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• Improved Customer Experience, but at what Cost?

  - by Tony Berk

  We can all probably agree that improving your customers' experience is a good thing. But a key question many people are asking is will it help your organization and, in particular, what are the financial benefits?That's a good question, especially when companies ARE experiencing phenomenal return on investment (ROI). Of course, there are many factors that impact ROI or other measures of success, but we'd like to share some success stories as examples of customer experience in action and delivering positive results. If you would like to learn more about the economics of customer experience, see Brian Curran's presentation at the Oracle Customer Experience Summit last month. In this series of blog posts, we'll share actual customer stories. Today's example is Dell, which uses Oracle Real-Time Decisions (RTD) and Siebel CRM as part of their customer experience portfolio to better understand their customers' needs and wants and provide consistent interactions. Regular readers of this blog are probably familiar with Siebel, but RTD may be new to many of you. RTD is a complete decision management solution that delivers real-time decisions and recommendations and automatically renders decisions within a business process to create tailored messaging for every customer interaction.What does that mean? In the video below, Dell describes how customer experience is important not just for one interaction channel, but across all "vehicles." RTD is helping Dell understand customer behavior and communicate with the customer in a more relevant manner, across all communication  or interaction channels including sales and service call centers, email marketing and online. Dell continues to expand use of RTD because the benefits are showing up in sales, service and marketing results including 19% increase in close rates, faster issue resolution and 40% improvement in revenue per click in email marketing. Click here, to learn more about Oracle Customer Experience and stay tuned for more customer spotlights.

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• Page appears indexed in Google but not findable for any search terms?

  - by Jeff Atwood

  (Note that I am going to use screenshots here because I suspect writing about this will change the behavior over time.) If you do a Google search for uiviewcontroller best practices either with or without the quotes, you end up with results like this: Note that none of these pages resolve to the actual Stack Overflow question containing those words in the title. They resolve to either a) sites that are mirroring our creative commons data and correctly pointing back to the source question without nofollow, as properly specified by our attribution requirements or b) our own internal links to the question, but not the actual question itself. The actual page with the title ... Custom UIView and UIViewController best practices? ... does exist at this URL ... http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3300183/custom-uiview-and-uiviewcontroller-best-practices ... and apparently it is present in Google's index! But why does it not appear when we search for uiviewcontroller best practices ? We know that Google contains this page in its index Our search terms match the title of the question Stack Overflow has much higher pagerank than the other sites that are mirroring this question under Creative Commons I don't get it. What are we doing wrong here?

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• Can I remove the systems from a component entity system?

  - by nathan

  After reading a lot about entity/component based engines. I feel like there is no real definition for this kind of engine. Reading this thread: Implementing features in an Entity System and the linked article made me think a lot. I did not feel that comfortable using System concept so I'll write something else, inspired by this pattern. I'd like to know if you think it's a good way to organize game code and what improvements can be made. Regarding a more strict implementation of entity/component based engine, is my solution viable? Do I risk getting stuck at any point due to the lack of flexibility of this implementation (or anything else)? My engine, as for entity/component patterns has entities and components, no systems since the game logic is handled by components. Also, I think the main difference is the fact that my engine will use inherence and OOP concepts in general, I mean, I don't try to minimize them. Entity: an entity is an abstract class. It holds his position, width and height, scale and a list of linked components. The current implementation can be found here (java). Every frame, the entity will be updated (i.e all the components linked to this entity will be updated), and rendered, if a render component is specified. Component: like for entity, a component is an abstract class that must be extended to create new components. The behavior of an entity is created through his components collection. The component implementation can be found here. Components are updated when the owning entity is updated or for only one specific component (render component), rendered. Here is an example of a logic component (i.e not a renderable component, a component that's updated each frame) in charge of listening for keyboard events and a render component in charge of display a plain sprite (i.e not animated).

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• What follows after lexical analysis?

  - by madflame991

  I'm working on a toy compiler (for some simple language like PL/0) and I have my lexer up and running. At this point I should start working on building the parse tree, but before I start I was wondering: How much information can one gather from just the string of tokens? Here's what I gathered so far: One can already do syntax highlighting having only the list of tokens. Numbers and operators get coloured accordingly and keywords also. Autoformatting (indenting) should also be possible. How? Specify for each token type how many white spaces or new line characters should follow it. Also when you print tokens modify an alignment variable (when the code printer reads "{" increment the alignment variable by 1, and decrement by 1 for "}". Whenever it starts printing on a new line the code printer will align according to this alignment variable) In languages without nested subroutines one can get a complete list of subroutines and their signature. How? Just read what follows after the "procedure" or "function" keyword until you hit the first ")" (this should work fine in a Pascal language with no nested subroutines) In languages like Pascal you can even determine local variables and their types, as they are declared in a special place (ok, you can't handle initialization as well, but you can parse sequences like: "var a, b, c: integer") Detection of recursive functions may also be possible, or even a graph representation of which subroutine calls who. If one can identify the body of a function then one can also search if there are any mentions of other function's names. Gathering statistics about the code, like number of lines, instructions, subroutines EDIT: I clarified why I think some processes are possible. As I read comments and responses I realise that the answer depends very much on the language that I'm parsing.

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• Ubuntu Desktop does not load

  - by Niklas

  If I login on my Ubuntu 14.04, I get the following desktop: This weird behavior appeared after I executed sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade and restarted my computer. Don't know why though. To my Ubuntu I have tried the following (nothing seems to work so far) Fix any broken packages: sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get autoclean sudo apt-get clean sudo apt-get autoremove Locate any broken packages and reinstall them: sudo apt-get install debsums sudo apt-get clean sudo debsums_init sudo debsums -cs sudo apt-get install --reinstall $(sudo dpkg -S $(sudo debsums -c) | cut -d : -f 1 | sort -u) Removing some compiz files: rm -r ~/.cache/compizconfig-1 rm -r ~/.compiz Purging of NVIDIA and installing NVIDIA-prime: sudo apt-get install --reinstall ubuntu-desktop sudo apt-get install unity sudo apt-get purge nvidia* bumblebee* sudo apt-get install nvidia-prime sudo shutdown -r now Compizconfig Settings Manager: sudo apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager export DISPLAY=:0 ccsm // Back to UI and enablement of Unity Plugin Unity replace, which stopped at a while and did nothing afterwards unity --replace Some dconf reset dconf reset -f /org/compiz/ unity --reset-icons &disown Actually dconf did not work and I got this error: error: Cannot autolaunch D-Bus without X11 $DISPLAY Can anybody help me on that? This is my hardware (hope it helps in any way): Intel® Core™ i7-3770 ASUS GTX660TI-DC2-OG-2GD5 (NVIDIA driver is/was installed) ASUS P8Z77-V LX Corsair DIMM 8 GB DDR3-1600 Kit Samsung 830series 2,5" 256 GB (Windows is installed here) Seagate ST31000524AS 1 TB (3/4 are reserved for files; 1/4 is for Ubuntu (16GB swap included))

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, May 20, 2014

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, May 20, 2014Popular ReleasesEdiFabric: Release 3.1: Fixed parse tree generation for the latest validation schemasCompare .NET Objects: Version 2.03.0.0: Support for System.Drawing.Font type New Option to Ignore Unknown Object TypesQuickMon: Version 3.11: This release adds some major changes to the core monitoring engine. 1. Polling overrides: Each collector entry can specify a minimum time updating is allowed for it and dependent collector entries. 2. Polling frequency sliding: Additional to polling overrides a collector entry can specify 'sliding' polling frequency if the state remains the same. This means the frequency slows down reducing overhead of polling on a stagnant resource. 3. The monitor pack has an overriding frequency. If used...Family Tree Analyzer: Version 3.7.2.3-beta2: Small beta test to determine issue with Lost Cousins facts with census with no country.AST - a tool for exploring windows kernel: Ast-0.2.20140519-win8.1x86: symbol form, supports any symbol query like dt/x command in windbg symbol form, supports loading pdb file pe form, visualizer of pe info (dos/optional header, sections, directories, import/export table)Mini SQL Query: Mini SQL Query (1.0.72.457): Apologies for the previous update! FK issue fixed and also a template data cache issue.Endomondo Export: First Release: This is the first release, it might be buggy, so I'll eventually try to improve it over time. I did it quick and dirty as I didn't have much spare time to develop it, but again it works for me. ;-) If I see people use it and there are reasonable requests I might add more stuff to it. Hope you guys like it!FileTable Services for Lightswitch: FileTable Services for Lightswitch 1.0.0: 19 MAY 2014 v.1.0.0 Initial releaseWordMat: WordMat v. 1.06: Check WordMat.blogspot.com for a complete description of new features.Visual F# Tools: Daily Builds Preview 05-16-2014: This preview is released for use under a proprietary license.Wsus Package Publisher: Release v1.3.1405.17: Add Russian translation (thanks to VSharmanov) Fix a bug that make WPP to crash if the user click on "Connect/Reload" while the Report Tab is loading. Enhance the way WPP store the password for remote computers command.MoreTerra (Terraria World Viewer): More Terra 1.12.9: =========== = Compatibility = =========== Updated to account for new format 1.2.4.1 =========== = Issues = =========== all items have not been added. Some colors for new tiles may be off. I wanted to get this out so people have a usable program.LINQ to Twitter: LINQ to Twitter v3.0.3: Supports .NET 4.5x, Windows Phone 8.x, Windows 8.x, Windows Azure, Xamarin.Android, and Xamarin.iOS. New features include Status/Lookup, Mute APIs, and bug fixes. 100% Twitter API v1.1 coverage, Async, Portable Class Library (PCL).ConEmu - Windows console with tabs: ConEmu 140519 [Alpha]: ConEmu - developer build x86 and x64 versions. Written in C++, no additional packages required. Run "ConEmu.exe" or "ConEmu64.exe". Some useful information you may found: http://superuser.com/questions/tagged/conemu http://code.google.com/p/conemu-maximus5/wiki/ConEmuFAQ http://code.google.com/p/conemu-maximus5/wiki/TableOfContents If you want to use ConEmu in portable mode, just create empty "ConEmu.xml" file near to "ConEmu.exe" CS-Script for Notepad++ (C# intellisense and code execution): Release v1.0.26.0: Added access to the Release Notes during 'Check for Updates...'' Debug panels Added support for generic types members Members are grouped into 'Raw View' and 'Non-Public members' categories Implemented dedicated (array-like) view for Lists and Dictionaries http://download-codeplex.sec.s-msft.com/Download?ProjectName=csscriptnpp&DownloadId=846498ClosedXML - The easy way to OpenXML: ClosedXML 0.70.0: A lot of fixes. See history.SFDL.NET: SFDL.NET (2.2.9.2): Changelog: Neues Icon Xup.in CnL Plugin BugfixSEToolbox: SEToolbox 01.030.008 Release 1: Fixed cube editor failing to apply color to cubes. Added to cube editor, replace cube dialog, and Build Percent dialog. Corrected for hidden asteroid ore, allowing rare ore to show when importing an asteroid, or converting a 3d model to an asteroid (still appears to be limitations on rare ore in small asteroids). Allowed ore selection to Asteroid file import. (Can copy/import and convert existing asteroid to another ore). Added progress bars to common long running operations. Fixed ...Better Robocopy GUI: Command Line GUI for Robocopy: Better Robocopy GUI had become the primary plugin in Command Line GUI built on .NET 4TFS Planning and Disaster Recovery Avoidance Guide: v1.4.BETA - TFS, DR and Azure IaaS Planning Guides: Welcome to the TFS Planning and DR Avoidance Guidance What is new? A new crisper, more compact style, which is easier to consume on multiple devices without sacrificing any content. Also included are the new TFS on Azure IaaS guide and supplementary guides. Note Capacity planning workbook and posters are included in the Everything Zip package. Quality-Bar Detail Documentation has been reviewed by Visual Studio ALM Rangers Documentation has been through an independent technical review ...New ProjectsBizTalk Port Info Query Tool: This tool is capable of retrieving BizTalk send and receive port information, through which can be searched.C5_StyleCopped: The C5 project while an excellent set of collections suffers from being very non StyleCop compliant.Channel 9 RSS Reader (Universal / WinPhone 8): Channel 9 RSS Reader Code Share Sample- A simple RSS reader app for the Channel 9 RSS feed sharing code across 3 apps.CRM Web API Yelp Example: Sample Visual Studio 2013 project that provides an example of how you could use Web API and Microsoft Azure to integrate with Yelp.ERP Accounting System: ERP Accounting SystemEssIL: Essential classes written in CIL.FileTable Services for Lightswitch: Integrates SQL Server 2012 and later FileTable functionality with Lightswitch rapid application development tools. Works with ALL types of Lightswitch clients.freeasyDMS: A free and easy to use DMS for everyone. Without any cloud restrictions. All information about added Documents are stored lokaly at XML files.FreelancerCreateReport: Freelancer_CreateReportInstituto Superior de Ciencias Comerciales: esta es una pruebaMVC Blogger: Under TestingMVC Bootstrap Timepicker: ASP.NET MVC html helper for Bootstrap 3 time picker. This helper makes it easy to use a time picker with the bootstrap look 'n feel in your web site.NextGen: NextGen FrameworkPlato 2D Framework: Plato Windows Runtime App canvas oriented MVVM framework.Promotion Planner Pro: Trade Promotion Management and Analytic suitSharePoint Managed Metadata List Filter: This managed metadata list filter webpart provides the ability to filter multiple list view webparts that contain the same Managed metadata site column on the sSurfwave: A Windows Store (Windows Runtime) library that provides multi-touch tracking and normalized interpretation capabilities.Torrent Description Generator: A simple WPF application to generate a robust torrent description for movies in text or bbcode. Includes file info, thumbs, imdb/RT links and poster.Trang's Project: Qu?n lý thông tin khách hàng trong ho?t d?ng vay v?nWebSniffer: A bot written in C# to play a hangman game and intelligently make decisions about what to pick next.WorldBankBBS: BBS Package designed for use with ASCII, ANSI and PETSCII (Commodore) users. All resources are shared between differing clients. WPF Password Generator with Prism 5 and Moq (2014): This is a WPF reference implementation for developing an MVVM application that uses Prism (5) and Moq.????-????【??】????????: ??????????????,??????????????????,?????????????。?????????,????????????。 ?????-?????【??】?????????: ?????????????????,????,????,?????????.?????,?????!?????,?????????、??、??! ??????-??????【??】??????????: ????????????,???????,??????。??????????,????,????,?????,????????????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ???????????????、???????,?????????,???????????????。?????????????,???????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ?????????????????,???????????????????????????,????:????,????,????,?????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ????????????????,?????????????? ??。??????????、????、????、?????????? ???????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ??????????????????,???、???!???????,????????????????,????????????,???! ??????-??????【??】??????????: ???????????????,????,???????、???????????,???????????,????,?????,???????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ????????????????????????,?????????,??????????,????????,?????! ??????-??????【??】??????????: ?????????????,????????,??????????????,?????????,????,????,??????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ??????????????、?????????,?????????,????,????????,????????????????! ??????-??????【??】??????????: ?????????????:??????、????、????、????、????、??????、??????，???????! ??????-??????【??】??????????: ????????????????、?????,????????????????????,????,????,??????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ????????????????，???????、???????????，????????、????、????、??????、????????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ???????????????????????????,???????????????????????,???????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ???????????????、????、????、??????、????、???????,?????,?????????! ??????-??????【??】??????????: ??????????????????、????、??????、????????,????????????,???????????！ ??????-??????【??】??????????: ????????????????????,?????????????????????,?????,????,???????. ??????-??????【??】??????????: ???????????????、???????,?????????,???????????????,?????????????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ????????????、??、???????????,??????,????????,??????????????????...????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ????????????????，?????????/?,,???????????,??????????????! ??????-??????【??】??????????: ??????????,????????????????????????,???????????????,?????????????！ ??????-??????【??】??????????: ??????????,????????,?????,???,???????????,???????????,?????,??????！ ??????-??????【??】??????????: ???????????????????????????、??????????????,??????????????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ?????????????????"????,????"???,????????????????????????,??????????????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ?????????????????,????:????,????,????,??????,?????,???????????????! ??????-??????【??】??????????: ??????????????????????????,???????????,????????,?????????????????????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ???????????、????、????、??????、????、????????,????????、?????????,?????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ?????????????????,?????????????。????????????,???????,???????,?????,?????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ????????????????,?????????、??、??、????,??????????,?????????????！ ??????-??????【??】??????????: ???????????、????、????、??????????,???,?????,???????????????. ??????-??????【??】??????????: ??????????????????????,?????, ... ????????????,????,????,?????,???????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ????????????????????????、??????,????、?????、????， ?????????，?????????????！ ??????-??????【??】??????????: ????????,??????,?????????????????????,???????????????????????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ?????????????????????、????、????、??????、???????,??????、??????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ???????【.????.????.????.????.】??【??】:、??、??、??、??、??、??、??、??、??、??、?????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ??????????????????,????,??.??.??.??.??.??.??.???，????，???????! ??????-??????【??】??????????: ????????????????????、????????、????????、????????、???????,????????????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ????????????????????,?????,???????,???????????,??????! ??????-??????【??】??????????: ???????????、??????、????、?????、?????!????,????????????????!????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ??????,??,????????。 ... ??????????????????、??????????????????... ???????-???????【??】???????????: ???????????????????????????,???????????????,????????????????！ ???????-???????【??】???????????: ???????????????:????,????,????,???????,????????,??????:????????,?????! ???????-???????【??】???????????: ???????,?????????,?????????????。?????????????,?????????,???????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ????????????????,???????、???????????,????????,????,?????????,??????,??????! ??????-??????【??】??????????: ?????????????????,????????????,?????????????????,??????,????????! ??????-??????【??】??????????: ??????????????????,???????、????、????、??????、???????,??????,???????????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ?????????????,??,??,??,??? ?,??,,??,??,??,??,??,??,????????,??????！ ??????-??????【??】??????????: ????????????????????????????:???????,??????,????,????,????,?????！ ??????-??????【??】??????????: ???????????????????,????,????,????,???????,?????,?????.??????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ????????????????????,?????????????,???????????.????????????,????????????! ??????-??????【??】??????????: ??????????????????,??:??????,????,????,????,?????,??????????????. ??????-??????【??】??????????: ?????????????????,???????????????。?????????????,???????,?????????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ?????????????,????(??)????????，??????，????，???，????，???????! ??????-??????【??】??????????: ??????????????,?????????????,?????????????,??????,????,????,??????????！ ??????-??????【??】??????????: ????????????????,????????,????:???????,??????,????,????,?????,?????,??????! ??????-??????【??】??????????: ?????????????????????,????,????,??????????。???????????????,??,??,??????????,??????... ??????-??????【??】??????????: ?????????????????,??????????????、???????、???????、???????、?????！ ??????-??????【??】??????????: ???????????,?????????????? ??。????????、????、????、?????????? ???????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ????????????、?????、?????、?????、?????、????,???????????,?????,??????！ ??????-??????【??】??????????: ?????????????、?????、?????、????、?????,??????????。????????????????! ??????-??????【??】??????????: ??????????????????,????????????,?????、??、????,?????,??????！ ??????-??????【??】??????????: ?????????????????,???????????????。???????????,??????:????、????、???????！ ??????-??????【??】??????????: ??????????????,?????????????,????,?????????,?????????????,?????,?????! ??????-??????【??】??????????: ??????????????????,???????????,??????????????,??????????，??????????????！

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• Compiled code spreadsheet-like cell management? (auto-updating)

  - by proGrammar

  Okay so I am fully aware how spreadsheets manage cells, they build dependency graphs where when one cell changes it tells all the other cells that are dependent on it that it changed. So they can from there update. How they update I think involves either re-evaluating the formulas stored as strings, or re-evaluating the abstract syntax tree which I think is stored differently and might be faster. Something like that. What I'm looking to do is manage a few variables in my code so I don't have to update them in the correct way, which would be a nightmare. But I also want it much faster than spreadsheets. And since I'm not looking for any functionality as great as are in these spreadsheets, I just figured from that thought point that there has to be a way to have a very fast implementation of this functionality. Especially since I don't have to modify cells after compiling unless that would be an option. I'm very new to programming so I have no idea. One example might be to have a code-generator that generates code that does this for me. But I have no clue what the generated code would look like. Specifically, how exactly would variables inform others that they need to update, and what do those variables do to update? I'm looking for any kind of ideas. Programming is not my job but nonetheless I was hoping to have some kind of system like this that would greatly help me with some stuff. Of course I have been programming plenty lately so I can still program. I just don't have the full scope on things. I'm looking for any kind of ideas, thank you very much in advance! Also, please help me with the tags. I know C# and Java mainly and I'm hoping to implement this in either of those languages and I'm hoping this can stay in those tags. Forcing this into some kind of spreadsheet tag wouldn't be accurate.

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• Good 2D Platformer Physics

  - by Joe Wreschnig

  I have a basic character controller set up for a 2D platformer with Box2D, and I'm starting to tweak it to try to make it feel good. Physics engines have a lot of knobs to tweak, and it's not clear to me, writing with a physics engine for the first time, which ones I should use. Should jumping apply a force for several ticks? An impulse? Directly set velocity? How do I stop the avatar from sticking to walls without taking away all its friction (or do I take away all the friction, but only in the air)? Should I model the character as a capsule? A box with rounded corners? A box with two wheels? Just one big wheel? I feel like someone must have done this before! There seem to be very few resources available on the web that are not "baby's first physics", which all cut off where I'm hoping someone has already solved the issues. Most examples of physics engines for platformers have floaty-feeling controls, or in-air jumps, or easily exploitable behavior when temporary penetration is too high, etc. Some examples of what I mean: A short tap of jump jumps a short distance; a long tap jumps higher. Short skidding when stopping or reversing directions at high velocity. Standing stably on inclines (but maybe sliding down them when ducking). Analog speed when using an analog controller. All the other things that separate good platformers from bad platformers. Dare I suggest, stable moving platforms? I'm not really looking for "hey, do this." Obviously, the right thing to do is dependent on what I want in the game. But I'm hoping someone somewhere has gone through the possibilities and said "well technique A does feature X well, technique B does Y well, but that doesn't work with C", or has some worked examples beyond "if (key == space) character.impulse(0, 1)"

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• What types of programming contest problems are there?

  - by Alex

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

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• Ray Tracing concers: Efficient Data Structure and Photon Mapping

  - by Grieverheart

  I'm trying to build a simple ray tracer for specific target scenes. An example of such scene can be seen below. I'm concerned as to what accelerating data structure would be most efficient in this case since all objects are touching but on the other hand, the scene is uniform. The objects in my ray tracer are stored as a collection of triangles, thus I also have access to individual triangles. Also, when trying to find the bounding box of the scene, how should infinite planes be handled? Should one instead use the viewing frustum to calculate the bounding box? A few other questions I have are about photon mapping. I've read the original paper by Jensen and many more material. In the compact data structure for the photon they introduce, they store photon power as 4 chars, which from my understanding is 3 chars for color and 1 for flux. But I don't understand how 1 char is enough to store a flux of the order of 1/n, where n is the number of photons (I'm also a bit confused about flux vs power). The other question about photon mapping is, if it would be more efficient in my case to store photons per object (or even per Object's triangle) instead of using a balanced kd-tree. Also, same question about bounding box of the scene but for photon mapping. How should one find a bounding box from the pov of the light when infinite planes are involved?

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• Code structure for multiple applications with a common core

  - by Azrael Seraphin

  I want to create two applications that will have a lot of common functionality. Basically, one system is a more advanced version of the other system. Let's call them Simple and Advanced. The Advanced system will add to, extend, alter and sometimes replace the functionality of the Simple system. For instance, the Advanced system will add new classes, add properties and methods to existing Simple classes, change the behavior of classes, etc. Initially I was thinking that the Advanced classes simply inherited from the Simple classes but I can see the functionality diverging quite significantly as development progresses, even while maintaining a core base functionality. For instance, the Simple system might have a Project class with a Sponsor property whereas the Advanced system has a list of Project.Sponsors. It seems poor practice to inherit from a class and then hide, alter or throw away significant parts of its features. An alternative is just to run two separate code bases and copy the common code between them but that seems inefficient, archaic and fraught with peril. Surely we have moved beyond the days of "copy-and-paste inheritance". Another way to structure it would be to use partial classes and have three projects: Core which has the common functionality, Simple which extends the Core partial classes for the simple system, and Advanced which also extends the Core partial classes for the advanced system. Plus having three test projects as well for each system. This seems like a cleaner approach. What would be the best way to structure the solution/projects/code to create two versions of a similar system? Let's say I later want to create a third system called Extreme, largely based on the Advanced system. Do I then create an AdvancedCore project which both Advanced and Extreme extend using partial classes? Is there a better way to do this? If it matters, this is likely to be a C#/MVC system but I'd be happy to do this in any language/framework that is suitable.

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• Ubuntu won't suspend anymore, but it did upon install.

  - by Bruce Connor

  I fresh installed Ubuntu 10.10 back when it came out, and my laptop was suspending fine. All of a sudden, I can't get my laptop to suspend anymore. It's an HP Pavilion dv2-1110, but I don't think it's a hardware issue, here's why: It suspended fine upon first install. I haven't installed any new kernels since then, but I have installed tons of packages, so it's probably a package. The suspend and hibernate options disappeared from the shutdown menu. If I press my keyboard's suspend button (or if I close the lid) I get the following message: If I try the command pmi action suspend, I get the error message: Error org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name org.freedesktop.Hal was not provided by any .service files. If I try the command echo -n mem > sudo /sys/power/state I get absolutely no output and no visible effect. What might be causing this behavior? I thought a list of installed packages might be useful, but it's huge and I don't know how to post it here in collapse/expand mode or something. EDIT:Just in case someone asks, none of the installed packages are kdm or anything like that (which would justify the lack of options in gnome's shutdown menu).

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• Kids and programming: ScratchKara

  - by Mike Pagel

  Ever now and then I kept wondering how to share with my kids the excitement of creating something with your computer. Of course, today this is a bit more difficult, as they have seen 3D animation games and well-edited websites. I guess that's why they weren't all that hyped when I found my first computer model at our local recycling facilities (an 8-bit Laser VZ-200 with rubber keys). When I finally got it up and running with an old analog TV set they finally asked whether we could play soccer on it. Needless to say that my showing them how it remembers some BASIC commands and lists and executes them did not make any impression. So the question is for real: How do you get today's kids excited about programming? And just recently I looked again for environments that allow even young kids (mine are 7 and 9 years old now) to do something and have fun. Obviously any real, text-oriented programming language wouldn't work well. To cut it short: Something really nice was built by University of Oldenburg: ScratchKara. It is the perfect mixture of Kara, a simulation of a little ladybug and Scratch, an authoring environment from MIT. ScratchKara allows kids to initially simply explore how the bug moves and turns by pressing the action buttons, then move towards sequencing commands through drag & drop, and eventually end up building algorithms with procedures and functions. Even through it is built for kids and beginners, the environment comes with debugging and refactoring, which I found more than amazing. My kids love it and I have to admit I keep thinking about how to solve a bit more advanced problems with this language, which does not allow you to store any state information (other than your call stack). Yes, I am hooked, too... Once the language is understood you can then move to one of the original Kara versions, where you can define the bug's behavior through finite statemachines, Turing tables, Java and other textual languages. And from there, anything is possible.

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• Ubuntu 12.04.3 64 bit with Nemo 2.0.x no thumbnails

  - by Dr. Szrapnel

  I have strange problem with thumbnails in my Ubuntu machine. I was using Ubuntu with Cinnamon 1.8 from stable ppa and it was good but then Cinnamon 2.0 came out with some broken packages uploaded to stable ppa nad things gone wrong... Anyway after few updates Cinnamon started to work normaly except Nemo - there are no thumbnails at all, only icons. I heve tried purging /.cache/thumbnails and .thumbnails folders but this doesn't work. Next I have changed permissions for those folders - that didn't helped either. Then I've set Nemo as default file manager and desktop handler but with no result. What is weird - when I start Nautilus and open some folder with images then close it and open same folder with Nemo thumbnails appears but when I clean thumbnails directories there are no thumbnails again. It would be great if someone have some solution for this annoying Nemo behavior because I really don't want to resign from Cinnamon. p.s. I have set preview options in Nemo for Always and no bigger files than 4GB so that is not the case.

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• 'Xojo' is the only application that I can't install

  - by Gichan

  I can't install xojo. When I click install in the software center it's not progressing. In the terminal it's stuck in : gichan02@gichan02-Latitude-D520:~$ sudo apt-get install xojo [sudo] password for gichan02: Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following extra packages will be installed: xojo-bin The following NEW packages will be installed: xojo xojo-bin 0 upgraded, 2 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. Need to get 209 MB/209 MB of archives. After this operation, 596 MB of additional disk space will be used. Do you want to continue? [Y/n] Y 0% [Working] then after waiting for an hour for progress it says: Failed to fetch https://private-ppa.launchpad.net/commercial-ppa-uploaders/xojo/ubuntu/pool/main/x/xojo/xojo-bin_2013.41-0ubuntu1_i386.deb Could not resolve host: private-ppa.launchpad.net So I added apt repository for 'private-ppa': deb https://ging-giana:[email protected]/commercial-ppa-uploaders/xojo/ubuntu trusty main Then when I try 'apt-get update': GPG error: https://private-ppa.launchpad.net trusty Release: The following signatures were invalid: NODATA 2 Then I noticed something the Software Sources:Other software TAB: Added by software-center; credentials stored in /etc/apt/auth.conf https://private-ppa.launchpad.net/commercial-ppa-uploaders/xojo/ubuntu So i go to the '/etc/apt/auth.conf' ,but It cannot be opened and it is not a keyserver. So i uncheck: Added by software-center; credentials stored in /etc/apt/auth.conf https://private-ppa.launchpad.net/commercial-ppa-uploaders/xojo/ubuntu GPG error was gone. But then again I found myself at the beginning of the problem.STUCK at '0% [Working]'. 'Xojo' is the only application that I can't install.Any explanation why is it like that?

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• Are certain problems solved more elegantly with AOP?

  - by Winston Ewert

  I've come across the idea of Aspect Oriented Programming, and I have some concerns with it. The basic idea seems to be that we want to take cross-cutting concerns which aren't well modularized using object and modularize them. That is all very fine and well. But the implementation of AOP seems to be that of modifying code from outside of the module. So, for example, an aspect could be written that changes what happens when a particular object is passed as a parameter in a function. This seems to go directly against the idea of modules. I should not be able to modify a module's behavior from outside of that module, otherwise the whole point of modules are overturned. But aspects seem to be doing exactly that! Basically, aspects seems to be a form of code patching. It may useful for some quick hacks; but, as a general principle perhaps its not something you want to do. Aspect Oriented Programming seems to me taking a bad practice and raising to a general design principle. Is AOP a good practice? Are certain programming problems solved more elegantly with AOP?

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• Fixing dpkg after installation of broken packages? [closed]

  - by Amith KK

  Possible Duplicate: How to remove all associated files and configuration settings of an app installed through 'force architecture' command I installed a broken package, and now apt-get/aptitude is failing with trying to remove it Each time I run a apt operation, this is the message I get: Removing crossplatformui ... ztemtvcdromd: no process found dpkg: error processing crossplatformui (--remove): subprocess installed post-removal script returned error exit status 1 No apport report written because MaxReports is reached already Errors were encountered while processing: crossplatformui E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1) running sudo apt-get install -f gives me this: amith@amith-desktop:~$ sudo apt-get install -f Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following packages will be REMOVED: crossplatformui 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 to remove and 1123 not upgraded. 1 not fully installed or removed. After this operation, 0 B of additional disk space will be used. Do you want to continue [Y/n]? Y (Reading database ... 340804 files and directories currently installed.) Removing crossplatformui ... ztemtvcdromd: no process found dpkg: error processing crossplatformui (--remove): subprocess installed post-removal script returned error exit status 1 Errors were encountered while processing: crossplatformui E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1) How do I fix this?

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• Rails: Law of Demeter Confusion

  - by user2158382

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

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• How to get the Exact Collision Point and ignore the collision (from 2 "ghost bodies")

  - by Moritz

  I have a very basic problem with Box2D. For a arenatype game where you can throw scriptable "missiles" at other players I decided to use Box2D for the collision detection between the players and the missiles. Players and missiles have their own circular shape with a specific size (varying). But I don´t want to use dynamic bodies because the missiles need to move themselve in any way they want to (defined in the script) and shouldnt be resolved unless the script wants it. The behavior I look for is as following (for each time step): velocity of missiles is set by the specific missile script each missile is moved according to that velocity if a collision accurs now, I want to get the exact position of impact, and now I need a mechanism to decide if the missile should just ignore the collision (for example collision between two fireballs which shouldnt interact) or take it (so they are resolved and dont overlap anymore) So is there a way in Box2D to create Ghost bodies and listen to collisions from them, then deciding if they should ignore the collision or should take them and resolve their position? I hope I was clear enough and would be happy about any help!

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• Does TDD's "Obvious Implementation" mean code first, test after?

  - by natasky

  My friend and I are relatively new TDD and have a dispute about the "Obvious Implementation" technique (from "TDD By Example" by Kent Beck). My friend says it means that if the implementation is obvious, you should go ahead and write it - before any test for that new behavior. And indeed the book says: How do you implement simple operations? Just implement them. Also: Sometimes you are sure you know how to implement an operation. Go ahead. I think what the author means is you should test first, and then "just implement" it - as opposed to the "Fake It ('Till You Make It)" and other techniques, which require smaller steps in the implementation stage. Also after these quotes the author talks about getting "red bars" (failing tests) when doing "Obvious Implementation" - how can you get a red bar without a test?. Yet I couldn't find any quote from the book saying "obvious" still means test first. What do you think? Should we test first or after when the implementation is "obvious" (according to TDD, of course)? Do you know a book or blog post saying just that?

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• Museum of Modern Art Starts Video Game Collection; Acquires Myst, Pac-Man, and More

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  The Museum of Modern Art is weighing in on the video-games-as-art debate by starting a collection of iconic video games and putting them up for public display. Read on to see what games are included in the initial batch and the MoMA’s reasons behind starting a video game collection. Although the MoMA is slated to grow to over 40 titles, the seed batch is 14 titles including: Pac-Man, Tetris, Sim City 2000, Myst, Portal, and Dwarf Fortress. In the announcement they explain the motivation for building a video game collection: Are video games art? They sure are, but they are also design, and a design approach is what we chose for this new foray into this universe. The games are selected as outstanding examples of interaction design—a field that MoMA has already explored and collected extensively, and one of the most important and oft-discussed expressions of contemporary design creativity. Our criteria, therefore, emphasize not only the visual quality and aesthetic experience of each game, but also the many other aspects—from the elegance of the code to the design of the player’s behavior—that pertain to interaction design. In order to develop an even stronger curatorial stance, over the past year and a half we have sought the advice of scholars, digital conservation and legal experts, historians, and critics, all of whom helped us refine not only the criteria and the wish list, but also the issues of acquisition, display, and conservation of digital artifacts that are made even more complex by the games’ interactive nature. This acquisition allows the Museum to study, preserve, and exhibit video games as part of its Architecture and Design collection. The above quote is only a small snippet of a much lengthier look at the benefits of examining and preserving video games, hit up the link below to check out the full post including future titles the MoMA would like to include in their archive. Video Games: 14 in the Collection, for Starters [Inside/Out] 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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• How to build a "traffic AI"?

  - by Lunikon

  A project I am working on right now features a lot of "traffic" in the sense of cars moving along roads, aircraft moving aroun an apron etc. As of now the available paths are precalculated, so nodes are generated automatically for crossings which themselves are interconnected by edges. When a character/agent spawns into the world it starts at some node and finds a path to a target node by means of a simply A* algorithm. The agent follows the path and ultimately reaches its destination. No problem so far. Now I need to enable the agents to avoid collisions and to handle complex traffic situations. Since I'm new to the field of AI I looked up several papers/articles on steering behavior but found them to be too low-level. My problem consists less of the actual collision avoidance (which is rather simple in this case because the agents follow strictly defined paths) but of situations like one agent leaving a dead-end while another one wants to enter exactly the same one. Or two agents meeting at a bottleneck which only allows one agent to pass at a time but both need to pass it (according to the optimal route found before) and they need to find a way to let the other one pass first. So basically the main aspect of the problem would be predicting traffic movement to avoid dead-locks. Difficult to describe, but I guess you get what I mean. Do you have any recommendations for me on where to start looking? Any papers, sample projects or similar things that could get me started? I appreciate your help!

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• compile error in Ubuntu 10

  - by yozloy

  Hey guys I got a vps which run solusVM. I'm now trying to install ruby 1.9.2 in it. I follow this guide: after I run this command apt-get update apt-get -y install build-essential zlib1g zlib1g-dev libxml2 libxml2-dev libxslt-dev I got this error below root@makserver:/usr/local/src/ruby-1.9.2-p0# apt-get -f install Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree... Done Correcting dependencies... Done The following extra packages will be installed: libc6 Suggested packages: glibc-doc The following packages will be upgraded: libc6 1 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 80 not upgraded. Need to get 0B/4252kB of archives. After this operation, 4096B disk space will be freed. Do you want to continue [Y/n]? y debconf: apt-extracttemplates failed: Bad file descriptor (Reading database ... 21594 files and directories currently installed.) Preparing to replace libc6 2.11.1-0ubuntu7.2 (using .../libc6_2.11.1-0ubuntu7.8_amd64.deb) ... open2: fork failed: Cannot allocate memory at /usr/share/perl5/Debconf/ConfModule.pm line 59 dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/libc6_2.11.1-0ubuntu7.8_amd64.deb (--unpack): subprocess new pre-installation script returned error exit status 12 Errors were encountered while processing: /var/cache/apt/archives/libc6_2.11.1-0ubuntu7.8_amd64.deb E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1) Anybody can tell me how can I correct this. Thanks

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• Oracle VM 3.1.1 build 365 released

  - by wcoekaer

  A few days ago we released a patch update for Oracle VM 3.1.1 (build 365). Oracle VM Manager 3.1.1 Build 365 is now available from My Oracle Support patch ID 14227416 Oracle VM Server 3.1.1 errata updates are, as usual, released on ULN in the ovm3_3.1.1_x86_64_patch channel. Just a reminder, when we publish errata for Oracle VM, the notifications are sent through the oraclevm-errata maillist. You can sign up here. Some of the bugfixes in 3.1.1 : 14054162 - Removes unnecessary locks when creating VNICs in a multi-threaded operation. 14111234 - Fixes the issue when discovering a virtual machine that has disks in a un-discovered repository or has un-discovered physical disks. 14054133 - Fixes a bug of object not found where vdisks are left stale in certain multi-thread operations. 14176607 - Fixes the issue where Oracle VM Manager would hang after a restart due to various tasks running jobs in the global context. 14136410 - Fixes the stale lock issue on multithreaded server where object not found error happens in some rare situations. 14186058 - Fixes the issue where Oracle VM Manager fails to discover the server or start the server after the server hardware configuration (i.e. BIOS) was modified. 14198734 - Fixes the issue where HTTP cannot be disabled. 14065401 - Fixes Oracle VM Manager UI time-out issue where the default value was not long enough for storage repository creation. 14163755 - Fixes the issue when migrating a virtual machine the list of target servers (and "other servers") was not ordered by name. 14163762 - Fixes the size of the "Edit Vlan Group" window to display all information correctly. 14197783 - Fixes the issue that navigation tree (servers) was not ordered by name. I strongly suggest everyone to use this latest build and also update the server to the latest version. have at it.

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• Good design for a simple site that contains a blog

  - by bporter

  What is a good design for a simple web site with mostly static pages and a blog? I am helping a friend build this for their small business. We are looking for a simple approach that can be implemented fairly quickly. (I am a programmer and can help with coding, hosting, etc.) One option is to use a site like virb, which lets you choose from one of their themes and build a site pretty easily. You can also include a blog. They host the site for a pretty low monthly rate. I recommended this option, but my friend wants a design that is unique and custom. So, I took one of the themes and started modifying the HTML and CSS. This might still be a good option, but... ...If we are going to greatly modify it, why not just create the static pages from scratch and use something like Wordpress for the blog. Is this a good option? It looks fairly easy to integrate Wordpress with a site so that the design and behavior are really cohesive. Is this a good idea? Do you recommend any other approaches?

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