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• How to effectively design a piece of software

  - by ti83plus

  Im a compsci student and ive got some experience in various languages and paradigms c/java/python/ruby/html/css/scheme/sql/asp(classic). I realise that i want to have some software in my portfolio for future job hunting even tho i still have 2 years left of my education. Ive got a pretty good idea of what i want to make, its a webapp. Most shops around here are either .net or java and since i know java best and dont have access to ms developer tools im thinking i should go with java. Even tho i feel i know the principles of OOP pretty good ive got no clue how to go from my idea to a working solution. Where can i access information about designing the underlying architechture of my solution? Also i would like to know what other technologies i should train on, my current list includes javascript(and possibly a javascript library) some sort of java web framework tips are appreciated. I would like to add support for android/iphone apps in the future and this is something i have to take into account when designing the app. I have done a course on software engineering but i found this to be more centered around project management ideas then the actual design and implementation. So i would like tips on technologies i should focus on to get the most out of my time without the massive overhead of huge config processes but at the same time keep my project viable in a business sense, so that i use technologies that are relevant for business (java developer jobs). And i would also like tips on where i can learn more about the design process around a software project, i will be working mostly alone. But i find the approach ive used up until now (start coding and figure it out as you go) wont suffice.

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• Working Abroad Advice Needed

  - by RBA

  Hi, First of all, Happy New Year everybody! I wish you for 2011 all the best! For several years I was thinking about to work abroad, and I want to make this step(to work in a/several foreign countries, for several years). I am a Software Developer with a Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Science, with a +4 years of experience in Delphi(and small working experience in other programming languages). Until now I've applied at aprox. 100 positions over the world, and I've been contacted by 4-5 hiring managers. Our technical discussions went good, but then we reached at working visa 'problem'. I don't have legal/health problems, but I don't poses a working permit in other countries except Romania. I've been reading several forums concerning the working visas (here I take out working visa for US or other 'hard to get visa' countries), and there are several steps which companies must do (so I can take out the bureaucracy problem) to make the papers. Concerning the cost of a visa, this goes up to one medium salary from that country(in most of the cases). I've been working for the last years with different clients, from a wide variety of countries, and I don't believe I will have problems with integration in a foreign country So, the problem is that the market don't need Delphi Developers (there is a small amount of open positions on the recruiting sites), and I should start learning other programming language(all the time is better to know other programming languages - but to master it, requires some time) with a higher market 'rank' (Java/C#/etc), OR the problem is only concerning the working visa, and maybe the reticence of the employer to foreign possible candidates? I'm asking this especially for those users who made this step in their life or they want to make it in the future. Best regards,

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• Oracle Launches Mobile Applications User Experience Design Patterns

  - by ultan o'broin

  OK, you heard Joe Huang (@JoeHuang_Oracle) Product Manager for Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF) Mobile. If you're an ADF developer, or a Java (yeah, Java in iOS) developer, well now you're a mobile developer as well. And, using the newly launched Applications User Experience (UX) team's Mobile UX Design Patterns, you're a UX developer rockstar too, offering users so much more than just cool functionality. Mobile Design Pattern for Inline Actions Mobile design requires a different way of thinking. Use Oracle’s mobile design patterns to design iPhone, Android, or browser-based smartphone apps. Oracle's sharing these cutting edge mobile design patterns and their baked-in, scientifically proven usability to enable Oracle customers and partners to build mobile apps quickly. The design patterns are common solutions that developers can easily apply across all application suites. Crafted by the UX team's insight into Oracle Fusion Middleware, the patterns are designed to work with the mobile technology provided by the Oracle Application Development Framework. Other great UX-related information on using ADF Mobile to design task flows and the development experience on offer are on the ADF EMG podcast series. Check out FXAer Brian 'Bex' Huff (@bex of Bezzotech talking about ADF Mobile in podcast number 6 and also number 8 which has great tips about getting going with Android and iOS mobile app development too.

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• Should you always pass the bare minimum data needed into a function

  - by Anders Holmström

  Let's say I have a function IsAdmin that checks whether a user is an admin. Let's also say that the admin checking is done by matching user id, name and password against some sort of rule (not important). In my head there are then two possible function signatures for this: public bool IsAdmin(User user); public bool IsAdmin(int id, string name, string password); I most often go for the second type of signature, thinking that: The function signature gives the reader a lot more info The logic contained inside the function doesn't have to know about the User class It usually results in slightly less code inside the function However I sometimes question this approach, and also realize that at some point it would become unwieldy. If for example a function would map between ten different object fields into a resulting bool I would obviously send in the entire object. But apart from a stark example like that I can't see a reason to pass in the actual object. I would appreciate any arguments for either style, as well as any general observations you might offer. I program in both object oriented and functional styles, so the question should be seen as regarding any and all idioms.

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• How should I structure moving from overworld to menu system / combat?

  - by persepolis

  I'm making a text-based "Arena" game where the player is the owner of 5 creatures that battle other teams for loot, experience and glory. The game is very simple, using Python and a curses emulator. I have a static ASCII map of an "overworld" of sorts. My character, represented by a glyph, can move about this static map. There are locations all over the map that the character can visit, that break down into two types: 1) Towns, which are a series of menus that will allow the player to buy equipment for his team, hire new recruits or do other things. 2) Arenas, where the player's team will have a "battle" interface with actions he can perform, messages about the fight, etc. Maybe later, an ASCII representation of the fight but for now, just screens of information with action prompts. My main problem is what kind of design or structure I should use to implement this? Right now, the game goes through a master loop which waits for keyboard input and then moves the player about the screen. My current thinking is this: 1) Upon keyboard input, the Player coordinates are checked against a list of Location objects and if the Player coords match the Location coords then... 2) ??? I'm not sure if I should then call a seperate function to initiate a "menu" or "combat" mode. Or should I create some kind of new GameMode object that contains a method itself for drawing the screen, printing the necessary info? How do I pass my player's team data into this object? My main concern is passing around the program flow into all these objects. Should I be calling straight functions for different parts of my game, and objects to represent "things" within my game? I was reading about the MVC pattern and how this kind of problem might benefit - decouple the GUI from the game logic and user input but I have no idea how this applies to my game.

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• Central renderer for a given scene

  - by Loggie

  When creating a central rendering system for all game objects in a given scene I am trying to work out the best way to go about passing the scene to the render system to be rendered. If I have a scene managed by an arbitrary structure, i.e., an octree, bsp trees, quad-tree, kd tree, etc. What is the best way to pass this to the render system? The obvious problem is that if simply given the root node of the structure, the render system would require an intrinsic knowledge of the structure in order to traverse the structure. My solution to this is to clip all objects outside the frustum in the scene manager and then create a list of the objects which are left and pass this simple list to the render system, be it an array, a vector, a linked list, etc. (This would be a structure required by the render system as a means to know which objects should be rendered). The list would of course attempt to minimise OpenGL state changes by grouping objects that require the same rendering operations to be performed on them. I have been thinking a lot about this and started searching various terms on here and followed any additional information/links but I have not really found a definitive answer. The case may be that there is no definitive answer but I would appreciate some advice and tips. My question is, is this a reasonable solution to the problem? Are there any improvements that I could make? Are there any caveats I should know about? Side question: Am I right in assuming that octrees, bsp trees, etc are all forms of BVH?

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• Are there currently any modern, standardized, aptitude test for software engineering?

  - by Matthew Patrick Cashatt

  Background I am a working software engineer who is in the midst of seeking out a new contract for the next year or so. In my search, I am enduring several absurd technical interviews as indicated by this popular question I asked earlier today. Even if the questions I was being asked weren't almost always absurd, I would be tired nonetheless of answering them many times over for various contract opportunities. So this got me thinking that having a standardized exam that working software professionals could take would provide a common scorecard that could be referenced by interviewers in lieu of absurd technical interview questions (i.e. nerd hazing). Question Is there a standardized software engineering aptitude test (SEAT??) available for working professionals to take? If there isn't a such an exam out there, what questions or topics should be covered? An additional thought Please keep in mind, if suggesting a question or topic, to focus on questions or topics that would be relevant to contemporary development practices and realistic needs in the workforce as that would be the point of a standard aptitude test. In other words, no clown traversal questions.

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• Tips on how to notify a user of new features in your game

  - by brent777

  I have noticed a problem when releasing new features for a game that I wrote for Android and published on Google Play Store. Because my game is "stage-based" - and not a game like Hay Day, for example, where users will just go into the game every day since it can't really be finished - my users are not aware of new features that I release for the game. For example, if I publish a new version of my game and it contains a couple new stages, most of their devices will just auto-update the game and they don't even notice this and think to check out what's new. So this is why an approach like popping open a dialog that showcases the new feature(s) when they open the game for the first time after the update was done is not really sufficient. I am looking for some tips on an approach that will draw my users back into the game and then they could read more detail about new features on such a dialog. I was thinking of something like a notification that tells them to check out the new features after an update is done but I am not sure if this is a good idea. Any suggestions to help me solve this problem would be awesome.

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• The Importance of Fully Specifying a Problem

  - by Alan

  I had a customer call this week where we were provided a forced crashdump and asked to determine why the system was hung. Normally when you are looking at a hung system, you will find a lot of threads blocked on various locks, and most likely very little actually running on the system (unless it's threads spinning on busy wait type locks). This vmcore showed none of that. In fact we were seeing hundreds of threads actively on cpu in the second before the dump was forced. This prompted the question back to the customer: What exactly were you seeing that made you believe that the system was hung? It took a few days to get a response, but the response that I got back was that they were not able to ssh into the system and when they tried to login to the console, they got the login prompt, but after typing "root" and hitting return, the console was no longer responsive. This description puts a whole new light on the "hang". You immediately start thinking "name services". Looking at the crashdump, yes the sshds are all in door calls to nscd, and nscd is idle waiting on responses from the network. Looking at the connections I see a lot of connections to the secure ldap port in CLOSE_WAIT, but more interestingly I am seeing a few connections over the non-secure ldap port to a different LDAP server just sitting open. My feeling at this point is that we have an either non-responding LDAP server, or one that is responding slowly, the resolution being to investigate that server. Moral When you log a service ticket for a "system hang", it's great to get the forced crashdump first up, but it's even better to get a description of what you observed to make to believe that the system was hung.

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• The battery indicator in Unity panel not showing up

  - by user61415

  I installed Ubuntu 12.04 with Wubi. Well after being completely dazzled with the amount of free content in the Software Centre, I decided to go deeper and start messing with settings. Well after changing the screen brightness the highest level I noticed that there wasn't an indicator for how much battery was left in my laptop. I looked up online on got 2 suggestions on how to fix: Right click on the Unity panel and add an indicator Set it to show in the power settings menu. Well I did both when I right click at the top menu nothing comes up and setting it to show does nothing either. Then I tried installing something in the Software Centre. I got something but when I activated it it said I had 0% power left even though I was charging and at %100 according the Light in the front of my laptop. So now I'm thinking that it doesn't even recognise my computer as a laptop which is weird because in the display settings it says my screen size is set to laptop. How can I install it? I don't know what version it is other then Ubuntu 12.04 and no matter what the icon does not appear with the

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• Is it conceivable to have millions of lists of data in memory in Python?

  - by Codemonkey

  I have over the last 30 days been developing a Python application that utilizes a MySQL database of information (specifically about Norwegian addresses) to perform address validation and correction. The database contains approximately 2.1 million rows (43 columns) of data and occupies 640MB of disk space. I'm thinking about speed optimizations, and I've got to assume that when validating 10,000+ addresses, each validation running up to 20 queries to the database, networking is a speed bottleneck. I haven't done any measuring or timing yet, and I'm sure there are simpler ways of speed optimizing the application at the moment, but I just want to get the experts' opinions on how realistic it is to load this amount of data into a row-of-rows structure in Python. Also, would it even be any faster? Surely MySQL is optimized for looking up records among vast amounts of data, so how much help would it even be to remove the networking step? Can you imagine any other viable methods of removing the networking step? The location of the MySQL server will vary, as the application might well be run from a laptop at home or at the office, where the server would be local.

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• Why is <my site url> not indexed by search engines? [closed]

  - by Henrik Erlandsson

  was indexed fine until about a year ago. The only thing I can think of is that search engines throw up at using h5 before h4, or that some person (fantasizing now) has reported my site as unsafe to every search engine. However, I'm not here to speculate. The site validates, and has an RSS feed on the front page, for Pat Morita's sake! To me, it looks like the kind of site search engines would feast on. It's got more than a dozen blogs on it, if nothing else. Hah. :) I was thinking you could identify basically what has changed in search engines (currently, google, yahoo, bing which used to work fine) the last year to make them not find news and blog articles on this site. The site was submitted to Google, oh, way back in 2006. With online crawler tests I get mixed results, some crawlers index fine, some go blank. I don't really know which ones are reliable and am looking to you guys for advice on that. Yes, I am prepared to again verify my site with Google and upload a sitemap, but that's not the topic here. I really would first like to know what change on the site last year could make search engines not index it. (Yees, the robots.txt is fine. Should be nothing to discourage bots there.) It's a very intriguing problem. One which I have yet to find the reason for but would like to know the reason for. Any and all input appreciated, but I would heavily enjoy pertinent advice the most. ;) Edit: Some google searches that don't show up include - aca630 All of which are posted in the news and blogs that are on the front page there. Now, these search terms are extremely specific as the term in is almost unique on the web and ACA630 is also a very qualified search term that can't be confused with mainstream search terms.

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• XNA for life!

  - by George Clingerman

  Or until my arm falls off at least…. I’ve been meaning to get a new tattoo for quite a while. And I wanted it to be geeky and to represent some memorable milestone in my life. So I was thinking, mulling over some various ideas, sketching some things out. And then it hit me. XNA. Specifically the XNA logo. It’s super geeky (so geeky I’ll probably have to explain to 90% of the people that say it what it even means) and I’m not sure that anything has been so memorable and made such a change in my life as XNA. Cheesy but true. When the XNA framework came out, thing started happening quickly. I stumbled into a geek community and started going to code camps, MSDN events, code-a-thons. I got an XNA MVP award. Met huge geek idols in my life (like Rory Blyth and Scott Hanselman) and just really started getting integrated into this fantastic development community. Then to add to all of that I became part of this fantastic XNA community. It’s really just been one of the best things to ever happen to me and I’m having the time of my life right now. So sure, it’s permanent. Sure Microsoft could cancel XNA, rebrand it to Flimmer Flammer or some other name. Sure my arms are going to be wrinkly and flabby when I’m older and for sure I’m going to have to explain to people over and over again just what in the world “xna” means. But you know what, every time I look at that tattoo and every time I’m telling somebody what xna means, I’m going to remember all these awesome things that have happened to me. All the tremendous things I’m seeing people do with the XNA framework and more importantly all the stories and friendships I’ve formed in the XNA community. And I think that deserves a little permanent recognition.

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• Architecture of an action multiplayer game from scratch

  - by lcf

  Not sure whether it's a good place to ask (do point me to a better one if it's not), but since what we're developing is a game - here it goes. So this is a "real-time" action multiplayer game. I have familiarized myself with concepts like lag compensation, view interpolation, input prediction and pretty much everything that I need for this. I have also prepared a set of prototypes to confirm that I understood everything correctly. My question is about the situation when game engine must be rewind to the past to find out whether there was a "hit" (sometimes it may involve the whole 'recomputation' of the world from that moment in the past up to the present moment. I already have a piece of code that does it, but it's not as neat as I need it to be. The domain logic of the app (the physics of the game) must be separated from the presentation (render) and infrastructure tools (e.g. the remote server interaction specifics). How do I organize all this? :) Is there any worthy implementation with open sources I can take a look at? What I'm thinking is something like this: -> Render / User Input -> Game Engine (this is the so called service layer) -> Processing User Commands & Remote Server -> Domain (Physics) How would you add into this scheme the concept of "ticks" or "interactions" with the possibility to rewind and recalculate "the game"? Remember, I cannot change the Domain/Physics but only the Game Engine. Should I store an array of "World's States"? Should they be just some representations of the world, optimized for this purpose somehow (how?) or should they be actual instances of the world (i.e. including behavior and all that). Has anybody had similar experience? (never worked on a game before if that matters)

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• We are moving an Access based corporate front-end into a Web-based App

  - by Max Vernon

  We have an enterprise application with a front end written in Microsoft Access 2003 that has evolved over the past 6 years. The back end data, and a fair amount of back-end logic is contained within several Microsoft SQL Server databases. This front end app consists of around 180 forms, and over 120,000 lines of code, and interacts with VB.Net DLLs that support various critical functions used by our sales force. The current system makes use of 3 monitors to display various information; the Access app uses COM+ to control Microsoft Outlook and Internet Explorer for various purposes. The Access front end sometimes occupies 2 screens, automatically resizing itself based on Windows API-reported screen dimensions. The app also uses a Google map to present data to our agents, and allows two-way interactivity with the map through COM+ connectivity to JavaScript contained in the Google map. At the urging of senior management, we are looking to completely rewrite this application using some web-based technology, such as ASP.Net or perhaps a LAMP stack (the thinking with the LAMP stack thing is "free" is pretty cheap). We want to move to a web-based app so we can eliminate the dependency on our physical location for hiring new sales force members. Currently, our main office is full to capacity, and we need to continue growing the company. Does anyone have any thoughts on what would be the best technology to use for a web-based app of this magnitude? Keeping in mind the app is dependent on back-end services on our existing infrastructure. The app handles financial data and personal customer data, among other things. [I've looked at Best practices for moving large MS Access application towards .Net? and read the answers, and most of the comments. Interesting reading, and has some valid points, but our C.O.O. and contracted Software Architect are pushing for a full web-based app, not a .Net Windows App]

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• Is there such thing as a "theory of system integration"?

  - by Jeff

  There is a plethora of different programs, servers, and in general technologies in use in organizations today. We, programmers, have lots of different tools at our disposal to help solve various different data, and communication challenges in an organization. Does anyone know if anyone has done an serious thinking about how systems are integrated? Let me give an example: Hypothetically, let's say I own a company that makes specialized suits a'la Iron Man. In the area of production, I have CAD tools, machining tools, payroll, project management, and asset management tools to name a few. I also have nice design space, where designers show off their designs on big displays, some touch, some traditional. Oh, and I also have one of these new fangled LEED Platinum buildings and it has number of different computer controlled systems, like smart window shutters that close when people are in the room, a HVAC system that adjusts depending on the number of people in the building, etc. What I want to know is if anyone has done any scientific work on trying to figure out how to hook all these pieces together, so that say my access control system is hooked to my payroll system, and my phone system allowing my never to swipe a time card, and to have my phone follow me throughout the building. This problem is also more than a technology challenge. Every technology implementation enables certain human behaviours, so the human must also be considered as a part of the system. Has anyone done any work in how effectively weave these components together? FYI: I am not trying to build a system. I want to know if anyone has thoroughly studied the process of doing a large integration project, how they develop their requirements, how they studied the human behaviors, etc.

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• How to Structure a Trinary state in DB and Application

  - by ABMagil

  How should I structure, in the DB especially, but also in the application, a trinary state? For instance, I have user feedback records which need to be reviewed before they are presented to the general public. This means a feedback reviewer must see the unreviewed feedback, then approve or reject them. I can think of a couple ways to represent this: Two boolean flags: Seen/Unseen and Approved/Rejected. This is the simplest and probably the smallest database solution (presumably boolean fields are simple bits). The downside is that there are really only three states I care about (unseen/approved/rejected) and this creates four states, including one I don't care about (a record which is seen but not approved or rejected is essentially unseen). String column in the DB with constants/enum in application. Using Rating::APPROVED_STATE within the application and letting it equal whatever it wants in the DB. This is a larger column in the db and I'm concerned about doing string comparisons whenever I need these records. Perhaps mitigatable with an index? Single boolean column, but allow nulls. A true is approved, a false is rejected. A null is unseen. Not sure the pros/cons of this solution. What are the rules I should use to guide my choice? I'm already thinking in terms of DB size and the cost of finding records based on state, as well as the readability of code the ends up using this structure.

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• How can you achieve and maintain flow while pair programming?

  - by bizso09

  Flow is a concept introduced by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi; in short, it means to get into the "zone". You feel immersed in your task, focused; the task can be difficult but challenging at the same time. When people achieve flow their productivity shoots up. Programming requires a great deal of mental focus because we often need to juggle several things in our minds at once. Many like to work in a quiet environment where they can direct their full attention to the task. If they are interrupted, it may take several minutes or even hours to get back into flow. I understand there's a practice in agile development and extreme programming called pair programming. It means you put the whole software development team in one room so that communication is seamless. You do write code with your pair because this way you get instant code reviews and fewer bugs get through. I've always had problems achieving flow while doing pair programming because of constant interruptions. I'm thinking deep about an issue then all of sudden someone asks me a question from another pair. My train of thought is lost. How can you achieve and maintain flow while pair programming?

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• Http handler for classic ASP application for introducing a layer between client and server

  - by JPReddy

  I've a huge classic ASP application where in thousands of users manage their company/business data. Currently this is not multi-user so that application users can create users and authorize them to access certain areas in the system. I'm thinking of writing a handler which will act as middle man between client and server and go through every request and find out who the user is and whether he is authorized to access the data he is trying to. For the moment ignore about the part how I'm going to check the authorization and all that stuff. Just want to know whether I can implement a ASP.net handler and use it as middle man for the requests coming for a asp website? I just want to read the url and see what is the page user is trying to access and what are the parameters he is passing in the url the posted data. Is this possible? I read that Asp.net handler cannot be used with asp website and I need to use isapi filter or extensions for that and that can be developed only c/c++. Can anybody through some light on this and guide me whether I'm in the right direction or not?

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• What should a developer know before building a public web site?

  - by Joel Coehoorn

  What things should a programmer implementing the technical details of a web site address before making the site public? If Jeff Atwood can forget about HttpOnly cookies, sitemaps, and cross-site request forgeries all in the same site, what important thing could I be forgetting as well? I'm thinking about this from a web developer's perspective, such that someone else is creating the actual design and content for the site. So while usability and content may be more important than the platform, you the programmer have little say in that. What you do need to worry about is that your implementation of the platform is stable, performs well, is secure, and meets any other business goals (like not cost too much, take too long to build, and rank as well with Google as the content supports). Think of this from the perspective of a developer who's done some work for intranet-type applications in a fairly trusted environment, and is about to have his first shot and putting out a potentially popular site for the entire big bad world wide web. Also: I'm looking for something more specific than just a vague "web standards" response. I mean, HTML, JavaScript, and CSS over HTTP are pretty much a given, especially when I've already specified that you're a professional web developer. So going beyond that, Which standards? In what circumstances, and why? Provide a link to the standard's specification. This question is community wiki, so please feel free to edit that answer to add links to good articles that will help explain or teach each particular point. To search in only the answers from this question, use the inquestion:this option.

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• OpenGL + Allegro. Moving from software drawing X Y to openGL is confusing

  - by Aaron

  Having a fair bit of trouble. I'm used to Allegro and drawing sprites on a bitmap buffer at X Y coords. Now I've started a test project with OpenGL and its weird. Basically, as far as I know, theirs many ways to draw stuff in OpenGL. At the moment, I think I'm creating a Quad? Whatever that is, and I think Ive given it a texture of a bitmap and them im drawing that: GLuint gl_image; bitmap = load_bitmap("cat.bmp", NULL); gl_image = allegro_gl_make_texture_ex(AGL_TEXTURE_MASKED, bitmap, GL_RGBA); glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, gl_image); glBegin(GL_QUADS); glColor4ub(255, 255, 255, 255); glTexCoord2f(0, 0); glVertex3f(-0.5, 0.5, 0); glTexCoord2f(1, 0); glVertex3f(0.5, 0.5, 0); glTexCoord2f(1, 1); glVertex3f(0.5, -0.5, 0); glTexCoord2f(0, 1); glVertex3f(-0.5, -0.5, 0); glEnd(); So yeah. So I got a few questions: Is this the best way of drawing a sprite? Is it suitable? The big question: Can anyone help / Does anyone know any tutorials on this weird coordinate thing? If it even is that. It's vastly different from XY, but I want to learn it. I was thinking maybe I could learn how this weird positioning stuff works, and then write a function to try and translate it to X and Y coords. Thats about it. I'm still trying to figure it all out on my own but any contributions you guys can make would be greatly appreciated =D Thanks!

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• Regulation of the software industry

  - by Flexo

  Every few years someone proposes tighter regulation for the software industry. This IEEE article has been getting some attention lately on the subject. If software engineers who write programs for systems that expose the public to physical or financial risk knew they would be tested on their competence, the thinking goes, it would reduce the flaws and failures in code—and maybe save a few lives in the bargain. I'm skeptical about the value and merit of this. To my mind it looks like a land grab by those that proposed it. The quote that clinches that for me is: The exam will test for basic knowledge, not mastery of subject matter because the big failures (e.g. THERAC-25) seem to be complex, subtle issues that "basic knowledge" would never be sufficient to prevent. Ignoring any local issues (such as existing protections of the title Engineer in some jurisdictions): The aims are noble - avoid the quacks/charlatans1 and make that distinction more obvious to those that buy their software. Can tighter regulation of the software industry ever achieve it's original goal? 1 Exactly as regulation of the medical profession was intended to do.

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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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• Data Movement and the Decision Matrix

  - by BuckWoody

  Maybe it’s my military background, or maybe I’ve always had this predilection, but I like to use two devices when I need to make a complex decision: A checklist and a decision matrix. I like to use a checklist because it ensures that I remember the big bits of what I need to do, and brings up questions or areas that I didn’t think about when evaluating options for the decision. And the decision matrix – that’s the thing I use to actually lay out those options. It’s simply a spreadsheet-like grid (I use Excel, but paper and pencil works as well) that lays out the requirements or advantages for the decision across the top, and the options I have on the left-hand side. Then in the “cells” I put whether or not that option on the left will meet the requirement in that column. I then simply “weight” each cell to organize the choices by best-fit. The right answer (or answers) will float right to the top. I was asked yesterday about options for moving data in SQL Server to another system. There are just dozens of ways to do this, from bcp to Replication, each with certain advantages and costs. But asking the questions for the top row first helped me show the person that it isn’t a particular technology that is important, it’s laying out those requirements and thinking about which elements are more important than the other. For instance, is it more important to have the data moved all the time, or is it OK if that happens once in a while? Does the data have to move in two directions or just one? All of these will help that answer jump right out. Try it sometime – it’s a great learning exercise, since it will force you to focus on filling out the matrix. The answer is out there, Neo. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Ditch cPanel / WHM in favour of manual seup

  - by BWRic

  We currently use cPanel / WHM on a reseller account but are looking at getting a dedicated server. My first thought was to duplicate this set up on the dedicated box to allow us to quickly create new accounts. I'll be a managed server so they'll have set up the LAMP stack. I'm curious if I actually need cPanel and WHM. We don't use many of the features from cPanel / WHM, just creating accounts and databases, clients do not have FTP access. I'm no sys admin and come from a Windows / GUI background but have some knowledge in setting up development servers. WHM: Creating accounts I presume this sets up the Apache virtual host, FTP access and DNS settings. I've some knowledge of editing the Apache files to create virtual hosts. Am I correct in thinking as long as the DNS is pointing to the server IP and the virtual host is configured the server can serve the (php) pages? I'm not sure I need per site FTP access as only we will have access so I could have a server wide/htdocs only access to view all the site. The company who supply the dedicated hosts would also provide the own DNS management tool so I'm not need to cPanel one. MySQL: Creating users and databases We use cPanel to create the MySQL users and databases. As it's a dedicated box and I can have root access I think this could be replaced by SQLyog for db management and phpMyAdmin for user management. Do you I need cPanel or can I get by editing a few text files for creating the accounts, then use the MySQL tools for databases? Or am I missing something major with how the sites are configured?

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