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• Kids and programming: ScratchKara

  - by Mike Pagel

  Ever now and then I kept wondering how to share with my kids the excitement of creating something with your computer. Of course, today this is a bit more difficult, as they have seen 3D animation games and well-edited websites. I guess that's why they weren't all that hyped when I found my first computer model at our local recycling facilities (an 8-bit Laser VZ-200 with rubber keys). When I finally got it up and running with an old analog TV set they finally asked whether we could play soccer on it. Needless to say that my showing them how it remembers some BASIC commands and lists and executes them did not make any impression. So the question is for real: How do you get today's kids excited about programming? And just recently I looked again for environments that allow even young kids (mine are 7 and 9 years old now) to do something and have fun. Obviously any real, text-oriented programming language wouldn't work well. To cut it short: Something really nice was built by University of Oldenburg: ScratchKara. It is the perfect mixture of Kara, a simulation of a little ladybug and Scratch, an authoring environment from MIT. ScratchKara allows kids to initially simply explore how the bug moves and turns by pressing the action buttons, then move towards sequencing commands through drag & drop, and eventually end up building algorithms with procedures and functions. Even through it is built for kids and beginners, the environment comes with debugging and refactoring, which I found more than amazing. My kids love it and I have to admit I keep thinking about how to solve a bit more advanced problems with this language, which does not allow you to store any state information (other than your call stack). Yes, I am hooked, too... Once the language is understood you can then move to one of the original Kara versions, where you can define the bug's behavior through finite statemachines, Turing tables, Java and other textual languages. And from there, anything is possible.

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• Adding complexity by generalising: how far should you go?

  - by marcog

  Reference question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4303813/help-with-interview-question The above question asked to solve a problem for an NxN matrix. While there was an easy solution, I gave a more general solution to solve the more general problem for an NxM matrix. A handful of people commented that this generalisation was bad because it made the solution more complex. One such comment is voted +8. Putting aside the hard-to-explain voting effects on SO, there are two types of complexity to be considered here: Runtime complexity, i.e. how fast does the code run Code complexity, i.e. how difficult is the code to read and understand The question of runtime complexity is something that requires a better understanding of the input data today and what it might look like in the future, taking the various growth factors into account where necessary. The question of code complexity is the one I'm interested in here. By generalising the solution, we avoid having to rewrite it in the event that the constraints change. However, at the same time it can often result in complicating the code. In the reference question, the code for NxN is easy to understand for any competent programmer, but the NxM case (unless documented well) could easily confuse someone coming across the code for the first time. So, my question is this: Where should you draw the line between generalising and keeping the code easy to understand?

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• Upgrading Oracle Siebel CRM Application Without Downtime

  - by Doug Reid

  Oracle’s Siebel Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software helps organizations differentiate their businesses to achieve top- and bottom-line growth. Siebel CRM delivers comprehensive solutions that are tailored to more than 20 different industries. As Siebel CRM implementations have evolved into mission critical, operational business processes that must operate 24/7, companies are finding it increasingly difficult to afford the downtime typically required to perform an in-place upgrade. Without these upgrades, businesses loose out on critical new features and functionality. With Oracle GoldenGate, customers don’t have to choose between upgrades and outages. Oracle GoldenGate allows Siebel CRM customers to perform upgrades with zero downtime. Now Siebel customers can always take advantages of the latest innovations in customer relationship management without having to worry about potential lost revenue due to downtime. Oracle GoldenGate provides three different deployment models for Siebel CRM zero downtime upgrades that are designed to meet differing customer requirements. These range from a basic unidirectional model, which is designed to work out-of-the-box, to the most sophisticated active-active model for phased migrations. If you have mission-critical Siebel CRM implementations I recommend that you watch the screencast below to learn how you can begin taking advantage of all the latest Siebel enhancements without having any downtime. This screencast is also available on Oracle Media Network and Oracle's YouTube channel. For even more details I recommend reading the whitepaper Upgrading Siebel CRM with Zero Downtime .

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• Distinguishing between UI command & domain commands

  - by SonOfPirate

  I am building a WPF client application using the MVVM pattern that provides an interface on top of an existing set of business logic residing in a library which is shared with other applications. The business library followed a domain-driven architecture using CQRS to separate the read and write models (no event sourcing). The combination of technologies and patterns has brought up an interesting conundrum: The MVVM pattern uses the command pattern for handling user-interaction with the view models. .NET provides an ICommand interface which is implemented by most MVVM frameworks, like MVVM Light's RelayCommand and Prism's DelegateCommand. For example, the view model would expose a number of command objects as properties that are bound to the UI and respond when the user performs actions like clicking buttons. Many implementations of the CQRS use the command pattern to isolate and encapsulate individual behaviors. In my business library, we have implemented the write model as command / command-handler pairs. As such, when we want to do some work, such as create a new order, we 'issue' a command (CreateOrderCommand) which is routed to the command-handler responsible for executing the command. This is great, clearly explained in many sources and I am good with it. However, take this scenario: I have a ToolbarViewModel which exposes a CreateNewOrderCommand property. This ICommand object is bound to a button in the UI. When clicked, the UI command creates and issues a new CreateOrderCommand object to the domain which is handled by the CreateOrderCommandHandler. This is difficult to explain to other developers and I am finding myself getting tongue-tied because everything is a command. I'm sure I'm not the first developer to have patterns overlap like this where the naming/terminology also overlap. How have you approached distinguishing your commands used in the UI from those used in the domain? (Edit: I should mention that the business library is UI-agnostic, i.e. no UI technology-specific code exists, or will exists, in this library.)

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• How to diagram custom programming languages, non textual?

  - by Adam

  I've used and created domain-specific languages before, plenty of times (e.g. using yacc/lex). Normally we'd start with grammar written in BNF, and a bunch of keywords. This is easy to do, easy to share. Recently, I've started working with diagrammatic programming languages - closest parallel is circuit-diagrams in electronics, where it's very difficult to express ideas in text, but very easy to express them in wiring-diagrams. This is a new and novel problem for me: how to efficiently express these mini-languages, and share concepts in them with colleagues? (i.e. how to whiteboard-program within them. Actual programming is easy - you have physical components to hand) Are there tools for this? Or good/best practices (e.g. equivalent of "always use BNF as starting point for your new DSL, and use tools like yacc to generate the parser, compiler, etc"). My googlefu is proving weak - all I get is false positives for wiring diagrams, and UML editors (since these are custom languages, UML doesn't seem to help)

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• How do I trust an off site application

  - by Pieter

  I need to implement something similar to a license server. This will have to be installed off site at the customers' location and needs to communicate with other applications at the customers' site (the applications that use the licenses) and an application running in our hosting center (for reporting and getting license information). My question is how to set this up in a way I can trust that: The license server is really our application and not something that just simulates it; and There is no "man in the middle" (i.e. a proxy or something that alters the traffic). The first thing I thought of was to use with client certificates and that would solve at least 2. However, what I'm worried about is that someone just decompiles (this is build in .NET) the license server, alters some logic and recompiles it. This would be hard to detect from both connecting applications. This doesn't have to be absolutely secure since we have a limited number of customers whom we have a trust relationship with. However, I do want to make it more difficult than a simple decompile/recompile of the license server. I primarily want to protect against an employee or nephew of the boss trying to be smart.

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• How to disable visual effects and compiz 100%

  - by oshirowanen

  UPDATE 1: The problem is not a monitor refresh rate flickering problem, as then the whole screen would be flickering. For me, only the application windows flicker in and out of view, then most of the time, when there do decide to show themselves, they only partly show themselves, like just top half, bottom half, left half, corner missing, window disappears when you try moving it or mouse over it even etc etc. I know it is a visual effect problem as I know my computer cannot handle visual effects and for some reason when the windows do appear partly, I can see the shadows behind the windows. Those shadows are part of the visual effects which are turned on by default for some reason. I get the same problem with 10.04, but can quickly turn off the visual effects by right clicking the desktop, selecting change background image, and in the visual effects tab, I can click on none, which stops all the visual problems. ORIGINAL QUESTION: I am having problems with 11.04 on my computer. For some reason it is enabling visual effects by default in the live cd when it should not be as my computer cannot support such effects. My computer cannot support Unity either, but it defaults to standard gnome with visual effects for some reason. It should be defaulting to standard gnome with no visual effects. THerefore, all I get is a very flickery live cd which makes it very difficult to see anything. So my question is, how do I disable the visual effects from the live cd? To put it simply, the live cd flickering is so bad, that I had to log back into my standard 10.04 install just to write this question, as I just couldn't see enough of the screen because of the flickering in 11.04 to even get to askubuntu.com...

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• Strange and erratic transformations when using OpenGL VBOs to render scene

  - by janoside

  I have an existing iOS game with fairly simple scenes (all textured quads) and I'm using Apple's "Texture2D" class. I'm trying to convert this class to use VBOs since the vertices of my objects basically never change so I may as well not re-create them for every object every frame. I have the scene rendering using VBOs but the sizes and orientations of all rendered objects are strange and erratic - though locations seem generally correct. I've been toying with this code for a few days now, and I've found something odd: if I re-create all of my VBOs each frame, everything looks correct, even though I'm almost certain my vertices are not changing. Other notes I'm basing my work on this tutorial, and therefore am also using "IBOs" I create my buffers before rendering begins My buffers include vertex and texture data I'm using OpenGL ES 1.1 Fearing some strange effect of the current matrix GL state at the time of buffer creation I've also tried wrapping my buffer-setup code in a "pushMatrix-loadIdentity-popMatrix" block which (as expected) had no effect I'm aware that various articles have been published demonstrating that VBOs may not help performance, but I want to understand this problem and at least have the option to use them. I realize this is a shot in the dark, but has anyone else experienced this type of strange behavior? What might I be doing to result in this behavior? It's rather difficult for me to isolate the problem since I'm working in an existing, moderately complex project, so suggestions about how to approach the problem are also quite welcome.

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• Is there an excuse for short variable names?

  - by KChaloux

  This has become a large frustration with the codebase I'm currently working in; many of our variable names are short and undescriptive. I'm the only developer left on the project, and there isn't documentation as to what most of them do, so I have to spend extra time tracking down what they represent. For example, I was reading over some code that updates the definition of an optical surface. The variables set at the start were as follows: double dR, dCV, dK, dDin, dDout, dRin, dRout dR = Convert.ToDouble(_tblAsphere.Rows[0].ItemArray.GetValue(1)); dCV = convert.ToDouble(_tblAsphere.Rows[1].ItemArray.GetValue(1)); ... and so on Maybe it's just me, but it told me essentially nothing about what they represented, which made understanding the code further down difficult. All I knew was that it was a variable parsed out specific row from a specific table, somewhere. After some searching, I found out what they meant: dR = radius dCV = curvature dK = conic constant dDin = inner aperture dDout = outer aperture dRin = inner radius dRout = outer radius I renamed them to essentially what I have up there. It lengthens some lines, but I feel like that's a fair trade off. This kind of naming scheme is used throughout a lot of the code however. I'm not sure if it's an artifact from developers who learned by working with older systems, or if there's a deeper reason behind it. Is there a good reason to name variables this way, or am I justified in updating them to more descriptive names as I come across them?

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• What is meant by, "A user shouldn't decide whether it is an Admin or not. The Privileges or Security system should."

  - by GlenPeterson

  The example used in the question pass bare minimum data to a function touches on the best way to determine whether the user is an administrator or not. One common answer was: user.isAdmin() This prompted a comment which was repeated several times and up-voted many times: A user shouldn't decide whether it is an Admin or not. The Privileges or Security system should. Something being tightly coupled to a class doesn't mean it is a good idea to make it part of that class. I replied, The user isn't deciding anything. The User object/table stores data about each user. Actual users don't get to change everything about themselves. But this was not productive. Clearly there is an underlying difference of perspective which is making communication difficult. Can someone explain to me why user.isAdmin() is bad, and paint a brief sketch of what it looks like done "right"? Really, I fail to see the advantage of separating security from the system that it protects. Any security text will say that security needs to be designed into a system from the beginning and considered at every stage of development, deployment, maintenance, and even end-of-life. It is not something that can be bolted on the side. But 17 up-votes so far on this comment says that I'm missing something important.

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• Generalise variable usage inside code

  - by Shirish11

  I would like to know if it is a good practice to generalize variables (use single variable to store all the values). Consider simple example Strings querycre,queryins,queryup,querydel; querycre = 'Create table XYZ ...'; execute querycre ; queryins = 'Insert into XYZ ...'; execute queryins ; queryup = 'Update XYZ set ...'; execute queryup; querydel = 'Delete from XYZ ...'; execute querydel ; and Strings query; query= 'Create table XYZ ... '; execute query ; query= 'Insert into XYZ ...'; execute query ; query= 'Update XYZ set ...'; execute query ; query= 'Delete from XYZ ...'; execute query ; In first case I use 4 strings each storing data to perform the actions mentioned in their suffixes. In second case just 1 variable to store all kinds the data. Having different variables makes it easier for someone else to read and understand it better. But having too many of them makes it difficult to manage. Also does having too many variables hamper my performance?

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• Ubuntu 9.10 + LXDE Error unmet dependencies

  - by skg

  I am working on Ubuntu 9.10 + LXDE as my current project. I am finding it difficult to install any new packages on this OS. For example, I need to install OpenCv package for qt webcam application, but every time it gives unmet dependencies error.And when i try to install dependencies it again show some more dependencies and so on and forms a circular loops. for example: sudo apt-get install libcv-dev .. .... The following packages have unmet dependencies: libcv-dev: Depends: libhighgui-dev (=1.0.0-6.2ubuntu1) but it is not going to installed. E: Broken packages Then I try to install libhighgui-dev as follow: sudo appt-get install libhighgui-dev .. ... The following packages have unmet dependencies: libhighgui-dev: Depends: libgtk2.0-dev but it is not going to installed E: Broken packages And this goes on never ending. Please suggest me something, as i have googled a lot and did not found any help. It may be , i m missing some primary packages to be installed.But how to find it? Any suggestion/help/link will be really appreciated. Thanks in Advance.

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• Should I use mod_wsgi embedded mode if I have full control of Apache?

  - by mgibsonbr

  I'm managing a bunch of sites and applications in a shared hosting, using Django via mod_wsgi. I had planned to use daemon mode from the beginning (to avoid restart problems), but ended up purchasing a plan that allows me to run a dedicated Apache instance. I kept using daemon mode for convenience, but I'm afraid it's consuming more server resources than it should (I have different projects for each site, each with its own process and process group), so I'm considering switching to embedded mode. Would that be a sensible thing to do? I'd still be able to restart Apache anytime I need to, and I wouldn't need so many child processes and sockets (so I hope the resource usage would decrease). But I'm unsure whether or not doing so would make it more difficult to manage those sites (if I need to update one, I have to restart all) or maybe the applications won't be properly isolated from one another. Are these problems really significant (or only a minor nuisance), are there other drawbacks I coudn't foresee? I'm looking for advice in any aspect of this setup - mainainability, performance, security etc. Tips for improving the current setup are also welcome (I know how to correctly configure a basic mod_wsgi setup, but I'm clueless about sensible values for threads, processes etc).

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• Smooth waypoint traversing

  - by TheBroodian

  There are a dozen ways I could word this question, but to keep my thoughts in line, I'm phrasing it in line with my problem at hand. So I'm creating a floating platform that I would like to be able to simply travel from one designated point to another, and then return back to the first, and just pass between the two in a straight line. However, just to make it a little more interesting, I want to add a few rules to the platform. I'm coding it to travel multiples of whole tile values of world data. So if the platform is not stationary, then it will travel at least one whole tile width or tile height. Within one tile length, I would like it to accelerate from a stop to a given max speed. Upon reaching one tile length's distance, I would like it to slow to a stop at given tile coordinate and then repeat the process in reverse. The first two parts aren't too difficult, essentially I'm having trouble with the third part. I would like the platform to stop exactly at a tile coordinate, but being as I'm working with acceleration, it would seem easy to simply begin applying acceleration in the opposite direction to a value storing the platform's current speed once it reaches one tile's length of distance (assuming that the tile is traveling more than one tile-length, but to keep things simple, let's just assume it is)- but then the question is what would the correct value be for acceleration to increment from to produce this effect? How would I find that value?

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• Developer momentum on open source projects

  - by sashang

  Hi I've been struggling to develop momentum contributing to open source projects. I have in the past tried with gcc and contributed a fix to libstdc++ but it was a once off and even though I spent months in my spare time on the dev mailing list and reading through things I just never seemed to develop any momentum with the code. Eventually I unsubscribed and got my free time back and uncluttered my mailbox. Like a lot of people I have some little open source defunct projects lying around on the net, but they're not large and I'm the only contributor. At the moment I'm more interested in contributing to a large open source project and want to know how people got started because I find it difficult while working full time to develop any momentum with the code base. Other more regular contributors, who are on the project full-time, are able to make changes at will and as result enter that positive feedback cycle where they understand the code and also know where it's heading. It makes the barrier to entry higher for those that come along later. My questions are to people who actively contribute to large opensource projects, like the Linux kernel, or gcc or clang/llvm or anything else with say a developer head count of more than 10. How did you get started? Was there a large chunk of time in your life that you just could dedicate to working on the project? I know in Linus's case he had a chunk of time (6 months) to get it started. What barriers to entry did you encounter? Can you describe the initial stages of the time spent with the project, from when you had little understanding of the code to when you understood enough to commit regularly. Thanks

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• When I shoot from a gun while walking, the bullet is off the center, but when stand still it's fine

  - by Vlad1k

  I am making a small project in Unity, and whenever I walk with the gun and shoot at the same time, the bullets seem to curve and shoot off 2-3 CMs from the center. When I stand still this doesn't happen. This is my main Javascript code: @script RequireComponent(AudioSource) var projectile : Rigidbody; var speed = 500; var ammo = 30; var fireRate = 0.1; private var nextFire = 0.0; function Update() { if(Input.GetButton ("Fire1") && Time.time > nextFire) { if(ammo != 0) { nextFire = Time.time + fireRate; var clone = Instantiate(projectile, transform.position, transform.root.rotation); clone.velocity = transform.TransformDirection(Vector3 (0, 0, speed)); ammo = ammo - 1; audio.Play(); } else { } } } I assume that these two lines need to be tweaked: var clone = Instantiate(projectile, transform.position, transform.root.rotation); clone.velocity = transform.TransformDirection(Vector3 (0, 0, speed)); Thanks in advanced, and please remember that I just started Unity, and I might have a difficult time understanding some things. Thanks!

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• Setting Krypton Light to Screen Pixels

  - by Adam Jerrett

  So a few days back, I started playing around with Krypton XNA for 2D lighting in my game. I noticed in general, that spawning a light at (0,0) with Krypton causes the light to appear in, pretty much, the centre of the game screen. Is there any way to change this so a Krypton light's "starting point" at [0,0] would spawn at the top left of the screen, and thus follow the standard screen co-ordinates for position? I ask because currently I'm busy working on my game where my spawn point is [512,512]. With hard code, the closest I've got to the light being "central" to this point is the vector position [12,-20], which makes no sense and is impossible to craft, mathematically, if I want the light to move with the camera (the position [480,512] maps roughly to [10,-20]). So, is there any way to "normalise" the krypton lights to use standard screen co-ordinates? If you guys can, play around with the demo from the site and please see if you can find anything out about it. Documentation on the engine is rather scarce, so it's difficult to find anything relevant to my "pixel-perfect" need. It might just also be something in the code with regards to the matrices that I'm not fully understanding. Any help would be useful. Thanks.

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• alt+tab moves windows between workspaces and crashes unity

  - by Ruslanchik

  I have recently been using multiple workspaces in unity but have run into a bug that is making it very difficult to do this effectively. The problem is with alt+tab. When I am focused on a window that is not in the primary (top-left) workspace one of two things happens: Unity restarts (the launcher and menu bar disappear and screen flashes blank before everything reappears) and all of my windows are moved to different workspaces. The focused window is always moved to the primary workspace and other windows are typically moved one workspace to the left. alt+tab will usually function normally after this. Unity completely crashes. The windows in the current workspace are still there, but the launcher and menu bar are gone, I cannot switch between workspaces, and none of the hotkeys work. The same issues occur when using alt+` as well. I have installed ccsm, but have made only minor adjustments with it. I am still using the Unity switcher. I actually uninstalled ccsm hoping that would resolve the issue, but the issue persists. Is there some resolution to this issue? I like Unity and want to keep using it, but having to use the mouse to switch between programs is irritating and enough reason to switch to Gnome.

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• Learning Programming from scratch

  - by David542

  I am entirely new to programming, other than basic HTML/CSS knowledge. I want to learn programming as quickly and efficiently as possible, and I'm willing to put in the time (at least 70 hours a week). The reason I want to learn is because I have a startup that I've written a business plan for and have prototyped in Photoshop (both front-end and back-end pages). My goals is to have a prototype of the site up within 6 months. I have a good aptitude for math (A's in all math courses up through DiffEq and Linear Algebra). I assume learning programming from scratch can be a daunting task -- not because it is particularly difficult, but because there are so many areas and so much information. I want to make sure that I learn as efficiently as possible and have individuals (in addition to Google) to solicit advice from and that will help me when I get stuck or have questions. I know with other's help, my learning experience will be both more productive and enjoyable. What is the best way to find people that will help me in this? What are some good 'live' resources in addition to asking questions on Stack Overflow? Thank you very much for your time and help.

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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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• How do I install the latest 2012 TeX Live on 12.04?

  - by user74713

  The Tex Live included in Ubuntu 12.04 is very old (2009), and I would like to install the latest version to be able to edit the Ubuntu manual. How do I do that from the terminal? Hello, my name is Chris. I am a student pursuing a career in technical writing and I would like to assist the Ubuntu community while gaining experience & building my resume. I need to install upstream version of TeX Live for 12.04 to edit the manual for Ubuntu. I am having a difficult time installing it per the directions @ http://ubuntu-manual.org/getinvolved/editors#install-texlive. TeX Live documents are on my computer, but I am not able to run the install. No TeX Live program found on my computer. Any help is greatly appreciated! ~Thanx!~ Below I have listed the prior attempts & links to view the posts of each attempt: Backports I have tried using the official backports of the latest (2012) TeX-Live via their PPA. Please refer to link below for the particulars. How do I install the latest 2012 TeX Live on 12.04? Latex I've also tried running Latex as suggested. Please refer to link below for the particulars. http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2019051 PPA Causing Issue?? or something else I came across a post concerning the ability to install programs via the terminal and am wondering if it may be my problem??? Please refer to link below for the particulars. PPA - TeX Live Cannot install anything through Terminal - apt-get -f install

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• Understanding and memorizing git rebase parameters

  - by Robert Dailey

  So far the most confusing portion of git is rebasing onto another branch. Specifically, it's the command line arguments that are confusing. Each time I want to rebase a small piece of one branch onto the tip of another, I have to review the git rebase documentation and it takes me about 5-10 minutes to understand what each of the 3 main arguments should be. git rebase <upstream> <branch> --onto <newbase> What is a good rule of thumb to help me memorize what each of these 3 parameters should be set to, given any kind of rebase onto another branch? Bear in mind I have gone over the git-rebase documentation again, and again, and again, and again (and again), but it's always difficult to understand (like a boring scientific white-paper or something). So at this point I feel I need to involve other people to help me grasp it. My goal is that I should never have to review the documentation for these basic parameters. I haven't been able to memorize them so far, and I've done a ton of rebases already. So it's a bit unusual that I've been able to memorize every other command and its parameters so far, but not rebase with --onto.

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• Want to tap into a niche market. Do I create new site or bolt on to existing site?

  - by nitbuntu

  Hi, After a lot of heard work and a few years of perseverance, I'm seeing regular sales on my website which have been steadily growing over the past year. However, the entrepreneur in me wants tap into a niche market which I've become very interested in. It's possible to bolt on this niche onto my existing site as an additional category, without it looking too out of place; my new category of products would also benefit from the ranking my current site gets. The kind of people who would purchase these new niche products, however, are very particular and obsessive about detail. So, for example, many Vegetarians would not eat in KFC even if they were to introduce a new range of Veggie burgers. So, I thought it best to create a new website and since my existing site was created using an 'old-school' shopping cart and there are many more up-to-date, feature-rich, ones available now, I wanted to use a different shopping cart system. My dilemma is that I already have 2 websites (1 b2c and another b2b site) and maintaining a 2nd b2c site would end up vastly increasing my workload and I fear that I would not be able to pay adequate attention to all the sites. Moreover, the additional customer service work (e.g. answering emails from many separate email accounts) could end up being too confusing and difficult to maintain. The easy answer would be to take on an employee, but I'm just not earning enough to justify this yet. If anyone has any tips or experience they'd like to share, which could help me answer this question, I'd be highly grateful.

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• A short but intense GCC Gathering in London

  - by user817571

  About one week ago I joined in London many long time GCC friends and acquaintances for a gathering organized by Google (in particular I guess should be thanked Diego and Ian). Only a weekend, and I wasn't able to attend on Sunday morning, but a very good occasion to raise some issues in a very relaxed way, in particular those at the border between areas of competence, which are the most difficult to discuss during the normal work days. If you are interested in a general overview and some notes this is a good link: http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/GCCGathering2011 As you may easily guess, the third topic is mine, which I managed to have up quite early on Friday morning thanks to the votes of some good friends like Dodji (the ordering of the topics resulted from democratic voting on Friday evening!). I learned a lot from the discussion: for example that certainly the new C++11 'final' should be exploited largely in the c++ front-end; the various reasons why devirtualization can be quite trick (but I'm really confident that Martin and Honza are going to make a good progress also basing on a set of short testcases which I promised to collect); that, as explained by Ian, the gold linker already implements the nice --icf (Identical Code Folding) facility, which some friends of mine are definitely going to like (however, see: http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=12919). I also enjoyed the observations made by Lawrence, where he remarked that in C+11 we are going to see more pointer iterations implicitly produced by the new range-based for-loop and we really want to make sure the loop optimizers are able to deal with those as well as loops explicitly using a counter. All in all, I really hope we are going to do it again!

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• Understanding Asynchronous Programming with .NET Reflector

  - by Nick Harrison

  When trying to understand and learn the .NET framework, there is no substitute for being able to see what is going on behind at the scenes inside even the most confusing assemblies, and .NET Reflector makes this possible. Personally, I never fully understood connection pooling until I was able to poke around in key classes in the System.Data assembly. All of a sudden, integrating with third party components was much simpler, even without vendor documentation!With a team devoted to developing and extending Reflector, Red Gate have made it possible for us to step into and actually debug assemblies such as System.Data as though the source code was part of our solution. This maybe doesn’t sound like much, but it dramatically improves the way you can relate to and understand code that isn’t your own.Now that Microsoft has officially launched Visual Studio 2012, Reflector is also fully integrated with the new IDE, and supports the most complex language feature currently at our command: Asynchronous processing.Without understanding what is going on behind the scenes in the .NET Framework, it is difficult to appreciate what asynchronocity actually bring to the table and, without Reflector, we would never know the Arthur C. Clarke Magicthat the compiler does on our behalf.Join me as we explore the new asynchronous processing model, as well as review the often misunderstood and underappreciated yield keyword (you’ll see the connection when we dive into how the CLR handles async).Read more here

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