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• Does Agile force developers to work more?

  - by Shooshpanchick

  Looking at common Agile practices it seems to me that they (intentionally or unintentionally?) force developer to spend more time actually working as opposed to reading blogs/articles, chatting, coffee breaks and just plain procrastinating. In particular: 1) Pair programming - the biggest work-forcer, just because it is inconvenient to do all that procrastination when there are two of you sitting together. 2) Short stories - when you have a HUGE chunk of work that must be done in e.g. a month, it is pretty common to slack off in the first three weeks and switch to OMG DEADLINE mode for the last one. And with the little chunks (that must be done in a day or less) it is exact opposite - you feel that time is tight, there is no space for maneuvering, and you will be held accountable for the task pretty soon, so you start working immediately. 3) Team communication and cohesion - when you underperform in a slow, distanced and silent environment it may feel ok, but when at the end of the day at Scrum meeting everyone boasts what they have accomplished and you have nothing to say you may actually feel ashamed. 4) Testing and feedback - again, it prevents you from keeping tasks "99% ready" (when it's actually around 20%) until the deadline suddenly happens. Do you feel that under Agile you work more than under "conventional" methodologies? Is this pressure compensated by the more comfortable environment and by the feeling of actually getting right things done quickly?

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• Experienced programmer, beginner at web design, tools for effective maintainable web design? [closed]

  - by Clinton

  I do quite a bit of programming in my work, which I'm comfortable with, but recently I've being trying to do some web-design for non-work related reasons. I've got a Drupal site up and running, and added some content. But they all look fairly basic. Header with some content. It doesn't look particularly polished. Anyway, as an example, what I wanted to do was make some "bubbles", each with some text in them. From a programmers point of view, say: bubble(question_text, answer_text) might expand to a box with some border, with "Question: " + question_text then "Answer: " + answer_text. Of course I'd have lots of these bubbles, but I'd like to change their look and feel in one place, so simple HTML would be a maintainable nightmare. I also want to lay them out on the screen in some fashion. I was thinking a mixture of javascript and CSS, or possibly use PHP which Drupal uses. On the other hand, I fear I might be taking a 1990s approach to this, and that there's actually tools available now that make this process a lot easier. I'm just wondering what the best approach to this sort of task is? Should I be using offline web design software and copying the code to Drupal, and if so, any recommendations? I'm sorry if my question is a bit vague, because I'm not really sure what question I should be asking. I'd appreciate if you answer and comment, and I'll try my best to be more specific as I understand more.

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• First Shard for SQL Azure and SQL Server

  - by Herve Roggero

  That's it!!!!! It's ready to go and be tested, abused and improved! It requires .NET 4.0 and uses some cool technologies, like caching (the new System.Runtime.Caching) and the Task Parallel Library (System.Threading.Tasks). With this library you can: Define a shard of 1, 2 or 100 SQL databases (a mix of SQL Server and SQL Azure) Read from the shard in parallel or sequentially, and cache resultsets Update, Delete a record from the shard Insert records quickly in the shard with a round-robin load Reset the cache You can download the source code and a sample application here: http://enzosqlshard.codeplex.com/  Note about the breadcrumbs: I had to add a connection GUID in order for the library to know which database a record came from. The GUID is currently calculated on the fly in the library using some of the parameters of the connection string. The GUID is also dynamically added to the result set so the client can pass it back to the library. I am curious to get your feedback on this approach. ** Correction from my previous post: this is a library for a Horizontal Partition Shard (HPS): tables are split across databases horizontally. So in essence, the tables need to have the same schema across the databases.

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• how to make a continuous machine gun sound-effect

  - by Jan

  I am trying to make an entity fire one or more machine-guns. For each gun I store the time between shots (1.0 / firing rate) and the time since the last shot. Also I've loaded ~10 different gun-shot sound-effects. Now, for each gun I do the following: function update(deltatime): timeSinceLastShot += deltatime if timeSinceLastShot >= timeBetweenShots + verySmallRandomValue(): timeSinceLastShot -= timeBetweenShots if gunIsFiring: displayMuzzleFlash() spawnBullet() selectRandomSound().play() But now I often get a crackling noise (which I assume is when two or more guns are firing at the same time and confuse the sound-device). My question is whether A) This a common problem and there is a well-known solution, maybe to do with the channels or something, or B) I am using a completely wrong approach to the task. I had a look at some sound-assets for other games and they used complete burst with multiple shots. I suppose I could try that, but I would like to have organic little hickups in the gun-fire (that's what the random value is for) to make the game more gritty and dirty. I am using Panda3D, but I had the exact same problem in PyGame and SDL. [edit] Thanks a lot for the answers so far! One more problem with faking it though: Now how do I stop the sound? Let's say I have an effect with 5 bangs... *bang* *bang* *bang* *bang* *bang* And I magically manage to loop it so that there's no gap or overlap if the player fires more than 5 shots. Now, what do I do if the player stops firing halfway through the third bang? How do I know how long to keep playing the sample so that the third bang is completed and I can start playing the rumbling echo of the last shot? Of course I can look up the shot/pause timing of that sound-sample and code accordingly, but it feels extremely hacky.

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• How should I describe the process of learning someone else's code? (In an invoicing situation.)

  - by MattyG

  I have a contract to upgrade some in-house software for a large company. The company has requested multiple feature additions and a few bug fixes. This is my first freelance style job. First, I needed to become familiar with how the application worked - I learnt it as if I was a user. Next, I had to learn how the software worked. I started with broad concepts, and then narrowed down into necessary detail before working on each bug fix and feature. At least at the start of the project, it took me a lot longer to learn the existing code than it did to write the additional features. How can I describe the process of learning the existing code on the invoice? (This part of the company usually does things in-house, so doesn't have much experience dealing with software contractors like me, and I fear they may not understand the overhead of learning someone else's code). I don't want to just tack the learning time onto the actual feature upgrade, because in some cases this would make a 'simple task' look like it took me way too long. I want break the invoice into relevant steps, and communicate that I'm charging for the large overhead of learning someone else's code before being able to add my own to it. Is there a standard way of describing this sort of activity when billing for a job?

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• What You Said: How You Organize a Messy Music Collection

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  Earlier this week we asked you to share your tips, tricks, and tools, for managing a messy music collection. Now we’re back to share so great reader tips; read on to find ways to tame your mountain of music. Several readers were, despite having tried various techniques over the years, fans of doing things largely the manual way. Aurora900 explains: I spent a weekend sorting everything myself once. Took a while, but now I have folders sorted by artist, and within the artist folders are folders for their albums. With my collection at about 260gb, it can be a daunting task, but it’s well worth it in the end. I don’t have the tagging issue as I make sure anything I have is properly tagged to begin with… If I’m ripping a CD I use Easy CD-DA Extractor, which automatically searches a database on the internet for the tags. If I’m downloading something, if its from a reputable source its going to be properly tagged already. Bilbo Baggins would love to automate, but eclectic music tastes make it hard: How to Own Your Own Website (Even If You Can’t Build One) Pt 3 How to Sync Your Media Across Your Entire House with XBMC How to Own Your Own Website (Even If You Can’t Build One) Pt 2

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• What are my choices for server side sandboxed scripting?

  - by alfa64

  I'm building a public website where users share data and scripts to run over some data. The scripts are run serverside in some sort of sandbox without other interaction this cycle: my Perl program reads from a database a User made script, adds the data to be processed into the script ( ie: a JSON document) then calls the interpreter, it returns the response( a JSON document or plain text), i save it to the database with my perl script. The script should be able to have some access to built in functions added to the scripting language by myself, but nothing more. So i've stumbled upon node.js as a javascript interpreter, and and hour or so ago with Google's V8(does v8 makes sense for this kind of thing?). CoffeeScript also came to my mind, since it looks nice and it's still Javascript. I think javascript is widespread enough and more "sandboxeable" since it doesn't have OS calls or anything remotely insecure ( i think ). by the way, i'm writing the system on Perl and Php for the front end. To improve the question: I'm choosing Javascript because i think is secure and simple enough to implement with node.js, but what other alternatives are for achieving this kind of task? Lua? Python? I just can't find information on how to run a sandboxed interpreter in a proper way.

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• Are long methods always bad?

  - by wobbily_col

  So looking around earlier I noticed some comments about long methods being bad practice. I am not sure I always agree that long methods are bad (and would like opinions from others). For example I have some Django views that do a bit of processing of the objects before sending them to the view, a long method being 350 lines of code. I have my code written so that it deals with the paramaters - sorting / filtering the queryset, then bit by bit does some processing on the objects my query has returned. So the processing is mainly conditional aggregation, that has complex enough rules it can't easily be done in the database, so I have some variables declared outside the main loop then get altered during the loop. varaible_1 = 0 variable_2 = 0 for object in queryset : if object.condition_condition_a and variable_2 > 0 : variable 1+= 1 ..... ... . more conditions to alter the variables return queryset, and context So according to the theory I should factor out all the code into smaller methods, so That I have the view method as being maximum one page long. However having worked on various code bases in the past, I sometimes find it makes the code less readable, when you need to constantly jump from one method to the next figuring out all the parts of it, while keeping the outermost method in your head. I find that having a long method that is well formatted, you can see the logic more easily, as it isn't getting hidden away in inner methods. I could factor out the code into smaller methods, but often there is is an inner loop being used for two or three things, so it would result in more complex code, or methods that don't do one thing but two or three (alternatively I could repeat inner loops for each task, but then there will be a performance hit). So is there a case that long methods are not always bad? Is there always a case for writing methods, when they will only be used in one place?

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• How is determined an impact of a requirement change on the existing code?

  - by MainMa

  Hi, How companies working on large projects evaluate an impact of a single modification on an existing code? Since my question is probably not very clear, here's an example: Let's take a sample business application which deals with tasks. In the database, each task has a state, 0 being "Pending", ... 5 - "Finished". A new requirement adds a new state, between 2nd and 3rd one. It means that: A constraint on the values 1 - 5 in the database must be changed, Business layer and code contracts must be changed to add a new state, Data access layer must be changed to take in account that, for example the state StateReady is now 6 instead of 5, etc. The application must implement a new state visually, add new controls for it, new localized strings for tool-tips, etc. When an application is written recently by one developer, it's more or less easy to predict every change to do. On the other hand, when an application was written for years by many people, no single person can anticipate every change immediately, without any investigation. So since this situation (such changes in requirements) is very frequent, I imagine there are already some clever techniques and ways to predict the impact. Is there any? Do you know any books which deal about this subject? Note: my question is not related to How do you deal with changing requirements? question. In fact, I'm not interested in evaluating the cost of a change, but rather the way to predict the parts of an application which will be concerned by the change. What will be those changes and how difficult they are really doesn't matter in my question.

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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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• OBIEE 11.1.1.6.5 Bundle Patch released Oct 2012

  - by user554629

  October  2012 OBIEE 11.1.1.6.5 Bundle Patch released Bundle patches are collection of controlled, well tested critical bug fixes for a specific product  which may include security contents and occasionally minor enhancements. These are cumulative in nature meaning the latest bundle patch in a particular series would include the contents of the previous bundle patches released.  A suite bundle patch is an aggregation of multiple product  bundle patches that are part of a product suite. For OBIEE on 11.1.1.6.0, we plan to run a monthly bundle patch cadence. 11.1.1.6.5 bundle patch- available for download from  My Oracle Support . - is cumulative, so it includes everything from previous updates- available for supported platforms ( Windows, Linux, Solaris, AIX, HPUX-IA ) Navigate to https://support.oracle.com and login- Knowledge Base tab  Select a product line [ Business Intelligence ]  Select a Task [ Patching and Maintenance ]  Click Search- Oct 23, 2012, OBIEE 11g: Required and Recommended Patches and Patch Sets, ID 1488475.1- 11.1.1.6.5 Published 19th October 2012 Note: The 11.1.1.6 versions on top of 11.1.1.6.0 are not upgrades, they are opatch fixes.  This is not an upgrade process like from OBIEE 10g to 11g, or from OBIEE 11.1.1.5 to 11.1.1.6.  It is much safer than applying any one-off fixes, which are not regression tested.  You will be more successful using 11.1.1.6.5.  

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• Please help restore my crashed launcher/compizconfig

  - by Will

  I have just upgraded from 11.04 to 11.10. Everything worked fine at first, but at one point when I was editing some CompizConfig settings (just something basic like 'number of desktops'), CompizConfig crashed. Then the whole launcher disappeared, along with most of the buttons in the top panel. The shutdown button, calendar, etc. all went, leaving just the tabs from File to Help. Also, windows now have the title and File, Edit..(etc) tabs on 2 separate lines, instead of the new format where hovering over the bar switches which one is visible. I have since been using Ctrl+Alt+T to open a terminal and open applications, shut down, etc, from there. I have typed in the command: unity --reset which has some effect, but the terminal never reaches the end of the task. I've also done apt-get update, which completed fine. Can anyone help me restore the launcher and panel functions?? I am getting most frustrated by the fact that once I have opened Firefox, I can't enter any other commands!

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• Is there a canonical source supporting "all-surrogates"?

  - by user61852

  Background The "all-PK-must-be-surrogates" approach is not present in Codd's Relational Model or any SQL Standard (ANSI, ISO or other). Canonical books seems to elude this restrictions too. Oracle's own data dictionary scheme uses natural keys in some tables and surrogate keys in other tables. I mention this because these people must know a thing or two about RDBMS design. PPDM (Professional Petroleum Data Management Association) recommend the same canonical books do: Use surrogate keys as primary keys when: There are no natural or business keys Natural or business keys are bad ( change often ) The value of natural or business key is not known at the time of inserting record Multicolumn natural keys ( usually several FK ) exceed three columns, which makes joins too verbose. Also I have not found canonical source that says natural keys need to be immutable. All I find is that they need to be very estable, i.e need to be changed only in very rare ocassions, if ever. I mention PPDM because these people must know a thing or two about RDBMS design too. The origins of the "all-surrogates" approach seems to come from recommendations from some ORM frameworks. It's true that the approach allows for rapid database modeling by not having to do much business analysis, but at the expense of maintainability and readability of the SQL code. Much prevision is made for something that may or may not happen in the future ( the natural PK changed so we will have to use the RDBMS cascade update funtionality ) at the expense of day-to-day task like having to join more tables in every query and having to write code for importing data between databases, an otherwise very strightfoward procedure (due to the need to avoid PK colisions and having to create stage/equivalence tables beforehand ). Other argument is that indexes based on integers are faster, but that has to be supported with benchmarks. Obviously, long, varying varchars are not good for PK. But indexes based on short, fix-length varchar are almost as fast as integers. The questions - Is there any canonical source that supports the "all-PK-must-be-surrogates" approach ? - Has Codd's relational model been superceded by a newer relational model ?

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• Displaying a Grid of Data in ASP.NET MVC

  One of the most common tasks we face as a web developers is displaying data in a grid. In its simplest incarnation, a grid merely displays information about a set of records - the orders placed by a particular customer, perhaps; however, most grids offer features like sorting, paging, and filtering to present the data in a more useful and readable manner. In ASP.NET WebForms the GridView control offers a quick and easy way to display a set of records in a grid, and offers features like sorting, paging, editing, and deleting with just a little extra work. On page load, the GridView automatically renders as an HTML <table> element, freeing you from having to write any markup and letting you focus instead on retrieving and binding the data to display to the GridView. In an ASP.NET MVC application, however, developers are on the hook for generating the markup rendered by each view. This task can be a bit daunting for developers new to ASP.NET MVC, especially those who have a background in WebForms. This is the first in a series of articles that explore how to display grids in an ASP.NET MVC application. This installment starts with a walk through of creating the ASP.NET MVC application and data access code used throughout this series. Next, it shows how to display a set of records in a simple grid. Future installments examine how to create richer grids that include sorting, paging, filtering, and client-side enhancements. We'll also look at pre-built grid solutions, like the Grid component in the MvcContrib project and JavaScript-based grids like jqGrid. But first things first - let's create an ASP.NET MVC application and see how to display database records in a web page. Read on to learn more! Read More >

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• What is a Coding Dojo?

  - by huwyss

  Recently i found out that there is a thing called "coding dojo". The point behind it is that software developers want to have a space to learn new stuff like processes, methods, coding details, languages, and whatnot in an environment without stress. Just for fun. No competition. No results required. No deadlines.Some days ago I joined the Zurich coding dojo. We were three programmers with different backgrounds.We gave ourselves the task to develop a method that takes an input value and returns its prime factors. We did pair programming and every few minutes we switched positions. We used test driven development. The chosen programming language was Ruby.I haven't really done TDD before. It was pretty interesting to see the algorithm develop following the testcases.We started with the first test input=1 then developed the most simple productive program that passed this very first test. Then we added the next test input=2 and implemented the productive code. We kept adding tests and made sure all tests are passed until we had the general solution.When we improved the performance of our code we saw the value of the tests we wrote before. Of course our first performance improvement broke several tests.It was a very interesting experience to see how other developers think and how they work. I will participate at the dojo again and can warmly recommend it to anyone. There are  coding dojos all over the world.Have fun!

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• Precise: Evolution laggy due to IMAP -profile or due to some odd Sync -issue?

  - by Izzy

  I'm fighting with Evolution. Basically it's working fine -- but it is very slow to react in certain situations. There is apparently some problem with syncing and IMAP. Helper questios Could be that changing away from Bonobo has to do with slowing-down? There might be some trouble with the new engine and "asynchronous actions". What to do about it? I want to get the previous "working mood" back. How can I speed this thing up? Different scenarios when sending a mail, the composer window hangs there inactive for a couple of seconds, everything grayed out. Though there is a green check mark saying it's sent, I'm not sure a) why it's still blocking everything and b) whether I could simply close it without "breaking"/"losing" anything. In earlier versions, the composer window was closing pretty fast, and one could see the message being stored into the local "outbox" until it was sent, and one could immediately continue with the next task. I prefer that behaviour over the current. switching between modules. Coming from mail and switching to the address book takes a couple of seconds. Same for switching to the calendar. I read about different "possible causes" and tried a few things: I only have 3 local address books, so no networking should be involved here. To make sure, I switched to offline mode and then tried to access the address book. No noticeable difference. I use 3 Google Calendars. Switching to offline mode made a minor difference, but so minor that it also could be "imagination" since one might have expected this in this case according to some reports, disabling the tasks should help. Well, it didn't in my case, as I don't use them regularly (just two local items stored here)

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• Purpose oriented user accounts on a single desktop?

  - by dd_dent

  Starting point: I currently do development for Dynamics Ax, Android and an occasional dabble with Wordpress and Python. Soon, I'll start a project involving setting up WP on Google Apps Engine. Everything is, and should continue to, run from the same PC (running Linux Mint). Issue: I'm afraid of botching/bogging down my setup due to tinkering/installing multiple runtimes/IDE's/SDK's/Services, so I was thinking of using multiple users, each purposed to handle the task at hand (web, Android etc) and making each user as inert as possible to one another. What I need to know is the following: Is this a good/feasible practice? The second closest thing to this using remote desktops connections, either to computers or to VM's, which I'd rather avoid. What about switching users? Can it be made seamless? Anything else I should know? Update and clarification regarding VM's and whatnot: The reason I wish to avoid resorting to VM's is that I dislike the performance impact and sluggishness associated with it. I also suspect it might add a layer of complexity I wish to avoid. This answer by Wyatt is interesting but I think it's only partly suited for requirements (web development for example). Also, in reference to the point made about system wide installs, there is a level compromise I should accept as experessed by this for example. This option suggested by 9000 is also enticing (more than VM's actually) and by no means do I intend to "Juggle" JVMs and whatnot, partly due to the reason mentioned before. Regarding complexity, I agree and would consider what was said, only from my experience I tend to pollute my work environment with SDKs and runtimes I tried and discarded, which would occasionally leave leftovers which cause issues throught the session. What I really want is a set of well defined, non virtualized sessions from which I can choose at my leisure and be mostly (to a reasonable extent) safe from affecting each session from the other. And what I'm really asking is if and how can this be done using user accounts.

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• How can I stop a process from moving to the background?

  - by Alex

  I have a machine running Ubuntu server version 12.04.3 LTS. On it, I'm attempting to run a node.js server that needs to stay up and running at all times. I'm running into an issue, however, where periodically I see this happen: [1]+ Stopped sudo node server.js When this happens, I have to manually bring it back with fg, which works fine, at least until it stops again. As far as I can tell, it isn't functioning properly while stopped, since I get no log files in those windows of time. So my question is this: Is there a way to prevent it from being stopped like that? I'm running it in a tmux window, if that changes anything. Also, to address the question before it gets asked: I'm running it as sudo due to some ecryptfs issues I've been having. I was originally running it in my home directory, but when it was left alive for too long things would get out of sync and the file writes it has to do would just stop working. To mitigate that, I moved it out of my home directory, but its new location requires me to use sudo permissions for everything to work correctly. Hopefully that isn't related to the whole background task thing. (sudo and tmux tags included in case one or both turn out to actually be relevant to the solution.)

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• Advice on choosing a book to read

  - by Kioshiki

  I would like to ask for some recommendations on useful books to read. Initially I had intended on posting quite a long description of my current issue and asking for advice. But I realised that I didn’t have a clear idea of what I wanted to ask. One thing that is clear to me is that my knowledge in various areas needs improving and reading is one method of doing that. Though choosing the right book to read seems like a task in itself when there are so many books out there. I am a programmer but I also deal with analysis, design & testing. So I am not sure what type of book to read. One option might be to work through two books at the same time. I had thought maybe one about design or practices and another of a more technical focus. Recently I came across one book that I thought might be useful to read: http://xunitpatterns.com/index.html It seems like an interesting book, but the comments I read on amazon.co.uk show that the book is probably longer than it needs to be. Has anyone read it and can comment on this? Another book that I already own and would probably be a good one to finish reading is this: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Code-Complete-Practical-Handbook-Construction/dp/0735619670/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1309438553&sr=8-1 Has anyone else read this who can comment on its usefulness? Beyond these two I currently have no clear idea of what to read. I have thought about reading a book related to OO design or the GOF design patterns. But I wonder if I am worrying too much about the process and practices and not focusing on the actual work. I would be very grateful for any suggestions or comments. Many Thanks, Kioshiki

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• XboxMP Helps You Find Multiplayer Games for the Xbox

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  Searching for the perfect versus or cooperative Xbox multiplayer game can be challenging–the game publisher says it plays four but what exactly does that mean? XboxMP catalogs games with detailed breakdowns of what the multiplayer experience actually entails. You can search first generation Xbox games, Xbox 360 games, and Xbox Live Arcade games with a variety of detailed criteria including the number of players it supports for local, system link, and online play (it may be a deal breaker, for example, that the only way to play the game with 4 players is to have two Xboxes or an Xbox live account). In addition to the multiplayer game data each game listing also includes addition information about the general game play including peripheral support and other features. Hit up the link below to check it out and, for more help finding multiplayer cooperative games, make sure to check out previously reviewed Co-Optimus. XBoxMP What Is the Purpose of the “Do Not Cover This Hole” Hole on Hard Drives? How To Log Into The Desktop, Add a Start Menu, and Disable Hot Corners in Windows 8 HTG Explains: Why You Shouldn’t Use a Task Killer On Android

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• The Home Stretch: NetBeans IDE 7.1 Release Candidate

  - by TinuA

  The first release candidate build of NetBeans IDE 7.1 is live and available for download, which means the big release (GA) is expected any day soon.NetBeans IDE 7.1 delivers support for JavaFX 2.0, enabling the full compile, debug and profile development cycle for JavaFX 2.0 applications and keeping developers in sync with the latest from the Java platform. Beyond JavaFX support, 7.1 also provides significant Swing GUI Builder enhancements, CSS3 support, and visual debugging tools for JavaFX and Swing user interfaces. And Git--a much anticipated featured--has been integrated into the IDE."The entire NetBeans team is tremendously excited about this release, which provides developers with more state-of-the-art tools for building front-end clients," says NetBeans Engineering Director John Jullion-Ceccarelli. "Whether you are doing JavaFX, HTML5, Swing, or JSF, NetBeans 7.1 will let you quickly and easily develop great-looking and full-featured clients for your Java or PHP-based applications."But there's one more task to check off before the general availability: The NetBeans team has launched a Community Acceptance Survey to get user feedback about the release candidate. Download the RC build, test it and take the survey to let the team know if NetBeans IDE 7.1 is ready for its debut!

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• I've inherited 200K lines of spaghetti code -- what now?

  - by kmote

  I hope this isn't too general of a question; I could really use some seasoned advice. I am newly employed as the sole "SW Engineer" in a fairly small shop of scientists who have spent the last 10-20 years cobbling together a vast code base. (It was written in a virtually obsolete language: G2 -- think Pascal with graphics). The program itself is a physical model of a complex chemical processing plant; the team that wrote it have incredibly deep domain knowledge but little or no formal training in programming fundamentals. They've recently learned some hard lessons about the consequences of non-existant configuration management. Their maintenance efforts are also greatly hampered by the vast accumulation of undocumented "sludge" in the code itself. I will spare you the "politics" of the situation (there's always politics!), but suffice to say, there is not a consensus of opinion about what is needed for the path ahead. They have asked me to begin presenting to the team some of the principles of modern software development. They want me to introduce some of the industry-standard practices and strategies regarding coding conventions, lifecycle management, high-level design patterns, and source control. Frankly, it's a fairly daunting task and I'm not sure where to begin. Initially, I'm inclined to tutor them in some of the central concepts of The Pragmatic Programmer, or Fowler's Refactoring ("Code Smells", etc). I also hope to introduce a number of Agile methodologies. But ultimately, to be effective, I think I'm going to need to hone in on 5-7 core fundamentals; in other words, what are the most important principles or practices that they can realistically start implementing that will give them the most "bang for the buck". So that's my question: What would you include in your list of the most effective strategies to help straighten out the spaghetti (and prevent it in the future)?

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• Should I build a multi-threaded system that handles events from a game and sorts them, independently, into different threads based on priority?

  - by JonathonG

  Can I build a multi-threaded system that handles events from a game and sorts them, independently, into different threads based on priority, and is it a good idea? Here's more info: I am about to begin work on porting a mid-sized game from Flash/AS3 to Java so that I can continue development with multi-threading capabilities. Here's a small bit of background about the game: The game contains numerous asynchronous activities, such as "world updating" (the game environment is constantly changing based on a set of natural laws and forces), procedural generation of terrain, NPCs, quests, items, etc., and on top of that, the effects of all of the player's interactions with his environment are programmatically calculated in real time, based on a set of constantly changing "stats" and once again, natural laws and forces. All of these things going on at once, in an asynchronous manner, seem to lend themselves to multi-threading very well. My question is: Can I build some kind of central engine that handles the "stacking" of all of these events as they are triggered, and dynamically sorts them out amongst the available threads, and would it be a good idea? As an example: Essentially, every time something happens (IE, a magic missile being generated by a spell, or a bunch of plants need to grow to their next stage), instead of just processing that task right then and adding the new object(s) to a list of managed objects, send a reference to that event to a core "event handler" that throws it into a stack of all other currently queued events, which then sorts them out and orders them according to urgency, splits them between a number of available threads for as-fast-as-possible multithreaded execution.

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• Bust Out these 13 Spooky Games for Halloween

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  Looking for a suitably spooky board game for Halloween? This roundup includes everything from the light-hearted to the dark and challenging. Over at GeekDad they’ve rounded up 13 horror/Halloween themed board games to help you fill your holiday board gaming quota. The list includes classics like the in-depth and atmospheric Arkham Horror to more recent and kid-friendly GeistesBlitz. Although we think their list is rock solid and includes some great titles, we’re disappointed to see that Witch of Salem, a great lighter-weight alternative to Arkham Horror for those nights you want some cooperative H.P. Lovecraft inspired play without the massive setup and game length, didn’t make the list. To check out the full GeekDad list hit up the link below, for more boardgame-centric reading we highly recommend the excellent board gaming site BoardgameGeek. 13 Spooky Board Games for Your Halloween Game Night [GeekDad] What Is the Purpose of the “Do Not Cover This Hole” Hole on Hard Drives? How To Log Into The Desktop, Add a Start Menu, and Disable Hot Corners in Windows 8 HTG Explains: Why You Shouldn’t Use a Task Killer On Android

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• Which approach is the most maintainable?

  - by 2rs2ts

  When creating a product which will inherently suffer from regression due to OS updates, which of these is the preferable approach when trying to reduce maintenance cost and the likelihood of needing refactoring, when considering the task of interpreting system state and settings for a lay user? Delegate the responsibility of interpreting the results of inspecting the system to the modules which perform these tasks, or, Separate the concerns of interpretation and inspection into two modules? The first obviously creates a blob in which a lot of code would be verbose, redundant, and hard to grok; the second creates a strong coupling in which the interpretation module essentially has to know what it expects from inspection routines and will have to adapt to changes to the OS just as much as the inspection will. I would normally choose the second option for the separation of concerns, foreseeing the possibility that inspection routines could be re-used, but a developer updating the product to deal with a new OS feature or something would have to not only write an inspection routine but also write an interpretation routine and link the two correctly - and it gets worse for a developer who has to change which inspection routines are used to get a certain system setting, or worse yet, has to fix an inspection routine which broke after an OS patch. I wonder, is it better to have to patch one package a lot or two packages, each somewhat less so?

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