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• Recommendations for a web-based help system

  - by ggkmath

  Hi Experts, I'm putting together a fairly large GUI. I'm a tech person, but more on the hardware side, not software. I'm wondering what software package would be best suited to enable me to generate a web-based help-system. Preferably it takes care of a lot of coding, allowing me to focus on the content. For example, the user would click on a link in the GUI when they have a question, that brings them to a web-based Help Guide, for example, providing an overview of how to use the GUI, perhaps a searchable index (key-word based index), table of contents, etc, for navigating through the Help Guide. My first thought was to program everything in XHTML using Dreamweaver, but my layout requirements are fairly modest (just figures and text, maybe a few equations), and I'd prefer not to spend a lot of time concentrating on the programming. Was wondering if any software existed that made generating web-based navigatable pages easy to create/publish. Again, I'm not really a programmer, so if there's something obvious out there, I'm probably not aware of it. Any advice much appreciated! Thanks in advance.

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• How should I architect a personal schedule manager that runs 24/7?

  - by Crawford Comeaux

  I've developed an ADHD management system for myself that's attempting to change multiple habits at once. I know this is counter to conventional wisdom, but I've tried the conventional for years & am now trying it my way. (just wanted to say that to try and prevent it from distracting people from the actual question) Anyway, I'd like to write something to run on a remote server that monitors me, helps me build/avoid certain habits, etc. What this amounts to is a system that: runs 24/7 may have multiple independent tasks to run at once may have tasks that require other tasks to run first lets tasks be scheduled by specific time, recurrence (ie. "run every 5 mins"), or interval (ie. "run from 2pm to 3pm") My first naive attempt at this was just a single PHP script scheduled to run every minute by cron (language was chosen in order to use a certain library, but no longer necessary). The logic behind when to run this or that portion of code got hairy pretty quick. So my question is how should I approach this from here? I'm not tied to any one language, though I'm partial to python/javascript. Thoughts: Could be done as a set of scripts that include a scheduling mechanism with one script per bit of logic...but the idea just feels wrong to me. Building it as a daemon could be helpful, but still unsure what to do about dozens of if-else statements for detecting the current time

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• Writing a Master's Thesis on evaluating visual scripting systems

  - by user1107412

  I am thinking to write my Master's thesis around theorizing, and then implementing a PlayMaker or Kismet-like (building game logic by visually arranging FSMs) tool in Unity. The only thing I am still concerned about is the actual research question that I should pose. I was kinda hoping that the more experienced game designers out there might know. Update: What about reducing the use of visual programming to graphically designing FSM-Action-Transition flows, which can then be attached to game entities (very much like http://playmaker.com does it)?

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• I've been told that Exceptions should only be used in exceptional cases. How do I know if my case is exceptional?

  - by tieTYT

  My specific case here is that the user can pass in a string into the application, the application parses it and assigns it to structured objects. Sometimes the user may type in something invalid. For example, their input may describe a person but they may say their age is "apple". Correct behavior in that case is roll back the transaction and to tell the user an error occurred and they'll have to try again. There may be a requirement to report on every error we can find in the input, not just the first. In this case, I argued we should throw an exception. He disagreed, saying, "Exceptions should be exceptional: It's expected that the user may input invalid data, so this isn't an exceptional case" I didn't really know how to argue that point, because by definition of the word, he seems to be right. But, it's my understanding that this is why Exceptions were invented in the first place. It used to be you had to inspect the result to see if an error occurred. If you failed to check, bad things could happen without you noticing. Without exceptions every level of the stack needs to check the result of the methods they call and if a programmer forgets to check in one of these levels, the code could accidentally proceed and save invalid data (for example). Seems more error prone that way. Anyway, feel free to correct anything I've said here. My main question is if someone says Exceptions should be exceptional, how do I know if my case is exceptional?

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• Syncing client and server CRUD operations using json and php

  - by Justin

  I'm working on some code to sync the state of models between client (being a javascript application) and server. Often I end up writing redundant code to track the client and server objects so I can map the client supplied data to the server models. Below is some code I am thinking about implementing to help. What I don't like about the below code is that this method won't handle nested relationships very well, I would have to create multiple object trackers. One work around is for each server model after creating or loading, simply do $model->clientId = $clientId; IMO this is a nasty hack and I want to avoid it. Adding a setCientId method to all my model object would be another way to make it less hacky, but this seems like overkill to me. Really clientIds are only good for inserting/updating data in some scenarios. I could go with a decorator pattern but auto generating a proxy class seems a bit involved. I could use a generic proxy class that uses a __call function to allow for original object data to be accessed, but this seems wrong too. Any thoughts or comments? $clientData = '[{name: "Bob", action: "update", id: 1, clientId: 200}, {name:"Susan", action:"create", clientId: 131} ]'; $jsonObjs = json_decode($clientData); $objectTracker = new ObjectTracker(); $objectTracker->trackClientObjs($jsonObjs); $query = $this->em->createQuery("SELECT x FROM Application_Model_User x WHERE x.id IN (:ids)"); $query->setParameters("ids",$objectTracker->getClientSpecifiedServerIds()); $models = $query->getResults(); //Apply client data to server model foreach ($models as $model) { $clientModel = $objectTracker->getClientJsonObj($model->getId()); ... } //Create new models and persist foreach($objectTracker->getNewClientObjs() as $newClientObj) { $model = new Application_Model_User(); .... $em->persist($model); $objectTracker->trackServerObj($model); } $em->flush(); $resourceResponse = $objectTracker->createResourceResponse(); //Id mappings will be an associtave array representing server id resources with client side // id. //This method Dosen't seem to flexible if we want to return additional data with each resource... //Would have to modify the returned data structure, seems like tight coupling... //Ex return value: //[{clientId: 200, id:1} , {clientId: 131, id: 33}];

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• How were some language communities (eg, Ruby and Python) able to prevent fragmentation while others (eg, Lisp or ML) were not?

  - by chrisaycock

  The term "Lisp" (or "Lisp-like") is an umbrella for lots of different languages, such as Common Lisp, Scheme, and Arc. There is similar fragmentation is other language communities, like in ML. However, Ruby and Python have both managed to avoid this fate, where innovation occurred more on the implementation (like PyPy or YARV) instead of making changes to the language itself. Did the Ruby and Python communities do something special to prevent language fragmentation?

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• How does Python compile some its code in C?

  - by Howcan

  I read that some constructs of Python are more efficient because they are compiled in C. https://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonSpeed/PerformanceTips Some of the examples used were map() and filter(). I was wondering how Python is able to do this? It's generally interpreted, so how does some of the code get compiled while another is interpreted - and in a different language? Why not just compile the whole thing?

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• Why don't languages include implication as a logical operator?

  - by Maciej Piechotka

  It might be a strange question, but why there is no implication as a logical operator in many languages (Java, C, C++, Python Haskell - although as last one have user defined operators its trivial to add it)? I find logical implication much clearer to write (particularly in asserts or assert-like expressions) then negation with or: encrypt(buf, key, mode, iv = null) { assert (mode != ECB --> iv != null); assert (mode == ECB || iv != null); assert (implies(mode != ECB, iv != null)); // User-defined function }

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• Algorithms for rainfall + river creation in procedurally generated terrain

  - by Peck

  I've recently become fascinated by the things that can be done with procedurally terrain and have started experimenting with world building a bit. I'd like to be able to make worlds something like Dwarf fortress with biomes created from meshing together various maps. So first step has been done. Using the diamond-square algorithm I've created some nice hieghtmaps. Next step is I would like to add some water features and have them somewhat realistically generated with rainfall. I've read about a few different approaches such as starting at the high points of the map, and "stepping" down to the lowest neighboring point, pooling/eroding as it works its way down to sea level. Are there any documented algorithms with this or are they more off the cuff? Would love any advice/thoughts.

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• How to fix this navigation issue in my site?

  - by David

  First off I use webs.com for the creation of my site. I have a very basic layout. List of links of the left and content on the right with a heading up top. Now in my list of links every link is an article that I wrote, I have about 25 links going down the left hand side of my site. Problem is when I try out new themes that support horizontal navigation as opposed to vertical navigation I get either a messy overflow of links Or a link called "more" which lists the rest of the articles in a drop down-list across my site. What I wish I had was a simple horizontal navigation like" "home, about, articles" and when the user clicks on articles it would then bring them to a page containing all my articles there. I would prefer it to be in a table like display. That way is not a long list. Anyways any ideas on how I can fix this issue im having? Please let me know if you need more information.

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• Drawing large 2D sidescroller level terrain

  - by Yar

  I'm a relatively good programmer but now that it comes to add some basic levels to my 2D game I'm kinda stuck. What I want to do: An acceptable, large (8000 * 1000 pixels) "green hills" test level for my game. What is the best way for me to do this? It doesn't have to look great, it just shouldn't look like it was made in MS paint with the line and paint bucket tool. Basically it should just mud with grass on top of it, shaped in some form of hills. But how should I draw it, I can't just take out the pencil tool and start drawing it pixel per pixel, can I?

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• How to properly URL/domain forward

  - by NRGdallas

  No clue on a title for this, someone feel free to suggest an edit. I have a client that has a website. He owns around 200 domains, and wants each domain to contain content from the main website. The header, footer, and navigation bars will remain the same for each domain, but the actual page content will vary (obviously duplicate content issues, open to suggestions) He wants each individual page to be its own separate domain, rather than a url within the main domain. (page1.com page2.com etc - NOT site.com/page1.html, however the file is actually hosted at site.com/page1.html - all links will direct to site.com/whatever accordingly) What would be the best place to start reading / learning on how to do this, and what concerns/considerations should be taken into mind?

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• The danger of changing the domain of your portfolio

  - by Mervin

  So I have a online portfolio that is available at mervin-ux-portfolio.com but I am planning to change hosts since the current host I am hosting it with is hitting me with a very high yearly renewal rate. When I was inquiring about domain transfers ,,they told me that since I had not initiated the domain transfer within 14 days of the expiry of the domain ,they cannot do it immediately and it would take about two weeks to to release the domain name. Since I dont like the idea of my site being down for like 2 weeks ,I was wondering if I should start afresh with a new domain on a new host and what were the potential dangers of that ( I have the entire site backup,so creating a replica of the site on the new host wont be hard) I also wont be losing any business or work since I work full time currently but I was just wondering about the challenges in terms of getting my domain name back to the top of search results and basically getting it out there assuming I go the new domain name approach. I know this is strictly not an UX question but I was hoping people could give some suggestions on what I should do

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• Abstract Factory Method and Polymorphism

  - by Scotty C.

  Being a PHP programmer for the last couple of years, I'm just starting to get into advanced programming styles and using polymorphic patterns. I was watching a video on polymorphism the other day, and the guy giving the lecture said that if at all possible, you should get rid of if statements in your code, and that a switch is almost always a sign that polymorphism is needed. At this point I was quite inspired and immediately went off to try out these new concepts, so I decided to make a small caching module using a factory method. Of course the very first thing I have to do is create a switch to decide what file encoding to choose. DANG! class Main { public static function methodA($parameter='') { switch ($parameter) { case 'a': $object = new \name\space\object1(); break; case 'b': $object = new \name\space\object2(); break; case 'c': $object = new \name\space\object3(); break; default: $object = new \name\space\object1(); } return (sekretInterface $object); } } At this point I'm not really sure what to do. As far as I can tell, I either have to use a different pattern and have separate methods for each object instance, or accept that a switch is necessary to "switch" between them. What do you guys think?

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• Questioning one of the arguments for dependency injection: Why is creating an object graph hard?

  - by oberlies

  Dependency injection frameworks like Google Guice give the following motivation for their usage (source): To construct an object, you first build its dependencies. But to build each dependency, you need its dependencies, and so on. So when you build an object, you really need to build an object graph. Building object graphs by hand is labour intensive (...) and makes testing difficult. But I don't buy this argument: Even without dependency injection, I can write classes which are both easy to instantiate and convenient to test. E.g. the example from the Guice motivation page could be rewritten in the following way: class BillingService { private final CreditCardProcessor processor; private final TransactionLog transactionLog; // constructor for tests, taking all collaborators as parameters BillingService(CreditCardProcessor processor, TransactionLog transactionLog) { this.processor = processor; this.transactionLog = transactionLog; } // constructor for production, calling the (productive) constructors of the collaborators public BillingService() { this(new PaypalCreditCardProcessor(), new DatabaseTransactionLog()); } public Receipt chargeOrder(PizzaOrder order, CreditCard creditCard) { ... } } So there may be other arguments for dependency injection (which are out of scope for this question!), but easy creation of testable object graphs is not one of them, is it?

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• Query something and return the reason if nothing has been found

  - by Daniel Hilgarth

  Assume I have a Query - as in CQS that is supposed to return a single value. Let's assume that the case that no value is found is not exceptional, so no exception will be thrown in this case. Instead, null is returned. However, if no value has been found, I need to act according to the reason why no value has been found. Assuming that the Query knows the reason, how would I communicate it to the caller of the Query? A simple solution would be not return the value directly but a container object that contains the value and the reason: public class QueryResult { public TValue Value { get; private set; } public TReason ReasonForNoValue { get; private set; } } But that feels clumsy, because if a value is found, ReasonForNoValue makes no sense and if no value has been found, Value makes no sense. What other options do I have to communicate the reason? What do you think of one event per reason? For reference: This is going to be implemented in C#.

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• What should a game have in order to keep humans playing it?

  - by Adam Davis

  In many entertainment professions there suggestions, loose rules, or general frameworks one follows that appeal to humans in one way or another. For instance, many movies and books follow the monomyth. In video games I find many types of games that attract people in different ways. Some are addicted to facebook gem matching games. Others can't get enough of FPS games. Once in awhile, though, you find a game that seems to transcend stereotypes and appeals almost immediately to everyone that plays it. For instance, Plants Versus Zombies seems to have a very, very large demographic of players. There are other games similar in reach. I'm curious what books, blogs, etc there are that explore these game types and styles, and tries to suss out one or more popular frameworks/styles that satisfy people, while keeping them coming back for more.

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• Service Layer - how broad should it be, and should it also be on the local application?

  - by BornToCode

  Background: I need to build a desktop application with some operations (CRUD and more) (=winforms), I need to make another application which will re-use some of the functions of the main application (=webforms). I understood that using service layer is the best approach here. If I understood correctly the service should be calling the function on the BL layer (correct me if I'm wrong) The dilemma: In my main winform UI - should I call the functions from the BL, or from the service? (please explain why) Should I create a service for every single function on the BL even if I need some of the functions only in one UI? for example - should I create services for all the CRUD operations, even though I need to re-use only update operation in the webform? YOUR HELP IS MUCH APPRECIATED

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• What features would you like to have in PHP? [closed]

  - by StasM

  Since it's the holiday season now and everybody's making wishes, I wonder - which language features you would wish PHP would have added? I am interested in some practical suggestions/wishes for the language. By practical I mean: Something that can be practically done (not: "I wish PHP would guess what my code means and fix bugs for me" or "I wish any code would execute under 5ms") Something that doesn't require changing PHP into another language (not: "I wish they'd drop $ signs and use space instead of braces" or "I wish PHP were compiled, statically typed and had # in it's name") Something that would not require breaking all the existing code (not: "Let's rename 500 functions and change parameter order for them") Something that does change the language or some interesting aspect of it (not: "I wish there was extension to support for XYZ protocol" or "I wish bug #12345 were finally fixed") Something that is more than a rant (not: "I wish PHP wouldn't suck so badly") Anybody has any good wishes? Mod edit: Stanislav Malyshev is a core PHP developer.

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• Is premature optimization really the root of all evil?

  - by Craig Day

  A colleague of mine today committed a class called ThreadLocalFormat, which basically moved instances of Java Format classes into a thread local, since they are not thread safe and "relatively expensive" to create. I wrote a quick test and calculated that I could create 200,000 instances a second, asked him was he creating that many, to which he answered "nowhere near that many". He's a great programmer and everyone on the team is highly skilled so we have no problem understanding the resulting code, but it was clearly a case of optimizing where there is no real need. He backed the code out at my request. What do you think? Is this a case of "premature optimization" and how bad is it really?

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• Help with converting an XML into a 2D level (Actionscript 3.0)

  - by inzombiak

  I'm making a little platformer and wanted to use Ogmo to create my level. I've gotten everything to work except the level that my code generates is not the same as what I see in Ogmo. I've checked the array and it fits with the level in Ogmo, but when I loop through it with my code I get the wrong thing. I've included my code for creating the level as well as an image of what I get and what I'm supposed to get. EDIT: I tried to add it, but I couldn't get it to display properly Also, if any of you know of better level editors please let me know. xmlLoader.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, LoadXML); xmlLoader.load(new URLRequest("Level1.oel")); function LoadXML(e:Event):void { levelXML = new XML(e.target.data); xmlFilter = levelXML.* for each (var levelTest:XML in levelXML.*) { crack = levelTest; } levelArray = crack.split(''); trace(levelArray); count = 0; for(i = 0; i <= 23; i++) { for(j = 0; j <= 35; j++) { if(levelArray[i*36+j] == 1) { block = new Platform; s.addChild(block); block.x = j*20; block.y = i*20; count++; trace(i); trace(block.x); trace(j); trace(block.y); } } } trace(count);

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• Game ideas for a platformer

  - by user5925

  I have created a platformer which currently has the features listed below. I would greatly appreciate any further ideas which I could implement! (I don't play a lot of games which is why I require help) -- Walking/jumping/movement -- player can shoot lasers -- enemies also walk, fly, and shoot lasers -- water (you can swim in this) -- mud (slows you down on contact, and stops you from jumping) -- ladders -- damage when falling from a large height, unless falling into water -- moving platforms -- springboards (jumping on them shoot you into the air) -- growing platforms (allow you to reach new places) -- key and door system -- gem and coin collection system

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• What technologies and tools would I need to create an advanced 3D game on Unreal Engine 3?

  - by BleakCabalist

  This is a purely hypothetical question. Let's say I already have the UE3 license and would like to create an advanced single-player FPS. What other tools/technologies would I need? For example for audio, animations, modeling and so on. I mean all of them. I've been looking for some time now and can't find any source, which would say what's needed from beggining to the end of game development cycle.

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• How to do thread management in C++?

  - by Dipan Mehta

  We use pthread for thread management in C based systems. pthread is in general compilable by C++ compiler (like g++). However, what are the better ways of abstractions for threads in C++? Also, for making any system to be working in a multi-threaded system, it is also important to make thread safe. What are the standard libraries that requires alternative (installs) to be thread safe or are they unsafe for multi-threaded environments? Is smart pointers, templates require special measures to make it safe? What are the best practices for the thread managements in C++?

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• Ranking players depending on decision making during a game

  - by tabchas

  How would I go about a ranking system for players that play a game? Basically, looking at video games, players throughout the game make critical decisions that ultimately impact the end game result. Is there a way or how would I go about a way to translate some of those factors (leveling up certain skills, purchasing certain items, etc.) into something like a curve that can be plotted on a graph? This game that I would like to implement this is League of Legends. Example: Player is Level 1 in the beginning. Gets a kill very early in the game (he gets gold because of the kill and it increases his "power curve"), and purchases attack damage (gives him more damage which also increases his "power curve". However, the player that he killed (Player 2), buys armor (counters attack damage). This slightly increases Player 2's own power curve, and reduces Player 1's power curve. There's many factors I would like to take into account. These relative factors (example: BECAUSE Player 2 built armor, and I am mainly attack damage, it lowers my OWN power curve) seem the hardest to implement. My question is this: Is there a certain way to approach this task? Are there similar theoretical concepts behind ranking systems that I should read up on? I've seen the ELO system, but it doesn't seem what I want since it simply takes into account wins and losses.

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