that is normally sold for 0.99$ as they perceive is not something big. Am I the only one having this feeling? Could anyone please share a list of references to some successfully backed kickstarter smartphone game projects? (In this way the question will not become a "chat" and will fulfill the requirements to be a gamedev question). Any other article or authoritative answer will be welcome.

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• How does this circle collision detection math work?

  - by Griffin

  I'm going through the wildbunny blog to learn about collision detection. I'm confused about how the vectors he's talking about come into play. Here's the part that confuses me: p = ||A-B|| – (r1+r2) The two spheres are penetrating by distance p. We would also like the penetration vector so that we can correct the penetration once we discover it. This is the vector that moves both circles to the point where they just touch, correcting the penetration. Importantly it is not only just a vector that does this, it is the only vector which corrects the penetration by moving the minimum amount. This is important because we only want to correct the error, not introduce more by moving too much when we correct, or too little. N = (A-B) / ||A-B|| P = N*p Here we have calculated the normalised vector N between the two centres and the penetration vector P by multiplying our unit direction by the penetration distance. I understand that p is the distance by which the circles penetrate, but I don't get what exactly N and P are. It seems to me N is just the coordinates of the 3rd point of the right trianlge formed by point A and B (A-B) then being divided by the hypotenuse of that triangle or distance between A and B (||A-B||). What's the significance of this? Also, what is the penetration vector used for? It seems to me like a movement that one of the circles would perform to get un-penetrated.

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• Cities from Space: A Tour of Urban Planning Patterns

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  While many cities developed haphazardly and organically with little structured planning, other cities were developed following strict organization–organization that reveals itself beautifully when seen from space. Wired magazine shares a roundup of ten well-planned cities viewed with a satellite’s eye. Among the roundup our favorite is the oldest, seen in the photo above: This nine-pointed fortress is perhaps the best example of a planned city from the Renaissance. Palmanova was built in 1593 and is located in the northeastern corner of Italy near the border with Slovenia. It was intended to be home to a completely self-reliant utopian community that could also defend itself against the Ottomans. It had three guarded entrances, ramparts between each of the star points and eventually a moat. Sadly, nobody was willing to move there. Eventually it was used as free housing for pardoned criminals. Today it is a national monument, a tourist destination and home to around 5,000 people. Hit up the link below to check out the other nine well-planned entries in the roundup. How To Boot Your Android Phone or Tablet Into Safe Mode HTG Explains: Does Your Android Phone Need an Antivirus? How To Use USB Drives With the Nexus 7 and Other Android Devices

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• Queueing up character actions

  - by TheBroodian

  I'm developing a 2D platformer with action-fighter elements. Currently things are working relatively smoothly but I'm having difficulty sorting something out. For the time, keeping my character's states and actions separated and preventing them from stepping on each others' toes is working out well and properly, but I would like to add a feature to my character to get him to behave a little bit more fluidly for the player. At the moment, he has numerous attacks and abilities that he can execute, all of them being executed with button presses. Here lies the problem: Being as everything is executed through button presses, while an action is in progress I flag the game to disregard further button presses until the action has completed. Therefore, consecutive actions cannot be performed until after the previous action has completed entirely. In runtime this behavior feels very icky, and very ungamelike. In games that rest most memorably at the forefront of my mind the player is able to execute button commands during the process of actions, and at the end of the current action, the following action is executed (seems like some sort of a queue system or something) Can anybody offer any guidance with this?

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• EE vs Computer Science: Effect on Developers' Approaches, Styles?

  - by DarenW

  Are there any systematic differences between software developers (sw engineers, architect, whatever job title) with an electronics or other engineering background, compared to those who entered the profession through computer science? By electronics background, I mean an EE degree, or a self-taught electronics tinkerer, other types of engineers and experimental physicists. I'm wondering if coming into the software-making professions from a strong knowledge of flip flops, tristate buffers, clock edge rise times and so forth, usually leads to a distinct approach to problems, mindsets, or superior skills at certain specialties and lack of skills at others, when compared to the computer science types who are full of concepts like abstract data types, object orientation, database normalization, who speak of "closures" in programming languages - things that make little sense to the soldering iron crowd until they learn enough programming. The real world, I'm sure, offers a wild range of individual exceptions, but for the most part, can you say there are overall differences? Would these have hiring implications e.g. (to make up something) "never hire an electron wrangler to do database design"? Could knowing about any differences help job seekers find something appropriate more effectively? Or provide enlightenment or some practical advice for those who find themselves misfits in a particular job role? (Btw, I've never taken any computer science classes; my impression of exactly what they cover is fuzzy. I'm an electronics/physics/art type, myself.)

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• How do you track existing requirements over time?

  - by CaptainAwesomePants

  I'm a software engineer working on a complex, ongoing website. It has a lot of moving parts and a small team of UI designers and business folks adding new features and tweaking old ones. Over the last year or so, we've added hundreds of interesting little edge cases. Planning, implementing, and testing them is not a problem. The problem comes later, when we want to refactor or add another new feature. Nobody remembers half of the old features and edge cases from a year ago. When we want to add a new change, we notice that code does all sorts of things in there, and we're not entirely sure which things are intentional requirements and which are meaningless side effects. Did someone last year request that the login token was supposed to only be valid for 30 minutes, or did some programmers just pick a sensible default? Can we change it? Back when the product was first envisioned, we created some documentation describing how the site worked. Since then we created a few additional documents describing new features, but nobody ever goes back and updates those documents when new features are requested, so the only authoritative documentation is the code itself. But the code provides no justification, no reason for its actions: only the how, never the why. What do other long-running teams do to keep track of what the requirements were and why?

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• A better alternative to incompatible implementations for the same interface?

  - by glenatron

  I am working on a piece of code which performs a set task in several parallel environments where the behaviour of the different components in the task are similar but quite different. This means that my implementations are quite different but they are all based on the relationships between the same interfaces, something like this: IDataReader -> ContinuousDataReader -> ChunkedDataReader IDataProcessor -> ContinuousDataProcessor -> ChunkedDataProcessor IDataWriter -> ContinuousDataWriter -> ChunkedDataWriter So that in either environment we have an IDataReader, IDataProcessor and IDataWriter and then we can use Dependency Injection to ensure that we have the correct one of each for the current environment, so if we are working with data in chunks we use the ChunkedDataReader, ChunkedDataProcessor and ChunkedDataWriter and if we have continuous data we have the continuous versions. However the behaviour of these classes is quite different internally and one could certainly not go from a ContinuousDataReader to the ChunkedDataReader even though they are both IDataProcessors. This feels to me as though it is incorrect ( possibly an LSP violation? ) and certainly not a theoretically correct way of working. It is almost as though the "real" interface here is the combination of all three classes. Unfortunately in the project I am working on with the deadlines we are working to, we're pretty much stuck with this design, but if we had a little more elbow room, what would be a better design approach in this kind of scenario?

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• Why do my websites have a first page rank on Bing and Yahoo but not Google? [closed]

  - by Linda Cullum

  I have 3 websites suffering from a drop in ranking with Google and hence a huge drop in traffic. The instant drop ocurred in September and I have not been able to remedy it. For the past 6-10 years my main website http://LearnToSail.Net has ranked from #3 to #1 on the 1st page of Google and all the other engines with the search term "learn to sail" Now it shows on the 1st page of Bing and Yahoo but does not show up on ANY pages of Google. The only way it does come up is if I add "cd" to the "learn to sail" phrase. We sell a sailing cd on that website. The other websites are http://LearnToSailOnLine.com ..search terms are "learn to sail online" or learntosailonline and historyofthepilgrims.com search terms are "history of the pilgrims" "historyofthepilgrims" I get the same result. Gone on Google but 1st pages for Bing and Yahoo. I have researched, edited,updated blogs, made sitemaps, prayed to the universe and use Google Webmaster tools but nothing is changing and I have lost alot of business. I host with 1and1.com and have been back and forth with them but to no avail and no change in traffic. I thought maybe some DNS mapping was off. I used to have alot of traffic now I have hardly any. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. I am still in the process of working on the issue of course! This is a really great website here and I am glad I came across it. Thank you, LS Cullum Little Pines Multimedia

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• Architecture : am I doing things right?

  - by Jeremy D

  I'm trying to use a '~classic' layered arch using .NET and Entity Framework. We are starting from a legacy database which is a little bit crappy: Inconsistent naming Unneeded views (view referencing other views, select * views etc...) Aggregated columns Potatoes and Carrots in the same table etc... So I ended with fully isolating my database structure from my domain model. To do so EF entities are hidden from presentation layer. The goal is to permit an easier database refactoring while lowering the impact of it on applications. I'm now facing a lot of challenges and I'm starting to ask myself if I'm doing things right. My Domain Model is highly volatile, it keeps evolving with apps as new fields needs are arising. Complexity of it keeps raising and class it contains start to get a lot of properties. Creating include strategy and reprojecting to EF is very tricky (my domain objects don't have any kind of lazy/eager loading relationship properties): DomainInclude<Domain.Model.Bar>.Include("Customers").Include("Customers.Friends") // To... IFooContext.Bars.Include(...).Include(...).Where(...) Some framework are raping the isolation levels (Devexpress Grids which needs either XPO or IQueryable for filtering and paging large data sets) I'm starting to ask myself if : the isolation of EF auto-generated entities is an unneeded cost. I should allow frameworks to hit IQueryable? Slow slope to hell? (it's really hard to isolate DevExpress framework, any successful experience?) the high volatility of my domain model is normal? Did you have similar difficulties? Any advice based on experience?

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• Automated Qt testing framework

  - by user1457565

  Can someone recommend a good robust "Free" testing framework for Qt? Our requirements: Should be able to test basic mouse click / mouse move events SHould be able to handle non-widget view components Should have "record" capability to generate test scripts. Should be automatable for running it daily. We looked at: Squish - this solves all our problems. But it is just too da** expensive. KD Executor - the download page now links to the squish page and says thats what they recommend for testing. Not sure what they mean by that. TDriver - from nokia.qt. Super difficult to install. Very little documentation. Having a hard time to just install. I wonder how much harder it would be to write tests. qtestlib - Could not handle non-widget components. Everything has to be a widget to be tested. No "record" feature. Can someone help with any other alternative ? thanks Mouli

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• What does SVN do better than git?

  - by doug

  No question that the majority of debates over programmer tools distill to either personal choice (by the user) or design emphasis, i.e., optimizing design according to particular uses cases (by the tool builder). Text Editors are probably the most prominent example--a coder who works on a Windows at work and codes in Haskell on the Mac at home, values cross-platform and compiler integration and so chooses Emacs over Textmate, etc. It's less common that a newly introduced technology is genuinely, demonstrably superior to the extant options. I wonder if this is in fact the case with version-control systems, in particular, centralized VCS (CVS, SVN) versus distributed VCS (git, hg)? I used SVN for about five years, and SVN is currently used where I work. A little less than three years ago, I switched to git (and gitHub) for all of my personal projects. I can think of a number of advantages of git over subversion (and which for the most part abstract to advantages of distributed over centralized VCS), but I cannot think of one contra example--some task (that's relevant and arises in a programmers usual workflow) that subversion does better than git. The only conclusion I have drawn from this is that I don't have any data--not that git is better, etc. My guess is that such counter-examples exist, hence this question.

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• Extreme Portability: OpenJDK 7 and GlassFish 3.1.1 on Power Mac G5!

  - by MarkH

  Occasionally you hear someone grumble about platform support for some portion or combination of the Java product "stack". As you're about to see, this really is not as much of a problem as you might think. Our friend John Yeary was able to pull off a pretty slick feat with his vintage Power Mac G5. In his words: Using a build script sent to me by Kurt Miller, build recommendations from Kelly O'Hair, and the great work of the BSD Port team... I created a new build of OpenJDK 7 for my PPC based system using the Zero VM. The results are fantastic. I can run GlassFish 3.1.1 along with all my enterprise applications. I recently had the opportunity to pick up an old G5 for little money and passed on it. What would I do with it? At the time, I didn't think it would be more than a space-consuming novelty. Turns out...I could have had some fun and a useful piece of hardware at the same time. Maybe it's time to go bargain-hunting again. For more information about repurposing classic Apple hardware and learning a few JDK-related tricks in the process, visit John's site for the full article, available here. All the best,Mark

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• Neural network input preprocessing

  - by TND

  It's clear that the effectiveness of a neural network depends strongly on the format you give it to work with. You want to preprocess it into the most convenient form you can algorithmically get to, so that the neural network doesn't have to account for that itself. I'm working on a little project that (surprise!) is going to be using neural networks. My future goal is to eventually use NEAT, which I'm really excited about. Anyway, one of my ideas involves moving entities in continuous 2D space, from a top-down perspective (this would be a really cool game AI). Of course, unless these guys are blind, they're going to be able to see the world around them. There's a lot of different ways this information could be fed into the network. One interesting but expensive way is to simply render a top-down "view" of things, with the entities as dots on the picture, and feed that in. I was hoping for something much simpler to use (at least at first), such as a list of the x (maybe 7 or so) nearest entities and their position in relative polar coordinates, orientation, health, etc., but I'm trying to think of the best way to do it. My first instinct was to order them by distance, which would inherently also train the neural network to consider those more "important". However, I was thinking- what if there's two entities that are nearly the same distance away? They could easily alternate indexes in that list, confusing the network. My question is, is there a better way of representing this? Essentially, the issue is the network needs a good way of keeping track of who's who, while knowing (by being inputted) relevant information about the list of entities it can see. Thanks!

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