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• I have an MIS degree. How do I sell myself as a programmer?

  - by hydroparadise

  So, I graduated with a BSBA in Management Information Systems with honors almost 2 years ago which is more of a business degree. As of right now, I do have a job title of "Programmer", but it's more of a report writing position in an arbitrary, proprietary language called PowerOn with the occasional interesting project using more mainstream technologies like .Net and Java. I am also somewhat isoloated being the only programmer in the workplace, which I beleive is a detriment to my career path. The only people I have to bounce ideas against are those on the various SE sites. I don't regret going MIS, but over the past couple of years I have discovered my passion for coding, even though I have been doing some form of coding profesionally and as an enthusiast for years. I do want to persue my Masters in CS (at a later time), but I am not sure if I necessarily need a CS degree to get in with a team of programmers. In addition, I do have a number classes I have taken for different laguanges on the way (C++, Java, SQL, and VB.Net) I beleive my strength is in problem solving where code is just a tool to tackling to problem if needed. My question: How do I best sell myself as a programmer? Should I continue pounding out reports and wait till I have my masters in CS? Or am I viable to be a programmer as I stand?

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• How to get Visual Studio 2010 Express Edition on Windows 7

  - by thanigai

  Visual studio 2010 is an amzing release from Microsoft. I have tried the beta 1,2 of Visual Studio 2010 and finally the full version is released. I am also interested in the latest edition of Windows which nothing but our Windows 7. Next to Vista I like this version very much. Out of curiosity I have installed the prebuild version of Windows 7. I tried installing the express edition here and it failed making me disappointed. I tried two or three times and finally I decided to download the trial version of Windows 7. After that I can install the Visual Studio 2010 express edition easily. I have given the link below from where I have downloaded the file. http://www.microsoft.com/express/downloads/ Here the link give is through Web PI Installer. Other option is you can download the ISO image file and burn them to a disc or use a virtual disc This Visual Web developer will provide the Sql Server engine alone. To get a Sql Server Management Studio get from the following link http://www.microsoft.com/express/Database/InstallOptions.aspx That's it all the things necessary for the web application programming is ready. Ah I forget to tell about the Silverlight. Please find the Silverlight 4 latest tools from the below link (WCF RIA services is the main update) http://www.silverlight.net/getstarted/ Silverlight 4 Tools(http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=eff8a0da-0a4d-48e8-8366-6ddf2ecad801&displaylang=en) Expression Blend 4 trial(http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=88484825-1b3c-4e8c-8b14-b05d025e1541&displaylang=en) I think the reader would have enjoyed on how to get these things. Please let me know if you are not clear with any of these things.  Thanks, Thani

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• Building Enterprise Smartphone App &ndash; Part 4: Application Development Considerations

  - by Tim Murphy

  This is the final part in a series of posts based on a talk I gave recently at the Chicago Information Technology Architects Group.  Feel free to leave feedback. Application Development Considerations Now we get to the actual building of your solutions.  What are the skills and resources that will be needed in order to develop a smartphone application in the enterprise? Language Knowledge One of the first things you need to consider when you are deciding which platform language do you either have the most in house skill base or can you easily acquire.  If you already have developers who know Java or C# you may want to use either Android or Windows Phone.  You should also take into consideration the market availability of developers.  If your key developer leaves how easy is it to find a knowledgeable replacement? A second consideration when it comes to programming languages is the qualities exposed by the languages of a particular platform.  How well does that development language and its associated frameworks support things like security and access to the features of the smartphone hardware?  This will play into your overall cost of ownership if you have to create this infrastructure on your own. Manage Limited Resources Everything is limited on a smartphone: battery, memory, processing power, network bandwidth.  When developing your applications you will have to keep your footprint as small as possible in every way.  This means not running unnecessary processes in the background that will drain the battery or pulling more data over the airwaves than you have to.  You also want to keep your on device in as compact a format as possible. Mobile Design Patterns There are a number of design patterns that have either come to life because of smartphone development or have been adapted for this use.  The main pattern in the Windows Phone environment is the MVVM (Model-View-View-Model).  This is great for overall application structure and separation of concerns.  The fun part is trying to keep that separation as pure as possible.  Many of the other patterns may or may not have strict definitions, but some that you need to be concerned with are push notification, asynchronous communication and offline data storage. Real estate is limited on smartphones and even tablets. You are also limited in the type of controls that can be represented in the UI. This means rethinking how you modularize your application. Typing is also much harder to do so you want to reduce this as much as possible.  This leads to UI patterns.  While not what we would traditionally think of as design patterns the guidance each platform has for UI design is critical to the success of your application.  If user find the application difficult navigate they will not use it. Development Process Because of the differences in development tools required, test devices and certification and deployment processes your teams will need to learn new way of working together.  This will include the need to integrate service contracts of back-end systems with mobile applications.  You will also want to make sure that you present consistency across different access points to corporate data.  Your web site may have more functionality than your smartphone application, but it should have a consistent core set of functionality.  This all requires greater communication between sub-teams of your developers. Testing Process Testing of smartphone apps has a lot more to do with what happens when you lose connectivity or if the user navigates away from your application. There are a lot more opportunities for the user or the device to perform disruptive acts.  This should be your main testing concentration aside from the main business requirements.  You will need to do things like setting the phone to airplane mode and seeing what the application does in order to weed out any gaps in your handling communication interruptions. Need For Outside Experts Since this is a development area that is new to most companies the need for experts is a lot greater. Whether these are consultants, vendor representatives or just development community forums you will need to establish expert contacts. Nothing is more dangerous for your project timelines than a lack of knowledge.  Make sure you know who to call to avoid lengthy delays in your project because of knowledge gaps. Security Security has to be a major concern for enterprise applications. You aren't dealing with just someone's game standings. You are dealing with a companies intellectual property and competitive advantage. As such you need to start by limiting access to the application itself.  Once the user is in the app you need to ensure that the data is secure at all times.  This includes both local storage and across the wire.  This means if a platform doesn’t natively support encryption for these functions you will need to find alternatives to secure your data.  You also need to keep secret (encryption) keys obfuscated or locked away outside of the application. People can disassemble the code otherwise and break your encryption. Offline Capabilities As we discussed earlier one your biggest concerns is not having connectivity.  Because of this a good portion of your code may be dedicated to handling loss of connection and reconnection situations.  What do you do if you lose the network?  Back up all your transactions and store of any supporting data so that operations can continue off line. In order to support this you will need to determine the available flat file or local data base capabilities of the platform.  Any failed transactions will need to support a retry mechanism whether it is automatic or user initiated.  This also includes your services since they will need to be able to roll back partially completed transactions.  What ever you do, don’t ignore this area when you are designing your system. Deployment Each platform has different deployment capabilities. Some are more suited to enterprise situations than others. Apple's approach is probably the most mature at the moment. Prior to the current generation of smartphone platforms it would have been Windows CE. Windows Phone 7 has the limitation that the app has to be distributed through the same network as public facing applications. You mark them as private which means that they are only accessible by a direct URL. Unfortunately this does not make them undiscoverable (although it is very difficult). This will change with Windows Phone 8 where companies will be able to certify their own applications and distribute them.  Given this Windows Phone applications need to be more diligent with application access in order to keep them restricted to the company's employees. My understanding of the Android deployment schemes is that it is much less standardized then either iOS or Windows Phone. Someone would have to confirm or deny that for me though since I have not yet put the time into researching this platform further. Given my limited exposure to the iOS and Android platforms I have not been able to confirm this, but there are varying degrees of user involvement to install and keep applications updated. At one extreme the user just goes to a website to do the install and in other case they may need to download files and perform steps to install them. Future Bluetooth Today we use Bluetooth for keyboards, mice and headsets.  In the future it could be used to interrogate car computers or manufacturing systems or possibly retail machines by service techs.  This would open smartphones to greater use as a almost a Star Trek Tricorder.  You would get you all your data as well as being able to use it as a universal remote for just about any device or machine. Better corporation controlled deployment At least in the Windows Phone world the upcoming release of Windows Phone 8 will include a private certification and deployment option that is currently not available with Windows Phone 7 (Mango). We currently have to run the apps through the Marketplace certification process and use a targeted distribution method. Platform independent approaches HTML5 and JavaScript with Web Service has become a popular topic lately for not only creating flexible web site, but also creating cross platform mobile applications.  I’m not yet convinced that this lowest common denominator approach is viable in most cases, but it does have it’s place and seems to be growing.  Be sure to keep an eye on it. Summary From my perspective enterprise smartphone applications can offer a great competitive advantage to many companies.  They are not cheap to build and should be approached cautiously.  Understand the factors I have outlined in this series, do you due diligence and see if there is a portion of your business that can benefit from the mobile experience. del.icio.us Tags: Architecture,Smartphones,Windows Phone,iOS,Android

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• Discovering Your Project

  - by Tim Murphy

  The discovery phase of any project is both exciting and critical to the project’s success.  There are several key points that you need to keep in mind as you navigate this process. The first thing you need to understand is who the players in the project are and what their motivations are for the project.  Leaving out a key stakeholder in the resulting product is one of the easiest ways to doom your project to fail.  The better the quality of the input you have at this early phase the better chance you will have of creating a well accepted deliverable. The next task you should tackle is to gather the goals for the project.  Specifically, what does the company expect to get for the money they are about to layout.  This seems like a common sense task, but you would be surprised how many teams to straight to building the system.  Even if you are following an agile methodology I believe that this is critical. Inventorying the resources that already exists gives you an idea what you are going to have to build and what you can leverage at lower risk.  This list should include documentation, servers, code repositories, databases, languages, security systems and supporting teams.  All of these are “resources” that can effect the cost and delivery schedule of your project. Finally, you need to verify what you have found and documented with the stakeholders and subject matter experts.  Documentation that has not been reviewed is actually a list of assumptions and we all know that assumptions are the mother of all screw ups. If you give the discovery phase of your project the attention that it deserves your project has a much better chance of success. I would love to hear what other people find important for this phase.  Please leave comments on this post so we can share the knowledge. del.icio.us Tags: Project discovery,documentation,business analysis,architecture

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• Which architecture should I choose for this project?

  - by Jichao

  I have a project. The server which based on a phone PCI-board is responsible for received phone calls from the customer and then redirect the phone calls to the operators. I have decided to code the server using c++ programming language and qt framework because the PCI-board SDK's interface is c/c++ originated and for the sake of portability. The server need to send the information of the the customer to the operator while ringing the operator and the ui interface of the operator client should be browser-based. Now the key problem is how could the server notify the operator that there is a phone call for he/she. One architecture I have considered is like this, The operator browser client use ajax pooling the web server to check whether there is call to the client; the web server pooling the database server to check whether there is call; the desktop server(c++) wait for the phone calls and set the information in the database. The other operations such as hang up the phone call from the client, retransfer the phone call to the other operator also use this architecture. Then, is there any way other than pooling the server(js code setInterval('getDail', 1000)) to decide whether there is a call to the operator? Is this architecture feasible or should I use some terrific techniques that I do know such as web services,xml-rpc, soap???

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• Oracle NoSQL Database: Cleaner Performance

  - by Charles Lamb

  In an earlier post I noted that Berkeley DB Java Edition cleaner performance had improved significantly in release 5.x. From an Oracle NoSQL Database point of view, this is important because Berkeley DB Java Edition is the core storage engine for Oracle NoSQL Database. Many contemporary NoSQL Databases utilize log based (i.e. append-only) storage systems and it is well-understood that these architectures also require a "cleaning" or "compaction" mechanism (effectively a garbage collector) to free up unused space. 10 years ago when we set out to write a new Berkeley DB storage architecture for the BDB Java Edition ("JE") we knew that the corresponding compaction mechanism would take years to perfect. "Cleaning", or GC, is a hard problem to solve and it has taken all of those years of experience, bug fixes, tuning exercises, user deployment, and user feedback to bring it to the mature point it is at today. Reports like Vinoth Chandar's where he observes a 20x improvement validate the maturity of JE's cleaner. Cleaner performance has a direct impact on predictability and throughput in Oracle NoSQL Database. A cleaner that is too aggressive will consume too many resources and negatively affect system throughput. A cleaner that is not aggressive enough will allow the disk storage to become inefficient over time. It has to Work well out of the box, and Needs to be configurable so that customers can tune it for their specific workloads and requirements. The JE Cleaner has been field tested in production for many years managing instances with hundreds of GBs to TBs of data. The maturity of the cleaner and the entire underlying JE storage system is one of the key advantages that Oracle NoSQL Database brings to the table -- we haven't had to reinvent the wheel.

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• Sys Admins are kind of like gods, aren't they? [closed]

  - by user75798

  A systems administrator has root access to the entire system. There is nothing they cannot do. They are omnipotent. Their power is absolute. Nothing dan stand before them. Like Sauron, the Dark Lord, they do not share power. There can be but one root. Else contradiction at the most fundamental level is possible, and that can not be tolerated. The sys admin's power is unconditional and non-negotiable. To be a sys admin is like being a god. (And if they are a god, what is the religion?) There is an old saying that absolute power corrupts absolutely. I wonder whether being a sys admin has ended up warping an individual. Perhaps a sys admin has become crazed or even gone berserk? Surely sys admins must need to be very level headed people. For example, imagine being 'the' sys admin for the NSA. (What an awesome job that would be!) Think about the access to data, the encryption keys, the secrets... Perhaps one day a sys admin might go bonkers, turn up for work and 'uninstall the entire NSA'! :) But you would have the same sorts of responsibilities working at a bank or other organization. I wonder whether much emphasis is put on ensuring that sys admins are level headed in the first place and kept sweet in the second. Do they get paid well? I am sure they do not receive half of what they are worth, considering all the hard earned knowledge they have had to gain and the massive responsibility they have.

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• How to change careers

  - by Jack Black

  For the past 4 years I have worked in c# doing web development. I have really enjoyed it, learnt a lot and have a worked hard to get to a position where I am earning good money and enjoy the work. However lately - I have wanted a change. What with the "native renaissance" I would like to change my career from being high level application and web development to more down to the metal native development. I haven't done any c or c++ since Uni over 4 years ago and so I have begun reading text books and websites to brush up. However - one major issue I have is that I have no practical experience with C++ and although I am brushing up on it, there will be a lot I don't know. Most of the jobs I have seen in native code around me all require native experience. The only positions I can find that don't explicitly ask for native experience are junior level positions. In my current role I am a mid level developer and although there would be a lot to learn in a c++ position, I wouldn't class myself as a junior. I guess my question is, how do people solve this issue when changing programming languages for their profession and / or how would you approach this hurdle? Like I said, I would really like to try out native development professionally but I wouldn't want to move back to a junior role. Would employers consider years of managed development and native hobby projects enough experience?

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• What scenarios are implementations of Object Management Group (OMG) Data Distribution Service best suited for?

  - by mindcrime

  I've always been a big fan of asynchronous messaging and pub/sub implementations, but coming from a Java background, I'm most familiar with using JMS based messaging systems, such as JBoss MQ, HornetQ, ActiveMQ, OpenMQ, etc. I've also loosely followed the discussion of AMQP. But I recently became aware of the Data Distribution Service Specification from the Object Management Group, and found there are a couple of open-source implementations: OpenSplice OpenDDS It sounds like this stuff is focused on the kind of high-volume scenarios one tends to associate with financial trading exchanges and what-not. My current interest is more along the lines of notifications related to activity stream processing (think Twitter / Facebook) and am wondering if the DDS servers are worth looking into further. Could anyone who has practical experience with this technology, and/or a deep understanding of it, comment on how useful it is, and what scenarios it is best suited for? How does it stack up against more "traditional" JMS servers, and/or AMQP (or even STOMP or OpenWire, etc?) Edit: FWIW, I found some information at this StackOverflow thread. Not a complete answer, but anybody else finding this question might also find that thread useful, hence the added link.

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• Algorithm to match timestamped events from two sources

  - by urza.cc

  I have two different physical devices (one is camera, one is other device) that observe the same scene and mark when a specified event occures. (record timestamp) So they each produce a serie of timestamps "when the event was observed". Theoretically the recorded timestamps should be very well aligned: Visualized ideal situation on two time lines "s" and "r" as recorded from the two devices: but more likely they will not be so nicely aligned and there might be missing events from timeline s or r: I am looking for algorithm to match events from "s" and "r" like this: So that the result will be something like: (s1,null); (s2,r1); (s3,null); (s4,r2); (s5,r3); (null,r4); (s6,r5); Or something similar. Maybe with some "confidence" rating. I have some ideas, but I feel that this might be probably a well known problem, that has some good known solutions, but I don't know the right terminology. I am a little bit out of my element here, this is not my primary area of programming.. Any helps, suggestions etc will be appreciated.

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• How can I triple boot Xubuntu, Ubuntu and Windows?

  - by ag.restringere

  Triple Booting Xubuntu, Ubuntu and Windows I'm an avid Xubuntu (Ubuntu + XFCE) user but I also dual boot with Windows XP. I originally created 3 partitions and wanted to use the empty one as a storage volume but now I want to install Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (the one with Unity) to do advanced testing and packaging. Ideally I would love to keep these two totally separate as I had problems in the past with conflicts between Unity and XFCE. This way I could wipe the Ubuntu w/ Unity installation if there are problems and really mess around with it. My disk looks like this: /dev/sda1 -- Windows XP /dev/sda2 -- Disk /dev/sda: 200.0 GB, 200049647616 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 24321 cylinders, total 390721968 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 * 63 78139454 39069696 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT /dev/sda2 78141440 156280831 39069696 83 Linux /dev/sda3 156282878 386533375 115125249 5 Extended /dev/sda4 386533376 390721535 2094080 82 Linux swap / Solaris /dev/sda5 156282880 386533375 115125248 83 Linux Keep each in it's own partition and totally separate and be able to select from each of the three systems from the GRUB boot menu... sda1 --- [Windows XP] sda2 --- [Ubuntu 12.04] "Unity" sda3(4,5) -- [Xubuntu 12.02] "Primary XFCE" What is the safest and easiest way to do this without messing my system up and requiring invasive activity?

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• Transition from 2D to 3D Game development [closed]

  - by jakebird451

  I have been working in the 2D world for a long time from manual blitting in windows to SDL to Python (pygame, pyopengl) and a bunch in between. Needless to say I have been programming for a while. So a while ago I started to program in OpenGL via C++ on my Mac. I then got a little intricate with my work after a while (3D models with skeleton structure and terrain development). After a long time of tinkering, I stopped due to the heavy work just to yield a low level understanding of how OpenGL works. Still interested in Graphics and Game Development I went on a search for a stable game engine with some features to grow on. Licence Requirement: Anything other than GPL (LGPL will do) OS Requirement: Mac & Windows Shader: GLSL or CG (GLSL preferred due to experience) Models: Any model structure with rigging (bone) support & animation I am looking at http://www.ogre3d.org/ currently and am starting to meddle around with some examples. However I am a little reluctant to spend a lot of time on it only to yield another dead end. So instead of falling down a spiraling black pit, I am posting my question to you guys to lead me in the right direction based on my requirements. How was your experience with the engine you recommend? Is it well documented? Does it have well documented examples? Any library requirements (Boost, libpng, etc)?

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• Html 5 clock, part ii - CSS marker classes and getElementsByClassName

  - by Norgean

  The clock I made in part i displays the time in "long" - "It's a quarter to ten" (but in Norwegian). To save space, some letters are shared, "sevenineight" is four letters shorter than "seven nine eight". We only want to highlight the "correct" parts of this, for example "sevenineight". When I started programming the clock, each letter had its own unique ID, and my script would "get" each element individually, and highlight / hide each element according to some obscure logic. I quickly realized, despite being in a post surgery haze, …this is a stupid way to do it. And, to paraphrase NPH, if you find yourself doing something stupid, stop, and be awesome instead. We want an easy way to get all the items we want to highlight. Perhaps we can use the new getElementsByClassName function? Try to mark each element with a classname or two. So in "sevenineight": 's' is marked as 'h7', and the first 'n' is marked with both 'h7' and 'h9' (h for hour). <div class='h7 h9'>N</div><div class='h9'>I</div> getElementsByClassName('h9') will return the four letters of "nine". Notice that these classes are not backed by any CSS, they only appear directly in html (and are used in javascript). I have not seen classes used this way elsewhere, and have chosen to call them "marker classes" - similar to marker interfaces - until somebody comes up with a better name.

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• The MsC gray zone: How to deal with the "too unexperienced on engineering/too under-qualified for research" situation?

  - by Hunter2

  Last year I've got a MsC degree on CS. On the beginning of the MsC course, I was keen on moving on with research and go for a PhD. However, as the months passed, I started to feel the urge to write software that people would, well, actually use. The programming bug had bitten me, again. So, I decided that before deciding on getting a PhD degree, I would spend some time on the "real world", working as a software developer. Sadly, most companies here in Brazil are "services" companies that seem to be stuck on the 80s when it comes to software development. I have to fend off pushy managers, less-than-competent coworkers and outrageous software requirements (why does everyone seem to need a 50k Oracle license and a behemoth Websphere AS for their CRUD applications?) on a daily basis, and even though I still love software development, the situation is starting to touch a nerve. And, mind you, I'm already lucky for getting a job at a place that isn't a plain software sweatshop. Sure, there are better places around here or I could always try my luck abroad, but then I hit the proverbial brick wall: Sorry, you're too unexperienced as a developer and too under-qualified as a researcher I've already heard this, and variations of that, multiple times. Research position recruiters look for die-hard, publication-ridden, rockstar PhDs, while development position recruiters look for die-hard, experience-ridden, rockstar programmers. To most, my MsC degree seems like a minor bump on my CV (and an outright waste of time for some). Applying for abroad positions is even harder, since the employer would have to deal of the hassle of a VISA process, which I understand that, sometimes, is too much. Now I'm feeling I've reached a dead-end. I'm certain that development (and not research) is my thing, so should I just dismiss my MsC (or play it as a "trump card") and play the "big fish on a small pond" role while I gather some experience and contribute on some open-source projects as a plus? Is there a better way to handle this?

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• Learning OO for a C Programmer

  - by Holysmoke

  I've been programming professionally in C, and only C, for around 10 years in a variety of roles. As would be normal to expect, I understand the idioms of the language fairly well and beyond that also some of the design nuances - which APIs to make public, who calls what, who does what, what is supposed to reentrant and so on. I grew up reading 'Writing Solid Code', it's early C edition, not the one based on C++. However, I've never ever programmed in an OO language. Now, I want to migrate to writing applications for iPhone (maybe android), so want to learn to use Objective-C and use it with a degree of competence fitting a professional programmer. How do I wrap my head around the OO stuff? What would be your smallest reading list suggestion to me. Is there a book that carries some sort of relatively real world example OO design Objective-C? Besides, the reading what source code would you recommend me to go through. How to learn OO paradigm using Objective-C?

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• How does datomic handle "corrections"?

  - by blueberryfields

  tl;dr Rich Hickey describes datomic as a system which implicitly deals with timestamps associated with data storage from my experience, data is often imperfectly stored in systems, and on many occasions needs to retroactively be corrected (ie, often the question of "was a True on Tuesday at 12:00pm?" will have an incorrect answer stored in the database) This seems like a spot where the abstractions behind datomic might break - do they? If they don't, how does the system handle such corrections? Rich Hickey, in several of his talks, justifies the creation of datomic, and explains its benefits. His work, if I understand correctly, is motivated by core the insight that humans, when speaking about data and facts, implicitly associate some of the related context into their work(a date-time). By pushing the work required to manage the implicit date-time component of context into the database, he's created a system which is both much easier to understand, and much easier to program. This turns out to be relevant to most database programmers in practice - his work saves everyone a lot of time managing complex, hard to produce/debug/fix, time queries. However, especially in large databases, data is often damaged/incorrect (maybe it was not input correctly, maybe it eroded over time, etc...). While most database updates are insertions of new facts, and should indeed be treated that way, a non-trivial subset of the work required to manage time-queries has to do with retroactive updates. I have yet to see any documentation which explains how such corrections, or retroactive updates, are handled by datomic; from my experience, they are a non-trivial (and incredibly difficult to deal with) subset of time-related data manipulation that database programmers are faced with. Does datomic gracefully handle such updates? If so, how?

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• Designs for outputting to a spreadsheet

  - by Austin Moore

  I'm working on a project where we are tasked to gather and output various data to a spreadsheet. We are having tons of problems with the file that holds the code to write the spreadsheet. The cell that the data belongs to is hardcoded, so anytime you need to add anything to the middle of the spreadsheet, you have to increment the location for all the fields after that in the code. There are random blank rows, to add padding between sections, and subsections within the sections, so there's no real pattern that we can replicate. Essentially, anytime we have to add or change anything to the spreadsheet it requires a many long and tedious hours. The code is all in this one large file, hacked together overtime in Perl. I've come up with a few OO solutions, but I'm not too familiar with OO programming in Perl and all my attempts at it haven't been great, so I've shied away from it so far. I've suggested we handle this section of the program with a more OO friendly language, but we can't apparently. I've also suggested that we scrap the entire spreadsheet idea, and just move to a webpage, but we can't do that either. We've been working on this project for a few months, and every time we have to change that file, we all dread it. I'm thinking it's time to start some refactoring. However, I don't even know what could make this file easier to work with. The way the output is formatted makes it so that it has to be somewhat hardcoded. I'm wondering if anyone has insight on any design patterns or techniques they have used to tackle a similar problem. I'm open to any ideas. Perl specific answers are welcome, but I am also interested in language-agnostic solutions.

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• Server-side Architecture for Online Game

  - by Draiken

  basically I have a game client that has communicate with a server for almost every action it takes, the game is in Java (using LWJGL) and right now I will start making the server. The base of the game is normally one client communicating with the server alone, but I will require later on for several clients to work together for some functionalities. I've already read how authentication server should be sepparated and I intend on doing it. The problem is I am completely inexperienced in this kind of server-side programming, all I've ever programmed were JSF web applications. I imagine I'll do socket connections for pretty much every game communication since HTML is very slow, but I still don't really know where to start on my server. I would appreciate reading material or guidelines on where to start, what architecture should the game server have and maybe some suggestions on frameworks that could help me getting the client-server communication. I've looked into JNAG but I have no experience with this kind of thing, so I can't really tell if it is a solid and good messaging layer. Any help is appreciated... Thanks ! EDIT: Just a little more information about the game. It is intended to be a very complex game with several functionalities, making some functionalities a "program" inside the program. It is not an usual game, like FPS or RPG but I intend on having a lot of users using these many different "programs" inside the game. If I wasn't clear enough, I'd really appreciate people that have already developed games with java client/server architecture, how they communicated, any frameworks, apis, messaging systems, etc. It is not a question of lack of knowledge of language, more a question for advice, so I don't end up creating something that works, but in the later stages will have to be rewriten for any kind of limiting reason. PS: sorry if my english is not perfect...

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• Designing a plug-in system

  - by madflame991

  I'm working on a Java project and I would like to add a plug-in system. More precisely, I would like to let the user design his own module, pack it into a jar, leave it in a "plugins/" subfolder of my application and be done with it. I've managed to get a child classloader to instantiate objects of classes located in external jars, but now I'm facing a design dilemma: Say Joe makes a plug-in and he packs it in joeplugin.jar. I would really like Joe to have a class named "instantiation.Factory" and I would also like everyone to have this class with this exact location and name. (This factory class obviously implements a interface that I provide and through it I get what I want from the plug-in.) If Joe wouldn't be restricted in this way I would have to look into his entire jar for some class that implements my factory interface and I don't want to imagine how complicated things get. So my question is: should I enforce a strict naming convention for this single class? I have no idea how plug-in systems work.

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• MSDN Live 2010 &ndash; Delivered : 24 sessions (4 x 6) on Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server

  - by terje

  We (Mikael Nitell and me) got a whole track on the Norwegian MSDN Live tour this year.  We did these as a pair, and covered 4 cities over 4 days, 6 sessions per day, taking 8 hours to come through it.  The Islandic volcano made the travels a bit rough, but we managed 6 flights out of 8. The first one had to go by van instead, 7-8 hour drive each way together with other MSDN Live presenters – a memorable tour! Oslo was the absolute top point.  We had to change hall to a bigger one. People were crowding, and even the big hall was packed!  The presentations were mostly based on demos, but we had a few slides as well.  They have been uploaded to my SkyDrive.  Info to aliens – some of the text may be Norwegian. The sessions were as follows: Overview of news in Visual Studio and Team Foundation server 2010 Ensuring Quality with VS/TFS 2010 Releasing products with VS/TFS 2010 No More No Repro with VS/TFS 2010 Performance Testing and Parallel Programming with VS/TFS 2010 Migrating to VS/TFS 2010 Tips, tricks, news and some best practices with VS/TFS 2010   In the coming days, I will post up examples from the demos too, with explanations of how they are intended to work. These entries will also contain stuff we had to remove from the actual presentations due to the time constraints. We managed to create recordings of two of the sessions, which will be uploaded to Channel 9 by Microsoft, afaik.   I will update this blog with information about exact locations when that is done. Also note we’re (read:Osiris Data AS) running both Upgrade and Deep Dive courses  on VS/TFS 2010 now in May.  Please look here for more info. If you want to be informed, follow me on Twitter.  All blog entries will be announced on twitter.

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• How to shift a vector based on the rotation of another vector?

  - by bpierre

  I’m learning 2D programming, so excuse my approximations, and please, don’t hesitate to correct me. I am just trying to fire a bullet from a player. I’m using HTML canvas (top left origin). Here is a representation of my problem: The black vector represent the position of the player (the grey square). The green vector represent its direction. The red disc represents the target. The red vector represents the direction of a bullet, which will move in the direction of the target (red and dotted line). The blue cross represents the point from where I really want to fire the bullet (and the blue and dotted line represents its movement). This is how I draw the player (this is the player object. Position, direction and dimensions are 2D vectors): ctx.save(); ctx.translate(this.position.x, this.position.y); ctx.rotate(this.direction.getAngle()); ctx.drawImage(this.image, Math.round(-this.dimensions.x/2), Math.round(-this.dimensions.y/2), this.dimensions.x, this.dimensions.y); ctx.restore(); This is how I instanciate a new bullet: var bulletPosition = playerPosition.clone(); // Copy of the player position var bulletDirection = Vector2D.substract(targetPosition, playerPosition).normalize(); // Difference between the player and the target, normalized new Bullet(bulletPosition, bulletDirection); This is how I move the bullet (this is the bullet object): var speed = 5; this.position.add(Vector2D.multiply(this.direction, speed)); And this is how I draw the bullet (this is the bullet object): ctx.save(); ctx.translate(this.position.x, this.position.y); ctx.rotate(this.direction.getAngle()); ctx.fillRect(0, 0, 3, 3); ctx.restore(); How can I change the direction and position vectors of the bullet to ensure it is on the blue dotted line? I think I should represent the shift with a vector, but I can’t see how to use it.

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• Strategy for hosting 700+ domains, each with static HTML site

  - by jonschlinkert

  I have a portfolio of more than 700 domain names, and ideally I'd like to put up a single-page HTML/CSS/JavaScript webpage for each domain. Is there a system/strategy/workflow that will allow me to: Automate the deployment of new websites, quickly and easily without having to manually initiate each new website in an admin panel. For instance, I've seen dropbox-based solutions that claim to make it simple to setup new websites on your dropbox account, but you still have to set each one up in an admin interface first. It would be so much easier to have a folder naming convention that allowed the user to easily clone/copy/duplicate sites inside their Dropbox App folder (https://www.dropbox.com/developers/blog/23) to create new ones. Sounds interesting, however... It's easy to managing CNAMEs on the registrar-side, is there a way to quickly associate CNAMEs with new websites, maybe gh-pages-style (https://help.github.com/articles/setting-up-a-custom-domain-with-pages)? With GitHub's gh-pages, all you have to do is drop a file called CNAME into your repo, with the domain name you want associated with the repo inside the file. gh-pages isn't a good solution for what I'm doing though unfortunately. I'm also a front-end developer, specializing in rapid web development and "front-end build systems", so I building and maintaining static assets for hundreds of sites is no problem. It's the hosting-side that I really struggle with. Any suggestions?

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• Entity system in Lua, communication with C++ and level editor. Need advice.

  - by Notbad

  Hi!, I know this is a really difficult subject. I have been reading a lot this days about Entity systems, etc... And now I'm ready to ask some questions (if you don't mind answering them) because I'm really messed. First of all, I have a 2D basic editor written in Qt, and I'm in the process of adding entitiy edition. I want the editor to be able to receive RTTI information from entities to change properties, create some logic being able to link published events to published actions (Ex:A level activate event throws a door open action), etc... Because all of this I guess my entity system should be written in scripting, in my case Lua. In the other hand I want to use a component based design for my entities, and here starts my questions: 1) Should I define my componentes en C++? If I do this en C++ won't I loose all the RTTI information I want for my editor?. In the other hand, I use box2d for physics, if I define all my components in script won't it be a lot of work to expose third party libs to lua? 2) Where should I place the messa system for my game engine? Lua? C++?. I'm tempted to just have C++ object to behave as servers, offering services to lua business logic. Things like physics system, rendering system, input system, World class, etc... And for all the other things, lua. Creation/Composition of entities based on components, game logic, etc... Could anyone give any insight on how to accomplish this? And what aproach is better?. Thanks in advance, HexDump.

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• State changes in entities or components

  - by GriffinHeart

  I'm having some trouble figuring how to deal with state management in my entities. I don't have trouble with Game state management, like pause and menus, since these are not handled as an entity component system; just with state in entities/components. Drawing from Orcs Must Die as an example, I have my MainCharacter and Trap entities which only have their components like PositionComponent, RenderComponent, PhysicsComponent. On each update the Entity will call update on its components. I also have a generic EventManager with listeners for different event types. Now I need to be able to place the traps: first select the trap and trap position then place the trap. When placing a trap it should appear in front of the MainCharacter, rendered in a different way and following it around. When placed it should just respond to collisions and be rendered in the normal way. How is this usually handled in component based systems? (This example is specific but can help figure out the general way to deal with entities states.)

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• Hello PCI Council, are you listening?

  - by David Dorf

  Mention "PCI" to any retailer and you'll instantly see them take a deep breath and start looking for the nearest exit.  Nobody wants to be insecure, but few actually believe that PCI does anything more than focus blame directly on retailers.  I applaud PCI for making retailers more aware of the importance of security, but did you have to make them PAINFULLY aware?  POS vendors aren't immune to this pain either as we have to undergo lengthy third-party audits in addition to the internal secure programming programs.  There's got to be a better way. There's a timely article over at StorefrontBacktalk that discusses the inequity of PCI's rules, and also mentions that the PCI Council is accepting comments until April 15th. As a vendor, my biggest issue with PCI is that they require vendors to disclose the details of any breaches, in effect "ratting out" customers.  I don't think its a vendor's place to do this.  I'd rather have the trust of my customers so we can jointly solve the problem. Mary Ann Davidson, Oracle's Chief Security Officer, has an interesting blog posting on this very topic.  Its a bit of a long read, but I found it very entertaining and thought-provoking.  Here's an excerpt: ...heading up the list of “you must be joking” regulations are recent disturbing developments in the Payment Card Industry (PCI) world. I’d like to give [the] PCI kahunas the benefit of the doubt about their intentions, except that efforts by Oracle among others to make them aware of “unfortunate side effects of your requirements” – which is as tactful I can be for reasons that I believe will become obvious below - have gone, to-date, unanswered and more importantly, unchanged. I encourage you to read the entire posting, Pain Comes Instantly, and then provide feedback to the PCI Council.

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