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• My 2012 Professional Development Goals

  - by kerry

  Once again I am going to declare some professional goals for my upcoming year. Convert my blog to Jekyll hosted on github – I am tired of wordpress, tired of spam, and would like to try something new.  I have already started on this.  Just need to finish it up. Launch my GWT / Google App Engine application – I am currently developing a GWT application to be deployed to Google App Engine. Do another presentation at the user group – At least a few lightning talks.  I have a few ideas. Attend a tech conference – Dev Nexus is the likely target Post more often – I did 10 posts last year, would like to maybe double that next year (including this one) Attend a user group meeting outside of Nashville JUG – A rollover from last year, I will probably be regularly attend the Interactive Developers meeting Study another language – I have been thinking about looking in to Dart or perhaps Go Launch an Android app – Another holdover from last year I am thinking of doing a small app having to do with managing the silent state of the phone

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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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• 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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• Secure Coding Practices in .NET

  - by SoftwareSecurity

  Thanks to everyone who helped pack the room at the Fox Valley Day of .NET.   This presentation was designed to help developers understand why secure coding is important, what areas to focus on and additional resources.  You can find the slides here. Remember to understand what you are really trying to protect within your application.  This needs to be a conversation between the application owner, developer and architect.  Understand what data (or Asset) needs to be protected.  This could be passwords, credit cards, Social Security Numbers.   This also may be business specific information like business confidential data etc.  Performing a Risk and Privacy Assessment & Threat Model on your applications even in a small way can help you organize this process. These are the areas to pay attention to when coding: Authentication & Authorization Logging & Auditing Event Handling Session and State Management Encryption Links requested Slides Books The Security Development Lifecycle: SDL: A Process for Developing Demonstrably More Secure Software Threat Modeling Writing Secure Code The Web Application Hackers Handbook  Secure Programming with Static Analysis   Other Resources: OWASP OWASP Top 10 OWASP WebScarab OWASP WebGoat Internet Storm Center Web Application Security Consortium Events: OWASP AppSec 2011 in Minneapolis

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• How to convince a client to switch to a framework *now*; also examples of great, large-scale php applications.

  - by cbrandolino

  Hi everybody. I'm about to start working on a very ambitious project that, in my opinion, has some great potential for what concerns the basic concept and the implementation ideas (implementation as in how this ideas will be implemented, not as in programming). The state of the code right now is unluckily subpar. It's vanilla php, no framework, no separation between application and visualization logic. It's been done mostly by amateur students (I know great amateur/student programmers, don't get me wrong: this was not the case though). The clients are really great, and they know the system won't scale and needs a redesign. The problem is, they would like to launch a beta ASAP and then think of rebuilding. Since just the basic functionalities are present now, I suggested it would be a great idea if we (we're a three-people shop, all very proficient) ported that code to some framework (we like CodeIgniter) before launching. We would reasonably be able to do that in < 10 days. Problem is, they don't think php would be a valid long-term solution anyway, so they would prefer to just let it be and fix the bugs for now (there's quite a bit) and then directly switch to some ruby/python based system. Porting to CI now will make future improvements incredibly easier, the current code more secure, changing the style - still being discussed with the designers - a breeze (reminder: there are database calls in template files right now); the biggest obstacle is the lack of trust in php as a valid, scalable technology. So well, I need some examples of great php applications (apart from facebook) and some suggestions on how to try to convince them to port soon. Again, they're great people - it's not like they would like ruby cause it's so hot right now; they just don't trust php since us cool programmers like bashing it, I suppose, but I'm sure going on like this for even one more day would be a mistake. Also, we have some weight in the decision process.

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• How do you avoid name similarities between your classes and the native ones?

  - by Oscar

  I just ran into an "interesting problem", which I would like your opinion about: I am developing a system and for many reasons (meaning: abstraction, technology independence, etc) we create our own types for exchanging information. For instance: if there is a method which is called SendEmail and is invoked by the business logic, it way have a parameter of type OurCompany.EMailMessage, which is an object which is completely technology independent and contains only "business relevant data" (for instance, no information abut head encoding). Inside the SendEmail function, we get this information from our EMailMEssage object and create a MailMessage (this one is technolgy specific) object so it can be sent over the network. As you can already notice, our class has a very similar name to the "native" language class. The problem is: this is exactly what they are, email messages, so it is hard to find another meaningful name for them. Do you have this problem often? How do you manage it? Edit: @mgkrebbs just commented about using fully qualified names. This is our current approach, but a little bit too verbose, IMHO. I would like something cleaner, if possible.

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• Dynamic model interactions

  - by Richard

  I am just curious as to how in many games (namely games like arkham asylum/city, manhunt, hitman) do they make it so that your character can "grab" a character in front of you and do stuff to them. I know this may sound very confusing but for an example go to youtube and search "hitman executions", and the first video is an example of what i'm asking. Basically I'm wondering how they make your model dynamically interact with whatever other model you come across, so in hitman when you come up behind some one with the fibre wire you strangle the other character or if you have the anesthetic you come up behind some person and put your hand over there mouth while they struggle and slowly go to the floor where you lay them down. I am confused as to whether it was animated to use two models using specific bone/skeletal identifiers, if it is just two completely separate animations that are played at the correct time to make it look like they are actually interacting or something else all together. I am not an animator so i assume most of what i just said is not right but i hope that some one can understand what i mean and provide an answer. PS) I am a programmer and I am in the process of building a hitmanesque game, just because i love that style of game and I want to increase my skills on something fun, so if you do know what i'm talking about have some examples with involving both models and programming (i use c++ and mainly Ogre3D at the moment but i am getting into unity and XNA) i would greatly appreciate it. Thanks.

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• Does unit testing lead to premature generalization (specifically in the context of C++)?

  - by Martin

  Preliminary notes I'll not go into the distinction of the different kinds of test there are, there are already a few questions on these sites regarding that. I'll take what's there and that says: unit testing in the sense of "testing the smallest isolatable unit of an application" from which this question actually derives The isolation problem What is the smallest isolatable unit of a program. Well, as I see it, it (highly?) depends on what language you are coding in. Micheal Feathers talks about the concept of a seam: [WEwLC, p31] A seam is a place where you can alter behavior in your program without editing in that place. And without going into the details, I understand a seam -- in the context of unit testing -- to be a place in a program where your "test" can interface with your "unit". Examples Unit test -- especially in C++ -- require from the code under test to add more seams that would be strictly called for for a given problem. Example: Adding a virtual interface where non-virtual implementation would have been sufficient Splitting -- generalizing(?) -- a (smallish) class further "just" to facilitate adding a test. Splitting a single-executable project into seemingly "independent" libs, "just" to facilitate compiling them independently for the tests. The question I'll try a few versions that hopefully ask about the same point: Is the way that Unit Tests require one to structure an application's code "only" beneficial for the unit tests or is it actually beneficial to the applications structure. Is the generalization code need to exhibit to be unit-testable useful for anything but the unit tests? Does adding unit tests force one to generalize unnecessarily? Is the shape unit tests force on code "always" also a good shape for the code in general as seen from the problem domain? I remember a rule of thumb that said don't generalize until you need to / until there's a second place that uses the code. With Unit Tests, there's always a second place that uses the code -- namely the unit test. So is this reason enough to generalize?

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• Most suited technology for browser games?

  - by Tingle

  I was thinking about making a 2D MMO which I would in the long run support on various plattforms like desktop, mac, browser, android and ios. The server will be c++/linux based and the first client would go in the browser. So I have done some research and found that webgl and flash 11 support hardware accelerated rendering, I saw some other things like normal HTML5 painting. So my question is, which technology should I use for such a project? My main goal would be that the users have a hassle free experience using what there hardware can give them with hardware acceleration. And the client should work on the most basic out-of-the-box pc's that any casual pc or mac user has. And another criteria would be that it should be developer friendly. I've messed with webgl abit for example and that would require writing a engine from scratch - which is acceptable but not preferred. Also, in case of non-actionscript, which kind language is most prefered in terms of speed and flexability. I'm not to fond of javascript due to the garbage collector but have learned to work around it. Thank you for you time.

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• Maintaining Two Separate Software Versions From the Same Codebase in Version Control

  - by Joseph

  Let's say that I am writing two different versions of the same software/program/app/script and storing them under version control. The first version is a free "Basic" version, while the second is a paid "Premium" version that takes the codebase of the free version and expands upon it with a few extra value-added features. Any new patches, fixes, or features need to find their way into both versions. I am currently considering using master and develop branches for the main codebase (free version) along side master-premium and develop-premium branches for the paid version. When a change is made to the free version and merged to the master branch (after thorough testing on develop of course), it gets copied over to the develop-premium branch via the cherry-pick command for more testing and then merged into master-premium. Is this the best workflow to handle this situation? Are there any potential problems, caveats, or pitfalls to be aware of? Is there a better branching strategy than what I have already come up with? Your feedback is highly appreciated! P.S. This is for a PHP script stored in Git, but the answers should apply to any language or VCS.

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• Floating point undesirable in highly critical code?

  - by Kirt Undercoffer

  Question 11 in the Software Quality section of "IEEE Computer Society Real-World Software Engineering Problems", Naveda, Seidman, lists fp computation as undesirable because "the accuracy of the computations cannot be guaranteed". This is in the context of computing acceleration for an emergency braking system for a high speed train. This thinking seems to be invoking possible errors in small differences between measurements of a moving object but small differences at slow speeds aren't a problem (or shouldn't be), small differences between two measurements at high speed are irrelevant - can there be a problem with small roundoff errors during deceleration for an emergency braking system? This problem has been observed with airplane braking systems resulting in hydroplaning but could this actually happen in the context of a high speed train? The concern about fp errors seems to not be well-founded in this context. Any insight? The fp is used for acceleration so perhaps the concern is inching over a speed limit? But fp should be just fine if they use a double in whatever implementation language. The actual problem in the text states: During the inspection of the code for the emergency braking system of a new high speed train (a highly critical, real-time application), the review team identifies several characteristics of the code. Which of these characteristics are generally viewed as undesirable? The code contains three recursive functions (well that one is obvious). The computation of acceleration uses floating point arithmetic. All other computations use integer arithmetic. The code contains one linked list that uses dynamic memory allocation (second obvious problem). All inputs are checked to determine that they are within expected bounds before they are used.

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• Count function on tree structure (non-binary)

  - by Spevy

  I am implementing a tree Data structure in c# based (largely on Dan Vanderboom's Generic implementation). I am now considering approach on handling a Count property which Dan does not implement. The obvious and easy way would be to use a recursive call which Traverses the tree happily adding up nodes (or iteratively traversing the tree with a Queue and counting nodes if you prefer). It just seems expensive. (I also may want to lazy load some of my nodes down the road). I could maintain a count at the root node. All children would traverse up to and/or hold a reference to the root, and update a internally settable count property on changes. This would push the iteration problem to when ever I want to break off a branch or clear all children below a given node. Generally less expensive, and puts the heavy lifting what I think will be less frequently called functions. Seems a little brute force, and that usually means exception cases I haven't thought of yet, or bugs if you prefer. Does anyone have an example of an implementation which keeps a count for an Unbalanced and/or non-binary tree structure rather than counting on the fly? Don't worry about the lazy load, or language. I am sure I can adjust the example to fit my specific needs. EDIT: I am curious about an example, rather than instructions or discussion. I know this is not technically difficult...

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• If your algorithm is correct, does it matter how long it took you to write it?

  - by John Isaacks

  I recently found out that Facebook had a programming challenge that if completed correctly you automatically get a phone interview. There is a sample challenge that asks you to write an algorithm that can solve a Tower of Hanoi type problem. Given a number of pegs and discs, an initial and final configuration; Your algorithm must determine the fewest steps possible to get to the final configuration and output the steps. This sample challenge gives you a 45 minute time limit but allows you to still test your code to see if it passes once your time limit expires. I did not know of any cute math solution that could solve it, and I didn't want to look for one since I think that would be cheating. So I tried to solve the challenge the best I could on my own. I was able to make an algorithm that worked and passed. However, it took me over 4 hours to make, much longer than the 45 minute requirement. Since it took me so much longer than the allotted time, I have not attempted the actual challenge. This got me wondering though, in reality does it really matter that it took me that long? I mean is this a sign that I will not be able to get a job at a place like this (not just Facebook, but Google, Fog Creek, etc.) and need to lower my aspirations, or does the fact that I actually passed on my first attempt even though it took too long be taken as good?

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• For those of you who are senior developers what do you look for in a new company and development team?

  - by Amy P

  As I move forward in my career new jobs become more difficult to choose between. When I was starting out and for the first 8 years of my career I took the jobs that I could get that would keep me programming on the general technological path that I was on. I am a job hopper, I only stay with a company for between 2 - 3 years. I think that I do this because after 2 years I get bored and unless there are new projects to keep my busy I no longer find work interesting. Now that I am becoming more experienced it is more important for me to only apply for jobs that are interesting and will move my career and my skill set forward. My problem now is that I keep finding jobs where the projects appear to be interesting during the interview but once I get in the company I find the development environment is sub-par and the development team is disjointed. I feel like I am asking the wrong questions during the interview process and don't know what to look for to make sure that the environment I will be working in will be a good one. Now my question: For those of you who are senior developers what do you look for in a new company and development team? I am looking for the key qualities in a company and development team that you look for when interviewing with a company. These qualities are the ones that would give you hints that the company will be a good one to work for.

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• Tools for game script / storyboard

  - by Pietro Polsinelli

  I am searching for a tool that will help in writing a game script. By "script" I mean the text core of a storyboard - without the drawing drafts, which may or may not be there (yet). What I'm thinking of will let write a piece of text of the script, define a simplified workflow from that step, and then define the text of next steps, and so on. Searching online, I found Inform http://inform7.com/ ("A Design System for Interactive Fiction Based on Natural Language") which in theory is exactly what I am searching for, but trying to use it it has this model of a space (a dungeon, a library) where you are picking up objects and exploring them. In my case I am designing more a Sims like game, the flow is entirely different. Considering non specific software, mind mapping tools miss the linearity of the process. What I am writing is a directed graph - simply a work-flow, but the way I want to design it is more text based than work-flow based. SO what I'm doing now is using a text editor, which I'll transform directly in code. Any suggestions?

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• How do I get others to see past my prior inexperience?

  - by Kevin

  My core question is how do I proceed from the following predicament. I will be honest with you, I wasted my College Experience. I slacked off and didn't take any of my comp sci classes that seriously, somehow i still got out with a 3.25 GPA. But truth be told I learned nothing. I befriended most of my professors who went pretty lenient on me in terms of grading. However, I basically came out of College knowing how to program a simple calculator in VB.Net. I was (to my great surprise) hired by a very large respected company in Denver as a Junior developer. Well the long and the short of it is that I knew so little about programming that I quickly became the office pariah and was almost fired due to my incompetence. It has been 8 months now and I feel I have learned some basic things and I am not as picked on as I used to be by the other developers. However, everyone hates me and the first few months have given the other developers a horrible perception of me. I am no longer afraid of code or learning, but I have put my self in the precarious position of being the scapegoat of our department. I hate going to work every day because no one there is my friend and pretty much everyone is hostile to me. What should I do? Any advice?

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• Process Improvement and the Data Professional

  - by BuckWoody

  Don’t be afraid of that title – I’m not talking about Six Sigma or anything super-formal here. In many organizations, there are more folks in other IT roles than in the Data Professional area. In other words, there are more developers, system administrators and so on than there are the “DBA” role. That means we often have more to do than the time we need to do it. And, oddly enough, the first thing that is sacrificed is process improvement – the little things we need to do to make the day go faster in the first place. Then we get even more behind, the work piles up and…well, you know all about that. Earlier I challenged you to find 10-30 minutes a day to study. Some folks wrote back and asked “where do I start”? Well, why not be super-efficient and combine that time with learning how to make yourself more efficient? Try out a new scripting language, learn a new tool that automates things or find out ways others have automated their systems. In general, find out what you’re doing and how, and then see if that can be improved. It’s kind of like doing a performance tuning gig on yourself! If you’re pressed for time, look for bite-sized articles (like the ones I’ve done here for PowerShell and SQL Server) that you can follow in a “serial” fashion. In a short time you’ll have a new set of knowledge you can use to make your day faster. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Adding root bone in 3DS Max?

  - by carlturtle

  my animation artist has made me a nice first person pair of arms, animated it, textured it, and given it to me. Then he went on vacation. I am programming my animations, and I am trying to test the model he has given me. Building my project gives me a warning: Multiple skeletons were found in the file. The first skeleton, named "frame l upperarm" has been moved to be a child of the scene root. The other, "frame r upperarm", will be ignored. Fragment identifier "frame r upperarm". Then an error: "Vertex is bound to bone "frame l forearm", but this bone is not present in the skeleton." I realize this means that there are two skeletons, as said in this problem: Importing 3d model with multiple skeletons I have 3DS Max, but I have no idea how to use it, and Google/CGTalk/Plycount turn up nothing relevant on how to add a root bone or combine skeletons. If anyone knows how, it would help me out greatly. Thanks.

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• Does Agile force developers to work more?

  - by Shooshpanchick

  Looking at common Agile practices it seems to me that they (intentionally or unintentionally?) force developer to spend more time actually working as opposed to reading blogs/articles, chatting, coffee breaks and just plain procrastinating. In particular: 1) Pair programming - the biggest work-forcer, just because it is inconvenient to do all that procrastination when there are two of you sitting together. 2) Short stories - when you have a HUGE chunk of work that must be done in e.g. a month, it is pretty common to slack off in the first three weeks and switch to OMG DEADLINE mode for the last one. And with the little chunks (that must be done in a day or less) it is exact opposite - you feel that time is tight, there is no space for maneuvering, and you will be held accountable for the task pretty soon, so you start working immediately. 3) Team communication and cohesion - when you underperform in a slow, distanced and silent environment it may feel ok, but when at the end of the day at Scrum meeting everyone boasts what they have accomplished and you have nothing to say you may actually feel ashamed. 4) Testing and feedback - again, it prevents you from keeping tasks "99% ready" (when it's actually around 20%) until the deadline suddenly happens. Do you feel that under Agile you work more than under "conventional" methodologies? Is this pressure compensated by the more comfortable environment and by the feeling of actually getting right things done quickly?

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• Advanced PHP book [closed]

  - by Aaditi Sharma

  I've gone and stumbled across a lot of recommendations for PHP books, including on SO, however could not find a reasonable & convincible answer for this. Is there a really good advanced book for PHP. Background: I've done almost 8 months in PHP. I know the basics. I go through php.net very often. I've played around with Codeigniter, amongst other frameworks. I've been doing JavaScript for almost 2 years, and specifically thank Douglas Crockford for this, I completely changed the way I code JavaScript. I spend a lot of time travelling, and would love to read a book about PHP, that includes the awesome parts and even when something doesn't quite work in PHP. (As a note a lot of previous answers on SO and programmers give varied results.) I have to place an order through a library which has it's limitations. One book that some of experienced PHP programmers could recommend would be helpful. I have gone through http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1711/what-is-the-single-most-influential-book-every-programmer-should-read and http://stackoverflow.com/questions/194812/list-of-freely-available-programming-books, which do NOT have books related to PHP.

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• How to factorize code in Unreal Kismet (i.e. "Material Function"s for Kismet)

  - by Georges Dupéron

  In the Unreal Development Kit, when using the Material Editor, one can factorize frequently-used groups of nodes by creating a Material Function (content Browser ? right-click ? new matrial function, IIRC). When defining the behaviour of some actor in Kismet, one can easily have a dozen nodes involved. If I have many actors that share the same behaviour, then I'll copy-paste these nodes, and change the variables so they point to the other actors. This leads to inconsistencies (a modification in the behaviour of an actor isn't propagated in the copy-pasted nodes), complexity (you end up with hundreds of nodes), and generally useless effort. My question is : Can I create a "kismet function", just like a material function ? Note: I'd rather avoid using UnrealScript. I don't even know where to type UnrealScripts, don't know where the documentation is and more generally don't have enough time to invest in learning UnrealScript. This "kismet function" feature must be usable by graphists (with little programming knowledge). If a (simple) script suffices to add this feature in the Kismet editor, so that one can create several "functions" without using UnrealScript, then fine, but I don't really want to have to write a script each time I want to factorize a few nodes. Thanks for any information !

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• Why is quicksort better than other sorting algorithms in practice?

  - by Raphael

  This is a repost of a question on cs.SE by Janoma. Full credits and spoils to him or cs.SE. In a standard algorithms course we are taught that quicksort is O(n log n) on average and O(n²) in the worst case. At the same time, other sorting algorithms are studied which are O(n log n) in the worst case (like mergesort and heapsort), and even linear time in the best case (like bubblesort) but with some additional needs of memory. After a quick glance at some more running times it is natural to say that quicksort should not be as efficient as others. Also, consider that students learn in basic programming courses that recursion is not really good in general because it could use too much memory, etc. Therefore (and even though this is not a real argument), this gives the idea that quicksort might not be really good because it is a recursive algorithm. Why, then, does quicksort outperform other sorting algorithms in practice? Does it have to do with the structure of real-world data? Does it have to do with the way memory works in computers? I know that some memories are way faster than others, but I don't know if that's the real reason for this counter-intuitive performance (when compared to theoretical estimates).

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• Are there legitimate reasons for returning exception objects instead of throwing them?

  - by stakx

  This question is intended to apply to any OO programming language that supports exception handling; I am using C# for illustrative purposes only. Exceptions are usually intended to be raised when an problem arises that the code cannot immediately handle, and then to be caught in a catch clause in a different location (usually an outer stack frame). Q: Are there any legitimate situations where exceptions are not thrown and caught, but simply returned from a method and then passed around as error objects? This question came up for me because .NET 4's System.IObserver<T>.OnError method suggests just that: exceptions being passed around as error objects. Let's look at another scenario, validation. Let's say I am following conventional wisdom, and that I am therefore distinguishing between an error object type IValidationError and a separate exception type ValidationException that is used to report unexpected errors: partial interface IValidationError { } abstract partial class ValidationException : System.Exception { public abstract IValidationError[] ValidationErrors { get; } } (The System.Component.DataAnnotations namespace does something quite similar.) These types could be employed as follows: partial interface IFoo { } // an immutable type partial interface IFooBuilder // mutable counterpart to prepare instances of above type { bool IsValid(out IValidationError[] validationErrors); // true if no validation error occurs IFoo Build(); // throws ValidationException if !IsValid(…) } Now I am wondering, could I not simplify the above to this: partial class ValidationError : System.Exception { } // = IValidationError + ValidationException partial interface IFoo { } // (unchanged) partial interface IFooBuilder { bool IsValid(out ValidationError[] validationErrors); IFoo Build(); // may throw ValidationError or sth. like AggregateException<ValidationError> } Q: What are the advantages and disadvantages of these two differing approaches?

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• How should I create a mutable, varied jtree with arbitrary/generic category nodes?

  - by Pureferret

  Please note: I don't want coding help here, I'm on Programmers for a reason. I want to improve my program planning/writing skills not (just) my understanding of Java. I'm trying to figure out how to make a tree which has an arbitrary category system, based on the skills listed for this LARP game here. My previous attempt had a bool for whether a skill was also a category. Trying to code around that was messy. Drawing out my tree I noticed that only my 'leaves' were skills and I'd labeled the others as categories. Explanation of tree: The Tree is 'born' with a set of hard coded highest level categories (Weapons, Physical and Mental, Medical etc.). Fro mthis the user needs to be able to add a skill. Ultimately they want to add 'One-handed Sword Specialisation' for instance. To do so you'd ideally click 'add' with Weapons selected and then select One-handed from a combobox, then click add again and enter a name in a text field. Then click add again to add a 'level' or 'tier' first proficiency, then specialisation. Of course if you want to buy a different skill it's completely different, which is what I'm having trouble getting my head around let alone programming in. What is a good system for describing this sort of tree in code? All the other JTree examples I've seen have some predictable pattern, and I don't want to have to code this all in 'literals'. Should I be using abstract classes? Interfaces? How can I make this sort of cluster of objects extensible when I add in other skills not listed above that behave differently? If there is not a good system to use, if there a good process for working out how to do this sort of thing?

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• Costs/profit of/when starting an indie company

  - by Jack

  In short, I want to start a game company. I do not have much coding experience (just basic understanding and ability to write basic programs), any graphics design experience, any audio mixing experience, or whatever else technical. However, I do have a lot of ideas, great analytical skills and a very logical approach to life. I do not have any friends who are even remotely technical (or creative in regards to games for that matter). So now that we've cleared that up, my question is this: how much, minimally, would it cost me to start such a company? I know that a game could be developed in under half a year, which means it would have to operate for half a year prior, and that's assuming that the people working on the first project do their jobs good, don't leave game breaking bugs, a bunch of minor bugs, etc.. So how much would it cost me, and what would be the likely profit in half a year? I'm looking at minimal costs here, as to do it, I would have to sell my current apartment and buy a new, smaller one, pay taxes, and likely move to US/CA/UK to be closer to technologically advanced people (and be able to speak the language of course). EDIT: I'm looking at a small project for starters, not a huge AAA title.

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