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• Subscribable World Cup 2010 Calendar

  - by jamiet

  I bang on quite a lot on this blog about ways in which data can get published over the web and one of the most interesting ways, in my opinion, of publishing data in a structured manner that is well understood is to use the iCalendar specification. There isn’t much information in the world that doesn’t have some concept of “when” so iCalendar is a great way of distributing that information. You have probably used iCalendar at some point without even knowing about it. All files with a .ics suffix are iCalendar format files and that is why you can happily import them into Outlook, Hotmail Calendar, Google Calendar etc… where they can be parsed and have the semantic data (when, where and who) extracted from them. Importing of iCalendar format data is really only half the trick though; in my opinion the real value of iCalendar-formatted calendar is the ability to subscribe to them. Subscribing has a simple benefit over importing but that single benefit is of massive importance: a subscriber to an iCalendar calendar can periodically check to see if any updates have been made and, if they have, automatically update the local copy. The real benefit to the user is the productivity gain – a single update to an iCalendar means that all subscribers are automatically made aware of the change and there is zero effort on the part of the subscriber; as my former colleague Howard van Rooijen is fond of saying, “work smarter not harder” – nowhere is this edict more ably demonstrated than subscribing versus importing of calendars. If you want to read some more thoughts about iCalendar then go and read my past blog post Calendar syndication - My big hope for 2009's breakthrough technology or better still go and seek out Jon Udell who speaks very authoritatively on the issue of iCalendar. With this subject of iCalendar on my mind I was interested to discover (via Steve Clayton’s blog post Download the world cup fixtures) that the BBC had made a .ics file available containing all of the matches in the upcoming World Cup. As you can probably guess this was a file that was made available so that it could be imported into your calendar of choice. It had one obvious downside though, right now nobody knows who is going to be playing in the knock-out stages so the calendar looks like this: with no teams being named after 25th June. How much more useful would this calendar have been if the BBC had made it possible to subscribe to the calendar instead, thus the calendar could be updated with the teams for the knock out stages when they are known and every subscriber would have a permanently up-to-date record of all the fixtures in their calendar. Better still, the calendar could be updated with match results as well or perhaps even post a match report from the BBC sport pages; when calendars are made subscribable a sea of opportunity opens up for distribution of information. So with that in mind I have decided to go one better than the BBC. I have imported their .ics into a brand new Hotmail calendar and made it publicly available at the following URLs: HTML http://cid-dc1ed121af0476be.calendar.live.com/calendar/World+Cup+2010/index.html iCalendar webcal://cid-dc1ed121af0476be.calendar.live.com/calendar/World+Cup+2010/calendar.ics The link you’re really interested in is the second one - click on that and it should open up in your calendar software of choice. Or, if you want to view it in an online calendar such as Hotmail Calendar or Google Calendar, copy and paste that URL into the appropriate place. I shall endeavour to keep the calendar updated throughout the World Cup and even if I don’t you’re no worse off than if you had imported the BBC’s .ics file so why not give it a try? If I do keep it up to date then you will have a permanent record of the 2010 World Cup available in your calendar. Forever. If you have your calendar synced to your smartphone then you’ll be carrying match reports around with you without you having to do a single thing. Surely that’s worth a quick click isn’t it?   If you have any thoughts let me have them in the comments below. Thanks for reading. @Jamiet Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• DC Comics Identifies Krypton on the Star Map

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  This week Action Comics Superman #14 hits the stands and DC comics reveals the actual location of Kyrpton, delivered by none other than beloved astrophysicist Neil Tyson. Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy reports on the resolution of fans’ long standing curiosity about the location of Krypton: Well, that’s about to change. DC comics is releasing a new book this week – Action Comics Superman #14 – that finally reveals the answer to this stellar question. And they picked a special guest to reveal it: my old friend Neil Tyson. Actually, Neil did more than just appear in the comic: he was approached by DC to find a good star to fit the story. Red supergiants don’t work; they explode as supernovae when they are too young to have an advanced civilization rise on any orbiting planets. Red giants aren’t a great fit either; they can be old, but none is at the right distance to match the storyline. It would have to be a red dwarf: there are lots of them, they can be very old, and some are close enough to fit the plot. I won’t keep you in suspense: the star is LHS 2520, a red dwarf in the southern constellation of Corvus (at the center of the picture here). It’s an M3.5 dwarf, meaning it has about a quarter of the Sun’s mass, a third its diameter, roughly half the Sun’s temperature, and a luminosity of a mere 1% of our Sun’s. It’s only 27 light years away – very close on the scale of the galaxy – but such a dim bulb you need a telescope to see it at all (for any astronomers out there, the coordinates are RA: 12h 10m 5.77s, Dec: -15° 4m 17.9 s). 6 Ways Windows 8 Is More Secure Than Windows 7 HTG Explains: Why It’s Good That Your Computer’s RAM Is Full 10 Awesome Improvements For Desktop Users in Windows 8

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• Sprite and Physics components or sub-components?

  - by ashes999

  I'm taking my first dive into creating a very simple entity framework. The key concepts (classes) are: Entity (has 0+ components, can return components by type) SpriteEntity (everything you need to draw on screen, including lighting info) PhysicsEntity (velocity, acceleration, collision detection) I started out with physics notions in my sprite component, and then later removed them to a sub-component. The separation of concerns makes sense; a sprite is enough information to draw anything (X, Y, width, height, lighting, etc.) and physics piggybacks (uses the parent sprite to get X/Y/W/H) while adding physics notions of velocity and collisions. The problem is that I would like collisions to be on an entity level -- meaning "no matter what your representation is (be it sprites, text, or something else), collide against this entity." So I refactored and redirected collision handling from entities to sprite.physics, while mapping and returning the right entity on physics collisions. The problem is that writing code like this.GetComponent<SpriteComponent>().physics is a violation of abstraction. Which made me think (this is the TLDR): should I keep physics as a separate component from sprites, or a sub-component, or something else? How should I share data and separate concerns?

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• Lazy coding is fun

  - by Anthony Trudeau

  Every once in awhile I get the opportunity to write an application that is important enough to do, but not important enough to do the right way -- meaning standards, best practices, good architecture, et al.  I call it lazy coding.  The industry calls it RAD (rapid application development). I started on the conversion tool at the end of last week.  It will convert our legacy data to a completely new system which I'm working on piece by piece.  It will be used in the future, but only the new parts because it'll only be necessary to convert the individual pieces of the data once.  It was the perfect opportunity to just whip something together, but it was still functional unlike a prototype or proof of concept.  Although I would never write an application like this for a customer (internal or external) this methodology (if you can call it that) works great for something like this. I wouldn't be surprised if I get flamed for equating RAD to lazy coding or lacking standards, best practice, or good architecture.  Unfortunately, it fits in the current usage.  Although, it's possible to create a good, maintainable application using the RAD methodology, it's just too ripe for abuse and requires too much discipline for someone let alone a team to do right. Sometimes it's just fun to throw caution to the wind and start slamming code.

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• How do you use blank lines in your code ?

  - by Matthieu M.

  There has been a few remarks about white space already in discussion about curly braces placements. I myself tend to sprinkle my code with blank lines in an attempt to segregate things that go together in "logical" groups and hopefully make it easier for the next person to come by to read the code I just produced. In fact, I would say I structure my code like I write: I make paragraphs, no longer than a few lines (definitely shorter than 10), and try to make each paragraph self-contained. For example: in a class, I will group methods that go together, while separating them by a blank line from the next group. if I need to write a comment I'll usually put a blank line before the comment in a method, I make one paragraph per step of the process All in all, I rarely have more than 4/5 lines clustered together, meaning a very sparse code. I don't consider all this white space a waste because I actually use it to structure the code (as I use the indentation in fact), and therefore I feel it worth the screen estate it takes. For example: for (int i = 0; i < 10; ++i) { if (i % 3 == 0) continue; array[i] += 2; } I consider than the two statements have clear distinct purposes and thus deserve to be separated to make it obvious. So, how do you actually use (or not) blank lines in code ?

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• Is it reasonable to expect knowing the whole stack bottom up?

  - by Vaibhav Garg

  I am an Sr. developer/architect/Product Manager for embedded systems. The systems that I have had experience with have typically been small to medium size codebases - typically close to 25-30K LOC in C, using 8-16 and 32 bit low end microcontrollers. The systems have been entirely bootstrapped by our team - meaning right from the start-up code to the end application code has either been written by the team, or at the very least, is thoroughly understood and maintained by us. Now, if we were to start developing more complex systems with complex peripherals, such as USB OTG et al. (think, low end cell phones), there are libraries and stacks available commercially and from chip vendors that reduce the task to just calling the right APIs and being able to use those peripherals. Now, from a habit point of view, this does not give me and the team a comfortable feeling, not being able to comprehend the entire code tree, with virtual black boxes at the lower layers. Is it reasonable to devote, and reserve, time getting into the details of how the APIs are implemented, assuming that the same would also entail getting into details of relevant standards (again, for USB as an example)? Or, alternatively, should a thorough understanding of the top level usage of the APIs be sufficient? This of course assumes that the source codes to all libraries are available, which they are, in almost all cases. Edit: In partial response to @Abhi Beckert, the documentation is refreshingly very comprehensive and meticulously maintained, AFAIK and been able to judge. I have not had a long experience with the same.

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• Lost in Translation

  - by antony.reynolds

  Using the Correct Character Set for the SOA Suite Database A couple of years ago I spent a wonderful week in Tel Aviv helping with the first Oracle BAM implementation in Israel.  Although everyone I interacted spoke better English than I did, the screens and data for the implementation were all in Hebrew, meaning the Hebrew alphabet.  Over the week I learnt to recognize a few Hebrew words, enough to enable me to test what we were doing.  So I knew SOA Suite worked OK with non-English and non-Latin character sets so I was suspicious recently when a customer was having data corruption of non-Latin characters.  On investigation it turned out that the data received correctly in the SOA Suite, but then it was corrupted after being stored in the database. A little investigation revealed that the customer was using the default database character set, which is “WE8ISO8859P1” which, as the name suggests only supports West European 8-bit characters.  What was happening was that when the customer had installed his SOA repository he had ignored the message that his database was not using AL32UTF as the character. After changing the character set on his database he no longer saw the corruption of non-English character data. So the moral of this story is Always install the SOA Repository in to an AL32UTF8 Database This is true for both SOA Suite 10g and 11g.  Ignore it at your peril, because you never know when you will need to support Hebrew, or Japanese or another multi-byte character set.

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• Cannot re-install Ubuntu 12.04 via USB (USB booting issue)

  - by Mohd Arafat Hossain

  I've read the previous questions related to my same problem regarding the USB not booting issue and have tried everything from what was replied in those post's but still no luck. I will tell you everything I have done so far (If it helps in any way...) 1) Previously I had Windows 7 running on my laptop, where I downloaded the official torrent ISO (i386 desktop) and using Unetbootin I made a bootable USB 2) Restarted the laptop with the USB connected and IT BOOTED, then I installed it on my HDD(Internal) replacing my Windows 7 3) After installing it restarted and I took some time to explore Ubuntu after the log in, then went online and followed some website for the things to do after installing Ubuntu 12.04.....and then there were errors while installing some softwares and plug-ins. The error asked me to check if i was connected to the Internet properly....while I was surfing facebook good as always on an open Firefox. The same error comes when installing Ubuntu one. 4) so I decided to re-install Ubuntu thinking I had done something wrong during the installation (I'm installing from the same USB)...and it didn't boot. I checked the boot priority and it was/is set in USB first (as always). To say in detail what happens is when I restart the USB light flashes at start, later on stops and in the screen the installed Ubuntu 12.04 loads up for me to log in (meaning it's not booting from the USB). By reading you can see that I haven't done much and I honestly didn't even touch the system settings to mess things up. As I have mentioned above I've tried everything in the previous post's in this related topic and it didn't work so I'm hoping for a new solution as a reply. Thanks in advance :) Edited: I wanted to add this I want to clean install instead of solving errors so please give a step by step guide. thanks for any help :)

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• Why does void in C mean not void?

  - by Naftuli Tzvi Kay

  In strongly-typed languages like Java and C#, void (or Void) as a return type for a method seem to mean: This method doesn't return anything. Nothing. No return. You will not receive anything from this method. What's really strange is that in C, void as a return type or even as a method parameter type means: It could really be anything. You'd have to read the source code to find out. Good luck. If it's a pointer, you should really know what you're doing. Consider the following examples in C: void describe(void *thing) { Object *obj = thing; printf("%s.\n", obj->description); } void *move(void *location, Direction direction) { void *next = NULL; // logic! return next; } Obviously, the second method returns a pointer, which by definition could be anything. Since C is older than Java and C#, why did these languages adopt void as meaning "nothing" while C used it as "nothing or anything (when a pointer)"?

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• Are books on programming hard to understand?

  - by DarkEnergy

  I've been reading books that are extremely daunting. Accelerated C++ is by far one of the books -- that I haven't finished. I plan too, but that's another story. When reading a programming book, do you find yourself re reading a lot of the paragraphs? Sometimes it takes me like an hour to read 20 pages out of a book. Sometimes they become so daunting that it takes me all day to finish a single chapter. I think having these as e-books makes them even harder to read sometimes, since I'm so used to looking down to read a book or just looking at tangible paper. IDK, just wanting to know if reading these books becomes extremely hard, and do you find yourself rereading the most simplest paragraphs 2-3 times just to get the meaning of it because the previous paragraph left your brain hurting? http://www.it-career-coach.net/2007/03/04/are-computer-programming-books-hard-to-study/ here is a article i read on something similar to this. edit sometimes I find myself reading a whole page... then I look up and say 'wth did I just read'... I could finish a chapter in 30 minutes to an hour and feel this way too...

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• How does this game loop actually work?

  - by Nicolai

  I read this playfulJS post, about ray-casting: http://www.playfuljs.com/a-first-person-engine-in-265-lines/ It looks really interested, so I decided to look at his javascript. I am no expert in javascript, so I quickly got lost. It's the game loop "object" that really gets me. I simply don't understand how it works. From the code: function GameLoop() { this.frame = this.frame.bind(this); this.lastTime = 0; this.callback = function() {}; } GameLoop.prototype.start = function(callback) { this.callback = callback; requestAnimationFrame(this.frame); }; GameLoop.prototype.frame = function(time) { var seconds = (time - this.lastTime) / 1000; this.lastTime = time; if (seconds < 0.2) this.callback(seconds); requestAnimationFrame(this.frame); }; var loop = new GameLoop(); loop.start(function frame(seconds) { map.update(seconds); player.update(controls.states, map, seconds); camera.render(player, map); }); Now, what really confuses me here, is this bind stuff and how this actually loops. I am guessing, that if less than 0.2 seconds have passed, since the last time the loop was run, it simply goes back to re-check the time. If more than 0.2 seconds have passed, it leaves the frame function, and executes the 3 lines in the loop. But, if this is true, then how does the loop.start() get called again? And what on earth is the meaning of this.frame = this.frame.bind(this);? I've looked up prototypes bind() but I really don't understand it.

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• Securing ClickOnce hosted with Amazon S3 Storage

  - by saifkhan

  Well, since my post on hosting ClickOnce with Amazon S3 Storage, I've received quite a few emails asking how to secure the deployment. At the time of this post I regret to say that there is no way to secure your ClickOnce deployment hosted with Amazon S3. The S3 storage is secured by ACL meaning that a username and password will have to be provided before access. The Amazon CloudFront, which sits on top of S3, allows you to apply security settings to your CloudFront distribution by Applying an encryption to the URL. Restricting by IP. The problem with the CloudFront is that the encryption of the URL is mandatory. ClickOnce does not provide a way to pass the "Amazon Public Key" to the CloudFront URL (you probably can if you start editing the XML and HTML files ClickOnce generate but that defeats the porpose of ClickOnce all together). What would be nice is if Amazon can allow users to restrict by IP addresses or IP Blocks. I'd sent them an email and received a response that this is something they are looking into...I won't hold my breadth though. Alternative I suggest you look at Rack Space Cloud hosting http://www.rackspacecloud.com they have very competitive pricing and recently started hosting Windows Virtual Servers. What you can do is rent a virtual server, setup IIS to host your ClickOnce applications. You can then use IIS security setting to restrict what IP/Blocks can access your ClickOnce payloads. Note: You don't really need Windows Server to host ClickOnce. Any web server can do. If you are familiar with Linux you can run that VM with rackspace for half the price of Windows. I hope you found this information helpful.

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• Consistency of an object

  - by Stefano Borini

  I tend to keep my objects consistent during their lifetime. In some cases, setting up an object requires multiple calls to different routines. For example, a connection object may operate in this way: Connection c = new Connection(); c.setHost("http://whatever") c.setPort(8080) c.connect() please note this is just a stupid example to let you understand the point. In between calls to setHost and setPort the object is inconsistent, because the Port has not been specified yet, so this code would crash Connection c = new Connection(); c.setHost("http://whatever") c.connect() Meaning that it's a requisite for connect() to have previous calls to both setHost and setPort, otherwise it won't be able to operate as its state is inconsistent. You may fix the issue with a default value, but there may be cases where no sensible default may be devised. We assume in the later example that there's no default for the port, and therefore a call to c.connect() without first calling both setHost and setPort will be an inconsistent state of the object. This, to me, points at an incorrect interface design, but I may be wrong, so I want to hear your opinion. Do you organize your interface so that the object is always in a consistent (i.e. workable) state both before and after the call ? Edit: Please don't try to solve the problem I gave above. I know how to solve that. My question is much broader in sense. I am looking for a design principle, officially or informally stated, regarding consistency of object state between calls.

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• Google earth will not reinstall

  - by chad

  I was trying to perform the the fix found at this link http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2012/01/how-to-make-google-earth-look-native-in-ubuntu It requires you to delete certain files from the /opt/google/earth/free folder and then add some new ones that you download. I deleted the files but the links to download the new ones were unusable. I was using gksudo nautilus so trash was disabled meaning I could not restore the files I had deleted. I the tried to go to the Google Earth website and reinstall it. I downloaded the .deb but when I tried to install it it gav me an error message saying "cannot install ia32-libs" I tried installing this via terminal and it gave me an error message saying chad@chad-Lenovo-G570:~$ sudo apt-get install ia32-libs [sudo] password for chad: Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable distribution that some required packages have not yet been created or been moved out of Incoming. The following information may help to resolve the situation: The following packages have unmet dependencies: ia32-libs : Depends: ia32-libs-multiarch E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages. How do I fix this? Now I am stuck without a functioning Google Earth. How can I fix this?

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• New JavaScript Editor

  - by Petr

  I did not write a blog post here for a few weeks. I think the last my post was  about releasing NetBeans 7.1 in the beginning of January. The reason is not that I would change the job:), but that I have concentrated on new JavaScript support/editor. The new JavaScript editor is written basically from scratch. The answer for the question "Why from beginning again, why do you just improve the old one?" is not easy and the decision has more aspects. One of the main reasons is that the old support was written 4 years ago and the architecture is limited. Also during the time, the APIs were changed and it was very hard to keep the editor up to date. Also there is a license issue etc. In short, it is time to rewrite the old JS editor.  We build up strong community about the PHP support in NetBeans and because many PHP developers also write JavaScript code I would like to ask you for a help. There is a continual PHP build with the new JavaScript support. You can download the result of the builds here. It's a zip file. You can unzip the file anywhere, where you want. I recommend to run the build with the new userdir, to avoid damaging your current userdir. It shouldn't happened, but just to be sure:). You can achieve this through the switch --userdir. So start the unzipped file from command line from the folder, where you unzipped it, can be done with this command on unix: bin/netbeans.sh --userdir /path/to/new/userdir and on windows: bin\netbeans.exe --userdir D:\path\to\new\userdir For the developers who use continual php build already, it's well known. There is also full IDE build with the new JavaScript support for people, who need more than only PHP support.  Because the builds with the new JavaScript editor is created from a branch, there are not nightly builds available. They will be, when we merge the branch to the trunk, but so far we have to work only with the mentioned continual build. We will merge our branch after branching NetBeans 7.2 from trunk. This is also answer for the question, what release of NetBeans will contain the new JS support. It should be the release after NetBeans 7.2. I'm asking you whether you could play with the builds or better, could work in the builds with new JavaScript support and tell us every issue that you run in. It can be everything what doesn't fit you, something doesn't work as you expected, something is slow, you want change the behaviour of a feature etc. Your input / comments are very important for us and it will help us to achieve the new JavaScript support that you need.  The best way how to communicate issues is through our Bugzilla, because it is simple to track them. Sure you can write comment here:), but still I prefer Bugzilla for any issue. You can click here (you should be already log in Bugzilla), a form for the new JavaScript issue is opened, with pre-filled component Editor and NO72 keyword. I will write about the single features later, but now I will mentioned a few features that should work in better way than in the old support.  Syntactic and semantic colouring Navigator Mark Occurrences and GoTo Declaration  Code Completion Code Completion is invoked through keyboard shortcut CTRL+SPACE. The first invocation offers items that are found through a source model. Almost all editor features are based on the model, that is build from source code. There is a lot of work on the model yet, but it should offer better results. When the pop up window with code completion items is open and you press CTRL+SPACE again, then the code completion offers all elements that are in the project. In the pictures all elements that starts with letter 't'. Formatter with many options and more :) A few features are not still implemented that are supported in the old JavaScript support (for example jQuery support), but we are adding this features ASAP.

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• Scaling Scrum within a group of 100s of programmers

  - by blunders

  Most Scrum teams lean toward 7-15 people **, though it's not clear how to scale Scrum among 100s of people, or how the effectiveness of a given team might be compared to another team within the group; meaning beyond just breaking the group into Scrum teams of 7-15 people, it's unclear how efforts between the teams are managed, compared, etc. Any suggestions related to either of these topics, or additional related topics that might be of more importance to account for in planning a large scale SCRUM grouping? ** In reviewing research related to the suggested size of software development teams, which appears to be the basis for the suggested Scrum team size, I found what appears to be an error in the research which oddly appears to show that bigger teams (15+ ppl), not smaller teams (7 ppl) are better. UPDATE, "Re: Scrum doesn't scale": Made huge amounts of progress on personally researching the topic, but thought I'd respond to the general belief of some that Scrum doesn't scale by citing a quote from Succeeding with Agile by Mike Cohn : Scrum Does Scale: You have to admire the intellectual honesty of the earliest agile authors. They were all very careful to say that agile methodolgies like Scrum were for small projects. This conservatism wasn’t because agile or Scrum turned out to be unsuited for large projects but because they hadn’t used these processes on large projects and so were reluctant to advise their readers to do so. But, in the years since the Agile Manifesto and the books that came shortly before and after it, we have learned that the principles and practices of agile development can be scaled up and applied on large projects, albeit it with a considerable amount of overhead. Fortunately, if large organizations use the techniques described regarding the role of the product owner, working with a shared product backlog, being mindful of dependencies, coordinating work among teams, and cultivating communities of practice, they can successfully scale a Scrum project. SOURCE: (ran across the book thanks to Ladislav Mrnka answer)

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• How to improve batching performance

  - by user4241

  Hello, I am developing a sprite based 2D game for mobile platform(s) and I'm using OpenGL (well, actually Irrlicht) to render graphics. First I implemented sprite rendering in a simple way: every game object is rendered as a quad with its own GPU draw call, meaning that if I had 200 game objects, I made 200 draw calls per frame. Of course this was a bad choice and my game was completely CPU bound because there is a little CPU overhead assosiacted in every GPU draw call. GPU stayed idle most of the time. Now, I thought I could improve performance by collecting objects into large batches and rendering these batches with only a few draw calls. I implemented batching (so that every game object sharing the same texture is rendered in same batch) and thought that my problems are gone... only to find out that my frame rate was even lower than before. Why? Well, I have 200 (or more) game objects, and they are updated 60 times per second. Every frame I have to recalculate new position (translation and rotation) for vertices in CPU (GPU on mobile platforms does not support instancing so I can't do it there), and doing this calculation 48000 per second (200*60*4 since every sprite has 4 vertices) simply seems to be too slow. What I could do to improve performance? All game objects are moving/rotating (almost) every frame so I really have to recalculate vertex positions. Only optimization that I could think of is a look-up table for rotations so that I wouldn't have to calculate them. Would point sprites help? Any nasty hacks? Anything else? Thanks.

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• Multi language site - use of canonical link and link rel="alternate"

  - by julia

  I keep reading everywhere that if you have a multilanguage site, where the same page appears in, say, French and English, then this is considered as duplicate content by google. It is written that using canonical link is the solution, but I do not understand how to use it in this case. Should I: Choose either French URL or English URL to be the canonical (main) one, and where I will place the canonical link? If so, how do I decide which of the two URLs must be canonical? both languages are important to me and I want the content under both languages to be indexed by google and served to the user, depending on the language in which he searches. OR should I place a canonical link on both French and English URLs? If so, then I do not understand the meaning of using the canonical link? In this case would both URLs be indexed, are both of them considered as "important" by google and not duplicates? Also I read that link rel="alternate" can be used to indicate to google that, for example the French URL is the French-language equivalent of the English page. This makes sense and I understand how to use such links, but how are they combined with canonical links? Should I define both the canonical URL AND specify rel="alternate" in both URLs? Could someone help me to clarify this, cause I'm stuck with this and can't seem to find a good-enough explanation in different sources.

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• Proper Data Structure for Commentable Comments

  - by Wesley

  Been struggling with this on an architectural level. I have an object which can be commented on, let's call it a Post. Every post has a unique ID. Now I want to comment on that Post, and I can use ID as a foreign key, and each PostComment has an ItemID field which correlates to the Post. Since each Post has a unique ID, it is very easy to assign "Top Level" comments. When I comment on a comment however, I feel like I now need a PostCommentComment, which attaches to the ID of the PostComment. Since ID's are assigned sequentially, I can no longer simply use ItemID to differentiate where in the tree the comment is assigned. I.E. both a Post and a Post Comment might have an ID of '5', so my foreign key relationship is invalid. This seems like it could go on infinitely, with PostCommentCommentComment's etc... What's the best way to solve this? Should I have a field in the comment called "IsPostComment" or something of the like to know which collection to attach the ID to? This strikes me as the best solution I've seen so far, but now I feel like I need to make recursive DataBase calls which start to get expensive. Meaning, I get a Post and get all PostComments where ItemID == Post.ID && where IsPostComment == true Then I take that as a collection, gather all the ID's of the PostComments, and do another search where ItemID == PostComment[all].ID && where IsPostComment == false, then repeat infinitely. This means I make a call for every layer, and if I'm calling 100 Posts, I might make 1000 DB calls to get 10 layers of comments each. What is the right way to do this?

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• Screen lock broken when using separate x screens

  - by Wolf

  For some reason, the screen lock appears to be broken when I use separate x screens (it works fine if I use twin view or just one monitor, though). If I wait for the screen to lock (or if I tell it to lock), it fades to black, showing only the mouse cursor. However, when I move the mouse to bring up the password prompt, nothing happens, the screens remain completely blank. Furthermore, it would appear that the screen lock never activated in the first place, for two reasons: one, if I blindly enter my password and press enter, nothing happens; and two, if I press ctrl+alt+delete and then enter it logs me out (which shouldn't happen if the password prompt is there, right), losing any progress I have on any of the open programs (meaning, not a very friendly option for a programmer ;) ). So yeah, does anyone know why this is happening, and how to fix it? Thanks! Notes: I am using Ubuntu 11.10 64 bit. I am using gnome-classic, but the same problem occurs when I use unity. I do not have xscreensaver, nor do I have any screen savers running (except, I guess for the default blank one).

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• What are the packages/libraries I should install before compiling Python from source?

  - by Lennart Regebro

  Once in a while I need to install a new Ubuntu (I used it both for desktop and servers) and I always forget a couple of libraries I should have installed before compiling, meaning I have to recompile, and it's getting annoying. So now I want to make a complete list of all library packages to install before compiling Python (and preferably how optional they are). This is the list I compiled with below help and by digging in setup.py. It is complete for Ubuntu 10.04 and 11.04 at least: build-essential (obviously) libz-dev (also pretty common and essential) libreadline-dev (or the Python prompt is crap) libncursesw5-dev libssl-dev libgdbm-dev libsqlite3-dev libbz2-dev More optional: tk-dev libdb-dev Ubuntu has no packages for v1.8.5 of the Berkeley database, nor (for obvious reasons) the Sun audio hardware, so the bsddb185 and sunaudiodev modules will still not be built on Ubuntu, but all other modules are built with the above packages installed. Python 2.5 and Python 2.6 also needs to have LDFLAGS set on Ubuntu 11.04 and later, to handle the new multi-arch layout: export LDFLAGS="-L/usr/lib/$(dpkg-architecture -qDEB_HOST_MULTIARCH)" For Python 2.6 and 2.7 you also need to explicitly enable SSL after running the ./configure script and before running make. In Modules/Setup there are lines like this: #SSL=/usr/local/ssl #_ssl _ssl.c \ # -DUSE_SSL -I$(SSL)/include -I$(SSL)/include/openssl \ # -L$(SSL)/lib -lssl -lcrypto Uncomment these lines and change the SSL variable to /usr: SSL=/usr _ssl _ssl.c \ -DUSE_SSL -I$(SSL)/include -I$(SSL)/include/openssl \ -L$(SSL)/lib -lssl -lcrypto Python 2.6 also needs Modules/_ssl.c modified to be used with OpenSSL 1.0, which is used in Ubuntu 11.10. At around line 300 you'll find this: else if (proto_version == PY_SSL_VERSION_SSL3) self->ctx = SSL_CTX_new(SSLv3_method()); /* Set up context */ else if (proto_version == PY_SSL_VERSION_SSL2) self->ctx = SSL_CTX_new(SSLv2_method()); /* Set up context */ else if (proto_version == PY_SSL_VERSION_SSL23) self->ctx = SSL_CTX_new(SSLv23_method()); /* Set up context */ Change that into: else if (proto_version == PY_SSL_VERSION_SSL3) self->ctx = SSL_CTX_new(SSLv3_method()); /* Set up context */ #ifndef OPENSSL_NO_SSL2 else if (proto_version == PY_SSL_VERSION_SSL2) self->ctx = SSL_CTX_new(SSLv2_method()); /* Set up context */ #endif else if (proto_version == PY_SSL_VERSION_SSL23) self->ctx = SSL_CTX_new(SSLv23_method()); /* Set up context */ This disables SSL_v2 support, which apparently is gone in OpenSSL1.0.

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• Does Google submit HTML forms?

  - by Saeed Neamati

  I have a web page, say http://domain/purchase and in this page, I have a web form. User, on submitting this form (which has validation, both client-side and server side and won't be validated until fields are filled appropriately), would be redirected to another page, where (s)he can choose other things, and specify other settings and then purchase our product. Say the second page is http://domain/options. So, user comes to our site and visits http://domain/purchase, fills the form, submits it, and then would be redirected to the second page, http://doamin/options?parameter1=value1&parameter2=value2, which contains parameters from the first page. This is very common in passing parameters between web pages (or technically, between URLs). Now I was reviewing my website, and saw that Google had indexed some of my redirected web pages and URLs, like: http://domain/options?parameter1=value1&parameter2=value2 http://domain/options?parameter1=value3&parameter2=value4 http://domain/options?parameter1=value5&parameter2=value6 http://domain/options?parameter1=value7&parameter2=value8 http://domain/options?parameter1=value9&parameter2=value10 This means that Google Bot has visited our http://domain/purchase page, and has filled our form, and has submitted it, and was being redirected to the other URL, with corresponding parameters. This is the only way that makes sense to me. Does Google really fills forms? PS: All parameters are meaningful, meaning that they are not filled arbitrarily. For example, the phone parameter in indexed pages has correct phone numbers. How is it possible?

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• Understanding normal maps on terrain

  - by JohnB

  I'm having trouble understanding some of the math behind normal map textures even though I've got it to work using borrowed code, I want to understand it. I have a terrain based on a heightmap. I'm generating a mesh of triangles at load time and rendering that mesh. Now for each vertex I need to calculate a normal, a tangent, and a bitangent. My understanding is as follows, have I got this right? normal is a unit vector facing outwards from the surface of the triangle. For a vertex I take the average of the normals of the triangles using that vertex. tangent is a unit vector in the direction of the 'u' coordinates of the texture map. As my texture u,v coordinates follow the x and y coordinates of the terrain, then my understanding is that this vector is simply the vector along the surface in the x direction. So should be able to calculate this as simply the difference between vertices in the x direction to get a vector, (and normalize it). bitangent is a unit vector in the direction of the 'v' coordinates of the texture map. As my texture u,v coordinates follow the x and y coordinates of the terrain, then my understanding is that this vector is simply the vector along the surface in the y direction. So should be able to calculate this as simply the difference between vertices in the y direction to get a vector, (and normalize it). However the code I have borrowed seems much more complicated than this and takes into account the actual values of u, and v at each vertex which I don't understand the need for as they increase in exactly the same direction as x, and y. I implemented what I thought from above, and it simply doesn't work, the normals are clearly not working for lighting. Have I misunderstood something? Or can someone explain to me the physical meaning of the tangent and bitangent vectors when applied to a mesh generated from a hightmap like this, when u and v texture coordinates map along the x and y directions. Thanks for any help understanding this.

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• How to write a very basic compiler [closed]

  - by Ali

  Possible Duplicate: Best Online resources to learn about Compilers? What would be the best way to learn about compilers, and executable formats? Advanced compilers like gcc compile codes into machine readable files according to the language in which the code has been written (e.g. C, C++, etc). In fact, they interpret the meaning of each codes according to library and functions of the corresponding languages. Correct me if I'm wrong. I wish to better understand compilers by writing a very basic compiler (probably in C) to compile a static file (e.g. Hello World in a text file). I tried some tutorials and books, but all of them are for practical cases. They deal with compiling dynamic codes with meanings connected with the corresponding language. How can I write a basic compiler to convert a static text into a machine readable file? The next step will be introducing variables into the compiler; imagine that we want to write a compiler which compile only some functions of a language. Introducing practical tutorials and resources is highly appreciated :-)

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• Alternatives to a leveling system

  - by Bane

  I'm currently designing a rough prototype of a mecha fighting game. These are the basics I came up with: Multiplayer (matchmaking for up to 10 people, for now) Browser based (HTML5) 2D (<canvas>) Persistent (as in, players have accounts and don't have to use a new mech each time they start a match) Players earn money upon destroying another mech, which is used to buy parts (guns, armor, boosters, etc) Simplicity (both of the game itself, and of the development of said game) No "leveling" (as in, players don't get awarded with XP) The last part is bothering me. At first, I wanted to have players gain experience points (XP) when destroying other mechs, but gaining two things at once (money and XP) seemed to be in conflict with my last point, which is simplicity. If I were to have a leveling system, that would require additional development. But, the biggest problem is that I simply couldn't fit it anywhere! Adding levels would require adding meaning to these levels, and most of the things that I hoped to achieve could already be achieved with the money mechanic I introduced. So I decided to drop leveling off completely. That, in turn, removed a fairly popular and robust mean of progression in games from my game (not that I would use it well anyway). Is there another way of progression in games, aside from leveling and XP points, that wouldn't get rendered redundant by my money mechanic, would be somehow meaningful (even on a symbolic level), and wouldn't be in conflict with my last point, which is simplicity?

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