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• I can't program because the code I am using uses old coding styles. Is this normal to programmers? [closed]

  - by Renato Dinhani Conceição

  I'm in my first real job as programmer, but I can't solve any problems because of the coding style used. The code here: Does not have comments Does not have functions (50, 100, 200, 300 or more lines executed in sequence) Uses a lot of if statements with a lot of paths Has variables that make no sense (eg.: cf_cfop, CF_Natop, lnom, r_procod) Uses an old language (Visual FoxPro 8 from 2002), but there are new releases from 2007. I feel like I have gone back to 1970. Is it normal for a programmer familiar with OOP, clean-code, design patterns, etc. to have trouble with coding in this old-fashion way? EDIT: All the answers are very good. For my (un)hope, appears that there are a lot of this kind of code bases around the world. A point mentioned to all answers is refactor the code. Yeah, I really like to do it. In my personal project, I always do this, but... I can't refactor the code. Programmers are only allowed to change the files in the task that they are designed for. Every change in old code must be keep commented in the code (even with Subversion as version control), plus meta informations (date, programmer, task) related to that change (this became a mess, there are code with 3 used lines and 50 old lines commented). I'm thinking that is not only a code problem, but a management of software development problem.

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• Looking for a better Factory pattern (Java)

  - by Sam Goldberg

  After doing a rough sketch of a high level object model, I am doing iterative TDD, and letting the other objects emerge as a refactoring of the code (as it increases in complexity). (That whole approach may be a discussion/argument for another day.) In any case, I am at the point where I am looking to refactor code blocks currently in an if-else blocks into separate objects. This is because there is another another value combination which creates new set of logical sub-branches. To be more specific, this is a trading system feature, where buy orders have different behavior than sell orders. Responses to the orders have a numeric indicator field which describes some event that occurred (e.g. fill, cancel). The combination of this numeric indicator field plus whether it is a buy or sell, require different processing buy the code. Creating a family of objects to separate the code for the unique handling each of the combinations of the 2 fields seems like a good choice at this point. The way I would normally do this, is to create some Factory object which when called with the 2 relevant parameters (indicator, buysell), would return the correct subclass of the object. Some times I do this pattern with a map, which allows to look up a live instance (or constructor to use via reflection), and sometimes I just hard code the cases in the Factory class. So - for some reason this feels like not good design (e.g. one object which knows all the subclasses of an interface or parent object), and a bit clumsy. Is there a better pattern for solving this kind of problem? And if this factory method approach makes sense, can anyone suggest a nicer design?

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• Checking for collisions on a 3D heightmap

  - by Piku

  I have a 3D heightmap drawn using OpenGL (which isn't important). It's represented by a 2D array of height data. To draw this I go through the array using each point as a vertex. Three vertices are wound together to form a triangle, two triangles to make a quad. To stop the whole mesh being tiny I scale this by a certain amount called 'gridsize'. This produces a fairly nice and lumpy, angular terrain kind of similar to something you'd see in old Atari/Amiga or DOS '3D' games (think Virus/Zarch on the Atari ST). I'm now trying to work out how to do collision with the terrain, testing to see if the player is about to collide with a piece of scenery sticking upwards or fall into a hole. At the moment I am simply dividing the player's co-ordinates by the gridsize to find which vertex the player is on top of and it works well when the player is exactly over the corner of a triangle piece of terrain. However... How can I make it more accurate for the bits between the vertices? I get confused since they don't exist in my heightmap data, they're a product of the GPU trying to draw a triangle between three points. I can calculate the height of the point closest to the player, but not the space between them. I.e if the player is hovering over the centre of one of these 'quads', rather than over the corner vertex of one, how do I work out the height of the terrain below them? Later on I may want the player to slide down the slopes in the terrain.

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• How to ask developers to think about high resolution screens

  - by WhiteWind

  I just got a ASUS N56VZ laptop, and it`s all good, but the screen resolution 1920x1080px. I am not asking, how to scale ui elements. If someone is interested I have found some tricks: increase font size in system settings increase unity dock size in MyUnity or system settings in modern Ubuntu versions. tweak userChrome.js of FireFox to make buttons|panels|icons larger add DefaultZoomLevel extension to FireFox to make it zoom pages initially. But all of it is miserable, because there are some big bugs: window decoration elements are way too small to pick them with mouse. I can't scale window easily and I can't position my cursor fast on the close|maximize buttons. Tuning lines like in sound volume dialog are hardly clickable at all. Unity top panel (status panel & tray) hardly can contain the bigger font, so it looks ugly, but icons are still the same. Sometimes I can`t read text, as it is cropped (and I cant scale some dialogs as it has fixed size) Chromium is not usable at all (ok, it's not Ubuntu problem, but the problem still exists) JAVA applications are not scalable (same as above) In FF I am able to get descent results in most cases, but multiplication of system font increase and browser font increase makes system controls (combobox, lists, drop down lists) extremely big, so I cant even control the zoom level on the page. IMHO, we should post a bug report (but what kind of bug?) and vote for it! The problem is even deeper, but at least we should ask developers to think about it. So my question is: how can I post a report (the right words and right place) and how can we (who already has that problem, or who want it to be solved before hardware upgrade) vote for faster solution. Any ideas?

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• Are there design patterns or generalised approaches for particle simulations?

  - by romeovs

  I'm working on a project (for college) in C++. The goal is to write a program that can more or less simulate a beam of particles flying trough the LHC synchrotron. Not wanting to rush into things, me and my team are thinking about how to implement this and I was wondering if there are general design patterns that are used to solve this kind of problem. The general approach we came up with so far is the following: there is a World that holds all objects you can add objects to this world such as Particle, Dipole and Quadrupole time is cut up into discrete steps, and at each point in time, for each Particle the magnetic and electric forces that each object in the World generates are calculated and summed up (luckily electro-magnetism is linear). each Particle moves accordingly (using a simple estimation approach to solve the differential movement equations) save the Particle positions repeat This seems a good approach but, for instance, it is hard to take into account symmetries that might be present (such as the magnetic field of each Quadrupole) and is this thus suboptimal. To take into account such symmetries as that of the Quadrupole field, it would be much easier to (also) make space discrete and somehow store form of the Quadrupole field somewhere. (Since 2532 or so Quadrupoles are stored this should lead to a massive gain of performance, not having to recalculate each Quadrupole field) So, are there any design patterns? Is the World-approach feasible or is it old-fashioned, bad programming? What about symmetry, how is that generally taken into acount?

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• How can I design my classes to include calendar events stored in a database?

  - by Gianluca78

  I'm developing a web calendar in php (using Symfony2) inspired by iCal for a project of mine. At this moment, I have two classes: a class "Calendar" and a class "CalendarCell". Here you are the two classes properties and method declarations. class Calendar { private $month; private $monthName; private $year; private $calendarCellList = array(); private $translator; public function __construct($month, $year, $translator) {} public function getCalendarCellList() {} public function getMonth() {} public function getMonthName() {} public function getNextMonth() {} public function getNextYear() {} public function getPreviousMonth() {} public function getPreviousYear() {} public function getYear() {} private function calculateDaysPreviousMonth() {} private function calculateNumericDayOfTheFirstDayOfTheWeek() {} private function isCurrentDay(\DateTime $dateTime) {} private function isDifferentMonth(\DateTime $dateTime) {} } class CalendarCell { private $day; private $month; private $dayNameAbbreviation; private $numericDayOfTheWeek; private $isCurrentDay; private $isDifferentMonth; private $translator; public function __construct(array $parameters) {} public function getDay() {} public function getMonth() {} public function getDayNameAbbreviation() {} public function isCurrentDay() {} public function isDifferentMonth() {} } Each calendar day can includes many calendar events (such as appointments or schedules) stored in a database. My question is: which is the best way to manage these calendar events in my classes? I think to add a eventList property in CalendarCell and populate it with an array of CalendarEvent objects fetched by the database. This kind of solution doesn't allow other coders to reuse the classes without db (because I should inject at least a repository services also) just to create and visualize a calendar... so maybe it could be better to extend CalendarCell (for instance in CalendarCellEvent) and add the database features? I feel like I'm missing some crucial design pattern! Any suggestion will be very appreciated!

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• How do 2D physics engines solve the problem of resolving collisions along tiled walls/floors in non-grid-based worlds?

  - by ssb

  I've been working on implementing my SAT algorithm which has been coming along well, but I've found that I'm at a wall when it comes to its actual use. There are plenty of questions regarding this issue on this site, but most of them either have no clear, good answer or have a solution based on checking grid positions. To restate the problem that I and many others are having, if you have a tiled surface, like a wall or a floor, consisting of several smaller component rectangles, and you traverse along them with another rectangle with force being applied into that structure, there are cases where the object gets caught on a false collision on an edge that faces the inside of the shape. I have spent a lot of time thinking about how I could possibly solve this without having to resort to a grid-based system, and I realized that physics engines do this properly. What I want to know is how they do this. What do physics engines do beyond basic SAT that allows this kind of proper collision resolution in complex environments? I've been looking through the source code to Box2D trying to find out how they do it but it's not quite as easy as looking at a Collision() method. I think I'm not good enough at physics to know what they're doing mathematically and not good enough at programming to know what they're doing programmatically. This is what I aim to fix.

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• How can I deal with a difficult developer that is holding back the project? [migrated]

  - by ILovePaperTowels

  Our entire project is being held up because of one piece which is being handled by a single developer. When we did finally got the latest version of his code and started reviewing it, we found the code was horrendous! Its a relatively simply workflow, however the code is so complex that it's very difficult to step through and review/debug. The developer responsible has a hard time accepting any kind of criticism, and feels he is more knowledgeable than others members of the team. It's difficult to even talk to him about his development work because it turns into "I know what I'm talking about and you're just wrong!" type of conversation. A request has already been put in to replace this developer but management is not doing anything. This is probably because devs are in short supply where we are, and this is a corporation has a lot of office drama. I'm just one of the developers, not the project manager, however I really want to see this project succeed. What can I do in this sort of situation to try and keep the project on track?

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• Browser automatically refreshes and Home folder window opens

  - by Vikash

  I am facing a very strange problem. Out of the blue, my browser starts refreshing itself infinitely. My first guess was firefox is messing up. I installed chrome. But, it happens in chrome as well. Other than that, sometimes my home folder automatically opens and keep opening itself infinitely. My next guess was Mouse is faulty. Replace the mouse - but same things. This happens even if I remove my keyboard. What can be the reason? This started happening after I installed Ubuntu 10.10 few days back. Earlier on windows, everything was working fine. So, I am a bit skeptical to assume that this is a hardware fault. How to fix this problem? UPDATE: xev gives this kind of result: KeyPress event, serial 36, synthetic NO, window 0x4200001, root 0xb8, subw 0x0, time 29897358, (237,791), root:(1252,842), state 0x10, keycode 65 (keysym 0x20, space), same_screen YES, XLookupString gives 1 bytes: (20) " " XmbLookupString gives 1 bytes: (20) " " XFilterEvent returns: False KeyRelease event, serial 36, synthetic NO, window 0x4200001, root 0xb8, subw 0x0, time 29897603, (237,791), root:(1252,842), state 0x10, keycode 65 (keysym 0x20, space), same_screen YES, XLookupString gives 1 bytes: (20) " " XFilterEvent returns: False

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• Bad previous code. To fix or not to fix?

  - by Viniyo Shouta

  As a freelancer programmer I am often asked to edit part of an application source code in order to add functionalities, fix bugs etc. While I'm on my adventure journey to study the source to do what I'm asked correctly I run into code like: World::User* GetWorld() { map<DWORD,World*>::iterator it = mapWld.find( m_userWorldId ) if( it != mapWld.end() ) return &it->second; return NULL; } if( pUser->GetWorld()->GetId() == 250 ) If I investigate further I end up finding that the DWORD class member of User, userWorldId can be a value non-found in the map mapWld, which will lead to a casuality as also known as crash! The obviously valid way to do it is: World* pWorld = pUser->GetWorld(); if( pWorld && pWorld->GetId() == 250 )//... Sometimes when it's something just 'small' I end up sort of 'fixing' it. But sometimes when I'm on a 500 thousand line source code and this kind of code is everywhere there is no much can do. The question is if it's politically correct to fix some of these things. Think of it; You are not paid to fix it. Perhaps you think it's right, but it was necessarily done that way for some reason and you should not be messing with it. You do not have authorization, you do not own the source and none of the copyrights belong to you. You have authorization to edit issues accordingly to the owners but you're in a hurry, you have many other projects to do, it's the end of the month, you must pay the bills. Sincerely, I think of it as seeing an animal die from a disease in front of you, you have the cure in your hands but you do nothing. What is the best to do in this scenario?

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• Is there a (family of) monotonically non-decreasing noise function(s)?

  - by Joe Wreschnig

  I'd like a function to animate an object moving from point A to point B over time, such that it reaches B at some fixed time, but its position at any time is randomly perturbed in a continuous fashion, but never goes backwards. The objects move along straight lines, so I only need one dimension. Mathematically, that means I'm looking for some continuous f(x), x ? [0,1], such that: f(0) = 0 f(1) = 1 x < y ? f(x) = f(y) At "most" points f(x + d) - f(x) bears no obvious relation to d. (The function is not uniformly increasing or otherwise predictable; I think that's also equivalent to saying no degree of derivative is a constant.) Ideally, I would actually like some way to have a family of these functions, providing some seed state. I'd need at least 4 bits of seed (16 possible functions), for my current use, but since that's not much feel free to provide even more. To avoid various issues with accumulation errors, I'd prefer the function not require any kind of internal state. That is, I want it to be a real function, not a programming "function".

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• How do I get HDMI output working on a Dell XPS 15 L502x?

  - by Jones

  Recently I've bought my dream's notebook, a Dell XPS 15 but since then this dream became a kind of endless nightmare. I'm almost getting crazy to make my graphic card driver work properly, but it seems to be just impossible. Yes, I have a 2GB NVIDIA GeForce GT 540m (Optimus) in it! It simply doesn't work. Every time I generate the xorg.conf Ubuntu hangs on while starting up, which forces me to remove this file to be able to start the notebook with the standard graphic settings. Another problem is that the Dell XPS 15 does NOT have a VGA output, but a HDMI. So, to be able to use a second monitor I have to configure it by the NVIDIA X Server Settings, which just works if the driver is properly initialized with the xorg.conf. I've also tried to make it work with the Bumblebee, but unfortunately it didn't help me much with the HDMI output. Do you guys have any idea to solve this deadlock? Is there any way for me to use my second monitor?

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• How to justify rewriting/revamping legacy software in a business case?

  - by sxthomson

  I work for a great little software company which makes good revenue from our main software package. The problem for me is that it's almost unmaintainable. It's written in Delphi 7 (has upgraded versions over time) and has been worked on by a lot of developers over the past 20 or so years. The software lacks any meaningful architecture - there's no object orientation whatsoever, horrible amounts of cyclical dependencies and an over-reliance on global variables to name just a few things. Another huge thing for me is Delphi 7 does NOT support 64-bit. The problem here for me is that my management team don't care about technical things, they want to know why they should care. Obviously that's expected, so what I'm asking here is for some guidance, or tales, or pitfalls about this kind of thing. There's a few things I would love to include, namely for me, the length of time taken to debug/write a feature in "legacy" code, versus coherent, well structured OO code. Does anyone know of any blog posts or the like where this is talked about? For us in the company this is a huge reason. Despite being decent developers we feel like writing a new feature is just piling more rubbish on top. On top of that, even for me who has a decent level of understanding of the code, changing things is infuriating - a small change can have a ridiculous domino effect. Anyone have any experiences they'd like to share?

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• What could have caused a large traffic drop from Google in early May?

  - by Scott Schluer

  I have a website (www.equispot.com) that has been indexed for almost 2 years in Google. I managed to get myself on the first page (average position 6-8) on Google for my target keyword of "horses for sale" and held there pretty solidly for months. Suddenly, with no changes to the site, traffic from Google dropped like a rock in early May. I slowly fell in position until now I'm sitting at the bottom of page 4. I have never hired an SEO firm, have not used any "black hat" techniques that Google would have penalized me for in their May update, etc. I'm not familiar enough with SEO to know how to look at link profiles, etc. to tell if there's something wrong. I've run my site through a DNS checker and it came back with no errors. Google Webmaster Tools shows no messages or notices of any kind, just a drop in traffic. GWT also shows only 2 server errors and 1 404. Is there anyone who can tell me by quickly checking my domain if there's an obvious reason that my traffic would have fallen so far, something that I can fix?

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• Ubuntu One - Files API - Cloud - More detailed info somehwere?

  - by Brian McCavour

  I am just starting on a mobile app for Ubuntu One, and I'm reviewing the info at https://one.ubuntu.com/developer/files/store_files/cloud I find the information a bit lacking though. It's a nice reference, but for someone not familiar with it, I had to goggle search to find out what a "volume" was exactly (its kind of obvious, but never hurts to know the specifics) There's also things like: GET /api/file_storage/v1/volumes Return a JSON list of Volume Representations, one for each volume. A volume is a synced folder, or the Ubuntu One folder, owned by the user. Note that all volume paths begin with ~.: ... but there's no such thing as a JSON "list". Does it mean array ? And other things... So I was wondering if here existed another page with more detailed information. Maybe some sample request / responses or something? I could just write a little proof of concept app to answer some of these questions... but I prefer not to unless I have to. Thanks

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• Quicker alternative to gnome-screenshot? (no animation!, quick!, no frills)

  - by humanityANDpeace

  I want to take screenshots in Ubuntu. This is normally no big problem with the standard gnome-screenshot program is working good. But just now I ran into trouble because I need to take a screenshot of some window which appears only for about 0.5 seconds. The Problem is that the gnome-screenshot is using a (from me at least disappreciated animation when used... this fancy thing kind of delays all and I really cannot manage to take the picture..) So what I need is a "no frills" "down to the ground" alternative to the gnome-screenshot. I really disklike the animation - now because it makes me so much trouble. I also hate it that there appears to be no way to disable it after all. Everybody is forced to accept this animation that looks like "a flash light is going on". I am not against being fancy... but this animation in gnome-screenshot is impacting/reducing its functionality. Indeed in my case the shortly appearing window hides when loosing focus. The animaiton -as I assume- triggers the "loosing of focus". So because of the animation I cannot take the screenshot. Anyhow I have looked for "less frills" alternatives and I have found that shutter is a programme that commes with quite some baggage.. But maybe somebody knows a very light-weight programm that serves the very sinple (do nothing else) purpose of just taking a screenshot...

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• SharePoint 2013 Developer Ramp-Up - Part 2

  As stated already yesterday, today I continued with the available course material on Pluralsight. For sure interesting topics in the second part of the series but not the field of operation I'm going to work in later. During the course you get a lot of information about how to create and deploy SharePoint Solutions and hosted SharePoint Apps. Today's resource(s) Apart from some blog articles I watched in the following course today: SharePoint 2013 Developer Ramp-Up - Part 2 - Developing SharePoint Solutions and Apps Not thrilling but still two solid hours to go. Takeaway One of the coolest aspects I figured out today is that SharePoint development can be done easily in JavaScript and C# - just as you like or prefer. It's actually pretty cool to see that you could integrate external JS libraries like datajs, knockout,js and so forth in order to implement your solution. And that you should be very familiar with Microsoft PowerShell. Not only to simplify some repetitive work but also to do be able to get things going in SharePoint. Having a decent background knowledge in Linux, I find this pretty amusing and remember the initial baby steps when PowerShell was introduced some years back (Note: German language). The outcry as well as the hype was too funny. Honestly, I have kind of mixed feelings about today's progress. Surely, there was interesting information about developing extensions directly for and in SharePoint... Hm, I'll leave that one for now and probably it might be helpful someday.

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• How do you plan your asynchronous code?

  - by NullOrEmpty

  I created a library that is a invoker for a web service somewhere else. The library exposes asynchronous methods, since web service calls are a good candidate for that matter. At the beginning everything was just fine, I had methods with easy to understand operations in a CRUD fashion, since the library is a kind of repository. But then business logic started to become complex, and some of the procedures involves the chaining of many of these asynchronous operations, sometimes with different paths depending on the result value, etc.. etc.. Suddenly, everything is very messy, to stop the execution in a break point it is not very helpful, to find out what is going on or where in the process timeline have you stopped become a pain... Development becomes less quick, less agile, and to catch those bugs that happens once in a 1000 times becomes a hell. From the technical point, a repository that exposes asynchronous methods looked like a good idea, because some persistence layers could have delays, and you can use the async approach to do the most of your hardware. But from the functional point of view, things became very complex, and considering those procedures where a dozen of different calls were needed... I don't know the real value of the improvement. After read about TPL for a while, it looked like a good idea for managing tasks, but in the moment you have to combine them and start to reuse existing functionality, things become very messy. I have had a good experience using it for very concrete scenarios, but bad experience using them broadly. How do you work asynchronously? Do you use it always? Or just for long running processes? Thanks.

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• Dual Booting Windows 7 and Ubuntu 12.04. Partition Sizes?

  - by John F.

  I'm about to reinstall Windows, so I thought that I'd try Ubuntu out on a partition just for fun. My question is, how large should my partitions be for each of them? I know this various depending on what you use, so i'll give you a general idea of what I have, and what I have in mind. I'm currently running: Windows 7 Professional (64bit) RAM: 4GB CPU: 2.5Ghz Quad Core processor HDD: 500GB GPU: 1GB Nvidia GeForce I have around 130GB in Steam games, and some heavier applications like Photoshop CS6, Sony Vegas Pro 11. But other Applications I use are: Chrome Skype Dxtory Fraps OpenOffice BitTorrent and other assorted smaller programs. So, I was thinking that I would give my Windows partition about 150-200GB, my Ubuntu Partition around 20GB, and the rest to shared storage. I'm not really sure if I'd need more or less on Ubuntu, because I've never used it and I'm not really sure what kind of apps i'd be using over there. This would also be a clean install, so I'd be wiping my HDD, creating the Partitions in GParted, then installing Windows with Ubuntu following that. Any critique you could give me? Maybe explanations to what the /root, /boot and /home partitions I hear are about? Thanks in advanced if you actually read this lengthy thing! Any help is appreciated. (x

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• Rendering a DOM across multiple displays

  - by meetamit

  I'm building a data-driven animation with HTML and javascript to run in a web browser. I would like to display it tiled across three 1080p monitors. This essentially yields a viewport that's 5760px wide and 1080px tall. Pretty large. Does anyone have experience setting up something like this? I have many questions below, but any tip would be appreciated: Is it reasonable to expect a DOM to render into such a large viewport size at close to 60fps? I might choose to use canvas, instead of SVG or HTML, but that would yield a giant canvas. Can a canvas with such high resolution be performant? Of course everything depends on the complexity of the graphics I want to render, but I'm looking to remove that factor from this question, so assume I'm asking about a canvas animation that can run at 60fps at 1920x1080 resolution. Would it run roughly as fast at 3 times the width? Would three.js and WebGL be a more proper approach at that resolution? How do you actually cause Chrome or FF to span 3 monitors at full screen? Do I need a 3rd party solution of any kind? Thanks!

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• I Can't run the Netbeans but I installed successfully

  - by David

  I'm new to Ubuntu as well as Netbeans. I installed Netbeans, and I've made sure to install all the JDKs and JREs I could find. It installed without errors. I also saw this question and made sure I followed all the instructions there as well. I never got any error messages of any kind. So far as I know, it installed okay. However, when I try to run Netbeans, I get the message in the bottom of the Netbeans IDE like this: ant -f /root/NetBeansProjects/samp1 -Djsp.includes=/root/NetBeansProjects/samp1/build/web/one.jsp -DforceRedeploy=false -Dclient.urlPart=/one.jsp -Ddirectory.deployment.supported=true -Djavac.jsp.includes=org/apache/jsp/one_jsp.java -Dnb.wait.for.caches=true run /root/NetBeansProjects/samp1/nbproject/build-impl.xml:774: The libs.CopyLibs.classpath property is not set up. This property must point to org-netbeans-modules-java-j2seproject-copylibstask.jar file which is part of NetBeans IDE installation and is usually located at <netbeans_installation>/java<version>/ant/extra folder. Either open the project in the IDE and make sure CopyLibs library exists or setup the property manually. For example like this: ant -Dlibs.CopyLibs.classpath=a/path/to/org-netbeans-modules-java-j2seproject-copylibstask.jar BUILD FAILED (total time: 0 seconds)

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• How did we get saddled with the (hierarchical) filesystem as the basic data structure?

  - by user1936

  I'm self-taught and I don't have a CS degree. The more I've been learning about data structure, the more I wonder, in this day and age, how are we still saddled with the filesystem, with directories and files, as the basic data storage structure on the OS? I understand the simplicity of it, but it seems nowadays that there could be more options available natively. As far as I'm aware, the only project to improve the basic functionality of the filesystem was ReiserFS, where you could tell what line of a file was changed by whom, and when. For instance, if I could have native tagging for files, where I could tag images, diagrams, word-processing documents, an entire code repository, all as belonging to a single project, that would really be helpful to me. Since I'm stuck in the filesystem paradigm, I know that I could put all those into a single folder/directory, but what if they already exist in disparate directories, and they need to stay there? I know there are programs out there that can do this, but why aren't they on the filesystem? Something that would be nice to have is some kind of relational feature in the filesystem, like you get with RDBMSes. I understand that that was supposed to be part of Vista/7, but that fell off the feature list too. Sure, any program can store a binary file and have any data structure it wants in it, by why couldn't the OS offer more complex ways of storing data, beyond the simple heirarchy of the filesystem?

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• Should CV contain cases where certain party fools me and not pay salary? Is it "holiday" time or not?

  - by otto

  Suppose I am fooled to work in a start-up or a company that has been a very small over a long time, let say 10 years. I work them 3 months and I really enjoy the work -- I learn a lot of new skills such as Haskell, MapReduce, CouchDB and many other little things. Now the firm did not pay any salary: A) I may be unskilled, B) I did not meet some deadline (I don't know because I am not allowed to speak to the boss but I know that I am not getting any payment) or C) I was fooled. Some detail about C I heard that the firm have had similar cases from my friend, "The guy X was there and he said he does not trust the firm at all so he went to other firm". I don't know what the term "trust" mean here, anyway the firm consists of ignorant drop-outs that hires academic people, a bit irony. They hire people from student-organizations and let them work and promise ok -compensation but -- when you start working the co-employer starts all kind of instructions "Do not work so hard, do not work so long, do not work so much" -- it is like he is making sure you do not feel sad when he does not pay any salary (co-employer is an owner in the firm). Anyway, I learnt a ton in the company but it was very inefficient working. I worked only alone, not really working in a "company". Now should by resume contain references to the firm and the guy who did not pay me anything? Or should my resume read that I worked in XYZ -technologies -- but 1 year's NDA -- what can write here? Now I fear that if I put the firm to my resume: they will lie about my input to my next employer. I feel they are very dishonest. On the other hand, I want to make it sure that I have worked over the time. So: Should my CV contain the not-so-good or even awful employers that may be fooling people to work there? I am pretty sure everyone knows the firm and its habbits, circles are small but people are afraid to speak.

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• How to optimize a box2d simulation in action game?

  - by nathan

  I'm working on an action game and i use box2d for physics. The game use a tiled map. I have different types of body: Static ones used for tiles Dynamic ones for player and enemies Actually i tested my game with ~150 bodies and i have a 60fps constantly on my computer but not on my mobile (android). The FPS drop as the number of body increase. After having profiled the android application, i saw that the World.step took around 8ms in CPU time to execute. Here are few things to note: Not all the world is visible on screen, i use a scrolling system Enemies are constantly moving toward the player so there is alaways to force applied to their body Enemies need to collide between each others Enemies collide with tiles I also now that i can active/desactive or sleep/awake bodies. Considering the fact that only a part of the enemies are possibly displayed on screen, is there any optimizations i can do to reduce the execution time of box2d simulation? I found a guy trying an optimization based on distance of enemies from the player (link). But i seems like he just desactives far bodies (in my case, i could desactive bodies that are not visible). But my enemies need to move even when they are not visible on screen, and applying forces will not workd on inactive bodies. Should i play with sleeping bodies here? Also, enemies are composed by two fixtures and are constantly colliding with each others and with tiles but i really never need to get notified about that. Is there anything i can do to optimize this kind of scenario? Finally, am i wrong to try to run simulation at 60FPS on mobile and should i try to make it run at 30FPS?

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• Five years old Ubuntu system - dist-upgrades always went fine, however some tasks remain

  - by knb

  I have a PC with a current Ubuntu distribution installed. I've upgraded many times since 5.10. It always went well, however some tools or features were kind of left behind in a unsatisfactory state: grub to grub2 - is it an really necessary to switch the boot loader some time to grub2. Upgrading this scares me abit. I still have ext3 devices - is it worth upgrading to ext4? should I wait for btrfs? hibernation and suspend- it only worked in 5.10, since 6.04 it was messed up. Should I really care? Any chance to repair this myself? Simply by cleanup or hacking config files. It is a desktop PC after all. So energy saving functionality is not really needed. I am using vmware workstation 6.5 and the latest kernel that supports it is 2.6.32. This is my default kernel now, ignoring 2.6.35. Am I missing anything important in the new kernel now?

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