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• How Do Computers Work? [closed]

  - by Rob P.

  This is almost embarrassing ask...I have a degree in Computer Science (and a second one in progress). I've worked as a full-time .NET Developer for nearly five years. I generally seem competent at what I do. But I Don't Know How Computers Work! Please, bare with me for a second. A quick Google of 'How a Computer Works' will yield lots and lots of results, but I struggled to find one that really answered what I'm looking for. I realize this is a huge, huge question, so really, if you can just give me some keywords or some direction. I know there are components....the power supply, the motherboard, ram, CPU, etc...and I get the 'general idea' of what they do. But I really don't understand how you go from a line of code like Console.Readline() in .NET (or Java or C++) and have it actually do stuff. Sure, I'm vaguely aware of MSIL (in the case of .NET), and that some magic happens with the JIT compiler and it turns into native code (I think). I'm told Java is similar, and C++ cuts out the middle step. I've done some mainframe assembly, it was a few years back now. I remember there were some instructions and some CPU registers, and I wrote code....and then some magic happened....and my program would work (or crash). From what I understand, an 'Emulator' would simulate what happens when you call an instruction and it would update the CPU registers; but what makes those instructions work the way they do? Does this turn into an Electronics question and not a 'Computer' question? I'm guessing there isn't any practical reason for me to understand this, but I feel like I should be able to. (Yes, this is what happens when you spend a day with a small child. It takes them about 10 minutes and five iterations of asking 'Why?' for you to realize how much you don't know)

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• Problems moving a rectangle in Pygame.

  - by Yann Core

  Hi guys! I'm making a game in Pygame and I want to be able to target enemy unit. I made it so when I click on them a variable "targeted" becomes true, and stays true until I click somewhere else on the screen. I also want targeted units to have a small green circle around them, so I made it in GEDIT. I have made a function that draws everything on the screen (the background, the player, objects, etc) and in the part where it draws the units it checks if the variable "targeted" is true and if it is it should move that little green circle over the enemy units. here is the code that does that: screen.blit(enemy_unit.pic, enemy_unit.rect) #draw the unit if enemy_unit.targeted == True: #if the unit has been targeted then draw a circle over it target_rect.move_ip(enemy_unit.pos) #move the circle to the unit target_rect.fit(enemy_unit.rect) #there are some bigger units and some smaller ones, so we have to "scale" the circle screen.blit(target_pic, target_rect) #actually draw the circle This doesn't work, when I target the unit the circle just appears for a 1/5 of second next (not on, but just next) to the unit and then disappears. I am sure that I am keeping a good track of "enemy_unit.pos" because I tested it (I added a piece of code that would print one units position and mouse's position every time i clicked the mouse and when i was near him the numbers were same). If you could give me a hint about what I'm doing wrong. I think its in move_ip function, but I tried just move and it didn't work either (the circle didn't even show at all)!

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• RequireJS: JavaScript for the Enterprise

  - by Geertjan

  I made a small introduction to RequireJS via some of the many cool new RequireJS features in NetBeans IDE. I believe RequireJS, and the modularity and encapsulation and loading solutions that it brings, provides the tools needed for creating large JavaScript applications, i.e., enterprise JavaScript applications. &amp;amp;lt;span id=&amp;amp;quot;XinhaEditingPostion&amp;amp;quot;&amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;lt;/span&amp;amp;gt; (Sorry for the wobbly sound in the above.) An interesting comment by my colleague John Brock on the above: One other advantage that RequireJS brings, is called lazy loading of resources. In your first example, everyone one of those .js files is loaded when the first file is loaded in the browser. By using the require() call in your modules, your application will only load the javascript modules when they are actually needed. It makes for faster startup in large applications. You could show this by showing the libraries that are loaded in the Network Monitor window. So I did as suggested: Click the screenshot to enlarge it and notice how the Network Monitor is helpful in the context of RequireJS troubleshooting.

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• Bug: unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at

  - by maria

  I have recently installed new system on my disc, Ubuntu 12.04. Installation proceeded without problems, I started installing additional software and put data from other discs. I had already two times bug report, it was quite long, and I have no idea how to acces to log file (which probably is somewhere saved) and since I had to switch off the computer using the button, anything else was possible, here is just a small part of it (what I've noted on paper) could not write bytes: Broken pipe speach dicpatcher disabled: edit etc/default/speach-dispatcher saned disabled: edit .... and than: BUG: unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at 0000009c I've run Memory test in GRUB, everything is fine. First time it occured when I was using rsync, second time when I was trying to install texlive. Should I install whole system once again? Or can it be hardware problem? Or something else? If there is any hardware details which may be relevant, please ask, since I have no idea what is happening, I don't know what kind of information could be useful. Thanks P.S. dmesg output:

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• Cannot usermod -L in LightDM scripts

  - by user95723

  I'm running Xubuntu 12.04 and use the LightDM. I want to restrict access to the machine as a kind of parental control. This is how it should work I hook in a script that executes just before the greeter comes up. Within that script some awk processing will read an entry in a config file and will trigger a usermod -L or usermod -U depending on whether the user is allowed to login. While user is logged, a cron job will count down the entry in the config and forces a xfce4-session-logout if time is up. A cron job running on a server will upload the "credits" on a daily base. How is this idea? That's theory, now for the problems It appears for some unknown reason, the usermod command is not executed, neither as part of a display-setup-script nor within the greeter-setup-script. I wrote a small sandbox script usermod -L johndoe 2error.txt touch /etc/blabla 2error.txt The script is executing, cause the blabla file is existing. That means that the script must have been executed with root privileges. error.txt is empty but the usermod command has just no effect. Is this a bug or a feature. What's wrong? Best regards and thank you Oli

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• Tile sizes in 2D games

  - by Ephismen

  While developing a small game using tile-mapping method a question came to my mind: I would develop the game on Windows but wouldn't exclude adapting it to another platform. What size(in pixels) would you recommend using for creating the tiles of a tile-mapped game(ie: RPG) with the following requirements? Have an acceptable level of detail without having too many tiles. Having a decent map size. Allow adaptation of the game on a handheld(ie: PSP), smartphone or a computer without too much loss of detail or slowdowns. Allow more or less important zoom-in / zoom-out. Have a resolution of tile that permits either pixel-perfect collision or block-collision. Anything from a good explanation to a game example is useful as long as it can fit the requirements. This question may seem a bit simplistic, but I noticed that many Indies game developer were using inappropriate scales scenery. Also sorry for the poor syntax and the lack of vocabulary of my question, being a non-native English speaker doesn't help when talking about computers programming.

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• How often do you review fundamentals?

  - by mlnyc

  So I've been out of school for a year and a half now. In school, of course we covered all the fundamentals: OS, databases, programming languages (i.e. syntax, binding rules, exception handling, recursion, etc), and fundamental algorithms. the rest were more in-depth topics on things like NLP, data mining, etc. Now, a year ago if you would have told me to write a quicksort, or reverse a singly-linked list, analyze the time complexity of this 'naive' algorithm vs it's dynamic programming counterpart, etc I would have been able to give you a decent and hopefully satisfying answer. But if you would have asked me more real world questions I might have been stumped (things like how would handle logging for an application, or security difference between GET and POST, differences between SQL Server and Oracle SQL, anything I list on my resume as currently working with [jQuery questions, ColdFusion questions, ...] etc) Now, I feel things are the opposite. I haven't wrote my own sort since graduating, and I don't really have to worry much about theoretical things that do not naturally fall into problems I am trying to solve. For example, I might give you some great SQL solutions using an analytical function that I would have otherwise been stumped on or write a cool web application using angular or something but ask me to write an algo for insertAfter(Element* elem) and I might not be able to do it in a reasonable time frame. I guess my question here to the experienced programmers is how do you balance the need to both learn and experiment with new technologies (fun!), working on personal projects (also fun!) working and solving real world problems in a timeboxed environment (so I might reach out to a library that does what I want rather than re-invent the wheel so that I can focus on the problem I am trying to solve) (work, basically), and refreshing on old theoretical material which is still valid for interviews and such (can be a drag)? Do you review older material (such as famous algorithms, dynamic programming, Big-O analysis, locking implementations) regularly or just when you need it? How much time do you dedicate to both in your 'deliberate practice' and do you have a certain to-do list of topics that you want to work on?

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• Open Source Highlight: namebench

  - by eddraper

  DNS is a big deal.  Even small incremental changes to improve its performance can yield significant value due to the vast quantity of look-ups required when using the internet.  Until now, It’s always been one of those things I had to kinda take on faith… was my ISP doing a good job?  Are those public DNS server really that much faster?  What about security and privacy concerns? Let me introduce you to namebench.  This is the kinda tool I really love – one that immediately delivers value and is almost over-the-top OCD in its attention to detail. Trust me, this tool is utterly ruthless in it’s quest for getting it right – you’re not left with a big question mark after it presents its data.  The results are conclusive and actionable.  Here’s what is does: It hunts down the fastest DNS servers from your desktop that it can find using thousands of requests.  No, it doesn’t pop up this little dialog in 10 seconds to give you some “off the cuff” answer from a handful of providers.  It takes the better part of 10-15 minutes to run.  When it finishes, it presents you with a veritable horn-o-plenty of data.  Mean response duration, response distribution, bad data,  no stone is left un-turned. Check it out.  You’ll dig it.

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• HTML5 - Does it have the power to handle a large 2D game with a huge world?

  - by user15858

  I have been using XNA game studio, but due to private reasons (as well as the ability to publish anywhere & my heavy interest in isogenic engine), I would like to switch to HTML5. However, I have very high 2D graphic demands for my game. The game itself will have a HDD size of anywhere between 6GB (min) to 12GB (max) which would be a full game deployed offline. The size of the images aren't significantly large, so streaming would be entirely possible if only those assets required were streamed as needed. The game has a massive file size because of the sheer amount of content. For some images or spritesheets, they would be quite massive. (ex. a very large Dragon, which if animated in a spritesheet would be split into two 4096x4096 sheets or one 8192x8192 sheet). Most assets would be very small, and about 7MB for a full character with 15 animations in every direction (all animations not required immediately) so in the size of a few hundred KB to download before the game loads. My question, however, is if the graphical power of HTML5 is enough to animate several characters on screen at once, when it flips through frames quite rapidly. All my sprites have about 25 frames per animation, 5 directions (a spritesheet for each direction & animation), and run at 30fps. Upon changing direction, animation, or a new character entering, spritesheets would change and be constantly loading/unloading. If I pack all directions in a single sheet, it would be about 2048x2048 per sheet. Most frameworks have no problem with this, but I am afraid from what I read that HTML5's graphical capabilities will limit me. Since it takes significant time simply to animate characters in any language, I'd like a quick answer.

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• Most efficient way to store this collection of moduli and remainders?

  - by Bryan

  I have a huge collection of different moduli and associated with each modulus a fairly large list of remainders. I want to store these values so that I can efficiently determine whether an integer is equivalent to any one of the remainders with respect to any of the moduli (it doesn't matter which, I just want a true/false return). I thought about storing these values as a linked-list of balanced binary trees, but I was wondering if there is a better way? EDIT Perhaps a little more detail would be helpful. As for the size of this structure, it will be holding about 10s of thousands of (prime-1) moduli and associated to each modulus will be a variable amount of remainders. Most moduli will only have one or two remainders associated to it, but a very rare few will have a couple hundred associated to it. This is part of a larger program which handles numbers with a couple thousand (decimal) digits. This program will benefit more from this table being as large as possible and being able to be searched quickly. Here's a small part of the dataset where the moduli are in parentheses and the remainders are comma separated: (46) k = 20 (58) k = 15, 44 (70) k = 57 (102) k = 36, 87 (106) k = 66 (156) k = 20, 59, 98, 137 (190) k = 11, 30, 68, 87, 125, 144, 182 (430) k = 234 (520) k = 152, 282 (576) k = 2, 11, 20, 29, 38, 47, 56, 65, 74, ...(add 9 each time), 569 I had said that the moduli were prime, but I was wrong they are each one below a prime.

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• Compensation advice on overseas contract with former employer [closed]

  - by user64248

  I work as a full time developer in the US. My previous employer from 3 years ago has sold a large startup project in Russia for next month, however their three and only senior developers have recently resigned. I still have somewhat intricate knowledge of the software to be installed since I was the original author, so my former employer, in somewhat of a panic, has asked if I can take two weeks vacation from my current job to fly to Russia and lead the startup. Logistically, I can do this and my current employer agreed without issue. Said former employer is very small and hasn't hired contractors before, and I haven't contracted either. The company simply asked my what my salary requirements are. I had, and still have, a great professional relationship with the owners. I feel like I'm doing this as a favor in a way. Payment is guaranteed, but I have no idea what I should bill for overseas work. If it matters, I was paid around 110k at the former employer. Just looking for some advice. There are many contracting salary threads here, but I feel that the overseas work throws a twist in things. Thank you!

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• Did I Inadvertently Create a Mediator in my MVC?

  - by SoulBeaver

  I'm currently working on my first biggish project. It's a frontend facebook application that has, since last Tuesday, spanned some 6000-8000 LOC. I say this because I'm using the MVC, an architecture I have never rigidly enforced in any of my hobby projects. I read part of the PureMVC book, but I didn't quite grasp the concept of the Mediator. Since I didn't understand and didn't see the need for it, my project has yet to use a single mediator. Yesterday I went back to the design board because of some requirement changes and noticed that I could move all UI elements out of the View and into its own class. The View essentially only managed the lifetime of the UI and all events from the UI or Model. Technically, the View has now become a 'Mediator' between the Model and UI. Therefore, I realized today, I could just move all my UI stuff back into the View and create a mediator class that handles all events from the view and model. Is my understanding correct in thinking that I have devolved my View as it currently is (handling events from the Model and UI) into a Mediator and that the UI class is what should be the View?

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• How do I get debuild to put the binary in /usr/bin?

  - by SammySP

  I have been recently trying to package a small Python utility to put on my PPA and I've almost got it to work, but I'm having problems in making the package install the binary (a chmod +x Python script) under /usr/bin. Instead it installs under /. I have this directory structure - http://db.tt/0KhIYQL. My package Makefile is like so: TARGET=usr/bin/txtrevise make: chmod +x $(TARGET) install: cp -r $(TARGET) $(DESTDIR) I've used $(DESTDIR), as I understand it to place the file under the debian subdir when debuild is run. I have the txtrevise script, my executable, under usr/bin folder under the root of my package. I also have the Makefile and usr/bin/textrevise in my tarball: txtrevise_1.1.original.tar.gz. However when I build this and look inside of the Debian package, txtrevise is always at the root of the package instead of under usr/bin and will be installed to / instead of /usr/bin. How can I get debuild to put the script in the right place? Thanks. Any help would be greatly appreciated. I'm stumped.

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• Noise Canceling Earphones

  - by Mark Treadwell

  I travel a lot. The hours spent droning through the sky can be made more tolerable with an MP3 player and a set of noise-cancelling headphones. Reducing the sound of the airflow and engines is a great relief. For a year or two, I used a pair of folding Sony MDR-NC5 Noise Canceling Headphones, the ear foam covers self-destructed. I replaced them with old washcloth material and was happy, but the DW thought it looked bad.  I switched to a new set of Sony MDR-NC6 Noise Canceling Headphones.  These worked equally well, although they did not fold as small as the MDR-NC5 headphones. Over four years of use, the MDR-NC6 headphones started cutting out and making popping noises.  This was not surprising considering the beating they took on travel in my backpack.  It looked like I needed another new set. The older MDR-NC5 headphones were still on the shelf with the hated washcloth covers.  A quick search online showed a vibrant business in selling replacement ear foams, often at exorbitant prices.  Nowhere did I see ear foam covers made for the oblong MDR-NC5.  I then realized that foam is stretchable and that the shape should not matter.  After another search and some consideration, I purchased 2-5/16" foam pad ear covers that were able to stretch over the MDR-NC5's strange shape.  Problem solved for less than $5.

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• Why is text on my TV monitor all grainy?

  - by searchfgold6789

  I have successfully installed the Catalyst drivers and hooked up my 1080p TV to the Radeon HD 5750's HDMI port and now it is working. There only seems to be one issue - most images appear OK, at least to my eyes, but text is grainy and difficult to read (not sure how well it can be seen in the picture): It works fine with a smaller screen, and hopefully you can see it with the new pictures which are only slightly better, but images are rendered a little funny too. Changing antialiasing does nothing and changing the refresh rate only makes a slight change if any. The small monitor I have works fine. Smaller resolutions such as 1024x768 look OK but are the wrong aspect ratio. I have tried renaming the input mode on the TV to "PC", and that helped... a little bit. Also, I tried a different PC with the same result. Messing around extensively with the ATI Catalyst Control Center also did not help. I am wondering if there is anything else I can try to increase the quality so it is more usable.

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• How can i compare Audio, what programming language should i use

  - by Pimmetje

  I have 2 audio files that are from almost the same source. But at some points there shifted a bit. Also the codecs does not match. I would like to make a program that takes a sample 2 - 4 seconds. And looks for it in the other file. (Most of the time it's not shifted more than 30 seconds). Than take the time and store it, Go ahead for a few seconds take a sample and find it again. This way i want to create a file where i can see on what points the file is shifted. For people who are more interested in what i want. I have a audio/video file speech and subtitles. But i have same speech from different sources with differs a bit in time. And i like to make a program that can correct the subtitle time for me. Enough about the problem I looked on the Internet for ways to compare audio files. Based on what i read comparing 2 audio files isn't that easy as i had hoped. Some talk about algorithms http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=169641 Some audio-library's portaudio.com aubio.org sourceforge.net/projects/ccaudio/ ambiera.com/irrklang/ The biggest problem i have is that i can't find something i can generate from the audio that i can use to compare with. I hope someone here can point me in the right direction.

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• Been doing .NET for several years and am thinking about a platform change. Where do people suggest I go?

  - by rsteckly

  Hi, I've been programming in .NET for several years now and am thinking maybe its time to do a platform switch. Any suggestions about which platform would be the best to learn? I've been thinking about going back to C++ development or just focusing on T-SQL within the Microsoft stack. I'm thinking of switching because: a) I feel that the .NET platform is increasingly becoming commodified--meaning that its more about learning a GUI and certain things to click around than really understanding programming. I'm concerned that this will lend itself to making developers on that stack increasingly paid less. b) It's very frustrating to spend your entire day essentially debugging something that should work but doesn't. Usually, Microsoft releases something that suggests anyone can just click here and there and poof there's your application. Most of the time it doesn't work and winds up sucking so much more time than it was supposed to save. c) I recently led a team in a small startup to build a WPF application. We were really hit hard with people complaining about having to download the runtime. Our code was also not portable to any other platform. Added to which, the ram usage and slowness to load of the app was remarkable for its size. I researched it and we could not find a way to optimize it. d) I'm a little concerned about being wedded to the Windows platform. What are the pros and cons of adding another platform and which platform do people suggest? Thanks!

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• what's wrong with my lookAt and move forward code?

  - by alaslipknot

  so am still in the process of getting familiar with libGdx and one of the fun things i love to do is to make basics method for reusability on future projects, and for now am stacked on getting a Sprite rotate toward target (vector2) and then move forward based on that rotation the code am using is this : // set angle public void lookAt(Vector2 target) { float angle = (float) Math.atan2(target.y - this.position.y, target.x - this.position.x); angle = (float) (angle * (180 / Math.PI)); setAngle(angle); } // move forward public void moveForward() { this.position.x += Math.cos(getAngle())*this.speed; this.position.y += Math.sin(getAngle())*this.speed; } and this is my render method : @Override public void render(float delta) { // TODO Auto-generated method stub Gdx.gl.glClearColor(0, 0, 0.0f, 1); Gdx.gl.glClear(GL20.GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT); // groupUpdate(); Vector3 mousePos = new Vector3(Gdx.input.getX(), Gdx.input.getY(), 0); camera.unproject(mousePos); ball.lookAt(new Vector2(mousePos.x, mousePos.y)); // if (Gdx.input.isTouched()) { ball.moveForward(); } batch.begin(); batch.draw(ball.getSprite(), ball.getPos().x, ball.getPos().y, ball .getSprite().getOriginX(), ball.getSprite().getOriginY(), ball .getSprite().getWidth(), ball.getSprite().getHeight(), .5f, .5f, ball.getAngle()); batch.end(); } the goal is to make the ball always look at the mouse cursor, and then move forward when i click, am also using this camera : // create the camera and the SpriteBatch camera = new OrthographicCamera(); camera.setToOrtho(false, 800, 480); aaaand the result was so creepy lol Thank you

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• How to persuade C fanatics to work on my C++ open source project?

  - by paperjam

  I am launching an open-source project into a space where a lot of the development is still done Linux-kernel-style, i.e. C-language with a low-level mindset. There are multiple benefits to C++ in our space but I fear those used to working in C will be scared off. How can I make the case for the benefits of C++? Specifically, the following C++ attributes are very valuable: concept of objects and reference-counting pointers - really don't want to have to malloc(sizeof(X)) or memcpy() structs templates for specialising whole bodies of code with specific performance optimizations and for avoiding duplication of code. template metaprogramming related to the above syntactic sweetness available (e.g. operator overloading, to be used in very small doses) STL Boost libraries Many of the knee-jerk negative reactions to C++ are illfounded. Performance does not suffer: modern compilers can flatten dozens of call stack levels and avoid bloat through wide use of template specializations. Granted, when using metaprogramming and building multiple specializations of a large call tree, compile time is slower but there are ways to mitigate this. How can I sell C++?

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• Artists and music - Need Help Deciding on a CMS

  - by infty

  A friend has asked me to build a site with the following options: staff members must be able to add new music and artists to the page a gallery must be provided - it is also good if each artist has the ability to have his/her own smaller gallery users must be able to vote for artists users must be able to alter in discussions (forums or comments sections) staff members must be able to blog staff members must be able to write articles I did a small project where i actually implemented all of these features, but I want to use an existing content management system for all of these features so that future developers can, hopefully, more easy extend the website. And also, so that I don't have to provide too much documentation. I have never developed a website using an external CMS like Drupal or Wordpress and after seeing hours of tutorial videos of both systems, I still can't make up my mind on whether i should : a) use Drupal 7 b) use Wordpress 3 c) create my own cms I can imagine that staff members would also want to create content using iPhone or android based mobile devices, but this is not a required feature. Can someone, with experience, please tell me about their experiences with larger projects like this? The site will have approximately 400 000 - 500 000 visitors (not daily visitors, based on numbers from last year in a period of 4 months)

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• Is it too late to start your career as a programmer at the age of 30 ?

  - by Matt

  Assuming one graduated college at 30 years old and has 5 years of experience (no real job experience, just contributing to open source and doing personal projects) with various tools and programming languages, how would he or she be looked upon by hiring managers ? Will it be harder to find a job considering that (I got this information looking at various websites, user profiles on SO and here, etc.) the average person gets hired in this field at around 20 years old. I know that it's never too late to do what you're passionate about and the like but sometimes it is too late to start a career. Is this the case? Managers are always looking for fresh people and I often read job descriptions specifically asking for young people. I don't need answers of encouragement, I know the community here is great and I wouldn't get offended by even the most cold answers. Please don't close this as being too localized, I'm not referring to any specific country or region, talk about the region you're in. I would also appreciate if you justified your answer.

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• ADF - Now with Robots!

  - by Duncan Mills

  I mentioned this briefly in a tweet the other day, just before the full rush of OOW really kicked off, so I though it was worth re-visiting. Check out this video, and then read on: So why so interesting? Well - you probably guessed from the title, ADF is involved. Indeed this is as about as far from the traditional ADF data entry application as you can get. Instead of a database at the back-end there's basically a robot. That's right, this remarkable tape drive is controlled through an ADF using all your usual friends of ADF Faces, Controller and Binding (but no ADFBC for obvious reasons). ADF is used both on the touch screen you see on the front of the device in the video, and also for the remote management console which provides a visual representation of the slots and drives. The latter uses ADF's Active Data Framework to provide a real-time view of what's going on the rack. . What's even more interesting (for the techno-geeks) is the fact that all of this is running out of flash storage on a ridiculously small form factor with tiny processor - I probably shouldn't reveal the actual specs but take my word for it, don't complain about the capabilities of your laptop ever again! This is a project that I've been personally involved in and I'm pumped to see such a good result and,  I have to say, those hardware guys are great to work with (and have way better toys on their desks than we do). More info in the SL150 (should you feel the urge to own one) is here. 

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• Is it a good idea to dynamically position and size controls on a form or statically set them?

  - by CrystalBlue

  I've worked mostly with interface building tools such as xCode's Interface Builder and Visual Studio's environment to place forms and position them on screens. But I'm finding that with my latest project, placing controls on the form through a graphical interface is not going to work. This more has to do with the number of custom controls I have to create that I can't visually see before hand. When I first tackled this, I began to position all of my controls relative to the last ones that I created. Doing this had its own pros and cons. On the one hand, this gave me the opportunity to set one number (a margin for example) and when I changed the margin, the controls all sized correctly to one another (such as shortening controls in the center while keeping controls next to the margin the same). But this started to become a spiders-web of code that I knew wouldn't go very far before getting dangerous. Change one number and everything re sizes, but remove one control and you've created many more errors and size problems for all the other controls. It became more surgery then small changes to controls and layout. Is there a good way or maybe a preferred way to determine when I should be using relative or absolute positioning in forms?

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• Programming During a Crisis

  - by Duracell

  Hello, I'm having difficulty turning this into a proper question, but here goes... Some of you may have heard about the flooding happening in Queensland, Australia. Well, I'm in the inner suburbs of Brisbane right now; the river has been slowly creeping toward my house since Tuesday. When I left for work this morning it was twenty meters down the road when it is normally kilometers away. Within hours of the distater striking, the government already had some pretty good web applications available for people to get information about what was happening and where the flood was predicted to rise. They also set up a database for people to search for the whereabouts of relatives or could register their location for others to see. Has anyone been involved in the development of these kinds of projects before? It's interesting that they could churn out this software in what appeared to be less than a day when the average development house could take weeks at best. In what ways did it differ from a 'normal' project? Any other thoughts?

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• How to structure reading of commands given at a(n interactive) CLI prompt?

  - by Anto

  Let's say I have a program called theprogram (the marketing team was on strike when the product was to be named). I start that program by typing, perhaps not surprisingly, the program name as a command into a command prompt. After that, I get into a loop (from the users standpoint, an interactive command-line prompt), where one command will be read from the user, and depending on what command was given, the program will execute some instructions. I have been doing something like the following (in C-like pseudocode): main_loop{ in=read_input(); if(in=="command 1") do_something(); else if(in=="command 2") do_something_else(); ... } (In a real program, I would probably encapsulate more things into different procedures, this is just an example.) This works well for a small amount of commands, but let's say you have 100, 1000 or even 10 000 of them (the manual would be huge!). It is clearly a bad idea to have 10 000 ifs and else ifs after each other, for instance, the program would be hard to read, hard to maintain, contain a lot of boilerplate code... Yeah, you don't want to do that, so what approach would you recommend me to use (I will probably never use 10 000 commands in a program, but the solution should, at least preferably, be able to scale to that kind of massive (?) problems. The solution doesn't have to allow for arguments to the commands)?

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