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• How to start a high school Java/Android development club for 13-17 year olds

  - by PaulHurleyuk

  My wife is a high school maths teacher, and is considering starting a programming club for 13-17 years olds who show an interest. Their interest seems to be around Apps and Android which I have little experience of. The kids would be (presumably) interested in programming, and have a fairly high level of computing knowledge. We would provide them with resources and some knowledge, but hopefully a lot would be self guided. I'm hoping stack overflow'ers can provide some tips or starting points. Specific things I think I'll need are; A development Environment; Currently I'm looking towards Java and Android, developed in Eclipse, probably installed on donated older hardware Some initial direction; There seem to be a plethora or 'start android' tutorials, so some recommendations for good ones are valuable, as are recommended paper books A Target; Some final project they should be shooting for A Route; This is where I'm most stuck, how to lead them through the required Java concepts and learning they would need Some related questions already out there Language+IDE for teaching high school students? Teaching "web design/development" to high-school home-school group. Good sources? How can I bootstrap a software development community at my school?

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• 2D Rectangle Collision Response with Multiple Rectangles

  - by Justin Skiles

  Similar to: Collision rectangle response I have a level made up of tiles where the edges of the level are made up of collidable rectangles. The player's collision box is represented by a rectangle as well. The player can move in 8 directions. The player's velocity is equal in X and Y directions and constant. Each update, I am checking the player's collision against all tiles that are a certain distance away. When the player collides with a rectangle, I am finding the intersection depth and resolving along the most shallow axis followed by the other axis. This resolution happens for both axes simultaneously. See below for two examples of situations where I am having trouble. Moving up-left against the left wall In the scenario below, the player is colliding with two tiles. The tile intersection depth is equal on both axes for the top tile and more shallow in the X axis for the middle tile. Because the player is moving up the wall, the player should slide in an upward direction along the wall. This works properly as long as the rectangle with the more shallow depth is evaluated first. If the equal intersection depth rectangle is evaluated first, there is a chance the player becomes stuck. Moving up-left against the top wall Here is an identical scenario with the exception that the collision is with the top wall. The same problem occurs at the corners when intersection depth is equal for both axes. I guess my overall question is: How can I ensure that collision response occurs on tiles that have non-equal intersection depth before tiles that have equal intersection depth in order to get around the weirdness that occurs at these corners. Sean's answer in the linked question was good, but his solution required having different velocity components in a certain direction. My situation has equal velocities, so there's no good way to tell which direction to resolve at corners. I hope I have made my explanation clear.

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• What is the safest way to remove a swap partition?

  - by user212062

  I am running Ubuntu 12.04 on a 64-bit HP laptop with a 16 GB flash drive. I do not have a working hard drive right now. When I installed Ubuntu, I created a 2 GB swap partition on sdb1. I have since learned that swap partitions are generally a bad idea on flash drives, so I would like to use my swap space for my other partitions. You can see my partition scheme in the link below. I have read that I just have to comment sdb1 out of the fstab file, boot from a GParted live CD, select swapoff for sdb1, delete/merge with other partition, and everything's good. But, I've also read that messing with sdb1 can change the UUID of sdb2 or sdb3 and cause problems. Is this true? Does initramfs use swap at all? Also, when I get Ubuntu running on my laptop with an internal hard drive, does the swap partition help that much? I have 6 GB of DDR3. Does the rule of 1.5xActual RAM still apply? It seems like quite a bit to me. Thanks for the help! UPDATE: I have removed swap. The process I followed is: Right click swap partition in GParted and selected swapoff. Used # to comment the swap partition out of fstab. I tried to boot from a live GParted CD, but I kept getting an error, so I ran GParted in Ubuntu. Deleted swap partition in GParted. Unmounted /windows. Expanded /windows to take the remaining space. Mounted /windows. The / and /windows partitions each kept their own names and UUIDs, and everything is running fine. I have never seen any swap space being used before, and I don't intend to use the hibernate function, so I think removing swap was a good idea.

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• PHP safe_mode is a pain, looking for advice (Ubuntu 12.04 server, public webserver)

  - by user73279

  Maybe askUbuntu isn't the right forum or I haven't provided the right search query but I haven't seen anything in my searching of askUbuntu on PHP safe_mode. I get lots of Windows Safe Mode and Ubuntu Safe Mode results but not PHP safe_mode. So I keep running into one issue after another regarding PHP safe_mode. (I write a lot of my own PHP code for various site maintenance tools and such.) I know safe_mode is going away in the next version of PHP but I still see a fair amount of advice recommending that you leave it enabled. I've recently consolidated from 3 servers down to 1 and at least one of those old servers had safe_mode disabled without any issues. (The lack of issues may have simply been a matter of good luck.) None of the previous 3 gave me this much trouble so I'm guessing so additional php.ini/PHP safe_mode setting was turned on for the new server. I primarily run WordPress for my websites with a few MediaWiki sites sprinkled in. And I am currently running into an issue using WordPress's auto update feature as it doesn't seem to be able to use fopen. WordPress is not relaying the actual error message to me but since I was just able to update the plugins I'm using this is a safe_mode problem. I've had a lot of safe_mode issues since consolidating to this new server. Long story short, the advice I'd seen to use safe_mode was all at least 2 years old. Do I really need it? If I disable PHP safe_mode are there a good set of security measures I should implement - i.e. chmod 640 /var/www/..., add this to your .htaccess, etc - to protect my server/sites? Thanks

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• Office design and layout for agile development

  - by Adam Eberbach

  (moved from stackoverflow) I have found lot of discussions here on about which keyboard, desk, light or colored background is best - but I can't find one addressing the layout of the whole office. We are a company with about 20 employees moving to a new place, something larger. There are two main development practices going on here with regular combination, the back end people often needing to work with the mobile people to arrange web services. There are about twice as many back end people as mobile people. About half of the back end developers are working on-site at any time and while they are almost never all in the office at once at least 5-10 spaces need to be provided - so most of the time the two groups are about equal. We have the chance to arrange desks, partitions and possibly even walls to make the space good. There won't be cash for dot-com frills like catering or massages but now's the time to be planning to avoid ending up with a bunch of desks in a long line. Joel on Software's Bionic Office is an article I've remembered from way back and it has some good ideas but I* (and more importantly the company's owners) are not completely sold on the privacy idea in an environment where we are supposed to be collaborating. This is another great link - The Ultimate Software Development Office Layout - I hadn't even remembered enclosed meeting rooms until reading this. Does the private office stand in the way of agile development? Is the scrum enough forced contact and if you need to bug someone you should need to get up and knock on their door? What design layouts can you point to and why would you recommend them? *I'm not against closed offices at all but would be happy if some other solution can do just as well. If it can't... well, that's what this question is all about.

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• Mock the window.setTimeout in a Jasmine test to avoid waiting

  - by Aligned

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/Aligned/archive/2014/08/21/mock-the-window.settimeout-in-a-jasmine-test-to-avoid-waiting.aspxJasmine has a clock mocking feature, but I was unable to make it work in a function that I’m calling and want to test. The example only shows using clock for a setTimeout in the spec tests and I couldn’t find a good example. Here is my current and slightly limited approach.   If we have a method we want to test: var test = function(){ var self = this; self.timeoutWasCalled = false; self.testWithTimeout = function(){ window.setTimeout(function(){ self.timeoutWasCalled = true; }, 6000); }; }; Here’s my testing code: var realWindowSetTimeout = window.setTimeout; describe('test a method that uses setTimeout', function(){ var testObject; beforeEach(function () { // force setTimeout to be called right away, no matter what time they specify jasmine.getGlobal().setTimeout = function (funcToCall, millis) { funcToCall(); }; testObject = new test(); }); afterEach(function() { jasmine.getGlobal().setTimeout = realWindowSetTimeout; }); it('should call the method right away', function(){ testObject.testWithTimeout(); expect(testObject.timeoutWasCalled).toBeTruthy(); }); }); I got a good pointer from Andreas in this StackOverflow question. This would also work for window.setInterval. Other possible approaches: create a wrapper module of setTimeout and setInterval methods that can be mocked. This can be mocked with RequireJS or passed into the constructor. pass the window.setTimeout function into the method (this could get messy)

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• Sprite Sheets in PyGame?

  - by Eamonn

  So, I've been doing some googling, and haven't found a good solution to my problem. My problem is that I'm using PyGame, and I want to use a Sprite Sheet for my player. This is all well and good, and it would be too, if I wasn't using a Sprite Sheet strip. Basically, if you don't understand, I have a strip of 32x32 'frames'. These frames are all in an image, along side each other. So, I have 3 frames in 1 image. I'd like to be able to use them as my sprite sheet, and not have to crop them up. I have used an awesome, popular and easy-to-use game framework for Lua called LÖVE. LÖVE has these things called "Quads". They are similar to texture regions in LibGDX, if you know what they are. Basically, quads allow you to get parts of an image. You define how large a quad is, and you define parts of an image that way, or 'regions' of an image. I would like to do something similar to this in PyGame, and use a "for" loop to go through the entire image width and height and mark each 32x32 area (or whatever the user defines as their desired frame width and height) and store that in a list or something for use later on. I'd define an animation speed and stuff, but that's for later on. I've been looking around on the web, and I can't find anything that will do this. I found 1 script on the PyGame website, but it crashed PyGame when I tried to run it. I tried for hours trying to fix it, but no luck. So, is there a way to do this? Is there a way to get regions of an image? Am I going about this the wrong way? Is there a simpler way to do this? Thanks! :-)

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• C++ Iterator lifetime and detecting invalidation

  - by DK.

  Based on what's considered idiomatic in C++11: should an iterator into a custom container survive the container itself being destroyed? should it be possible to detect when an iterator becomes invalidated? are the above conditional on "debug builds" in practice? Details: I've recently been brushing up on my C++ and learning my way around C++11. As part of that, I've been writing an idiomatic wrapper around the uriparser library. Part of this is wrapping the linked list representation of parsed path components. I'm looking for advice on what's idiomatic for containers. One thing that worries me, coming most recently from garbage-collected languages, is ensuring that random objects don't just go disappearing on users if they make a mistake regarding lifetimes. To account for this, both the PathList container and its iterators keep a shared_ptr to the actual internal state object. This ensures that as long as anything pointing into that data exists, so does the data. However, looking at the STL (and lots of searching), it doesn't look like C++ containers guarantee this. I have this horrible suspicion that the expectation is to just let containers be destroyed, invalidating any iterators along with it. std::vector certainly seems to let iterators get invalidated and still (incorrectly) function. What I want to know is: what is expected from "good"/idiomatic C++11 code? Given the shiny new smart pointers, it seems kind of strange that STL allows you to easily blow your legs off by accidentally leaking an iterator. Is using shared_ptr to the backing data an unnecessary inefficiency, a good idea for debugging or something expected that STL just doesn't do? (I'm hoping that grounding this to "idiomatic C++11" avoids charges of subjectivity...)

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• Seeking solution for printing-reporting .NET

  - by Parhs

  I am developing an application that prints in separate threads in extreme cases about 20-25 pages per minute to various thermal printers. Currently templates for these are XAML xps documents. All printers have graphics drivers that support EMF/GDI printing. So GDI-EMF is done by operating system resulting in slower performance. Sending raw text for printing is another good solution but doesnt work always , because some clients have old chinese thermal printer that nobody support thus impossible to change codepage / emulation. So it doesnt work always. Also most computers running my software are low end ATOM CPU. So I am thinking to return to GDI, EMF printing and have both Text-Only reports and EMF reports. Another reason i want EMF is because here receipts are signed by Electronic Fiscal Memory device.Most of these dont do good job extracting text from XPS as they dont follow the standard but how windows convert GDI to XPS.Even with text-only mode some of them dont support all character encodings and are impossible to send paper cut command after the sign. I know that using a reporting engine would solve rendering problem but I dont want to buy one. All I want is to be able to show tabular data and insert an image and replaced text.I know there is StringTemplate that could do the generation of template but the problem is i should parse somehow the template and render it using GDI commands. Is there any other solution/approach for this ? Or is there anything ready ?

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• What features are helpful when performing remote debugging / diagnostics?

  - by Pemdas

  Obviously, the easiest way to solve a bug is to be able to reproduce it in-house. However, sometimes that is not practical. For starters, users are often not very good at providing you with useful information. Customer Service: "what seems to be the issue?" User: "It crashed!" To further compound that, sometimes the bug only occurs under certain environmentally conditions that can not be adequately replicated in-house. With that in mind, it is important to build some sort of diagnostic framework into your product. What types of built-in diagnostic tools have you used or seen used? Logging seems to be the predominate method, which makes sense. We have a fairly sophisticated logging frame work in place with different levels of verbosity and the ability to filter on specific modules (actually we can filter down to the granularity of a single file). Error logs are placed strategically to manufacture a pretty good representation of a stack trace when an error occurs. We don't have the luxury of 10 million terabytes of disk space since I work on embedded platforms, so we have two ways of getting them off the system: a serial port and a syslog server. However, an issue we run into sometimes is actually getting the user to turn the logs on. Our current framework often requires some user interaction.

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• Current SPARC Architectures

  - by Darryl Gove

  Different generations of SPARC processors implement different architectures. The architecture that the compiler targets is controlled implicitly by the -xtarget flag and explicitly by the -arch flag. If an application targets a recent architecture, then the compiler gets to play with all the instructions that the new architecture provides. The downside is that the application won't work on older processors that don't have the new instructions. So for developer's there is a trade-off between performance and portability. The way we have solved this in the compiler is to assume a "generic" architecture, and we've made this the default behaviour of the compiler. The only flag that doesn't make this assumption is -fast which tells the compiler to assume that the build machine is also the deployment machine - so the compiler can use all the instructions that the build machine provides. The -xtarget=generic flag tells the compiler explicitly to use this generic model. We work hard on making generic code work well across all processors. So in most cases this is a very good choice. It is also of interest to know what processors support the various architectures. The following Venn diagram attempts to show this: A textual description is as follows: The T1 and T2 processors, in addition to most other SPARC processors that were shipped in the last 10+ years supported V9b, or sparcvis2. The SPARC64 processors from Fujitsu, used in the M-series machines, added support for the floating point multiply accumulate instruction in the sparcfmaf architecture. Support for this instruction also appeared in the T3 - this is called sparcvis3 Later SPARC64 processors added the integer multiply accumulate instruction, this architecture is sparcima. Finally the T4 includes support for both the integer and floating point multiply accumulate instructions in the sparc4 architecture. So the conclusion should be: Floating point multiply accumulate is supported in both the T-series and M-series machines, so it should be a relatively safe bet to start using it. The T4 is a very good machine to deploy to because it supports all the current instruction sets.

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• Rule of thumb for cost vs. savings for code re-use

  - by Styler

  Is it a good rule of thumb to always write code for the intent of re-using it somewhere down the road? Or, depending on the size of the component you are writing, is it better practice to design it for re-use when it makes sense with regards to time spent on it. What is a good rule of thumb for spending extra time on analysis and design on project components that have "some probability" of being needed later down the road for other things that may or may need this part. For example, if I have the need for project X to do things A, and B. A definitely needs to be written for re-use because it just makes sense to do so. B is very project specific at the moment, and I can hack it all together in a couple days to finish the project on time and give everyone kudos for being a great team, etc. Or if we say, lets spend a whole friggin' 2 weeks figuring out what project Y/Z might need this thing for and spend a load of extra time on on part B because someday we might need to use it on project Y/Z (where the savings will be realized). I'd imagine a perfect world situation would be a nicely crafted combination of project specific vs. re-use architected components given the project. However some code shops might feel it would be a great idea to write everything for the intention of using it at some point down the road.

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• Release/Change management - best aproach

  - by Bob Rivers

  I asked this question an year ago in StackOverflow and never got a good answer. Since Programmers seems to be a better place to ask it, I'll give it a try... What is the better way to work with release management? More specifically what would be the best way to release packages? For example, assuming that you have a relatively stable system, a good quality assurance process (QA), etc. How do you prefer to release new versions? Let's assume that we are talking about a mid to large "centralized" web system (no clients), in-house development. This system can be considered "vital" for a corporate operations. I have a tendency to prefer to do this by releasing packets at regular intervals, not greater than 1 to 3 months. During this period, I will include into the package,fixes and improvements and make the implementation in production environment only once. But I've seen some people who prefer to place small changes in production, but with a greater frequency. The claim of these people is that by doing so, it is easier to identify bugs that have gone through the process of QA: in a package with 10 changes and another with only 1, it is much easier to know what caused the problem in the package with just one change... What is the opinion came from you?

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• Google affecting my SERP Rank?

  - by Asad Moeen

  The following are some of my website's details. Home-page: [thebluewaffles].[com] Keywords: Blue Waffles- Rest of the keywords are post/subject specific. Site Description: Health Articles Blog Site Age: 1.5 years A short history: When I started my website, the few things in my mind when posting content were at-least 500 words on each page and writing of all the articles with to the point information. I didn't go really fast with it which is why I only have about 15 articles in 1.5 years. The SEO strategy was more simple. I shared links through Social Marketing websites and some Article Sharing websites after which I could see my website's rankings in top 5 SERP results. I ranked good enough for about 8 months continuously but didn't keep updating content due to which there were some 3 rough months when no content was posted due to some personal work. The SERPS dropped to 2nd page in April and almost started disappearing in May. I asked a lot of people about it and most came up with the reason of "no updates to site" so I started updating my site again since the day, November has almost started and I see no signs of my website's ranking. Another important point is that when I post a new article, and do a title search in Google, I see it ranks good enough for the first 10 hours and then disappears. What could be wrong here?

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• Migration of PowerBuilder application to multiplatform

  - by Alex Bibiano

  I developed a client/server application with PowerBuilder in the past for medical clinics and done maintenance for it until now. Now, some clients are asking me to develop a release for Mac/Linux and need some advice about what programming language/technology is best suited for it and the learning curve. It’s not a very very big program but I’m the only developer and have done it in my spare time. PowerBuilder is very productive for this kind of projects (database centric), but it’s not multiplatform and it’s hard to sell PowerBuilder application now days (web, .NET, java sells a lot better with his marketing). My programming skills: - I studied C and C++ in the past (university) but never used it on real projects - Have some Java experience but not in desktop applications - Some experience with Ruby on Rails for web projects - Good skills with PowerBuilder and C# (.NET) (there are my main developing languages) My first dilemma is if I change the desktop application to a web interface, but I think the user will lose some user-experience, and some doctors don’t have a clinic (they are alone at home with my software). I think installing a web application (with webserver) for one user will be overwhelming. If I continue developing desktop application, what is at the moment a good framework/toolset to learn having my skills? Somebody has had similar experiences? A lot of thanks

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• @CodeStock 2012 Review: Leon Gersing ( @Rubybuddha ) - "You"

  "YOU"Speaker: Leon GersingTwitter: @Rubybuddha Site: http://about.me/leongersing I honestly had no idea what I was getting in to when I sat down in to this session. I basically saw the picture of the speaker and knew that it would be a good session. I was completely wrong; it was the BEST SESSION of CodeStock 2012.  In fact it was so good, I texted another coworker attending the conference to get over and listen to Leon. Leon took on the concept of growth in the software development community. He specifically referred David Hansson in his ability to stick to his beliefs when the development community thought that he was crazy for creating Ruby on Rails. If you do not know this story Ruby on Rails is one of the fastest growing web languages today. In addition, he also touched on the flip side of this argument in that we must be open to others ideas and not discard them so quickly because we all come from differing perspectives and can add value to a project/team/community. This session left me with two very profound concepts/quotes: “In order to learn you must do it badly in front of a crowed and fail.” - @Rubybuddha I can look back on my career so far and say that he is correct; I think I have learned the most after failing, especially when I achieved this failure in front of other. “Experts must be able to fail.” - @Rubybuddha I think we can all learn from our own mistakes but we can also learn from others. When respected experts fail it is a great learning opportunity for the entire team as well as the person who failed. When expert admit mistakes and how they worked through them can be great learning tools for other developers so that they know how to avoid specific scenarios and if they do become stuck in the same issue they will know how to properly work their way out of them.

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• Starting out with OpenGL when most tutorials are out of date

  - by AUTO

  I'm sure there are already a bunch of questions like this asked, but the constant updating of the OpenGL library throws them all away, and in a month or two, the answers here will be worthless again. I am ready to start programming in OpenGL using C++. I've got a working compiler (DevCpp; do NOT ask me to switch to VC++, and don't ask me why). Now I'm just looking for a solid tutorial on how to program with OpenGL. My assistant found the tutorial provided by NeHe Productions, but as I've come to find out, it's WAY OUT OF DATE! (although I did pull together a basic window to support an OpenGL canvas) Then I went online, and found the OpenGL SuperBible, which apparently uses freeglut? But what I'd like to know is whether or not SuperBible 5th edition is up to date any longer. The suggestion to freeglut I found said the latest version was 2.6.0 but now it's 2.8.0! Is the OpenGL SuperBible still a good, and fairly up-to-date place to start? Is there a better place to go to learn OpenGL? Am I allowed to simply store freeglut in the DevCpp include directory (maybe in GL), or is there some important procedure? Are there any comments or suggestions that I didn't think to ask since I'm only just beginning? @dreta cleared some things up for me, so now I have a better idea of what to ask: I think I'd like to start out with OpenGL using a wrapper library instead of directly accessing OpenGL.I just think that, for a beginner, it would be easier for me to program and get good results, while I don't yet have to understand all the grimy details (as @stephelton mentioned). The problem is, I can't find any library that doesn't have undefined references to no longer supported functions. Freeglut sounds operational, but it still uses GLU.Does anyone know what I can do?Also, I tried compiling the first SuperBible's source, but I got errors since GLAPI is not being defined as a type, the error originating in the GLU library. I'd like to use the SuperBible, but I don't know how to fix this.

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• How to tell your boss that his programming style is really bad?

  - by Roflcoptr

  I'm a student and in my spare time I'm working for a big enterprise as Java developer. The job is good, but the problem is, my boss is writing very strange code. I don't want to complain, but some issues are in my opinion really strange. For example: he doesn't know any booleans. All boolean conditions are Strings called "YesOrNo" and then in the condition he uses if (YesOrNo == "Yes") there are a lot of very strange characters in method names and variables like é õ ô or è all loops are infinite loops in the style of for(;;). Then at the end of the loop the condition is tested and if the conditions is fulfilled break; is called. I don't now if I should tell him that I think this isn't a good practice, since he is my boss and decides how and what to do. On the other hand some of this examples are really very weird. Any hints how to cope with? And is this only me who thinks that's bad style?

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• How to provide value?

  - by Francisco Garcia

  Before I became a consultant all I cared about was becoming a highly skilled programmer. Now I believe that what my clients need is not a great hacker, coder, architect... or whatever. I am more and more convinced every day that there is something of greater value. Everywhere I go I discover practices where I used to roll my eyes in despair. I saw the software industry with pink glasses and laughed or cried at them depending on my mood. I was so convinced everything could be done better. Now I believe that what my clients desperately need is finding a balance between good engineering practices and desperate project execution. Although a great design can make a project cheap to maintain thought many years, usually it is more important to produce quick fast and cheap, just to see if the project can succeed. Before that, it does not really matters that much if the design is cheap to maintain, after that, it might be too late to improve things. They need people who get involved, who do some clandestine improvements into the project without their manager approval/consent/knowledge... because they are never given time for some tasks we all know are important. Not all good things can be done, some of them must come out of freewill, and some of them must be discussed in order to educate colleagues, managers, clients and ourselves. Now my big question is. What exactly are the skills and practices aside from great coding that can provide real value to the economical success of software projects? (and not the software architecture alone)

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• Nifty GUI Layout

  - by Jason Crosby

  I am new to JME3 game engine but I know Android XML GUI layouts pretty good. I have a simple layout here and I cant figure out what is wrong. Here is my XML code: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <nifty xmlns="http://nifty-gui.sourceforge.net/nifty-1.3.xsd" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://nifty-gui.sourceforge.net/nifty-1.3.xsd http://nifty-gui.sourceforge.net/nifty-1.3.xsd"> <useControls filename="nifty-default-controls.xml" /> <useStyles filename="nifty-default-styles.xml" /> <screen id="start" controller="com.jasoncrosby.game.farkle.gui.MenuScreenGui"> <layer id="layer" backgroundColor="#66CD00" childLayout="center"> <panel id="panel" align="center" valign="center" childLayout="center" visibleToMouse="true"> <image filename="Textures/wood_floor.png" height="95%" width="95%"/> <panel id="panel" align="center" valign="center" childLayout="center" visibleToMouse="true"> <text text="test" font="Interface/Fonts/Eraser.fnt"></text> </panel> </panel> </layer> </screen> Everything works good until I get to displaying the text. I have tried different alignments and tried moving the text into different panels but no matter what I do the text is never in the center of the screen. Its always in the upper left corner so far I can only see the lower right part of the text. I'm sure it has to be something simple but since I'm new to this I'm not noticing anything. Thanks for the help in advance.

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• Script language native extensions - avoiding name collisions and cluttering others' namespace

  - by H2CO3

  I have developed a small scripting language and I've just started writing the very first native library bindings. This is practically the first time I'm writing a native extension to a script language, so I've run into a conceptual issue. I'd like to write glue code for popular libraries so that they can be used from this language, and because of the design of the engine I've written, this is achieved using an array of C structs describing the function name visible by the virtual machine, along with a function pointer. Thus, a native binding is really just a global array variable, and now I must obviously give it a (preferably good) name. In C, it's idiomatic to put one's own functions in a "namespace" by prepending a custom prefix to function names, as in myscript_parse_source() or myscript_run_bytecode(). The custom name shall ideally describe the name of the library which it is part of. Here arises the confusion. Let's say I'm writing a binding for libcURL. In this case, it seems reasonable to call my extension library curl_myscript_binding, like this: MYSCRIPT_API const MyScriptExtFunc curl_myscript_lib[10]; But now this collides with the curl namespace. (I have even thought about calling it curlmyscript_lib but unfortunately, libcURL does not exclusively use the curl_ prefix -- the public APIs contain macros like CURLCODE_* and CURLOPT_*, so I assume this would clutter the namespace as well.) Another option would be to declare it as myscript_curl_lib, but that's good only as long as I'm the only one who writes bindings (since I know what I am doing with my namespace). As soon as other contributors start to add their own native bindings, they now clutter the myscript namespace. (I've done some research, and it seems that for example the Perl cURL binding follows this pattern. Not sure what I should think about that...) So how do you suggest I name my variables? Are there any general guidelines that should be followed?

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• Find points whose pairwise distances approximate a given distance matrix

  - by Stephan Kolassa

  Problem. I have a symmetric distance matrix with entries between zero and one, like this one: D = ( 0.0 0.4 0.0 0.5 ) ( 0.4 0.0 0.2 1.0 ) ( 0.0 0.2 0.0 0.7 ) ( 0.5 1.0 0.7 0.0 ) I would like to find points in the plane that have (approximately) the pairwise distances given in D. I understand that this will usually not be possible with strictly correct distances, so I would be happy with a "good" approximation. My matrices are smallish, no more than 10x10, so performance is not an issue. Question. Does anyone know of an algorithm to do this? Background. I have sets of probability densities between which I calculate Hellinger distances, which I would like to visualize as above. Each set contains no more than 10 densities (see above), but I have a couple of hundred sets. What I did so far. I did consider posting at math.SE, but looking at what gets tagged as "geometry" there, it seems like this kind of computational geometry question would be more on-topic here. If the community thinks this should be migrated, please go ahead. This looks like a straightforward problem in computational geometry, and I would assume that anyone involved in clustering might be interested in such a visualization, but I haven't been able to google anything. One simple approach would be to randomly plonk down points and perturb them until the distance matrix is close to D, e.g., using Simulated Annealing, or run a Genetic Algorithm. I have to admit that I haven't tried that yet, hoping for a smarter way. One specific operationalization of a "good" approximation in the sense above is Problem 4 in the Open Problems section here, with k=2. Now, while finding an algorithm that is guaranteed to find the minimum l1-distance between D and the resulting distance matrix may be an open question, it still seems possible that there at least is some approximation to this optimal solution. If I don't get an answer here, I'll mail the gentleman who posed that problem and ask whether he knows of any approximation algorithm (and post any answer I get to that here).

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• GWB | Comment Spam On The Rise

  - by Geekswithblogs Administrator

  I don’t know a member on Geekswithblogs.net that is not frustrated with the amount of spam they get. It is a major problem that we have been dealing with for 6+ years and trying to come up with new ways to fight. As spammers get smarter, we have to continue to upgrade the tools we use to combat it. Just like any spam filter, sometimes good comments will get caught up. This has been a huge concern for some bloggers causing us to tame what we call spam and not spam. So this post is here just to state we know the spam problem is like a wave, sometimes it is not so bad, other times it gets worse. Right now it is worse. One measure we will take is a requirement for CAPTCHA soon if it continues since most members don’t clean up their spam via the admin tools (which are not the best tools, I know). Also I want to solicit a better approach from the members, what would you like the spam interface on GWB to be like? Be realistic cause we all want “Zero Spam, Good Comment live”. Related Tags: Geekswithblogs.net, Spam

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• Personalized Pricing

  - by David Dorf

  In past postings I've spent a fair amount of time talking about targeted promotions.  Using a complete view of the customer that includes purchase history, location history, and psychographics gleaned from social media, we can select the offer with the greatest chance of redemption.  This is done to influence shopping behavior, which might be introducing the consumer to a new product line, increasing their basket size, increasing frequency of purchases, etc. Safeway seems to be taking a slightly different approach with their personalized pricing.  In additional to offering electronic coupons and club card offers, they are also providing a personalized price for certain items based on purchase history.  So when Sally want to shop at Safeway, she first checks the "Just for U" website for three types of deals.  She starts by selecting manufacturer coupons to load into her loyalty card, then she checks the Club Card for offers like "buy one get one free." The third step is the interesting one.  Safeway will set a particular lower price for Sally good for 90 days on items she buys often.  Clearly this isn't enforcing a new behavior but rather instilling loyalty.  I would love to know exactly how they are determining the personalized price.  Of course bargain hunters can still stack the three offers so they can, for example, get their $4.99 Oatmeal for $0.72. I like this particular question and answer from their website's FAQ: My offers are not that great. Can I tell you what offers I need? That's a good idea. That functionality is not currently available, but we appreciate your input and are constantly improving our just for U program. Stay tuned for exciting enhancements! I suppose if Safeway is tracking all the purchases, they can easily determine whether the customer if profitable.  As long as the customer stays profitable, why not let them determine a few offers themselves?  Food for thought.

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• (PHP vs Python vs Perl) vs Ruby [closed]

  - by Dr.Kameleon

  OK, here's what : I've programmed in over 20 different languages and now, because of a large project I'm currently working on for Mac OS X (in Objective-C/Cocoa), I need to make a final decision on which language to use for my background scripting + plugin functionality. Definitely, one factor that'll ultimately influence my decision is which one I'm most familiar with, which is PHP (one of the ugliest languages around, which I however adore... lol), then Python / Perl (the "proven values"... )... and then Ruby (which, to me, is almost confusing and I've only played with it for some time.) Now, here's my considerations : (As previously mentioned) Being familiar with it (anyway, if X is better in my case, I really don't mind studying it from scratch...) Speed Good interaction with the Shell + ease of integration with my Cocoa application Btw, some of the reasons that made me wonder if Ruby would be a good choice is : The hype around it (although, I still don't get why; but that's probably just me...) My major competitor (we're actually talking about the same type of software here) is using Ruby for its backend scripting almost exclusively (ok, along with some BASH). Isn't Ruby considered slower e.g. than Perl? Why did he choose that? Simply, a matter of personal taste? So... your thoughts?

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