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  • Places to store basic data

    - by Ella
    I am using PHP. I'm building a fully modular CMS, which is destined for the public. Some people might view this as a framework, but I intend to write a set of extensions for it, extensions that will make it a CMS :P Because it's completely modular I have a problem figuring out how to load extensions. Practically I need to get the list of active extensions, so I can load them inside my base class. I load them by reading some file headers, which contain a "dependency" field. That field decides the order in which I have to instantiate the objects. The problem is that when the CMS starts I have no database interface, because that's an extension too, so I can't store the active extensions list in the database :) You might ask how are extensions activated in the first place. Well - in the administration interface, which is an extension as well (obviously on first install of the CMS there will be some extensions active by default). Could writing that list inside a text file be a solution? The problem is that a lot of hosts are not very nice with scripts when they write files. And since this CMS is public I might have a problem here?

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  • Software Manager who makes developers do Project Management

    - by hdman
    I'm a software developer working in an embedded systems company. We have a Project Manager, who takes care of the overall project schedule (including electrical, quality, software and manufacturing) hence his software schedule is very brief. We also have a Software Manager, who's my boss. He makes me write and maintain the software schedule, design documents (high and low level design), SRS, change management, verification plans and reports, release management, reviews, and ofcourse the software. We only have one Test Engineer for the whole software team (10 members), and at any given time, there are a couple of projects going on. I'm spending 80% of my time making these documents. My boss comes from a Process background, and believes what we need is better documentation to improve software: (1) He considers the design to be paramount, coding is "just writing the design down", it shouldn't take too long, and "all the code should be written before the hardware is ready". (2) Doesn't understand the difference between a Central & Distributed Version control, even after we told him its easier to collaborate with a distributed model. (3) Doesn't understand code, and wants to understand every bug and its proposed solution. (4) Believes verification should be done by developer, and validation by the Tester. Thing is though, our verification only checks if implementation is correct (we don't write unit tests, its never considered in the schedule), and validation is black box testing, so the units tests are missing. I'm really confused. (1) Am I responsible for maintaining all these documents? It makes me feel like I'm doing the Software Project Management, in essence. (2) I don't really like creating documents, I want to solve problems and write code. In my experience, creating design documents only helps to an extent, its never the solution to better or faster code. (3) I feel the boss doesn't really care about making better products, but only about being a good manager in the eyes of the management. What can I do?

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  • Retrofit WebForms with ASP.NET MVC - NoVa Code Camp 2010.2 Demo

    - by Soe Tun
    Thank you to everyone who attended my Retrofit WebForms with ASP.NET MVC session at NoVa Code 2010.2. It was a fun event for me and I hope you had a great time and learned something from it. I wish I had more time to go over some more important topics in more detail. I *promise* I will be writing blog post series about it since I'll have some vacation time during the December holidays to cover some topics that I didn't get to cover in detail.   Please note that the ".bak" file included in the zip file is a SQL Server Database backup file. You have to restore it on your Database server to run it with the source code demo.   Please feel free to ask me about the demo project through Twitter or from this blog post. I'll be glad to help you out. If you want me to give this presentation at your .NET User Group, please let me know and I'll be honored to speak there also.   Again, thank you all and have a great holiday season. Here is the download link to my Demo project Zip file with the PowerPoint presentation in it. Please let me know if the link doesn't work.

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  • Is there any way to facilitate switching windows in Ubuntu?

    - by Ivan
    I'm just a student who received my laptop from my uncle, who's a coder, so I'm still getting used to working with ubuntu. I recently upgraded ubuntu from an earlier version, and everything seems to be pretty great. The only thing is that when I open a program, or file, or whatever, it takes up the whole screen. I can only close it by going to the far top left of my screen, or by ctrl+W. Anyways, I find it really hard to switch between programs. For example I really like to have my windows that are open to be accessible by clicking on their icon at the bottom of the screen... Great when writing or researching. Anyways, I really just want to find an easier way to switch windows. Also, I used to love the way I could cube-rotate my screen, and just drag files from one desktop to another, with compiz. Now, its sort of like flipping a coin when I switch windows, is there any way to get my desktop cube back? And yes, I have enabled all the old settings I used to use with compiz. Sorry if what I'm asking is very basic, I know how to use a computer, I'm just not really familiar with the interface! Any help is greatly appreciated.

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  • new email alias for ASK ADR

    - by user12842161
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} New email alias for Ask ADR! Please note that [email protected] will be decommissioned on the 4th of November. We advise you to start writing in to [email protected] for all ADR related queries and escalations going forward. All emails sent to [email protected] will be automatically forwarded to the new alias till the 4th of November, 2011.

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  • Am I programming too slow?

    - by Jonn
    I've only been a year in the industry and I've had some problems making estimates for specific tasks. Before you close this, yes, I've already read this: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/648/how-to-respond-when-you-are-asked-for-an-estimate and that's about the same problem I'm having. But I'm looking for a more specific gauge of experiences, something quantifiable or probably other programmer's average performances which I should aim for and base my estimates. The answers range from weeks, and I was looking more for an answer on the level of a task assigned for a day or so. (Note that this doesn't include submitting for QA or documentations, just the actual development time from writing tests if I used TDD, to making the page, before having it submitted to testing) My current rate right now is as follows (on ASP.NET webforms): Right now, I'm able to develop a simple data entry page with a grid listing (no complex logic, just Creating and Reading) on an already built architecture, given one full day's (8 hours) time. Adding complex functionality, and Update and Delete pages add another full day to the task. If I have to start the page from scratch (no solution, no existing website) it takes me another full day. (Not always) but if I encounter something new or haven't done yet it takes me another full day. Whenever I make an estimate that's longer than the expected I feel that others think that I'm lagging a lot behind everyone else. I'm just concerned as there have been expectations that when it's just one page it should take me no more than a full day. Yes, there definitely is more room for improvement. There always is. I have a lot to learn. But I would like to know if my current rate is way too slow, just average, or average for someone no longer than a year in the industry.

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  • Sharing My Thoughts on Space Flight

    - by Grant Fritchey
    This went out in the DBA newsletter from Red Gate, but I enjoyed writing it so much, I thought I'd share it to a wider audience: I grew up watching the US space program. I watched men walk on the moon for the first time in 1969, when I was only six years old. From that moment on, I dreamed of going into space. I studied aeronautics and tried to get into the Air Force Academy, all in preparation for my long career as an astronaut. Clearly, that didn't quite work out for me. But it sure could for you. At Red Gate, we're running a new contest: DBA in Space. The prize is a sub-orbital flight. When I first got word of this contest, my immediate response was, "And you need me to go right away and do a test flight? Excellent!" No, no test flight needed, plus I was pretty low on the list of volunteers. "That's OK, I'll just enter." Then I was told that, as a Red Gate employee, I couldn't win. My next response was, "I quit".eventually, I was talked down off the ledge, and agreed to help make this special for some other DBA. Many (most?) of us are science fiction fans, either the soft science of Star Trek and Star Wars, or the hard science of Niven and Pournelle, or Allen Steele. We watched the Shuttles go up and land. We've been dreaming of our own trips into orbit and our vacation-home on the Moon for a long, long time. All that might not arrive on schedule, but you've got a shot at breaking clear of the atmosphere. The first stage is a video quiz, starring Brad McGehee, and it's live at www.DBAinSpace.com now. Go for it. Good luck and God speed!

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  • Skip CodedUI Tests, use Selenium for Web Automation

    - by Aligned
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/Aligned/archive/2013/10/31/skip-codedui-tests-use-selenium-for-web-automation.aspxI recently joined a team that was using Agile Methodologies to create a new product. They have a working beta product after 10 or so 2 week sprints and already had UI’s that had changed several times as they went through iterations of their UI. As a result, the QA team was falling behind with automated tests and I was tasked to help them catch up and expand their tests. The project is a website. I heard many complaints about how hard it is to work with CodedUI (writing our own code, not relying on the recorder as we wanted re-usable and more maintainable code) then it took me 4+ hours to fix one issue. It was hard to traverse the key and debugging the objects with breakpoints… I said out loud “there has to be a better way or a framework the uses jQuery to run through the tests.” Plus it seemed really slow (wait… finding the object … wait… start putting in text…). Plus some tests would randomly fail on the test agents (using the test settings and an automated build, they are run on VMs using Microsoft test agents). Enough complaining. Selenium to the rescue (mostly). The lead QA guy decided to try it out and we haven’t turned back. We are now running tests in Chrome and Firefox and they run a lot faster. We had IE running to, but some of the tests were running fine locally, but hanging on the test agents. I’ll add some hints and lessons learned in a later post.

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  • No sound after upgrading to Ubuntu 11.10 from win7

    - by Tilman
    just as a prefix to my question, i'd like to note that i'm just now entering the world of Linux (unless you count my android, but that's a very different experience...) i have two computers now that run Ubuntu 11.10, the first of which i've had very little problems with, aside from figuring out the basics. the second, from which i'm writing this question, has (up to this point) only had one problem.... no sound. i've read a couple questions similiar and found little help as the component catalog doesn't have my computer listed. (in fact i'm not suprised this is a pos i had my mom grab from her work before they officially closed the doors behind them) had perfect sound before hand, and no sound now. sudo lspci -v brings up 00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation N10/ICH 7 Family High Definition Audio Controller (rev 01) Subsystem: Intel Corporation Device d608 Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 45 Memory at ff980000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K] Capabilities: [50] Power Management version 2 Capabilities: [60] MSI: Enable+ Count=1/1 Maskable- 64bit+ Capabilities: [70] Express Root Complex Integrated Endpoint, MSI 00 Capabilities: [100] Virtual Channel Capabilities: [130] Root Complex Link Kernel driver in use: HDA Intel Kernel modules: snd-hda-intel any help would be greatly appreciated, me and my gf just wanna watch a damn movie lol

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  • What's wrong with cplusplus.com?

    - by Kerrek SB
    This is perhaps not a perfectly suitable forum for this question, but let me give it a shot, at the risk of being moved away. There are several references for the C++ standard library, including the invaluable ISO standard, MSDN, IBM, cppreference, and cplusplus. Personally, when writing C++ I need a reference that has quick random access, short load times and usage examples, and I've been finding cplusplus.com pretty useful. However, I've been hearing negative opinions about that website frequently here on SO, so I would like to get specific: What are the errors, misconceptions or bad pieces of advice given by cplusplus.com? What are the risks of using it to make coding decisions? Let me add this point: I want to be able to answer questions here on SO with accurate quotes of the standard, and thus I would like to post immediately-usable links, and cplusplus.com would have been my choice site were it not for this issue. Update: There have been many great responses, and I have seriously changed my view on cplusplus.com. I'd like to list a few choice results here; feel free to suggest more (and keep posting answers). As of June 29, 2011: Incorrect description of some algorithms (e.g. remove). Information about the behaviour of functions is sometimes incorrect (atoi), fails to mention special cases (strncpy), or omits vital information (iterator invalidation). Examples contain deprecated code (#include style). Inexact terminology is doing a disservice to learners and the general community ("STL", "compiler" vs "toolchain"). Incorrect and misleading description of the typeid keyword.

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  • How do I write to an outer truecrypt volume when the inner volume protection prevents writng?

    - by con-f-use
    In a nutshell After some time using the outer volume of a hidden volume in Truecrypt I cannot write to the outer volume anymore. The protection of the inner volume always kicks in before. How do I fix this? Details I'm using truecrypt's two layered encryption of a USB stick. The outer container carries my semi-sensitive stuff while the inner hidden values has a bit more valuable information. I use both, the inner and outer volume regularly and that is part of the problem. Truecrypt can mount the outer volume for writing while protecting the inner. Usually the inner volume, when not protected this way (or mounted read-only) would be indistinguishable from free space. That is of course part of the plausible deniability scheme of truecrypt. At the beginning, everything worked as expected. I could copy and delete data to the outer volume as I pleased. Now it seams that I have written and deleted enough data to have filled the outer volume once. Despite the write protection Ubuntu tries now to write to the continuous "free space" that is the inner volume. It does that although enough other free space is on the outer volume. But on this free space there used to be data so its fragmented and the file system write prefers continuous space. The write on the continuous free space of the outer volume of course fails (with the error message in the picture above) as Truecrypt's inner-volume-protection kicks in. The Question I know this is expected behaviour, but is there a better way to write to the outer volume that does not attempt to write to the hidden free space at the end? The whole question could be more generally rephrased to: How do I control, where on a partition data is written in Ubuntu?

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  • Join Us!! Live Webinar: Using UPK for Testing

    - by Di Seghposs
    Create Manual Test Scripts 50% Faster with Oracle User Productivity Kit  Thursday, March 29, 2012 11:00 am – 12:00 pm ET Click here to register now for this informative webinar. Oracle UPK enhances the testing phase of the implementation lifecycle by reducing test plan creation time, improving accuracy, and providing the foundation for reusable training documentation, application simulations, and end-user performance support—all critical assets to support an enterprise application implementation. With Oracle UPK: Reduce manual test plan development time - Accelerate the testing cycle by significantly reducing the time required to create the test plan. Improve test plan accuracy - Capture test steps automatically using Oracle UPK and import those steps directly to any of these testing suites eliminating many of the errors that occur when writing manual tests. Create the foundation for reusable assets - Recorded simulations can be used for other lifecycle phases of the project, such as knowledge transfer for training and support. With its integration to Oracle Application Testing Suite, IBM Rational, and HP Quality Center, Oracle UPK allows you to deploy high-quality applications quickly and effectively by providing a consistent, repeatable process for gathering requirements, planning and scheduling tests, analyzing results, and managing  issues. Join this live webinar and learn how to decrease your time to deployment and enhance your testing plans today! 

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  • Dynamic quadrees

    - by paul424
    recently I come out writing Quadtree for creatures culling in Opendungeons game. Thing is those are moving points and bounding hierarchy will quickly get lost if the quadtree is not rebuild very often. I have several variants, first is to upgrade the leaf position , every time creature move is requested. ( note if I would need collision detection anyway, so this might be necessery anyway). Second would be making leafs enough large , that the creature would sure stay inside it's bounding box ( due to its speed limit). The partition of a plane in quadtree is always fixed ( modulo the hierarchical unions of some parts) . For creatures close to the center of the plane , there would be no way of keeping it but inside one big leaf, besides this brokes the invariant that each point can be put into any small area as desired. So on the second thought could I use several quadrees ? Each would have its "coordinate axis XY" somwhere shifted ? Before I start playing with this maybe some other space diving structure would suit me better, unfortunetly wiki does not compare it's execution time : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_%28spatial_index%29#See_also

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  • Sub-systems in game engines

    - by Hillel
    So here's the problem- I'm writing my own engine library, and it works fine with stuff like menus and the actual game screen. The thing is, I can't really figure out how to integrate something like an intro or dialogue preceding certain levels into this system. Let's look at another example- say I have a game-specific engine which gets a Level object and runs it. Engine would have its own collision and physics system, all hard coded. Now, what if at some point in a level, I want the player to enter a mini-game with different rules? How do I morph the Engine class to support these sub-systems without having to deal with their code all the time (as in: if(regular game) ... else if(mini game) ...)? And what if I want an intro animation at the start of a level, and I want the player to be able to assume control of his character once the animation ends, do I implement the animation into the Engine class itself? Or maybe I need to run another class, CutScene, and when it ends, it calls Engine and starts the level? What if I want to add a dialogue system, where at the start of each level there's a short dialogue and the player can't control his character, and once it ends, he can? Would I then run the dialogue code inside the Engine code? Maybe these sub-systems should all be scripted? I don't know anything about scripting, is it necessary for this kind of situation? Any help would be appreciated.

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  • Integrating Amazon EC2 in Java via NetBeans IDE

    - by Geertjan
    Next, having looked at Amazon Associates services and Amazon S3, let's take a look at Amazon EC2, the elastic compute cloud which provides remote computing services. I started by launching an instance of Ubuntu Server 14.04 on Amazon EC2, which looks a bit like this in the on-line AWS Management Console, though I whitened out most of the details: Now that I have at least one running instance available on Amazon EC2, it makes sense to use the services that are integrated into NetBeans IDE:  I created a new application with one class, named "AmazonEC2Demo". Then I dragged the "describeInstances" service that you see above, with the mouse, into the class. Then the IDE automatically created all the other files you see below, i.e., 4 Java classes and one properties file: In the properties file, register the access ID and secret keys. These are read by the other generated Java classes. Signing and authentication are done automatically by the code that is generated, i.e., there's nothing generic you need to do and you can immediately begin working on your domain-specific code. Finally, you're now able to rewrite the code in "AmazonEC2Demo" to connect to Amazon EC2 and obtain information about your running instance: public class AmazonEC2Demo { public static void main(String[] args) { String instanceId1 = "i-something"; RestResponse result; try { result = AmazonEC2Service.describeInstances(instanceId1); System.out.println(result.getDataAsString()); } catch (IOException ex) { Logger.getLogger(AmazonEC2Demo.class.getName()).log(Level.SEVERE, null, ex); } } } From the above, you'll receive a chunk of XML with data about the running instance, it's name, status, dates, etc. In other words, you're now ready to integrate Amazon EC2 features directly into the applications you're writing, without very much work to get started. Within about 5 minutes, you're working on your business logic, rather than on the generic code that anyone needs when integrating with Amazon EC2.

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  • Serializing network messages

    - by mtsvetkov
    I am writing a network wrapper around boost::asio and was wondering what is a good and simple way to serialize my messages. I have a message factory which can take care of dispatching the data to the correct builder, but I want to know if there are any established solutions for getting the binary data on the sender side and consequently passing the data for deserialization on the receiver end. Some options I've explored are: passing a pointer to a char[] to the serialize/deserialize functions (for serialize to write to, and deserialize to read from), but it's difficult to enforce buffer size this way; building on that, I decided to have the serialize function return a boost::asio::mutable_buffer, however ownership of the memory gets blurred between multiple classes, as the network wrapper needs to clean up the memory allocated by the message builder. I have also seen solutions involving streambuf's and stringstream's, but manipulating binary data in terms of its string representation is something I want to avoid. Is there some sort of binary stream I can use instead? What I am looking for is a solution (preferrably using boost libs) that lets the message builder dictate the amount of memory allocated during serialization and what that would look like in terms of passing the data around between the wrapper and message factory/message builders. PS. Messages contain almost exclusively built-in types and PODs and form a shallow but wide hierarchy for the sake of going through a factory. Note: a link to examples of using boost::serialization for something like this would be appreciated as I'm having difficulties figuring out the relation between it and buffers.

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  • How can I check myself when I'm the only one working on a project?

    - by Ricardo Altamirano
    I'm in between jobs in my field (unrelated to software development), and I recently picked up a temporary side contract writing a few applications for a firm. I'm the only person working on these specific applications. Are there ways I should be checking myself to make sure my applications are sound? I test my code, try to think of edge cases, generate sample data, use source control, etc. but since I'm the only person working on these applications, I'm worried I'll miss bugs that would easily be found in a team environment. Once I finish the application, either when I'm happy with it or when my deadline expires, the firm plans to use it in production. Any advice? Not to use a cliche, but as of now, I simply work "to the best of my ability" and hope that it's enough. Incidentally, I'm under both strict NDA's and laws about classified material, so I don't discuss the applications with friends who have actually worked in software development. (In case it's not obvious, I am not a software developer by trade, and even my experience with other aspects of information technology/computer science are limited and restrained to dabbling for the most part).

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  • Modular Architecture for Processing Pipeline

    - by anjruu
    I am trying to design the architecture of a system that I will be implementing in C++, and I was wondering if people could think of a good approach, or critique the approach that I have designed so far. First of all, the general problem is an image processing pipeline. It contains several stages, and the goal is to design a highly modular solution, so that any of the stages can be easily swapped out and replaced with a piece of custom code (so that the user can have a speed increase if s/he knows that a certain stage is constrained in a certain way in his or her problem). The current thinking is something like this: struct output; /*Contains the output values from the pipeline.*/ class input_routines{ public: virtual foo stage1(...){...} virtual bar stage2(...){...} virtual qux stage3(...){...} ... } output pipeline(input_routines stages); This would allow people to subclass input_routines and override whichever stage they wanted. That said, I've worked in systems like this before, and I find the subclassing and the default stuff tends to get messy, and can be difficult to use, so I'm not giddy about writing one myself. I was also thinking about a more STLish approach, where the different stages (there are 6 or 7) would be defaulted template parameters. Can anyone offer a critique of the pattern above, thoughts on the template approach, or any other architecture that comes to mind?

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  • Storage of leftover values in a situation of having to round down

    - by jt0dd
    I'm writing an app (client and server side) where the number of sales required by each employee must be kept track of in round-number form. Each month, the employees are required to sell a certain number, and this app needs to keep track of how many sales must be made for each 12 hour interval during the work week. Because I have to round the values down to a whole number, I must keep track of leftovers in the rounding process and ensure that they are always carried over. My method must ensure the storage of the leftover value even when client and server side crash, restart, close, etc. Right now, I'm working on doing this by storing the leftovers in a field in the user's account row in the database each time a value is rounded, reading the stored value, removing any portion that is used (when a whole number is reached, most of the leftover is used up), and storing the new value. This practice seems weird because while the leftovers are calculated on the client side, it's the same number for each employee, and every employee using the app is storing a copy of the same leftover data. Alternatively, I could have all clients store the data at once into the same data field on a general table, but this is just as weird. Is there a better way that this can be handled or is my method correct?

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  • How to avoid jumping to a solution when under pressure? [closed]

    - by GlenPeterson
    When under a particularly strict programming deadline (like an hour), if I panic at all, my tendency is to jump into coding without a real plan and hope I figure it out as I go along. Given enough time, this can work, but in an interview it's been pretty unsuccessful, if not downright counter-productive. I'm not always comfortable sitting there thinking while the clock ticks away. Is there a checklist or are there techniques to recognize when you understand the problem well enough to start coding? Maybe don't touch the keyboard for the first 5-10 minutes of the problem? At what point do you give up and code a brute-force solution with the hope of reasoning out a better solution later? When is it most productive to think and design more vs. code some experiments to and figure out the design later? Here is a list of techniques for taking a math test and another for taking an oral exam. Is there is a similar list of techniques for handling a programming problem under pressure? ANSWERS: I think this is a valid answer: How To Solve It. I found the link as an answer to Steps to solve or approach towards a solution. There were also some really good tips at Is thinking out loud during an interview really the best strategy?. A great and concise argument for TDD is the first answer to TDD Writing code vs Figuring out the answer to a problem?. My question may be a near-duplicate of that one.

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  • How to know how much detailed requirements should be?

    - by user1620696
    This doubt has to do with the requirements gathering phase of each iteration in one project based on agile methodologies. It arose because of the following situation: suppose I meet with my customer to gather the requirements and he says something like: "I need to be able to add, edit, remove and see details of my employees". That's fine, but how should we register this requirement? Should we simply write something like "the system must allow the user to manage employees", or should we be more specific writing for points The system must allow the user to add employees; The system must allow the user to see details of employees; The system must allow the user to edit employees; The system must allow the user to delete employees; Of course, this is just an example of a situation I was in doubt. The main point here is: how to know how much detailed I must be, and how to know what I should register? Are there strategies for dealing with these things? Thanks very much in advance!

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  • Advice on reconciling discordant data

    - by Justin
    Let me support my question with a quick scenario. We're writing an app for family meal planning. We'll produce daily plans with a target calorie goal and meals to achieve it for our nuclear family. Our calorie goal will be calculated for each person from their attributes (gender, age, weight, activity level). The weight attribute is the simplest example here. When Dad (the fascist nerd who is inflicting this on his family) first uses the application he throws approximate values into it for Daughter. He thinks she is 5'2" (157 cm) and 125 lbs (56kg). The next day Mom sits down to generate the menu and looks back over what the bumbling Dad did, quietly fumes that he can never recall anything about the family, and says the value is really 118 lbs! This is the first introduction of the discord. It seems, in this scenario, Mom is probably more correct that Dad. Though both are only an approximation of the actual value. The next day the dear Daughter decides to use the program and sees her weight listed. With the vanity only a teenager could muster she changes the weight to 110 lbs. Later that day the Mom returns home from a doctor's visit the Daughter needed and decides that it would be a good idea to update her Daughter's weight in the program. Hooray, another value, this time 117 lbs. Now how do you reconcile these data points? Measurement error, confidence in parties, bias, and more all confound the data. In some idealized world we'd have a weight authority of some nature providing the one and only truth. How about in our world though? And the icing on the cake is that this single data point changes over time. How have you guys solved or managed this conflict?

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  • Scene transitions

    - by Mars
    It's my first time working with actual scenes/states, aka DrawableGameComponents, which work separate from one another. I'm now wondering what's the best way to make transitions between them, and how to affect them from other scenes. Lets say I wanted to "push" one screen to the right, with another one coming in at the same time. Naturally I'd have to keep drawing both, until the transition is complete. And I'd have to adjust the coordinates I'm drawing at while doing it. Is there a way around specifically handling this special case in every single scene? Or of I wanted to fade one into the other. Basically the question stays the same, how would you do that without having to handle it in every single scene? While writing this I'm realizing it will be the same thing for all kinds of transitions. Maybe a central Draw method in the manager could be a solution, where parameters and effects are applied when necessary. But this wouldn't work if objects that are drawn have their own method, and aren't drawn within the scene, or if an effect has to be applied to the whole scene. That means, maybe scenes have to be drawn to their own rendertarget? That way one call to the base class after the normal drawing could be enough, to apply the effects, while drawing it to the main render target. But I once heard there are problems when switching from target to target, back and forth. So is that even a viable option? As you can see, I have some basic ideas how it might work... but nothing specific. I'd like to learn what's the common way to achieve such things, a general way to apply all kinds of transitions.

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  • Is there any kind of established architecture for browser based MMO games?

    - by black_puppydog
    I am beginning the development of a broser based game in which players take certain actions at any point in time. Big parts of gameplay will be happening in real life and just have to be entered into the system. I believe a good kind of comparison might be a platform for managing fantasy football, although I have virtually no experience playing that, so please correct me if I am mistaken here. The point is that some events happen in the program (i.e. on the server, out of reach for the players) like pulling new results from some datasource, starting of a new round by a game master and such. Other events happen in real life (two players closing a deal on the transfer of some team member or whatnot - again: have never played fantasy football) and have to be entered into the system. The first part is pretty easy since the game masters will be "staff" and thus can be trusted to a certain degree to not mess with the system. But the second part bothers me quite a lot, especially since the actions may involve multiple steps and interactions with different players, like registering a deal with the system that then has to be approved by the other party or denied and passed on to a game master to decide. I would of course like to separate the game logic as far as possible from the presentation and basic form validation but am unsure how to do this in a clean fashion. Of course I could (and will) put some effort into making my own architectural decisions and prototype different ideas. But I am bound to make some stupid mistakes at some point, so I would like to avoid some of that by getting a little "book smart" beforehand. So the question is: Is there any kind of architectural works that I can read up on? Papers, blogs, maybe design documents or even source code? Writing this down this seems more like a business application with business rules, workflows and such... Any good entry points for that?

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  • Series On Embedded Development (Part 3) - Runtime Optionality

    - by Darryl Mocek
    What is runtime optionality? Runtime optionality means writing and packaging your code in such a way that all of the features are available at runtime, but aren't loaded and used if the feature isn't used. The code is separate, and you can even remove the code to save persistent storage if you know the feature will not be used. In native programming terms, it's splitting your application into separate shared libraries so you only have to load what you're using, which means it only impacts volatile memory when enabled at runtime. All the functionality is there, but if it's not used at runtime, it's not loaded. A good example of this in Java is JVMTI, Java's Virtual Machine Tool Interface. On smaller, embedded platforms, these libraries may not be there. If the libraries are not there, there's no effect on the runtime as long as you don't try to use the JVMTI features. There is a trade-off between size/performance and flexibility here. Putting code in separate libraries means loading that code will take longer and it will typically take up more persistent space. However, if the code is rarely used, you can save volatile memory by including it in a separate library. You can also use this method in Java by putting rarely-used code into one or more separate JAR's. Loading a JAR and parsing it takes CPU cycles and volatile memory. Putting all of your application's code into a single JAR means more processing for that JAR. Consider putting rarely-used code in a separate library/JAR.

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