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  • Bot strategy in an arena

    - by joulesm
    I am writing the player's behavior for an arena game, and I'm wondering if you could offer some strategies. I'm writing it in Python, but I'm just interested in the high level game play. Here are the game aspects: Arena is a circle of a given size. The arena's size shrinks every round to help break any ties. Players are much smaller circles, and can be on teams of 1 or 2 players. Players attack by colliding with other players, and based on the physics of the collision (speed of both players, angle), one could force another player out of the arena. Once a player is out of the arena, they are out of the game (for that round). The goal is to be on the only team with players left in the arena. All other players have been pushed (through collisions or mistakes) out of the arena. It is possible for there to be no winner if the last two players exit the arena at the same time. Once the player has been programmed, the game just runs. There is no human intervention in the game. I'm thinking it's easiest to implement a few simple programmatic rules for my player to follow. For example, stay close to center of the arena, attack opponents from the inner side of the arena, etc. Are there any good simple game strategies? Would adding a random aspect to the game help? For example, to avoid predictability by the other team or something. Thanks in advance.

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  • Is comparing an OO compiler to a SQL compiler/optimizer valid?

    - by Brad
    I'm now doing a lot of SQL development at my new job where as before I was doing Object Oriented desktop app stuff. I keep running across very large scripts (thousands of lines) and wanting to refactor in some way. I am seeing that SQL is a different sort of beast and it's probably fine to have these big scripts for the most part but while explaining this to me people are also insisting that the whole idea of refactoring is bad. That stuff like the .NET compiler are actually burdened by refactored code and that a big wall of code is more efficient and better design than code designed for reuse, readability and scalability. The other argument is that OO compilers are almost dangerously inefficient and don't have efficient memory management or runs too many CPU instructions compared to older "simpler" compilers and compared to SQL. Are these valid complaints? Even if some compiler like a C compiler is modestly more "efficient" (whatever that means on this high of a level without seeing code) would you want to write applications in C over C# or Java? Is comparing an OO compiler to a SQL compiler/optimizer even valid?

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  • E-Business Suite Proactive Support - Workflow Analyzer

    - by Alejandro Sosa
    Overview The Workflow Analyzer is a standalone, easy to run tool created to read, validate and troubleshoot Workflow components configuration as well as runtime. It identifies areas where potential problems may arise and based on set of best practices suggests the Workflow System Administrator what to do when such potential problems are found. This tool represents a proactive way to verify Workflow configuration and runtime data to prevent issues ahead of time before they may become of more considerable impact on a production environment. Installation Since it is standalone there are no pre-requisites and runs on Oracle E-Business applications from 11.5.10 onwards. It is installed in the back-end server and can be run directly from SQL*Plus. The output of this tool is written in a HTML file friendly formatted containing the following on both workflow Components configuration and Workflow Runtime data: Workflow-related database initialization parameters Relevant Oracle E-Business profile option values Workflow-owned concurrent programs schedule and Workflow components status Workflow notification mailer configuration and throughput via related queues and table Workflow-relevant recommended and critical one-off patches as well as current code level Workflow database footprint by reading Workflow run-time tables to identify aged processes not being purged. It also checks for large open and closed processes or unhealthy looping conditions in a workflow process, among other checks. See a sample of Workflow Analyzer's output here.  Besides performing the validations listed above, the Workflow Analyzer provides clarification on the issues it finds and refers the reader to specific Oracle MOS documents to address the findings or explains the condition for the reader to take proper action. How to get it? The Workflow Analyzer can be obtained from Oracle MOS Workflow Analyzer script for E-Business Suite Workflow Monitoring and Maintenance (Doc ID 1369938.1) and the supplemental note How to run EBS Workflow Analyzer Tool as a Concurrent Request (Doc ID 1425053.1) explains how to register and run this tool as a concurrent program. This way the report from the Workflow Analyzer can be submitted from the Application and its output can be seen from the application as well.

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  • Design for XML mapping scenarios between two different systems [on hold]

    - by deepak_prn
    Mapping XML fields between two systems is a mundane routine in integration scenarios. I am trying to make the design documents look better and provide clear understanding to the developers especially when we do not use XSLT or any other IDE such as jDeveloper or eclipse plugins. I want it to be a high level design but at the same time talk in developer's language. So that there is no requirements that slip under the crack. For example, one of the scenarios goes: the store cashier sells an item, the transaction data is sent to Data management system. Now, I am writing a functional design for the scenario which deals with mapping XML fields between our system and the data management system. Question : I was wondering if some one had to deal with mapping XML fields between two systems? (without XSLT being involved) and if you used a table to represent the fields mapping (example is below) or any other visualization tool which does not break the bank ? I am trying to find out if there is a better way to represent XML mapping in your design documents. The widely accepted and used method seems to be using a simple table such as in the picture to illustrate the mapping. I am wondering if there are alternate ways/ tools to represent such as in Altova:

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  • Generating Deep Arrays: Shallow to Deep, Deep to Shallow or Bad idea?

    - by MobyD
    I'm working on an array structure that will be used as the data source for a report template in a web app. The data comes from relatively complex SQL queries that return one or many rows as one dimensional associative arrays. In the case of many, they are turned into two dimensional indexed array. The data is complex and in some cases there is a lot of it. To save trips to the database (which are extremely expensive in this scenario) I'm attempting to get all of the basic arrays (1 and 2 dimension raw database data) and put them, conditionally, into a single, five level deep array. Organizing the data in PHP seems like a better idea than by using where statements in the SQL. Array Structure Array of years( year => array of types( types => array of information( total => value, table => array of data( index => db array ) ) ) ) My first question is, is this a bad idea. Are arrays like this appropriate for this situation? If this would work, how should I go about populating it? My initial thought was shallow to deep, but the more I work on this, the more I realize that it'd be very difficult to abstract out the conditionals that determine where each item goes in the array. So it seems that starting from the most deeply nested data may be the approach I should take. If this is array abuse, what alternatives exist?

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  • Stage3D: Camera pans the whole screen

    - by Thomas Versteeg
    I am trying to create a 2D Stage3D game where you can move the camera around the level in an RTS style. I thought about using Orthographic Matrix3D functions for this but when I try to scroll the whole "stage" also scrolls. This is the Camera code: public function Camera2D(width:int, height:int, zoom:Number = 1) { resize(width, height); _zoom = zoom; } public function resize(width:Number, height:Number):void { _width = width; _height = height; _projectionMatrix = makeMatrix(0, width, 0, height); _recalculate = true; } protected function makeMatrix(left:Number, right:Number, top:Number, bottom:Number, zNear:Number = 0, zFar:Number = 1):Matrix3D { return new Matrix3D(Vector.<Number>([ 2 / (right - left), 0, 0, 0, 0, 2 / (top - bottom), 0, 0, 0, 0, 1 / (zFar - zNear), 0, 0, 0, zNear / (zNear - zFar), 1 ])); } public function get viewMatrix():Matrix3D { if (_recalculate) { _recalculate = false; _viewMatrix.identity(); _viewMatrix.appendTranslation( -_width / 2 - _x, -_height / 2 - y, 0); _viewMatrix.appendScale(_zoom, _zoom, 1); _renderMatrix.identity(); _renderMatrix.append(_viewMatrix); _renderMatrix.append(_projectionMatrix); } return _renderMatrix; } And the camera is send directly to the GPU with: c3d.setProgramConstantsFromMatrix(Context3DProgramType.VERTEX, 0, cameraMatrix, true); And these are the shaders: ------Vertex Shader------ m44 op, va0, vc0 mov v0, va1.xy mov v0.z, va0.z ------Fragment Shader------ tex ft0, v0, fs0 <2d,linear,nomip> mov oc, ft1 Here is a example and here are two screenshots to show what I mean: How do I only let the inside of the stage3D scroll and not the whole stage?

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  • Comparing the Performance of Visual Studio's Web Reference to a Custom Class

    As developers, we all make assumptions when programming. Perhaps the biggest assumption we make is that those libraries and tools that ship with the .NET Framework are the best way to accomplish a given task. For example, most developers assume that using ASP.NET's Membership system is the best way to manage user accounts in a website (rather than rolling your own user account store). Similarly, creating a Web Reference to communicate with a web service generates markup that auto-creates a proxy class, which handles the low-level details of invoking the web service, serializing parameters, and so on. Recently a client made us question one of our fundamental assumptions about the .NET Framework and Web Services by asking, "Why should we use proxy class created by Visual Studio to connect to a web service?" In this particular project we were calling a web service to retrieve data, which was then sorted, formatted slightly and displayed in a web page. The client hypothesized that it would be more efficient to invoke the web service directly via the HttpWebRequest class, retrieve the XML output, populate an XmlDocument object, then use XSLT to output the result to HTML. Surely that would be faster than using Visual Studio's auto-generated proxy class, right? Prior to this request, we had never considered rolling our own proxy class; we had always taken advantage of the proxy classes Visual Studio auto-generated for us. Could these auto-generated proxy classes be inefficient? Would retrieving and parsing the web service's XML directly be more efficient? The only way to know for sure was to test my client's hypothesis. Read More >

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  • Multiple audio sources on a single gameObject in unity

    - by angryInsomniac
    So, I have an audio system set up wherein I have loaded all my audio clips centrally and play them on demand by passing the requesting audioSource into the sound manager. However, there is a complication wherein if I want to overlay multiple looping sounds, I need to have multiple audio sources on an object, which is fine , so I created two in my script instantiated them and played my clips on them and then the world went crazy. For some reason, when I create two audio Sources in an object only the latest one is ever used, even if I explicitly keep objects separated, playing a clip on one or the other plays the clip on the last one that was created, furthermore, either this last one is not created in the right place or somehow messes with the rolloff rules because I can hear it all across my level, havign just one source works fine, but putting a second one on it causes shit to go batshit insane. Does anyone know the reason / solution for this ? Some pseudocode : guardSoundsSource = (AudioSource)gameObject.AddComponent("AudioSource"); guardSoundsSource.name = "Guard_Sounds_source"; // Setup this source guardThrusterSource = (AudioSource)gameObject.AddComponent("AudioSource"); guardThrusterSource.name = "Guard_Thruster_Source"; // setup this source // play using custom Sound manager soundMan.soundMgr.playOnSource(guardSoundsSource,"Guard_Idle_loop" ,true,GameManager.Manager.PlayerType); // this method prints out the name of the source the sound was to be played on and it always shows "Guard_Thruster_Source" even on the "Guard_Idle_loop" even though I clearly told it to use "Guard_Sounds_source"

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  • Handling changes to data types and entries in a database migration

    - by jandjorgensen
    I'm fully redesigning a site that indexes a number of articles with basic search functionality. The previous site was written about a decade ago, and I'm salvaging about 30,000 entries with data stored in less-than-ideal formats. While I'm moving from MSSQL to MySQL, I don't need to make any "live" changes, so this is not a production-level migration issue so much as a redesign. For instance, dates are stored the same as tags/subjects about the articles, but in strings as "YYYYMMDDd" (the lowercase d stands for "date" in the string). Essentially, before or after I move from the previous database format to a new one, I'm going to need to do a lot of replacement of individual entries. While I understand how to do operations with regular expressions in non-database issues, my database experience isn't robust enough to know the best way to handle this. What is the best (or standard) way to handle major changes like this? Is there an SQL operation I should be looking into? Please let me know if the problem isn't clear--I'm not entirely sure what kind of answer I'm looking for.

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  • links for 2010-05-11

    - by Bob Rhubart
    Fat Bloke: Oracle VM VirtualBox 3.1.8 released! "Supporting new platforms such as Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) and delivering a host of bugfixes, VirtualBox 3.1.8 is available now from the usual places, " says the Fat Bloke. (tags: oracle otn virtualization linux) Anthony Shorten: What is the Oracle Utilities Application Framework? "The Oracle Utilities Application Framework is a reusable, scalable and flexible java based framework which allows other products to be built, configured and implemented in a standard way," according to Anthony Shorten (tags: oracle otn framework java standards) Audio podcast: Oracle WebLogic Suite Virtualization Option (Application Grid) "Steve Harris, Senior Vice President of application server and Java Platform, Enterprise Edition development, talks about running Oracle WebLogic Server on Oracle JRockit Virtual Edition. Listen here to learn how you can run faster and more efficiently without a guest operating system on Oracle VM." (tags: oracle otn grid wweblogic podcast virtualization) MySQL Community Blog: MySQL track with free event at Kaleidoscope 2010 "The even greater news," writes Giuseppe Maxia, "is that, in addition to the general schedule, there are SUNDOWN SESSIONS!" (tags: java sun oracle mysql) @SOAtoday: Will Cloudsourcing Change the Face of Consulting? "Will we all be working remotely to deliver our client projects going forward? Maybe someday, but not anytime soon." -- Oracle ACE Director Jordan Braunstein (tags: oracle otn oracleace cloudcomputing entarch) @SOAtoday: Are we Paid to Say No? "Software architects take their governance initiatives seriously, and I can say with a high level of confidence that most of these denials are highly justified. But, have we architects lost our entrepreneurial spirit, with governance as our defense? Are we over-scrutinizing new ideas and slowing down pilots of innovation because they don’t align with our governance policies and enterprise frameworks?" -- Oracle ACE Director Jordan Braunstein (tags: architect entarch oracle otn soa)

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  • Session state provider and atomic operations

    - by vtortola
    Hi, I've been thinking about this and it is blowing my mind... How does a session state provider properly works internally? I mean, I tried to write a custom session state provider based on Azure Tables or Blobs, but quickly I realized that because there is no way to ensure an atomic operation or establish a lock, race conditions are suitable to happen when several web servers do operation on that shared information. I know that there is a SQL Server Session State Provider (SQLS-SSP) and people is happy with it, so I guess that it's using some kind of transaction isolation level in order to accomplish some degree of concurrent safety, like checking is the data is lock (a simple column), locking it if not and returning the data in an atomic operation, but is that so? what does happen if the data is lock? does it returns an error? block the call for a while? returns it in read-only fashion? Cloud computing paradigms could be somehow new, but webfarms have been here for a while, so as I'm pretty new on it... do you recommend any good lecture about the topic? Thanks.

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  • Introducing Programming To a Mathematician

    - by ell
    I currently am a programmer, I'm almost 16 years of age and have pretty much narrowed my careers down to something involving a Computer Science degree or Electrical Engineering degree (I know they are quite different but this question is about my friend) but my friend isn't so sure. He is very interested in maths and is very good at it and I think he would enjoy programming but he isn't willing to try it (edit he is willing to try but has never done before). Can anyone give me an suggestions for a language or tool that he could dabble in programming (at a reasonably basic level I assume) to solve maths problems or involve some kind of maths. As I say he enjoys maths a lot but I think he would enjoy programming, the problem is I don't want him to be put off by the stuff that isn't relevant at introductory levels such as memory allocation et al. I know that is very important but the point is that I want him to learn a bit of programming with maths then hopefully if he is interested enough he can start learning programming as programming. Thanks in advance, ell. Edit: Its not that he's completely uninterested - more that he hasn't actively explored the area before, maybe because he isn't informed about it. I wouldn't want to force him to do something he doesn't want to, I see this as more of a little push so that he can learn about programming. If he doesn't like it - fair enough, I can't control that and don't want to but if he turns out to enjoy it - this push will have been the right thing.

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  • XNA C# Platformer - physics engine or tile based?

    - by Hugh
    I would like to get some opinions on whether i should develop my game using a physics engine (farseer physics seems to be the best option) or follow the traditional tile-based method. Quick background: - its a college project, my first game, but have 4 years academic programming experience - Just want a basic platformer with a few levels, nothing fancy - want a shooting mechanic, run and gun, just like contra or metal slug for example - possibly some simple puzzles I have made a basic prototype with farseer, the level is hardcoded with collisions and not really tiled, more like big full-screen sized tiles, with collision bodies drawn manually along the ground and walls etc. My main problem is i want a simple retro feel to the jumping and physics but because its a physics simulation engine its going to be realistic, whereas typical in air controllable physics for platformers arent realistic. I have to make a box with wheel body fixture under it to have this effect and its glitchy and doesnt feel right. I chose to use a physics engine because i tried the tile method initially and found it very hard to understand, the engine took care of alot things to save me time, mainly being able to do slopes easily was nice and the freedom to draw collision bounds wherever i liked, rather then restricted to a grid, which gave me more freedom for art design also. In conclusion i don't know which method to pick, i want to use a method which will be the most straight forward way to implement and wont give me a headache later on, preferably a method which has an abundance of tutorials and resources so i dont get "stuck" doing something which has been done a million times before! Let me know i haven't provided enough information for you to help me! Thanks in advance, Hugh.

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  • Which would be a better way to load data via ajax

    - by Mike
    I am using google maps and returning html/lat/long from my MySQL database Currently A user picks a business category e.g; "Video Production". an ajax call is sent to a CodeIgniter controller the Controller then queries the db, and returns the following data via JSON Lat/Long of the marker HTML for the popup window this is approximately 34 rows in the database across two tables per business the ajax call receives this data and then plots the marker along with the html onto the map The data that is returned from the controller is one big json object... This is done for all businesses that exist in the Video Production category (currently approx 40 businesses). As you can see, pulling this data for multiple categories (100s of businesses) can get very very taxing on the server. My question is Would it be more beneficial to modify the process flow as such: a user picks a business category e.g; "Video Production". an ajax call is sent to a CodeIgniter controller the controller then queries the database for the location base information lat/long level (used to change marker icon color) This would be a single row per business with several columns the ajax call receives this data and then plots the marker on the map when the user clicks a marker an ajax call is sent to a CodeIgniter Controller the controller queries the database for the HTML and additional data based on business_id and if not, what are some better suggestions to this problem? In summary this means rather than including the HTML and additional data along for each business, only submitting minimal location information and then re-query for that information when each business marker is clicked. Potential Downsides longer load times when a user clicks a marker icon more code?? more queries to the database

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  • Changing frontend cache

    - by Utsav
    Our architecture consists of a front-end cache that most read only users obtain their data from directly. The front-end cache sits in front of a farm of webservers that serve pages written in PHP. We need to be able to detect certain conditions at the front-end cache level and pass those values through to the back-end via HTTP headers. For example we would like to manually tag the carrier network based on the IP address. So, for incoming traffic if the user is say coming from an IP address in the range of "41.202.192.0"/19 we would tag them as being a Orange Cameroon user by setting the appropriate HTTP request header, e.g., X-Carrier = "Orange Cameroon". Based on the setting of this header we would like to vary the cache and serve a different banner to the end user. How would you go about doing this? Keep in mind that we don't want to pollute the cache and we also don't want to create too many small cache segments. Assumptions: You can assume that the X-Carrier has already been detected in our cache. So, for the purposes of your test you can just set this value manually in your example script.

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  • How best to deal with the frustration that you encounter at the beginning of learning to code [closed]

    - by coderboy
    I am right now a newbie on the job learning to code in Cocoa . In the beginning I decided that I would try and understand everything I was doing . But right now I just feel like a clueless wizard chanting some spells . Its all just a matter of googling the right incantation . Frequently getting stuck and having to google for answers is proving to be a major demotivator for me . I know that this will get better over time but still I feel that somewhere , somehow I'm just approaching things the wrong way . I sit there stumped and then finally just look at sample code from Apple and I go Wow ! This is so logical and well structured ! . But just reading it is not going to get me to that level . So I would like to know , how do you guys approach learning something new . Do you read the whole documentation first , or do you read sample code or maybe its just about making lots of small programs first ?

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  • Constructs for wrapping a hardware state machine

    - by Henry Gomersall
    I am using a piece of hardware with a well defined C API. The hardware is stateful, with the relevant API calls needing to be in the correct order for the hardware to work properly. The API calls themselves will always return, passing back a flag that advises whether the call was successful, or if not, why not. The hardware will not be left in some ill defined state. In effect, the API calls advise indirectly of the current state of the hardware if the state is not correct to perform a given operation. It seems to be a pretty common hardware API style. My question is this: Is there a well established design pattern for wrapping such a hardware state machine in a high level language, such that consistency is maintained? My development is in Python. I ideally wish the hardware state machine to be abstracted to a much simpler state machine and wrapped in an object that represents the hardware. I'm not sure what should happen if an attempt is made to create multiple objects representing the same piece of hardware. I apologies for the slight vagueness, I'm not very knowledgeable in this area and so am fishing for assistance of the description as well!

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  • WCF/webservice architecture question

    - by M.R.
    I have a requirement to create a webservice to expose certain items from a CMS as a web service, and I need some suggestions - the structure of the items is as such: item - field 1 - field 2 - field 3 - field 4 So, one would think that the class for this will be: public class MyItem { public string ItemName { get; set; } public List<MyField> Fields { get; set; } } public class MyField { public string FieldName { get; set; } public string FieldValue { get; set; } //they are always string (except - see below) } This works for when its always one level deep, but sometimes, one of the fields is actually a point to ANOTHER item (MyItem) or multiple MyItem (List<MyItem>), so I thought I would change the structure of MyField as follows, to make FieldValue as object; public class MyField { public string FieldName { get; set; } public object FieldValue { get; set; } //changed to object } So, now, I can put whatever I want in there. This is great in theory, but how will clients consume this? I suspect that when users make a reference to this web service, they won't know which object is being returned in that field? This seems like a not-so-good design. Is there a better approach to this?

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  • Nova Software Becomes Kentico Certified Partner

    - by chanva
    Nova Software was awarded Kentico Certified Partner status. The new status confirms that Nova Software is qualified to provide professional services using the Kentico CMS. Nova Software has earned a reputation for excellence thanks to our in-depth technology knowledge and business acumen. By consistently applying this expertise to customers' individual business needs, Nova Software helps provide a sustainable competitive advantage based upon unique industry knowledge and relationships. Nova Software chose Kentico CMS as the platform for their clients' websites for its robust feature set, affordable licensing and solid core structure. As a custom software developer, Nova Software is drawn to the Kentico CMS both for its developer-centric environment as well as for its user-friendly CMS Desktop that will enhance the user experience of its clients. While commenting on the potentiality of this major collaboration with Kentico Software, Our customers come to us for high-quality websites that can offer the most up-to-date features. By using Kentico CMS, we feel confident that we will be able to cover all the needs of our customers, deliver the project on time and provide them services at a very affordable price.Partner Manager at Kentico, Lenka Navratilova, says the partnership with Nova Software is important to her company, "Choosing the right platform for a web project is only a part of its way to success. The skills and expertise of the company that delivers it makes the rest. With our partnership with Nova Software, we are sure that the end users of our product will be provided with top-level professional services." Kentico is currently used in 84 countries by more than 6,000 websites including some of the world's biggest corporations such as McDonalds, Mazda and Vodafone, This is an exciting development for large businesses and organisations as it will enable the building and management of any sized website, from simple 'brochure' sites to comprehensive, data hungry sites in a robust and technically superior platform. Kentico is modular so clients can start with a basic site and later add functions such as blogs, newsletters and e-commerce. Technical knowledge is not needed in order to update a Kentico website. If clients can use Microsoft Word, they can easily edit their site.

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  • What are the boundaries of the product owner in scrum?

    - by Saeed Neamati
    In another question, I asked about why I feel scrum turns active developers into passive developers, and it seems that the overall problem is not scrumy (related to scrum), and rather it's related to the bad implementation of scrum. So, here I have some questions about the scope of the responsibilities of PO (product owner) and the limitations he/she shouldn't pass. Should PO interfere the UI design, when there are designers at work in scrum team? (an example of this which has happened to us, is to replace checkboxes with a drop down list with two items, namely, yes and no; or to make some boxes larger, or to left-align some content instead of centering them on the page, or stuff like that). If yeah, to what extent? Colors? Layout? Should PO interfere in Design and architecture of coding? This hasn't happened to us yet, but I'm really curious about the boundaries. For example does PO has the right to change the platform (moving from ASP.NET MVC to PHP, or something like that), or choosing the count of servers (tier architecture), etc. Should PO interfere in validation mechanisms? For example, this field should be required, or we don't need to get this piece of information from user. Sometimes, analyzers and designers confirm that something can be handled behind the scene, like extracting the user profile info from another source, instead of asking for it in UI. How granular could/should PO get into the analysis and design? For example, a user story might be: "As a customer, I'd like to be able to buy new domains online". However, scrum team can implement this user story in a wizard of five steps, or in one single page. To which level PO should monitor, or govern, or supervise the technical analysis, design, and implementation? I asked these questions to judge whether our implementation is right or wrong?

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  • Organising levels / rooms in a MUD-style text based world

    - by Polynomial
    I'm thinking of writing a small text-based adventure game, but I'm not particularly sure how I should design the world from a technical standpoint. My first thought is to do it in XML, designed something like the following. Apologies for the huge pile of XML, but I felt it important to fully explain what I'm doing. <level> <start> <!-- start in kitchen with empty inventory --> <room>Kitchen</room> <inventory></inventory> </start> <rooms> <room> <name>Kitchen</name> <description>A small kitchen that looks like it hasn't been used in a while. It has a table in the middle, and there are some cupboards. There is a door to the north, which leads to the garden.</description> <!-- IDs of the objects the room contains --> <objects> <object>Cupboards</object> <object>Knife</object> <object>Batteries</object> </objects> </room> <room> <name>Garden</name> <description>The garden is wild and full of prickly bushes. To the north there is a path, which leads into the trees. To the south there is a house.</description> <objects> </objects> </room> <room> <name>Woods</name> <description>The woods are quite dark, with little light bleeding in from the garden. It is eerily quiet.</description> <objects> <object>Trees01</object> </objects> </room> </rooms> <doors> <!-- a door isn't necessarily a door. each door has a type, i.e. "There is a <type> leading to..." from and to are references the rooms that this door joins. direction specifies the direction (N,S,E,W,Up,Down) from <from> to <to> --> <door> <type>door</type> <direction>N</direction> <from>Kitchen</from> <to>Garden</to> </door> <door> <type>path</type> <direction>N</direction> <from>Garden</type> <to>Woods</type> </door> </doors> <variables> <!-- variables set by actions --> <variable name="cupboard_open">0</variable> </variables> <objects> <!-- definitions for objects --> <object> <name>Trees01</name> <displayName>Trees</displayName> <actions> <!-- any actions not defined will show the default failure message --> <action> <command>EXAMINE</command> <message>The trees are tall and thick. There aren't any low branches, so it'd be difficult to climb them.</message> </action> </actions> </object> <object> <name>Cupboards</name> <displayName>Cupboards</displayName> <actions> <action> <!-- requirements make the command only work when they are met --> <requirements> <!-- equivilent of "if(cupboard_open == 1)" --> <require operation="equal" value="1">cupboard_open</require> </requirements> <command>EXAMINE</command> <!-- fail message is the message displayed when the requirements aren't met --> <failMessage>The cupboard is closed.</failMessage> <message>The cupboard contains some batteires.</message> </action> <action> <requirements> <require operation="equal" value="0">cupboard_open</require> </requirements> <command>OPEN</command> <failMessage>The cupboard is already open.</failMessage> <message>You open the cupboard. It contains some batteries.</message> <!-- assigns is a list of operations performed on variables when the action succeeds --> <assigns> <assign operation="set" value="1">cupboard_open</assign> </assigns> </action> <action> <requirements> <require operation="equal" value="1">cupboard_open</require> </requirements> <command>CLOSE</command> <failMessage>The cupboard is already closed.</failMessage> <message>You closed the cupboard./message> <assigns> <assign operation="set" value="0">cupboard_open</assign> </assigns> </action> </actions> </object> <object> <name>Batteries</name> <displayName>Batteries</displayName> <!-- by setting inventory to non-zero, we can put it in our bag --> <inventory>1</inventory> <actions> <action> <requirements> <require operation="equal" value="1">cupboard_open</require> </requirements> <command>GET</command> <!-- failMessage isn't required here, it'll just show the usual "You can't see any <blank>." message --> <message>You picked up the batteries.</message> </action> </actions> </object> </objects> </level> Obviously there'd need to be more to it than this. Interaction with people and enemies as well as death and completion are necessary additions. Since the XML is quite difficult to work with, I'd probably create some sort of world editor. I'd like to know if this method has any downfalls, and if there's a "better" or more standard way of doing it.

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  • Continual Professional Development - proving new skills to non-technical employers

    - by Tom
    Background I work in a non-IT based company, as a professional software developer, building a large scale internal database system. I am fortunate to have a fairly senior position within the company, and have been working here for around 4 years. Often I get asked by management "how do you learn new things?". To be honest, I don't know how to answer this. Over the last 6 months, I've really gotten my teeth into some new techniques and technologies to make my level of coding far better and hopefully improve the quality of the software. Even if it's just refreshing my skills on things I've learnt already. Like last week I dived into some complex XLinq and TPL code (.net). Nothing revolutionary, but I feel like I am a bit better than before. Question The question is, how do I prove this to my employer? It'd be nice to be able to put this on paper. Possibilities I could: Keep a journal of what I've learnt - keeping the technical bits in (nobody would understand or care, but it's better than them being omitted) ???? (I've run out of ideas already) Any ideas? Thanks, Tom

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  • DB API for shell scripting (any shell)

    - by foampile
    I am faced with some legacy shell scripts that run batch data processing jobs in Oracle using SQL+. For the most part, the data tier does not have to communicate back to the script with retrieved data to be passed for shell-level processing but in a few cases it does. The problem is, SQL+ is really meant to be an end user app and not an API that can communicate with other clients programmaticaly. That is why people have invented APIs such as DBD::DBI for Perl, JDBC for Java, ODBC etc. The way it is done is they invoke SQL+ and then parse the output, which is clearly designed for human eye consumption, using tools like sed and awk. The whole thing is at best a hack and very prone to bugs. Since this client is rather conservative with their technology, they don't want to scale their scripts up to Perl or Python where there are data access APIs. So I am wondering whether there are similar APIs for shell, e.g. K or bash. What I would like is if an API would return data in a 2-dimensional array or strings (for the lack of type setting) so that I can just read DB data like that. The way they do it now is akin to parsing regular web page HTML to get a single stock quote rather than cleanly calling a web service and be done with it. Anybody know of a product I can use? Thanks

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  • ANTS Performance Profiler 7.0 has been released!

    - by Michaela Murray
    Please join me in welcoming ANTS Performance Profiler 7 to the world of .NET. ANTS Performance Profiler is a .NET code profiling tool. It lets you identify performance bottlenecks within minutes and therefore enables you to optimize your application performance. Version 7.0 includes integrated decompilation: when profiling methods and assemblies with no source code file, you can generate source code right from the profiler interface. You can then browse and navigate this automatically generated source as if it was your own. If you have an assembly's PDB file but no source, integrated decompilation even lets you view line-level timings for each method, pinpointing the exact cause of performance bottlenecks. Integrated decompilation is powered by .NET Reflector, but you don't need Reflector installed to use the functionality. Watch this video to see it in action. Also new in ANTS Performance Profiler 7.0: · Full support for SharePoint 2010 - No need to manually configure profiling for the latest version of SharePoint · Full support for IIS Express · Azure and Amazon EC2 support, enabling you to profile in the cloud Please click here, for more details about the ANTS Performance Profiler 7.0.

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  • Test Data in a Distributed System

    - by Davin Tryon
    A question that has been vexing me lately has been about how to effectively test (end-to-end) features in a distributed system. Particuarly, how to effectively manage (through time) test data for feature testing. The system in question is a typical SOA setup. The composition is done in JavaScript when call to several REST APIs. Each service is built as an independent block. Each service has some kind of persistent storage (SQL Server in most cases). The main issue at the moment is how to approach test data when testing end-to-end features. Functional end-to-end testing occurs through the UI, and it is therefore necessary for test data to be set up before the test run (this could be manual or automated testing). As is typical in a distributed system, identifiers from one service are used as a link in another service. So, some level of synchronization needs to be present in the data to effectively test. What is the best way to manage and set up this data after a successful deployment to a test environment? For example, is it better to manage this test data inside each service? Or package it together with the testing suite? Does that testing suite exist as a separate project? I'm interested in design guidance about how to store and manage this test data as the application features evolve.

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