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• How are events in games handled?

  - by Alex

  In may games that I have played, I have seen events being triggered, such as when you walk into a certain land area while holding a specific object, it will trigger a special creature to spawn. I was wondering, how do games deal with events such as this? Not in a specific game, but in general among games. The first thought I had was that each place has a hard-coded set of events that it will call when something happens there. However, that would be too inefficient to maintain, as when something new is added, that would require modification of every part of the game that would potentially cause the event to be called. Next up, I had the idea of maybe how GUI programming works. In all of the GUI programming I've done, you create a component and a callback function, or a listener. Then, when the user interacts when the button, the callback function is called, allowing you to do something with it. So, I was thinking that in terms of a game, when a land area gets loaded the game loops over a list of all events, creating instances of them and calling public methods to bind them to the current scene. The events themselves then handle what scene it is, and if it is a scene that pertains to the event, will call the public method of the scene to bind the event to an action. Then, when the action takes place, the scene would call all events that are bound to that action. However, I'm sure that's not how games would operate either, as that would require a lot of creating of events all the time. So how to video games handle events, are either of those methods correct, or is it something completely different?

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• Why do programmers seem to be such bad spellers?

  - by Joel Etherton

  Programming languages are very precise tools based on explicit grammars. They're very picky, and when being used they require an exacting amount of detail. C#, for instance, is case sensitive so even getting the case of an argument wrong will cause an error. Questions asked all over the StackExchange are replete with misspellings, grammatical errors, and other problems that seem to indicate a lack of attention to detail when it comes to the language itself. Now, I understand there are a lot of programmers out there whose native language is not English, and I am not directing this question (rant one might say) at them. I'm referring to the individuals who are clearly from an English speaking background who refuse to pay attention to these simple details. I am not perfect by any means, but I try to use the language correctly so that my meaning will be understood correctly. I find programmers misspelling variable names, classes, and all manner of words in any kind of technical documentation they might write. I have had to withstand code where I am repeatedly referring to the subit[sic] button or HttpWebResponse reponse. The general complaint about bad spelling is one thing, and it will always be there. I accept that. But my question/comment is about the proclivity of bad spelling within the programming community. I would think that people who deal with such exacting tools to be more naturally predisposed towards proper spelling. Yet this doesn't seem to be the case.

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• Learning to be a good developer: what parts can you skip over?

  - by Andrew M

  I have set myself the goal of becoming a decent developer by this time next year. By this I mean full experience of the development 'lifecycle,' a few good apps/sites/webapps under my belt, and most importantly being able to work at a steady pace without getting sidelined for hours by some should-know-this-already technique. I'm not starting from scratch. I've written a lot of html/css, SQL, javascript, python and VB.net, and studied other languages like C and Java. I know about things like OOP, design patterns, TDD, complexity, computational linguistics, pointers/references, functional programming, and other academic/theoretical matters. It's just I can't say I've really done these things yet. So I want to get up to speed, and I want to know what things I can leave till a later date. For instance, studying algorithms and the maths behind them is interesting and all, but so far I've hardly needed to write anything but the most basic nested loops. Investigating Assembly to have a clearer picture of low-level operations would be cool... but I imagine rarely infringes on daily work. On the other hand, looking at a functional programming language might help me write programs that are more comprehensible and less prone to hidden failures (at the moment I'm finding the biggest difficulty is when the complexity of the app exceeds my capacity to understand it - for instance passing data around was fine... until I had to start doing it with AJAX, which was a painful step up). I could spend time working through case studies of design patterns, but I'm not sure how many of them get used in 'real life.' I'm a programmer with basic abilities - what skills should I focus on developing? (also my Unix skills are very weak, and also knowledge of Windows configuration... not sure how much time I should spend on that)

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• Are programmers getting lazier and less competent

  - by Skeith

  I started programming in C++ at uni and loved it. In the next term we changed to VB6 and I hated it. I could not tell what was going on, you drag a button to a form and the ide writes the code for you. While I hated the way VB functioned I cannot argue that it was faster and easier than doing the same thing in C++ so i can see why it is a popular language. Now I am not calling VB developers lazy in just saying it easier than C++ and I have noticed that a lot of newer languages are following this trend such a C#. This leads me to think that as more business want quick results more people will program like this and sooner or later there will be no such thing as what we call programming now. Future programmers will tell the computer what they want and the compiler will write the program for them like in star trek. Is this just an under informed opinion of a junior programmer or are programmers getting lazier and less competent in general? EDIT: A lot of answers say why re invent the wheel and I agree with this but when there are wheels available people are not bothering to learn how to make the wheel. I can google how to do pretty much anything in any language and half the languages do so much for you when it come to debugging they have no idea what there code does of how to fix the error. That's how I cam up with the theory that programmers are becoming lazier and less competent as no one cares how stuff works just that it does until it does not.

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• Software development process for a part time University project for 1 developer?

  - by Pricey

  I will be doing a part time University project soon and the time frame for it is around 8 months with approximately 10-15 hours a week spent working on it, with a review by a tutor each quarter. My question is what software development process would you recommend using when the course requires you to work on your own in order to manage yourself as well as the project? I wanted to use a weekly or bi-weekly iterative approach to my work but a lot of the processes seem tailored to teams of people. I am looking at XP (Extreme Programming) OR Scrum as something that is less than the norm for University work but again Scrum I don't know a lot about yet, and a question I have is; can you say you are doing XP without pair-programming? because my tutor seems to think that I have to stick to all the practices otherwise I can't do it (nevermind if I am working alone). We can have external user input as well but due to the small timescales with part time work it may be more beneficial for myself to be the user as well, which is not what I prefer considering how I can get lost in the design.

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• Is the separation of program logic and presentation layer going too far?

  - by Timwi

  In a Drupal programming guide, I noticed this sentence: The theme hook receives the total number of votes and the number of votes for just that item, but the template wants to display a percentage. That kind of work shouldn't be done in a template; instead, the math is performed here. The math necessary to calculate a percentage from a total and a number is (number/total)*100. Is this application of two basic arithmetic operators within a presentation layer already too much? Is the maintenance of the entire system severely compromised by this amount of mathematics? The WPF (Windows Presentation Framework) and its UI mark-up language, XAML, seem to go to similar extremes. If you try to so much as add two numbers in the View (the presentation layer), you have committed a cardinal sin. Consequently, XAML has no operators for any arithmetic whatsoever. Is this ultra-strict separation really the holy grail of programming? What are the significant gains to be had from taking the separation to such extremes?

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• Is there a language more general than Lisp?

  - by Jon Purdy

  I've been programming for a long time, and writing in Lisp (well, mostly Scheme) for a little less. My experience in these languages (and other functional languages) has informed my ability to write clean code even with less powerful tools. Lisp-family languages have lovely facilities for implementing every abstraction in common use: S-expressions generalise structure. Macros generalise syntax. Continuations generalise flow control. But I'm dissatisfied. Somehow, I want more. Is there a language that's more general? More powerful? As great as Lisp is, I find it hard to believe no one has come up with anything (dare I say) better. I'm well aware that ordinarily a question like this ought to be closed for its argumentative nature. But there seems to be a broad consensus that Lisp represents the theoretical pinnacle of programming language design. I simply refuse to accept that without some kind of proof. Which I guess amounts to questioning whether the lambda calculus is in fact the ideal abstraction of computation.

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• Is it OK to use dynamic typing to reduce the amount of variables in scope?

  - by missingno

  Often, when I am initializing something I have to use a temporary variable, for example: file_str = "path/to/file" file_file = open(file) or regexp_parts = ['foo', 'bar'] regexp = new RegExp( regexp_parts.join('|') ) However, I like to reduce the scope my variables to the smallest scope possible so there is less places where they can be (mis-)used. For example, I try to use for(var i ...) in C++ so the loop variable is confined to the loop body. In these initialization cases, if I am using a dynamic language, I am then often tempted to reuse the same variable in order to prevent the initial (and now useless) value from being used latter in the function. file = "path/to/file" file = open(file) regexp = ['...', '...'] regexp = new RegExp( regexp.join('|') ) The idea is that by reducing the number of variables in scope I reduce the chances to misuse them. However this sometimes makes the variable names look a little weird, as in the first example, where "file" refers to a "filename". I think perhaps this would be a non issue if I could use non-nested scopes begin scope1 filename = ... begin scope2 file = open(filename) end scope1 //use file here //can't use filename on accident end scope2 but I can't think of any programming language that supports this. What rules of thumb should I use in this situation? When is it best to reuse the variable? When is it best to create an extra variable? What other ways do we solve this scope problem?

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• First Experience with Web Services

  When I first started programming with Microsoft .Net (1.0 Framework) I had a strong desire to learn how search engines indexed web sites. At that time I was a working as a search engine spammer creating web pages to generate traffic for specific themes for various clients. One way I attempted to better understand .Net was to build a web spider that analyzed web pages on demand. An example of the spider is hosted at AddLinkz.com. After my spider was built I had no real idea what I could/should do with it until I found the MSN Search API. I used this web service to compare its results with my spider. Additionally, I used the API to feed my .Net web spider new URLs from the API based on specific search terms. MSN’s search API was very easy to use, I just had to request information by calling a web URL with parameters via a Get request and the results were returned in XML. At that time all requests were limited to XML responses and a maximum of 1,000 results per query.   Since then the entire API has gone through several reconstructions, rebranding and new search services.  Microsoft’s new Bing API replaced the older MSN search API and added several new search capabilities. These new features allow search data to be returned for web searches, image searches, new searches, and related search terms to name a few. Bing API Version 2.0 SourceTypes Web Searches for web content Sushi Image Searches for images on the web Sushi News Searches news stories Sushi InstantAnswer Searches Encarta online what is sushi, convert 5 feet to meters, x*5=7, and 2 plus 2 Spell Searches Encarta dictionary for spelling suggestions Phonebook Searches phonebook entries sushi in Los Angeles RelatedSearch Returns the query strings most similar to yours Ad Returns advertisements to incorporate with results I currently plan to start using the web search feature from the new Bing 2.0 API in an open source project related to exception management. Currently, it is still in the conception phase.

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• Which is more important in a web application code promotion hierarchy? production environment to repo equivalence or unidirectional propagation?

  - by ghbarratt

  Lets say you have a code promotion hierarchy consisting of several environments, (the polar end) two of which are development (dev) and production (prod). Lets say you also have a web application where important (but not developer controlled) files are created (and perhaps altered) in the production environment. Lets say that you (or someone above you) decided that the files which are controlled/created/altered/deleted in the production environment needed to go into the repository. Which of the following two sets of practice / approaches do you find best: Committing these non-developed file modifications made in the production environment so that the repository reflects the production environment as closely and as often as possible. Generally ignoring the non-developed production environment alterations, placing confidence in backups to restore the production environment should it be harmed, and keeping a resolution to avoid pushing developments through the promotion hierarchy in the reverse direction (avoiding pushing from prod to dev), only committing the files found in the production environment if they were absolutely necessary in other environments for development. So, 1 or 2, and why? PS - I am currently slightly biased toward maintaining production environment to repository equivalence (option 1), but I keep an open mind and would accept an answer supporting either.

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• Generalist Languages: Dying or Alive and Well?

  - by dsimcha

  Around here, it seems like there's somewhat of a consensus that generalist programming languages (that try to be good at everything, support multiple paradigms, support both very high- and very low-level programming), etc. are a bad idea, and that it's better to pick the right tool for the job and use lots of different languages. I see three major areas where this is flawed: Interfacing multiple languages is always at least a source of friction and is sometimes practically impossible. How severe a problem this is depends on how fine-grained the interfacing is. Near the boundary between the two languages, though, you're basically limited to the intersection of their features, and you have to care about things like binary interfaces that you usually wouldn't. Passing complex data structures (i.e. not just primitives and arrays of primitives) between languages is almost always a hassle. Furthermore, shifting between different syntaxes, different conventions, etc. can be confusing and annoying, though this is a fairly minor complaint. Requirements are never set in stone. I hate picking a language thinking it's the right tool for the job, then realizing that, when some new requirement surfaces, it's actually a terrible choice for that requirement. This has happened to me several times before, usually when working with languages that are very slow, very domain specific and/or has very poor concurrency/parallelism support. When you program in a language for a while, you start to build up a personal toolbox of small utility functions/classes/programs. The value of these goes drastically down if you're forced to use a different language than the one you've accumulated all this code in. What am I missing here? Why shouldn't more focus be placed on generalist languages? Are generalist languages as a category dying or alive and well?

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• Benefits of classic OOP over Go-like language

  - by tylerl

  I've been thinking a lot about language design and what elements would be necessary for an "ideal" programming language, and studying Google's Go has led me to question a lot of otherwise common knowledge. Specifically, Go seems to have all of the interesting benefits from object oriented programming without actually having any of the structure of an object oriented language. There are no classes, only structures; there is no class/structure inheritance -- only structure embedding. There aren't any hierarchies, no parent classes, no explicit interface implementations. Instead, type casting rules are based on a loose system similar to duck-typing, such that if a struct implements the necessary elements of a "Reader" or a "Request" or an "Encoding", then you can cast it and use it as one. Does such a system obsolete the concept of OOP? Or is there something about OOP as implemented in C++ and Java and C# that is inherently more capable, more maintainable, somehow more powerful that you have to give up when moving to a language like Go? What benefit do you have to give up to gain the simplicity that this new paradigm represents?

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• What's the proper term for a function inverse to a constructor? Deconstructor, destructor, or something else?

  - by Petr Pudlák

  Edit: I'm rephrasing the question a bit. Apparently I caused some confusion because I didn't realize that the term destructor is used in OOP for something quite different - it's a function invoked when an object is being destroyed. In functional programming we (try to) avoid mutable state so there is no such equivalent to it. (I added the proper tag to the question.) Instead, I've seen that the record field for unwrapping a value (especially for single-valued data types such as newtypes) is sometimes called destructor or perhaps deconstructor. For example, let's have (in Haskell): newtype Wrap = Wrap { unwrap :: Int } Here Wrap is the constructor and unwrap is what? I've seen both, for example: ... Most often, one supplies smart constructors and destructors for these to ease working with them. ... at Haskell wiki, or ... The general theme here is to fuse constructor - deconstructor pairs like ... at Haskell wikibook (here it's probably meant in a bit more general sense). The questions are: How do we call unwrap in functional programming? Deconstructor? Destructor? Or by some other term? And to clarify, is this terminology applicable to other functional languages, or is it used just in the Has

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• What can be done against language inertia?

  - by gerrit

  Often, projects use programming language X, but would use programming language Y if they were started from scratch. For example, big numerical models may be written entirely in Fortran. Whereas this might be a reasonable choice for the components that need to run fast (alternative would be C or C++), it might be a poor choice for components that either do not need to run fast (such as things dealing with human input or simple visualisations), or where runtime is not the limiting factor (such as I/O, particularly when from the network). Another example may be when a project is built using a propriety language (such as Matlab; no, FOSS clones are not good enough) and was started at a time when FOSS alternatives were not viable, but ten years later, they are; and it would be beneficial to migrate. However, due to language inertia, a migration does not happen. Code that works should not be touched, porting code is a time-consuming, expensive process, and programmers are familiar in language X but not necessarily in language Y. Still, in the long term, a migration would likely be beneficial. Can anything be done to mitigate the problems associated with language inertia? Are there any notable examples of big projects that have successfully overcome this problem? Or is a project bound to stick forever with the initial choices?

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• Where to Start?

  - by freemann098

  my name is Chase. I've been programming for over 3 years now and I've made very little progress towards game development. I blame myself for it due to reasons. I have experience in many languages such as C++, C#, and Java. I have a little bit of knowledge in JavaScript/HTML and Python. My question is where to start on actually understanding jumping into game development. Whenever I watch game development tutorials it mostly makes sense until points of things like OpenGL or advanced topics that make no sense at all. An example is something like glOrhho Matrix or whatever. Videos either don't explain things like this or they're not explained very well. Do I not know enough basics? I find myself always copying code from a video but understanding very little of it. It's like i'm memorizing things I don't understand which makes it hard to program at all. If I were to want to get to the point where I could write my own game engine or just a game by myself in general in C++ using at the most documentation how would I start at mastering to that level. Should I learn C first, or get really good at basics in general with C++. I know there is a similar posted question on this site but it's not the same due to the fact the person asking the question has a well knowledge level in programming. I'm stuck in a loop of learning the same things but if I go farther I don't understand. I'm stuck in the same spot and need to make progress.

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• What's the proper term for a function inverse to a constructor - to unwrap a value from a data type?

  - by Petr Pudlák

  Edit: I'm rephrasing the question a bit. Apparently I caused some confusion because I didn't realize that the term destructor is used in OOP for something quite different - it's a function invoked when an object is being destroyed. In functional programming we (try to) avoid mutable state so there is no such equivalent to it. (I added the proper tag to the question.) Instead, I've seen that the record field for unwrapping a value (especially for single-valued data types such as newtypes) is sometimes called destructor or perhaps deconstructor. For example, let's have (in Haskell): newtype Wrap = Wrap { unwrap :: Int } Here Wrap is the constructor and unwrap is what? The questions are: How do we call unwrap in functional programming? Deconstructor? Destructor? Or by some other term? And to clarify, is this/other terminology applicable to other functional languages, or is it used just in the Haskell? Perhaps also, is there any terminology for this in general, in non-functional languages? I've seen both terms, for example: ... Most often, one supplies smart constructors and destructors for these to ease working with them. ... at Haskell wiki, or ... The general theme here is to fuse constructor - deconstructor pairs like ... at Haskell wikibook (here it's probably meant in a bit more general sense), or newtype DList a = DL { unDL :: [a] -> [a] } The unDL function is our deconstructor, which removes the DL constructor. ... in The Real World Haskell.

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• What are some ways to separate game logic from animations and the draw loop?

  - by TMV

  I have only previously made flash games, using MovieClips and such to separate out my animations from my game logic. Now I am getting into trying my hand at making a game for Android, but the game programming theory around separating these things still confuses me. I come from a background of developing non game web applications so I am versed in more MVC like patterns and am stuck in that mindset as I approach game programming. I want to do things like abstract my game by having, for example, a game board class that contains the data for a grid of tiles with instances of a tile class that each contain properties. I can give my draw loop access to this and have it draw the game board based on the properties of each tile on the game board, but I don't understand where exactly animation should go. As far as I can tell, animation sort of sits between the abstracted game logic (model) and the draw loop (view). With my MVC mindset, it's frustrating trying to decide where animation is actually supposed to go. It would have quite a bit of data associated with it like a model, but seemingly needs to be very closely coupled with the draw loop in order to have things like frame independent animation. How can I break out of this mindset and start thinking about patterns that make more sense for games?

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• When can you call yourself good at language X?

  - by SoulBeaver

  This goes back to a conversation I've had with my girlfriend. I tried to tell her that I simply don't feel adequate enough in my programming language (C++) to call myself good. She then asked me, "Well, when do you consider yourself good enough?" That's an interesting question. I didn't know what to tell her. So I'm asking you. For any programming language, framework or the like, when do you reach a point were you sit back, look at what you've done and say, "Hey, I'm actually pretty good at this."? How do you define "good" so that you can tell others, honestly, "Yeah, I'm good at X". Additionally, do you reach these conclusions by comparing what others can do? Additional Info I have read the canonical paper on how it takes ten-thousand hours before you are an expert on the field. (Props to anybody that knows what this paper is called again) I have also read various articles from Coding Horror about interviewing people. Some people, it was said, "Cannot function outside of a framework." So they may be "good" for that framework, but not otherwise in the language. Is this true?

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• What are some techniques I can use to refactor Object Oriented code into Functional code?

  - by tieTYT

  I've spent about 20-40 hours developing part of a game using JavaScript and HTML5 canvas. When I started I had no idea what I was doing. So it started as a proof of concept and is coming along nicely now, but it has no automated tests. The game is starting to become complex enough that it could benefit from some automated testing, but it seems tough to do because the code depends on mutating global state. I'd like to refactor the whole thing using Underscore.js, a functional programming library for JavaScript. Part of me thinks I should just start from scratch using a Functional Programming style and testing. But, I think refactoring the imperative code into declarative code might be a better learning experience and a safer way to get to my current state of functionality. Problem is, I know what I want my code to look like in the end, but I don't know how to turn my current code into it. I'm hoping some people here could give me some tips a la the Refactoring book and Working Effectively With Legacy Code. For example, as a first step I'm thinking about "banning" global state. Take every function that uses a global variable and pass it in as a parameter instead. Next step may be to "ban" mutation, and to always return a new object. Any advice would be appreciated. I've never taken OO code and refactored it into Functional code before.

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• Are specific types still necessary?

  - by MKO

  One thing that occurred to me the other day, are specific types still necessary or a legacy that is holding us back. What I mean is: do we really need short, int, long, bigint etc etc. I understand the reasoning, variables/objects are kept in memory, memory needs to be allocated and therefore we need to know how big a variable can be. But really, shouldn't a modern programming language be able to handle "adaptive types", ie, if something is only ever allocated in the shortint range it uses fewer bytes, and if something is suddenly allocated a very big number the memory is allocated accordinly for that particular instance. Float, real and double's are a bit trickier since the type depends on what precision you need. Strings should however be able to take upp less memory in many instances (in .Net) where mostly ascii is used buth strings always take up double the memory because of unicode encoding. One argument for specific types might be that it's part of the specification, ie for example a variable should not be able to be bigger than a certain value so we set it to shortint. But why not have type constraints instead? It would be much more flexible and powerful to be able to set permissible ranges and values on variables (and properties). I realize the immense problem in revamping the type architecture since it's so tightly integrated with underlying hardware and things like serialization might become tricky indeed. But from a programming perspective it should be great no?

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• JavaScript and callback nesting

  - by Jake King

  A lot of JavaScript libraries (notably jQuery) use chaining, which allows the reduction of this: var foo = $(".foo"); foo.stop(); foo.show(); foo.animate({ top: 0 }); to this: $(".foo").stop().show().animate({ top: 0 }); With proper formatting, I think this is quite a nice syntactic capability. However, I often see a pattern which I don't particularly like, but appears to be a necessary evil in non-blocking models. This is the ever-present nesting of callback functions: $(".foo").animate({ top: 0, }, { callback: function () { $.ajax({ url: 'ajax.php', }, { callback: function () { ... } }); } }); And it never ends. Even though I love the ease non-blocking models provide, I hate the odd nesting of function literals it forces upon the programmer. I'm interesting in writing a small JS library as an exercise, and I'd love to find a better way to do this, but I don't know how it could be done without feeling hacky. Are there any projects out there that have resolved this problem before? And if not, what are the alternatives to this ugly, meaningless code structure?

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• Spending a good fortune on a certificate holding Scrum Master or a Veteran XP coach?

  - by ashy_32bit

  There is a very prestigious company that delivers a well-sold software about financial systems. It has more that 20 years of history, and is staffed with about 20 programmers and much larger number of managerial staff. Dissatisfied customers have reported strange bugs and no one has a clue what is wrong, hard to read code, and customization is prohibitively expensive. In a word, the software is rotten. The company decided to spend a fortune and found the Agile thing as the remedy but they are stuck about what it is they need most urgently. Is it about the process or the developers or both? The challenge breaks down to the following options: They can hire a certificate holding Scrum Master to teach them Scrum. When asked about the value of doing it, the SM responded: "I will prepare them to embrace Agile and only then they can go Agile and save the product". They can as well hire a veteran XP coach. When posed with the same question he responded : "The most urgent problem is with the programmers and not the management, XP will save the product from rot and only then Scrum will make sense" Developers are far from capable of doing agile programming practices at the moment. No unit tests, no pair programmings, no CI (huh? what is it?) ... you get the idea. Some say they would be far better trying to improve their programming first (hire option 2) and then go with the process. Many say quite the opposite. Any insights ?

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• Should sanity be a property of a programmer or a program?

  - by toplel32

  I design and implement languages, that can range from object notations to markup languages. In many cases I have considered restrictions in favor of sanity (common knowledge), like in the case of control characters in identifiers. There are two consequences to consider before doing this: It takes extra computation It narrows liberty I'm interested to learn how developers think of decisions like this. As you may know Microsoft C# is very open on the contrary. If you really want to prefix your integer as Long with 'l' instead of 'L' and so risk other developers of confusing '1' and 'l', no problem. If you want to name your variables in non-latin script so they will contrast with C#'s latin keywords, no problem. Or if you want to distribute a string over multiple lines and so break a series of indentation, no problem. It is cheap to ensure consistency with restrictions and this makes it tempting to implement. But in the case of disallowing non-latin characters (concerning the second example), it means a discredit to Unicode, because one would not take full advantage of its capacity.

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• Laser range finder, what language to use? Beginner advice

  - by DrOnline

  I hope this is the right place. I am a programming beginner, and I want to make a laser range finder, and I need advice about how to proceed etc. In a few weeks I will get a lot of dirt cheap 3-5V lasers and some cheap usb webcams. I will point the laser and webcam in parallel, and somehow use trigonometry and programming to determined distance. I have seen online that others made done it this way, I have purposefully not looked at the details too much because I want to develop it on my own, and learn, but I know the general outline. I have a general idea of how to proceed. The program loads in a picture from the webcam, and I dunno how images work really, but I imagine there is a format that is basically an array of RGB values.. is this right? I will load in the red values, and find the most red one. I know the height difference between the laser and the cam. I know the center dot in the image, I know the redmost dot. I'm sure there's some way to figure out some range there. TO THE POINT: 1) Is my reasoning sound thus far, especially in terms of image analysis? I don't need complete solutions, just general points 2) What I need to figure out, is what platform to use. I have an arduino... apparently, I've read it's too weak to process images. Read that online. I know some C I know some Python I have Matlab. Which is the best option? I do not need high sampling rates, I have not decided on whether it should be automated or whether I should make a GUI with a button to press for samples. I will keep it simple and expand I think. I also do not need it to be super accurate, I'm just having fun here. Advice!

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• Installing Lubuntu 14.04.1 fails, upowerd appears to hang

  - by Rantanplan

  On the live-CD session, I tried installing Lubuntu double clicking on the install button on the desktop. Here, the CD starts running but then stops running and nothing happens. Next, I rebooted and tried installing Lubuntu directly from the boot menu screen using forcepae again. After a while, I receive the following error message: The installer encountered an unrecoverable error. A desktop session will now be run so that you may investigate the problem or try installing again. Hitting Enter brings me to the desktop. For what errors should I search? And how? Thanks for some hints! On Lubuntu 12.04: uname -a Linux humboldt 3.2.0-67-generic #101-Ubuntu SMP Tue Jul 15 17:45:51 UTC 2014 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux lsb_release -a No LSB modules are available. Distributor ID: Ubuntu Description: Ubuntu 12.04.5 LTS Release: 12.04 Codename: precise upowerd appears to hang: Aug 25 10:53:28 lubuntu kernel: [ 367.920272] INFO: task upowerd:3002 blocked for more than 120 seconds. Aug 25 10:53:28 lubuntu kernel: [ 367.920288] Tainted: G S C 3.13.0-32-generic #57-Ubuntu Aug 25 10:53:28 lubuntu kernel: [ 367.920294] "echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/hung_task_timeout_secs" disables this message. Aug 25 10:53:28 lubuntu kernel: [ 367.920300] upowerd D e21f9da0 0 3002 1 0x00000000 Aug 25 10:53:28 lubuntu kernel: [ 367.920314] e21f9dfc 00000086 f5ef7094 e21f9da0 c1050272 c1a8d540 c1920a00 00000000 Aug 25 10:53:28 lubuntu kernel: [ 367.920333] c1a8d540 c1920a00 d9e44da0 f5ef6540 c1129061 00000002 000001c1 0001c37b Aug 25 10:53:28 lubuntu kernel: [ 367.920351] 00000000 00000002 00000000 e2276240 00000000 00000040 c12b0ec5 c19975a8 Aug 25 10:53:28 lubuntu kernel: [ 367.920368] Call Trace: Aug 25 10:53:28 lubuntu kernel: [ 367.920389] [<c1050272>] ? kmap_atomic_prot+0x42/0x100 Aug 25 10:53:28 lubuntu kernel: [ 367.920404] [<c1129061>] ? get_page_from_freelist+0x2a1/0x600 Aug 25 10:53:28 lubuntu kernel: [ 367.920417] [<c12b0ec5>] ? process_measurement+0x65/0x240 Aug 25 10:53:28 lubuntu kernel: [ 367.920432] [<c1654c73>] schedule_preempt_disabled+0x23/0x60 Aug 25 10:53:28 lubuntu kernel: [ 367.920443] [<c16565bd>] __mutex_lock_slowpath+0x10d/0x171 Aug 25 10:53:28 lubuntu kernel: [ 367.920454] [<c1655aec>] mutex_lock+0x1c/0x28 Aug 25 10:53:28 lubuntu kernel: [ 367.920478] [<f857223a>] acpi_smbus_transaction+0x48/0x210 [sbshc] Aug 25 10:53:28 lubuntu kernel: [ 367.920489] [<c11858e1>] ? do_last+0x1b1/0xf60 Aug 25 10:53:28 lubuntu kernel: [ 367.920504] [<f857242f>] acpi_smbus_read+0x2d/0x33 [sbshc] Aug 25 10:53:28 lubuntu kernel: [ 367.920520] [<f881e0f1>] acpi_battery_get_state+0x74/0x8b [sbs] Aug 25 10:53:28 lubuntu kernel: [ 367.920535] [<f881e8a9>] acpi_sbs_battery_get_property+0x2a/0x233 [sbs] Aug 25 10:53:28 lubuntu kernel: [ 367.920549] [<c14fa61f>] power_supply_show_property+0x3f/0x240 Aug 25 10:53:28 lubuntu kernel: [ 367.920561] [<c114664f>] ? handle_mm_fault+0x64f/0x8d0 Aug 25 10:53:28 lubuntu kernel: [ 367.920573] [<c14fa5e0>] ? power_supply_store_property+0x60/0x60 Aug 25 10:53:28 lubuntu kernel: [ 367.920586] [<c1407d20>] ? dev_uevent_name+0x30/0x30 Aug 25 10:53:28 lubuntu kernel: [ 367.920597] [<c1407d38>] dev_attr_show+0x18/0x40 Aug 25 10:53:28 lubuntu kernel: [ 367.920608] [<c11dad15>] sysfs_seq_show+0xe5/0x1c0 Aug 25 10:53:28 lubuntu kernel: [ 367.920621] [<c119846e>] seq_read+0xce/0x370 Aug 25 10:53:28 lubuntu kernel: [ 367.920633] [<c11983a0>] ? seq_hlist_next_percpu+0x90/0x90 Aug 25 10:53:28 lubuntu kernel: [ 367.920644] [<c1179238>] vfs_read+0x78/0x140 Aug 25 10:53:28 lubuntu kernel: [ 367.920654] [<c11799a9>] SyS_read+0x49/0x90 Aug 25 10:53:28 lubuntu kernel: [ 367.920667] [<c165efcd>] sysenter_do_call+0x12/0x28 /var/log/installer/debug shows upower related error: Ubiquity 2.18.8 Gtk-Message: Failed to load module "overlay-scrollbar" Gtk-Message: Failed to load module "overlay-scrollbar" ERROR:dbus.proxies:Introspect error on :1.23:/org/freedesktop/UPower: dbus.exceptions.DBusException: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NoReply: Did not receive a reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken. Exception in GTK frontend (invoking crash handler): Traceback (most recent call last): File "/usr/lib/ubiquity/bin/ubiquity", line 636, in <module> main(oem_config) File "/usr/lib/ubiquity/bin/ubiquity", line 622, in main install(query=options.query) File "/usr/lib/ubiquity/bin/ubiquity", line 260, in install wizard = ui.Wizard(distro) File "/usr/lib/ubiquity/ubiquity/frontend/gtk_ui.py", line 290, in __init__ mod.ui = mod.ui_class(mod.controller) File "/usr/lib/ubiquity/plugins/ubi-prepare.py", line 93, in __init__ upower.setup_power_watch(self.prepare_power_source) File "/usr/lib/ubiquity/ubiquity/upower.py", line 21, in setup_power_watch power_state_changed() File "/usr/lib/ubiquity/ubiquity/upower.py", line 18, in power_state_changed not misc.get_prop(upower, UPOWER_PATH, 'OnBattery')) File "/usr/lib/ubiquity/ubiquity/misc.py", line 809, in get_prop return obj.Get(iface, prop, dbus_interface=dbus.PROPERTIES_IFACE) File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/dbus/proxies.py", line 70, in __call__ return self._proxy_method(*args, **keywords) File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/dbus/proxies.py", line 145, in __call__ **keywords) File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/dbus/connection.py", line 651, in call_blocking message, timeout)

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