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• Estimate angle to launch missile, maths question

  - by Jonathan

  I've been working on this for an hour or two now and my maths really isn't my strong suit which is definitely not a good thing for a game programmer but that shouldn't stop me enjoying a hobby surely? After a few failed attempts I was hoping someone else out there could help so here's the situation. I'm trying to implement a bit of faked intelligence when the A.I fires it's missiles at a target in a 2D game world. By predicting the likely position the target will be in given it's current velocity and the time it will take the missile to reach it's target. I created an image to demonstrate my thinking: http://i.imgur.com/SFmU3.png which also contains the logic I use for accelerating the missile after launch. The ship that fires the missile can fire within a total of 40 degree angle, 20 either side of itself, but this could likely become variable. My current attempt was to break the space between the two lines into segments which match the targets width. Then calculate the time it would take the missile to get to that location using the formula. So for each iteration of this we total up the values and that tells us the distance travelled, ad it would then just need compared to distance to the segment. startVelocity * ((startVelocity * acceleration)^(currentframe-1) So for example. If we start at a velocity of 1f/frame with an acceleration of 0.1f the formula, at frame 4, would be 1 * (1.1^3) = 1.331 But I quickly realized I was getting lost when trying to put this into practice. Does this seem like a correct starting point or am I going completely the wrong way about it? Any pointers would help me greatly. Maths really isn't my strong suit so I get easily lost in these matters and don't even really know a good phrase to search for with this. So I guess in summary my question is more about the correct way to approach this problem and any additional code samples on top of that would be great but I'm not averse to working out the complete code from helpful pointers.

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• Enforcing Constraints Upon Data Documents of Various Formats

  - by Christopher Berman

  This seems like the sort of problem that must have been solved elegantly long ago, but I haven't the foggiest how to google it and find it. Suppose you're maintaining a large legacy system, which has a large collection of data (tens of GB) of various formats, including XML and two different internal configuration formats. Suppose further that there are abstract rules governing the values these files may or may not contain. EXAMPLE: File A defines the raw, mathematical data pertaining to the aerodynamics of a car for consumption of the physics component of the system. File B contains certain values from File A in an easily accessible, XML hierarchy for consumption of a different component of the system. There exists, therefore, an abstract rule (or constraint) such that the values from File B must match the values from File A. This is probably the simplest constraint that can be specified, but in practice, the constraints between files can become very complicated indeed. What is the best method for managing these constraints between files of arbitrary formats, short of migrating it over to an RDBMS (which simply isn't feasible for the foreseeable future)? Has this problem been solved already? To be more specific, I would expect the solution to at least produce notifications of violated constraints; the solution need not resolve the constraints. ============================== Sample file structures File A (JeepWrangler2011.emv): MODEL JeepWrangler2011 { EsotericMathValueX 11.1 EsotericMathValueY 22.2 EsotericMathValueZ 33.3 } File B (JeepWrangler2011.xml): <model name="JeepWrangler2011"> <!--These values must correspond File A's EsotericMathValues--> <modelExtent x="11.1" y="22.2" z="33.3"/> [...] </model>

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• Intermittent internet connectivity

  - by Rob Oplawar

  UPDATED: I recently built a new computer and set it up to dual-boot Windows 7 and Ubuntu 11.10. In Windows, using the same hardware, my LAN connectivity is solid. In Ubuntu, however, my network interface periodically dies and resets itself; I'll have a solid connection for 30 seconds, and then it will go out for 30 seconds. When I tail the log: tail -f /var/log/kern.log I see "eth0 link up" messages appear periodically, corresponding with the return of connectivity. I posted the original question months ago, and misinterpreted what was going on. With a working Internet connection in Windows, I ignored the problem for some months. See my answer below for the solution (drivers). ORIGINAL POST In Ubuntu, although I maintain a solid connection to my LAN (pinging the router IP address consistently returns a good result), my internet connectivity drops in and out. When I continuously ping 74.125.227.18 (a google.com server), I get responses for a while, then I start getting "Destination Host Unreachable" for a while, then I get responses again. This happens consistently, dropping the connection for about 30 seconds out of every minute or two. Whether I configure my network via the network manager or via /etc/network/interfaces seems to make no difference. I configure with the following settings: address 192.168.1.101 network 192.168.1.0 gateway 192.168.1.99 (my router's IP address) netmask 255.255.255.0 (confirmed as the right netmask for the router) broadcast 192.168.1.255 (also confirmed with the router). ifconfig confirms that these settings are working: eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 50:e5:49:40:da:a6 inet addr:192.168.1.101 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0 inet6 addr: fe80::52e5:49ff:fe40:daa6/64 Scope:Link UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:11557 errors:0 dropped:11557 overruns:0 frame:11557 TX packets:13117 errors:0 dropped:211 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:9551488 (9.5 MB) TX bytes:1930952 (1.9 MB) Interrupt:41 Base address:0xa000 I get the same issue when I use automatic DHCP address settings, although I did confirm that there is no other machine on the network with the static IP address I want to use. As I said, the connection to the local network stays solid - I never have any trouble pinging 192.168.1.* - it's internet addresses that I intermittently cannot reach. It's not a DNS issue because pinging known IP addresses directly shows the same behavior. Also, I don't think it's a hardware issue, as I never have any internet connectivity problems on the same machine in Windows. The network hardware is built into the motherboard: Gigabyte Z68XP-UD3P. I managed to bring the OS fully up to date, according to the update manager, but it didn't fix the issue, and with my limited understanding of network architecture I'm at my wit's end. The only clue I can see is that ifconfig is reporting a lot of dropped packets, but I'm not sure what to do about it. UPDATE: It seems my problem is a little more generic than I described; now when I try pinging my router and google simultaneously, they both go unreachable at the same time. Running ifdown eth0 and then ifup eth0 brings it back temporarily; if I just wait it comes back after a couple of minutes. I'll broaden my search through intermittent network connectivity problems.

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• Speaking in Sweden in April

  - by Fabrice Marguerie

  As this is my first post in 2011, I wish you all the best for this new year. I don't know for you, but it will be a year of changes for me. I'll tell you more about that when the time comes. For the time being, I just wanted to announce my next speaking engagement: I'll be presenting at SDC2011, the Scandinavian Developer Conference. This event will take place on April 4 and 5 in Göteborg, Sweden. My session will be based on my article about memory leaks: How to detect and avoid memory and resources leaks in .NET applicationsDuring this session we will analyze the most common leak sources in .NET applications and we will see how to detect them in practice. We will demonstrate with live examples several tools that can help you to troubleshoot your applications. The goal of this session is to help you fix and avoid leaks in your .NET applications, whether they are built with Windows Forms, WPF, Silverlight, ASP.NET, or as console or Windows services. You will also get advices on how to improve your applications so they become less greedy. I hope to see you there if you're around in April :-)

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• How to handle monetary values in PHP and MySql?

  - by Songo

  I've inherited a huge pile of legacy code written in PHP on top of a MySQL database. The thing I noticed is that the application uses doubles for storage and manipulation of data. Now I came across of numerous posts mentioning how double are not suited for monetary operations because of the rounding errors. However, I have yet to come across a complete solution to how monetary values should be handled in PHP code and stored in a MySQL database. Is there a best practice when it comes to handling money specifically in PHP? Things I'm looking for are: How should the data be stored in the database? column type? size? How should the data be handling in normal addition, subtraction. multiplication or division? When should I round the values? How much rounding is acceptable if any? Is there a difference between handling large monetary values and low ones? Note: A VERY simplified sample code of how I might encounter money values in everyday life: $a= $_POST['price_in_dollars']; //-->(ex: 25.06) will be read as a string should it be cast to double? $b= $_POST['discount_rate'];//-->(ex: 0.35) value will always be less than 1 $valueToBeStored= $a * $b; //--> any hint here is welcomed $valueFromDatabase= $row['price']; //--> price column in database could be double, decimal,...etc. $priceToPrint=$valueFromDatabase * 0.25; //again cast needed or not? I hope you use this sample code as a means to bring out more use cases and not to take it literally of course. Bonus Question If I'm to use an ORM such as Doctrine or PROPEL, how different will it be to use money in my code.

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• How does datomic handle "corrections"?

  - by blueberryfields

  tl;dr Rich Hickey describes datomic as a system which implicitly deals with timestamps associated with data storage from my experience, data is often imperfectly stored in systems, and on many occasions needs to retroactively be corrected (ie, often the question of "was a True on Tuesday at 12:00pm?" will have an incorrect answer stored in the database) This seems like a spot where the abstractions behind datomic might break - do they? If they don't, how does the system handle such corrections? Rich Hickey, in several of his talks, justifies the creation of datomic, and explains its benefits. His work, if I understand correctly, is motivated by core the insight that humans, when speaking about data and facts, implicitly associate some of the related context into their work(a date-time). By pushing the work required to manage the implicit date-time component of context into the database, he's created a system which is both much easier to understand, and much easier to program. This turns out to be relevant to most database programmers in practice - his work saves everyone a lot of time managing complex, hard to produce/debug/fix, time queries. However, especially in large databases, data is often damaged/incorrect (maybe it was not input correctly, maybe it eroded over time, etc...). While most database updates are insertions of new facts, and should indeed be treated that way, a non-trivial subset of the work required to manage time-queries has to do with retroactive updates. I have yet to see any documentation which explains how such corrections, or retroactive updates, are handled by datomic; from my experience, they are a non-trivial (and incredibly difficult to deal with) subset of time-related data manipulation that database programmers are faced with. Does datomic gracefully handle such updates? If so, how?

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• GeoTrust SSL brand name used by re-sellers

  - by Christopher

  I feel like a I got the bait-and-switch from my web host provider since they advertise "GeoTrust SSL" for $99. I purchased it, thinking the certificate is issued from geotrust.com, but then I get an email from Comodo saying they are providing it. My host provider says they get a discount by using Comodo. I purchased the certificate with the understanding it would be issued by GeoTrust. I called the host provider and they said they usually expect it from GeoTrust, but someone from email support responded saying the product name is "GeoTrust SSL" but they use Comodo to get a discount. I think this is bogus and unfair trade practice. However, searching for "GeoTrust" on google brings up a ton of websites selling "GeoTrust" certificates. How can companies get away with this? Since the host provider is part of BBB I plan to inform my host to update the purchase page on their website to state clearly that... "This certicate is provided at a discount and may be issued by a provider other than GeoTrust.com, such as Comodo.com" Any feedback on this is appreciated.

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• Should the number of developers be considered when estimating a task?

  - by Ludwig Magnusson

  I am pretty inexperienced with working in agile projects but I have tried it a few times and I always run into this problem when estimating a task. Do we bring into the estimate the number of developers that will work on the task? Let me explain: Task A is estimated to one time unit and developer 1 will work on it. Task B is also estimated to one time unit and developer 2 and 3 will work on it together. I.e. if developer 1 begins to work on task A at the same time developer 2 and 3 begins to work on task B they will all finish at the same time according to the estimate. Should the estimate for task B be twice of that for task A or the same? The problem as I see it is that when a task is received and estimated, it is not always possible to know how many people will work on it. And if you assumed that two developers would work on the task for one time unit but it turns out that only one developer will actually do it, this will not automatically mean that that developer will work on it for two time units. Is there any standard practice for this?

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• Moving characters on a grid [on hold]

  - by madmax1

  i am developing my first game with C++. My game uses a grid of rectangles. I have a class Board which manages the grid as a whole, initializes the terrain, places/removes characters, etc. It has a 2D vector of a class Field, which handles the Structure of the field, contained Objects, Characters, etc. Field again contains a vector of class Character, which are positioned on the field. Now i want to implement the functionality to move a character on the board, however dont know which is best practice to do so. Should i implement a moveCharacter(character, offset) function in Board, make it search for the character and move it? Or should i implement a function move(offset) in Character? This sure would be nicest, however makes characters necessary to know the board they are on, or the field which in turn knows the board. On the one hand i feel like i should avoid inclusion between classes as much as possible e.g. to increase portability of classes for different projects, on the other hand i think the character.move() functionality is most comfortable for further development. Im pretty new to "bigger" C++ projects and these kind of design questions pop up more and more often lately and i have troubles deciding. Thanks a lot for any advice!

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• The five steps of business intelligence adoption: where are you?

  - by Red Gate Software BI Tools Team

  When I was in Orlando and New York last month, I spoke to a lot of business intelligence users. What they told me suggested a path of BI adoption. The user’s place on the path depends on the size and sophistication of their organisation. Step 1: A company with a database of customer transactions will often want to examine particular data, like revenue and unit sales over the last period for each product and territory. To do this, they probably use simple SQL queries or stored procedures to produce data on demand. Step 2: The results from step one are saved in an Excel document, so business users can analyse them with filters or pivot tables. Alternatively, SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) might be used to generate a report of the SQL query for display on an intranet page. Step 3: If these queries are run frequently, or business users want to explore data from multiple sources more freely, it may become necessary to create a new database structured for analysis rather than CRUD (create, retrieve, update, and delete). For example, data from more than one system — plus external information — may be incorporated into a data warehouse. This can become ‘one source of truth’ for the business’s operational activities. The warehouse will probably have a simple ‘star’ schema, with fact tables representing the measures to be analysed (e.g. unit sales, revenue) and dimension tables defining how this data is aggregated (e.g. by time, region or product). Reports can be generated from the warehouse with Excel, SSRS or other tools. Step 4: Not too long ago, Microsoft introduced an Excel plug-in, PowerPivot, which allows users to bring larger volumes of data into Excel documents and create links between multiple tables.  These BISM Tabular documents can be created by the database owners or other expert Excel users and viewed by anyone with Excel PowerPivot. Sometimes, business users may use PowerPivot to create reports directly from the primary database, bypassing the need for a data warehouse. This can introduce problems when there are misunderstandings of the database structure or no single ‘source of truth’ for key data. Step 5: Steps three or four are often enough to satisfy business intelligence needs, especially if users are sophisticated enough to work with the warehouse in Excel or SSRS. However, sometimes the relationships between data are too complex or the queries which aggregate across periods, regions etc are too slow. In these cases, it can be necessary to formalise how the data is analysed and pre-build some of the aggregations. To do this, a business intelligence professional will typically use SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) to create a multidimensional model — or “cube” — that more simply represents key measures and aggregates them across specified dimensions. Step five is where our tool, SSAS Compare, becomes useful, as it helps review and deploy changes from development to production. For us at Red Gate, the primary value of SSAS Compare is to establish a dialog with BI users, so we can develop a portfolio of products that support creation and deployment across a range of report and model types. For example, PowerPivot and the new BISM Tabular model create a potential customer base for tools that extend beyond BI professionals. We’re interested in learning where people are in this story, so we’ve created a six-question survey to find out. Whether you’re at step one or step five, we’d love to know how you use BI so we can decide how to build tools that solve your problems. So if you have a sixty seconds to spare, tell us on the survey!

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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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• Will people respect a Masters of Science in IT w/software engineering concentration from RPI?

  - by twneale

  Here's my thing: I got my undergraduate degree in political science, then a law degree. Then I figured out that I love programming and I'm pretty good at it too. It's fun and rewarding enough for me that I'd prefer to do it for a living over almost any form of pure law practice. So I'm looking at getting a masters degree to put some weight behind a possible career switch. If I actually want to develop software (web, in particular), would people in programming circles respect a master's of science in IT? Specifically, consider as an example the MS in IT from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (with a concentration in software engineering). Here's the home page: http://www.rpi.edu/IT/graduate/masters_program.html In particular, I mean to draw a contrast between IT as specifically contemplated by the RPI masters program (an interdisciplinary tech/business program) and other MS degrees in computer science or software engineering that focus more on the science and technical aspects. I guess I want to make sure that other programmers would respect my credentials and not consider me as different or underqualified based on the connotations of the phrase "IT". I believe RPI has an unimpeachable reputation for hard science, and the program seems excellent, but it still matters to me how people in industry would perceive it.

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• Want Google to index redirect urls

  - by Dave Goten

  I'm having issues with users who think that Google Search is the address bar. Some of the sites that link to my site use user friendly addresses with 301 redirects to pages that have less friendly URLs. So, for example if I enter www.foo.com/bar it goes to www.bar.com/page.php?some-parameters-and-utm-codes-etc usually this is done by a 301 redirect in order to keep the SEO from foo.com on bar.com and so on, which I believe is standard practice. However, lately there have been more and more people searching www.foo.com/bar instead of going to www.foo.com/bar directly and because the page /bar is nothing more than a redirect it has no SEO that I know of. Things I've thought of but haven't been able to test, because Google takes forever to update :) (and I'm lazy like that), include using Google sitemaps and having them enter their redirects as entries there. (I could see this working if they were the top search entry all the time, and it might appear as a sitelink, but I don't know if that'll make the url itself show up in searches) Using Canonical tags on my pages to the redirects they set up. Which is a nightmare in itself because of the nature of my pages. One week the www.foo.com/bar might go to www.bar.com/pageA.php the next it might goto www.bar.com/pageB.php and having to remember to take the canonical tag off of pageA, so that it doesn't get confused with pageB would be a pain. Using 302 redirects -.- So I guess the question here is, does anyone have any experience or knowledge about this? What should I do to make www.foo.com/bar show up when someone 'searches' for this redirect url?

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• Domain Transfer Protection - need advice

  - by Jack

  Hey, I am about to purchase a domain name for a bit of money. I do not personally know the person who I am purchasing the domain name from, we have only chatted via email. The proposed process for the transfer is: The owner of the domain lowest the domain name security and emails me the domain password, I request the transfer After the request, I transfer the money via PayPal When the money has been cleared the current domain name owner confirms the transfer via the link that he receives in that email I wait for it to be transferred. The domain is currently registered with DirectNIC - http://www.directnic.com/ Is this the best practice? Seeing I am paying a bit of money for this domain name, I am worried that after the money has been cleared that I won't see the domain name or hear from the current domain name owner again. Is there a 'domain governing body' which I can report to if this is the case? Is the proposed transfer process the best solution? Any advice would be awesome. Thanks! Jack

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• Is it common to only pay developers for the time they said a project would take?

  - by BAM

  I work at a small startup (<10 people), and I was recently assigned (along with one other developer) to a relatively small project. The project involved moving an existing iOS app to Android. The client told us they had built the app for iOS in 300 man-hours. Not knowing at the time that this figure was completely false, we naively and optimistically assumed that if they could build the app from scratch in that amount of time, we could easily "port" it in a similar amount of time. Therefore, we drafted up a fixed-price contract based on 350 man-hours, with a 5 week deadline. (We are well aware now of how big of a mistake this was... Never let the client tell you how long it's going to take!) Anyway, by week 4 we had already surpassed our 350 hours, and we estimated that there were at least 2 more weeks left on the project. We were told to continue working, but that the company could not afford to pay out on overdue projects anymore. I thought this just meant "be more careful about estimates in the future". However a few weeks later, the company president informed us that we would not be getting paid for any time past 350 man-hours. We argued over the issue for almost an hour. He claimed, however, that this is standard practice for many organizations, and that I was unreasonable for making a big deal out of it. So is this really a common thing, or am I justified in being upset about it? Thanks in advance for any advice!

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• Best practices in versioning

  - by Gerenuk

  I develop some scripts for data analysis in a small team. For the moment we use SVN, but not in a very structured way. We haven't even looked how to use branches even though we need this functionality. What do you suggest as the best practice to setup the following system: two code bases (core and plugins) versions can be incompatible to previous scripts sometimes individual features are being developed and not yet finished, while other fixes have to be done urgently to the code In the end we don't deliver the code as a package, but rather place the Python scripts in some directory (with version names?). Some other python script which serves as a configuration choses the desired version, sets the path to these libraries and then starts to import the modules. I saw stable releases to be named "trunk" so I did the same. However, no version numbers yet. Core and plugins are different repositories, however we have to match versions for compatibility. Can you suggest some best practices or reference to ease development and reduce chaos? :) Some suggested GIT. I haven't heard about it, but I'm free to change.

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• Managed Cloud Services Wins Another Prestigious Industry Award

  - by Dori DiMassimo-Oracle

  Over the last 90 days, Oracle Managed Cloud Services has been the proud recipient of TWO prestigious industry awards for service excellence and customer value leadership.  The most recent award is last month's 2014 Frost & Sullivan Best Practice Award - North America Managed Cloud Customer Value Leadership Award, which rated Oracle Managed Cloud Services as the clear leader versus other providers; Managed Cloud received an "exceptional" rating in 9 of 10 evaluation categories.  The research report  is an excellent look at our industry and what is valued by cloud customers looking for a managed solution.   In April, Managed Cloud was a repeat winner of the Outsourcing Excellence Award - 2014 Outsourcing Excellence Award - Best ITO Infrastructure (Sony Computer Entertainment America).  Last year we won the award for Best Cloud: 2013 Outsourcing Excellence Award - Best Cloud (Take-Two Interactive)  These awards are a great testimony of the transformation of Managed Cloud Services to a true Cloud-based business and a strategic and relevant part of the Oracle Cloud Solutions portfolio.  Frost & Sullivan, in particular, recognizes our vision and our capability of successfully managing business transactions in the cloud.

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• Knowing state of game in real time

  - by evthim

  I'm trying to code a tic tac toe game in java and I need help figuring out how to efficiently and without freezing the program check if someone won the game. I'm only in the design stages now, I haven't started programming anything but I'm wondering how would I know at all times the state of the game and exactly when someone wins? Response to MarkR: (note: had to place comment here, it was too long for comment section) It's not a homework problem, I'm trying to get more practice programming GUI's which I've only done once as a freshman in my second introductory programming course. I understand I'll have a 2D array. I plan to have a 2D integer array where x would equal 1 and o would equal 0. However, won't it take too much time if I check after every move if someone won the game? Is there a way or a data structure or algorithm I can use so that the program will know the state (when I say state I mean not just knowing every position on the board, the int array will take care of that, I mean knowing that user 1 will win if he places x on this block) of the game at all times and thus can know automatically when someone won?

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• How to get feedback from the community on large chunks of code?

  - by MainMa

  Code Review.SE is great when you need feedback on a precise, short piece of code. But where to get similar feedback about the code itself when: you have thousands of LOC, don't have colleagues in your workplace ready or willing to review the code¹, don't have thousands of dollars to spend for a professional review by a third party developer?² Places like CodePlex are a good idea to get your project known³, but from what I've seen, the feedback you get on known projects are consumer feedback, i.e. concerns the bugs and feature requests, not the quality of the source code itself. What are the social way to get the community involved in the code review of the codebase of a certain size for an open source project which doesn't have the scale of Firefox or similar products? ¹ Which is the case for most personal and open source projects, or projects done in companies where the practice of regular and complete code review is nonexistent. ² Which is, again, the case for most personal and open source projects. ³ Even if too many projects published on CodePlex never get known, either because nobody cares or because they are presented not very well.

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• At what point does "constructive" criticism of your code become unhelpful?

  - by user15859

  I recently started as a junior developer. As well as being one of the least experienced people on the team, I'm also a woman, which comes with all sorts of its own challenges working in a male-dominated environment. I've been having problems lately because I feel like I am getting too much unwarranted pedantic criticism on my work. Let me give you an example of what happened recently. Team lead was too busy to push in some branches I made, so he didn't get to them until the weekend. I checked my mail, not really meaning to do any work, and found that my two branches had been rejected on the basis of variable names, making error messages more descriptive, and moving some values to the config file. I don't feel that rejecting my branch on this basis is useful. Lots of people were working over the weekend, and I had never said that I would be working. Effectively, some people were probably blocked because I didn't have time to make the changes and resubmit. We are working on a project that is very time-sensitive, and it seems to me that it's not helpful to outright reject code based on things that are transparent to the client. I may be wrong, but it seems like these kinds of things should be handled in patch type commits when I have time. Now, I can see that in some environments, this would be the norm. However, the criticism doesn't seem equally distributed, which is what leads to my next problem. The basis of most of these problems was due to the fact that I was in a codebase that someone else had written and was trying to be minimally invasive. I was mimicking the variable names used elsewhere in the file. When I stated this, I was bluntly told, "Don't mimic others, just do what's right." This is perhaps the least useful thing I could have been told. If the code that is already checked in is unacceptable, how am I supposed to tell what is right and what is wrong? If the basis of the confusion was coming from the underlying code, I don't think it's my responsibility to spend hours refactoring a whole file that someone else wrote (and works perfectly well), potentially introducing new bugs etc. I'm feeling really singled out and frustrated in this situation. I've gotten a lot better about following the standards that are expected, and I feel frustrated that, for example, when I refactor a piece of code to ADD error checking that was previously missing, I'm only told that I didn't make the errors verbose enough (and the branch was rejected on this basis). What if I had never added it to begin with? How did it get into the code to begin with if it was so wrong? This is why I feel so singled out: I constantly run into this existing problematic code, that I either mimic or refactor. When I mimic it, it's "wrong", and if I refactor it, I'm chided for not doing enough (and if I go all the way, introducing bugs, etc). Again, if this is such a problem, I don't understand how any code gets into the codebase, and why it becomes my responsibility when it was written by someone else, who apparently didn't have their code reviewed. Anyway, how do I deal with this? Please remember that I said at the top that I'm a woman, and I'm sure these guys don't usually have to worry about decorum when they're reviewing other guys' code, but honestly that doesn't work for me, and it's causing me to be less productive. I'm worried that if I talk to my manager about it, he'll think I can't handled the environment, etc.

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• Is learning how to use C (or C++) a requirement in order to be a good (excellent) programmer?

  - by blueberryfields

  When I first started to learn how to program, real programmers could write assembly in their sleep. Any serious schooling in computer science would include a hefty bit of training and practice in programming using assembly. That has since changed, to the point where I see Computer Science degrees with assembly, if included at all, is relegated to one assignment, and one chapter, for a total of two weeks' work out of 4 years' schooling. C/C++ programming seems to have followed a similar path. I'm no longer surprised to interview university graduates who have not spent more than two weeks programming in C++, and have only read of C in a book somewhere. While the most serious CS degrees still seem to include significant time learning and using one or both of the languages, the trend is clearly towards less enforced C/C++ in school. It's clearly possible to make a career producing good work without ever reading or writing a single line of C or C++ code. Given all of that, is learning the two languages worth the effort? Are they at all required to excel? (beyond the obvious, non-language specific advice, such as "a good selection of languages is probably important for a comprehensive education", and "it's probably a good idea to keep trying out and learning new languages throughout a programmers' career, just to stretch the gray cells")

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• SEO - different data with same title and keywords

  - by Junaid Saeed

  here is my scenario i have a website where i redirect my users basing upon the device they were using, lets say a user is visiting from an iPad, i take him directly to the page of iPad wallpapers, the user selects iPad version & i take the user to the gallery of wallpapers where the user can select & download any wallpaper. Every wallpaper is the required resolution, i have my reasons for doing this, now the thing is there are diff. resolution. versions of an image appearing one 5 diff. sections of my website, each having their own view page Now there is only one record in db.table for the image, and basing on the my consistent naming convention of the images, i pick the required image. this means when 5 different pages are generated in 5 categorized sections of the website, due to a shared DB record, the keywords, the titles and every single detail of the 5 pages is same besides the resolution of the image, and the section specific details that the page has and yeah the pages also have different paths like wallpapers.com\ipad-1\cars\Ferrari-dino.html wallpapers.com\ipad-2\cars\Ferrari-dino.html wallpapers.com\ipad-3\cars\Ferrari-dino.html wallpapers.com\ipad-4\cars\Ferrari-dino.html wallpapers.com\ipad-5\cars\Ferrari-dino.html now this is my scenario, How do Search Engines see it and how do they rank it? Is it a Good or Normal or Bad SEO practice? If bad how dangerous it is for my sites SEO? i need your comments on my scenario.

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• Question regarding Readability vs Processing Time

  - by Jordy

  I am creating a flowchart for a program with multiple sequential steps. Every step should be performed if the previous step is succesful. I use a c-based programming language so the lay-out would be something like this: METHOD 1: if(step_one_succeeded()) { if(step_two_succeeded()) { if(step_three_succeeded()) { //etc. etc. } } } If my program would have 15+ steps, the resulting code would be terribly unfriendly to read. So I changed my design and implemented a global errorcode that I keep passing by reference, make everything more readable. The resulting code would be something like this: METHOD 2: int _no_error = 0; step_one(_no_error); if(_no_error == 0) step_two(_no_error); if(_no_error == 0) step_three(_no_error); if(_no_error == 0) step_two(_no_error); The cyclomatic complexibility stays the same. Now let's say there are N number of steps. And let's assume that checking a condition is 1 clock long and performing a step doesn't take up time. The processing speed of Method1 can be anywhere between 1 and N. The processing speed of Method2 however is always equal to N-1. So Method1 will be faster most of the time. Which brings me to my question, is it bad practice to sacrifice time in order to make the code more readable? And why (not)?

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• Are these advanced/unfair interview questions regarding Java concurrency?

  - by sparc_spread

  Here are some questions I've recently asked interviewees who say they know Java concurrency: Explain the hazard of "memory visibility" - the way the JVM can reorder certain operations on variables that are unprotected by a monitor and not declared volatile, such that one thread may not see the changes made by another thread. Usually I ask this one by showing code where this hazard is present (e.g. the NoVisibility example in Listing 3.1 from "Java Concurrency in Practice" by Goetz et al) and asking what is wrong. Explain how volatile affects not just the actual variable declared volatile, but also any changes to variables made by a thread before it changes the volatile variable. Why might you use volatile instead of synchronized? Implement a condition variable with wait() and notifyAll(). Explain why you should use notifyAll(). Explain why the condition variable should be tested with a while loop. My question is - are these appropriate or too advanced to ask someone who says they know Java concurrency? And while we're at it, do you think that someone working in Java concurrency should be expected to have an above-average knowledge of Java garbage collection?

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• Triggering Data Changes in N-Tier

  - by Ryan Kinal

  I've been studying n-tier architectures as of late, particularly in VB.NET with Entity Framework and/or LINQ to SQL. I understand the basic concepts, but have been wondering about best practices in regard to triggering CRUD-type operations from user input/action. So, the arcitecture looks something like the following: [presentation layer] - [business layer] - [data layer] - (database) Getting information from the database into the presentation layer is simple and abstracted. It's just a matter of instantiating a new object from the business layer, which in turn uses the data layer to get at the correct information. However, saving (updating and inserting), and deleting seem to require particular APIs on the relevant business objects. I have to assume this is standard practice, unless a business object will save itself on various operations (which seems inefficient), or on disposal (which seems like it just wouldn't work, or may be unwieldy and unreliable). Should my "savable" business objects all implement a particular "ISavable" or "IDatabaseObject" interface? Is this a recognized (anti-)pattern? Are there other, better patterns I should be using that I'm just unaware of? The TLDR question, I suppose, is How does the presentation layer trigger database changes?

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