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• what is the Web development process efficiency judgment criteria

  - by Ahmed safan

  I'm working as a web developer and I want to be able to determine if I'm efficient. Does this include the how long it take to accomplish tasks such as: Server side code for the site logic with one language or multiple php,asp,asp.net. Client side code like javascript with jquery for ajax, menus and other interactivity Page layout, html, css (color, fonts (but I have no artistic sense!)) The needs of the site and how it will work (planning) How can i judge how long it will take to complete a website? The site has CMS for adding and editing news, products, articles on the experience of the company. Also, they can edit team work, add Recreational Activities and a logo gallery with compressed psd download, and send messages to cpanel and to email. You are starting from scratch except JQuery and PHPmailer. How can I estimate how long the job will take, and how can I calculate the required time to finish any new projects? I'm so sorry for many scattered questions, but I'm in my first experiment and I want to take benefits from the great experience of those who have it.

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• The Science Behind Salty Airline Food

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  In this collection, Artist Signe Emma combines a scientific overview of the role salt plays in airline food with electron microscope scans of salt crystals arranged to look like the views from an airplane–a rather clever and visually stunning way to deliver the message. Attached to the collection is this explaination of why airlines load their snacks and meals with salt: White noise consists of a random collection of sounds at different frequencies and scientists have demonstrated that it is capable of diminishing the taste of salt. At low-pressure conditions, higher taste and odour thresholds of flavourings are generally observed. At 30.000 feet the cabin humidity drops by 15%, and the lowered air pressure forces bodily fluids upwards. With less humidity, people have less moisture in their throat, which slows the transport of odours to the brains smell and taste receptors. That means that if a meal should taste the same up in the air, as on ground it needs 30% of extra salt. To combat the double assault on our sense of taste, the airlines boost the salt content to compensate. For more neat microscope scans as high-altitude view photographs, hit up the link below. How to Play Classic Arcade Games On Your PC How to Use an Xbox 360 Controller On Your Windows PC Download the Official How-To Geek Trivia App for Windows 8

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• Prevent oversteering catastrophe in racing games

  - by jdm

  When playing GTA III on Android I noticed something that has been annoying me in almost every racing game I've played (maybe except Mario Kart): Driving straight ahead is easy, but curves are really hard. When I switch lanes or pass somebody, the car starts swiveling back and forth, and any attempt to correct it makes it only worse. The only thing I can do is to hit the brakes. I think this is some kind of oversteering. What makes it so irritating is that it never happens to me in real life (thank god :-)), so 90% of the games with vehicles inside feel unreal to me (despite probably having really good physics engines). I've talked to a couple of people about this, and it seems either you 'get' racing games, or you don't. With a lot of practice, I did manage to get semi-good at some games (e.g. from the Need for Speed series), by driving very cautiously, braking a lot (and usually getting a cramp in my fingers). What can you do as a game developer to prevent the oversteering resonance catastrophe, and make driving feel right? (For a casual racing game, that doesn't strive for 100% realistic physics) I also wonder what games like Super Mario Kart exactly do differently so that they don't have so much oversteering? I guess one problem is that if you play with a keyboard or a touchscreen (but not wheels and pedals), you only have digital input: gas pressed or not, steering left/right or not, and it's much harder to steer appropriately for a given speed. The other thing is that you probably don't have a good sense of speed, and drive much faster than you would (safely) in reality. From the top of my head, one solution might be to vary the steering response with speed.

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• Is what someone publishes on the Internet fair game when considering them for employment as a programmer?

  - by Jon Hopkins

  (Originally posted on Stack Overflow but closed there and more relevant for here) So we first interviewed a guy for a technical role and he was pretty good. Before the second interview we googled him and found his MySpace page which could, to put it mildly, be regarded as inappropriate. Just to be clear there was no doubt that it was his page (name, photos, matching biographical information and so on). The content was entirely personal and in no way related to his professional abilities or attitude. Is it fair to consider this when thinking about whether to offer them a job? In most situations my response would be what goes on in someone's private life is their own doing. However for anyone technical who professes (implicitly or explicitly) to understand the Internet and the possibilities it offers, is posting things in a way which can so obviously be discovered a significant error of judgement? EDIT: Clarification - essentially it was a fairly graphic commentary on porn (but of, shall we say, a non-academic nature). I'm actually more interested in the general concept than the specific incident as it's something we're likely to see more in the future as people put more and more of themselves on-line. My concerns are not primarily about him and how he feels about such things (he's white, straight, male and about the last possible victim of discrimination on the planet in that sense), more how it reflects on the company that a very simple search (basically his name) returns these things and that clients may also do it. We work in a relatively conservative industry.

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• What to Return with Async CRUD methods

  - by RualStorge

  While there is a similar question focused on Java, I've been in debates with utilizing Task objects. What's the best way to handle returns on CRUD methods (and similar)? Common returns we've seen over the years are: Void (no return unless there is an exception) Boolean (True on Success, False on Failure, exception on unhandled failure) Int or GUID (Return the newly created objects Id, 0 or null on failure, exception on unhandled failure) The updated Object (exception on failure) Result Object (Object that houses the manipulated object's ID, Boolean or status field to with success or failure indicated, Exception information if there was one, etc) The concern comes into play as we've started moving over to utilizing C# 5's Async functionality, and this brought the question up of how we should handle CRUD returns large-scale. In our systems we have a little of everything in regards to what we return, we want to make these returns standardized... Now the question is what is the recommended standard? Is there even a recommended standard yet? (I realize we need to decide our standard, but typically we do so by looking at best practices, see if it makes sense for us and go from there, but here we're not finding much to work with)

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• Drupal 7 Advice Needed: "Portal" Creation

  - by WernerCD

  Question: What is the best game plan for building what I want. I'm rebuilding the company intranet and am trying to get our "Portals" system re-created in Drupal. I'm trying to learn Panels, because thats what I think would do this, but I just can't seem to get it working. Menu at top, drop down lists for various webpages, tools, internal applications... and Department Portals. When you click on a department portal, you get the same menu at top... and on the main part of the page you have a menu on the left, with content on the right. Menu stays on the left, content loads next to it. Each Portal has its own menu and content (least of which is "Home"). Ultimately, I'd like to be able to say - users with role "Foo" can add/edit/delete Portal Bar. - Each Portal starts with a "Home" - Each Portal has its own Menu tree's. (Picture 2 above has a < ul for video tutorials that would be a second level menu. So more than one deep.) - Content on the right side of the portal should be flexible (Video, PDF via fileviewer, etc) - Portal Bar should have its own Folder to contain it's content. I'm trying to do this in Panels, but I can't seem to put the pieces together in my mind and in practice. I hope I'm making sense, because the dizzying array of stuff is killing me lol.

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• Best practices for using namespaces in C++.

  - by Dima

  I have read Uncle Bob's Clean Code a few months ago, and it has had a profound impact on the way I write code. Even if it seemed like he was repeating things that every programmer should know, putting them all together and putting them into practice does result in much cleaner code. In particular, I found breaking up large functions into many tiny functions, and breaking up large classes into many tiny classes to be incredibly useful. Now for the question. The book's examples are all in Java, while I have been working in C++ for the past several years. How would the ideas in Clean Code extend to the use of namespaces, which do not exist in Java? (Yes, I know about the Java packages, but it is not really the same.) Does it make sense to apply the idea of creating many tiny entities, each with a clearly define responsibility, to namespaces? Should a small group of related classes always be wrapped in a namespace? Is this the way to manage the complexity of having lots of tiny classes, or would the cost of managing lots of namespaces be prohibitive?

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• Be liberal in what you accept... or not?

  - by Matthieu M.

  [Disclaimer: this question is subjective, but I would prefer getting answers backed by facts and/or reflexions] I think everyone knows about the Robustness Principle, usually summed up by Postel's Law: Be conservative in what you send; be liberal in what you accept. I would agree that for the design of a widespread communication protocol this may make sense (with the goal of allowing easy extension), however I have always thought that its application to HTML / CSS was a total failure, each browser implementing its own silent tweak detection / behavior, making it near impossible to obtain a consistent rendering across multiple browsers. I do notice though that there the RFC of the TCP protocol deems "Silent Failure" acceptable unless otherwise specified... which is an interesting behavior, to say the least. There are other examples of the application of this principle throughout the software trade that regularly pop up because they have bitten developpers, from the top off my head: Javascript semi-colon insertion C (silent) builtin conversions (which would not be so bad if it did not truncated...) and there are tools to help implement "smart" behavior: name matching phonetic algorithms (Double Metaphone) string distances algorithms (Levenshtein distance) However I find that this approach, while it may be helpful when dealing with non-technical users or to help users in the process of error recovery, has some drawbacks when applied to the design of library/classes interface: it is somewhat subjective whether the algorithm guesses "right", and thus it may go against the Principle of Least Astonishment it makes the implementation more difficult, thus more chances to introduce bugs (violation of YAGNI ?) it makes the behavior more susceptible to change, as any modification of the "guess" routine may break old programs, nearly excluding refactoring possibilities... from the start! And this is what led me to the following question: When designing an interface (library, class, message), do you lean toward the robustness principle or not ? I myself tend to be quite strict, using extensive input validation on my interfaces, and I was wondering if I was perhaps too strict.

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• How to void checked exceptions in Java?

  - by deamon

  I consider checked exception for a design mistake in the Java language. They lead to leaky abstractions and a lot of clutter in the code. It seems that they force the programmer to handle exceptions early although they are in most cases better handled lately. So my question is how to avoid checked exception? My idea is to execute the actual code inside an exception translator using lambda expressions. Example: ExceptionConverter.convertToRuntimeException(() => { // do things that could throw checked exceptions here }); If for example a IOException occurs it gets rethrown as an exception with the same name but from a different class hierarchy (based on RuntimeException). This approach would effectivly remove the need to handle or declare checked exceptions. Exceptions could then be handled where and if it makes sense. Another solution would be to declare IOException throws Exception on each method. What do you think which solution is better? Do you know any better approach to avoid (suppress) checked exceptions in Java?

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• External USB hard-drive changing drive letter

  - by Sydius

  I have a Seagate FreeAgent Go external USB hard drive that was mounted but mysteriously decided to reconnect itself: Sep 30 15:07:06 feinman kernel: [243901.551604] usb 1-1.2: USB disconnect, device number 3 Sep 30 15:07:06 feinman kernel: [243901.553828] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Synchronizing SCSI cache Sep 30 15:07:06 feinman kernel: [243901.553893] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Result: hostbyte=DID_NO_CONNECT driverbyte=DRIVER_OK Sep 30 15:07:10 feinman kernel: [243905.336557] usb 1-1.2: new high-speed USB device number 4 using ehci_hcd Sep 30 15:07:10 feinman kernel: [243905.431219] scsi7 : usb-storage 1-1.2:1.0 Sep 30 15:07:11 feinman kernel: [243906.427207] scsi 7:0:0:0: Direct-Access Seagate FreeAgent Go 0148 PQ: 0 ANSI: 4 Sep 30 15:07:11 feinman kernel: [243906.428303] sd 7:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg1 type 0 Sep 30 15:07:11 feinman kernel: [243906.430317] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdc] 625142447 512-byte logical blocks: (320 GB/298 GiB) Sep 30 15:07:11 feinman kernel: [243906.430860] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdc] Write Protect is off Sep 30 15:07:11 feinman kernel: [243906.430865] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdc] Mode Sense: 1c 00 00 00 Sep 30 15:07:11 feinman kernel: [243906.431386] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdc] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA Sep 30 15:07:11 feinman kernel: [243906.493674] sdc: sdc1 Sep 30 15:07:11 feinman kernel: [243906.496109] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdc] Attached SCSI disk It changed from sdb to sdc, causing a number of problems for me. What can I do to further track down the cause? I thought it might be a problem with it sleeping but when I cat /sys/class/scsi_disk/6\:0\:0\:0/allow_restart, I see that it's already 1.

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• Tracking feature requests for small-scale components

  - by DXM

  I'm curious how other development teams (especially those that work in moderate to large development groups) track "future" features/wishlists for functionality for internally developed frameworks or components. I know the standard advice is that a development team should find one good tool for tracking bugs/features and use that for everything and I agree with that if the future requests are for the product itself. In my company we have an engineering department, which is broken up into multiple groups and within each there can be one to several agile teams. The bug tracking product we use has been "a leader since 1997" (their UI/usability seems to also be evaluated against that year even today) but my agile team or even group doesn't really control what is being used by the whole department. What we are looking to track is not necessarily product features but expansion/nice to have functionality for internal components that go into our product. So to name a few for example... framework/utility library on top of CppUnit which our developers share low-level IPC communications framework Common development SDK that myself and several other team leads started to help share some common code/tools at the department-wide level (this SDK is released as internal "product" to each of the groups). Is the standard practice to use the one bug tracking tool? Or would it make more sense to setup something more localized specifically for our needs and maintain it ourselves? It's also unclear how management will feel if developers start performing "IT" roles of maintaining software and servers. At the same time, right now, we use excel files, internal wiki and MS OneNote for this kind of stuff and that just doesn't feel right. (I'm afraid to ask for actual software recommendations, since that might make this question more localized or something. Also developers needs this way more than management, so it would be nice to find something either free or no more than the cost of a happy hour).

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• WordPress injection?

  - by saul

  I don't really know how to express my problem, so bear with me. This is a bit hard to explain. I have a Wordpress installation, the latest, and often (once a day) my site redirects users to the /wp-admin/install.php file. Asking for my login credentials of course. I have tried reinstalling WordPress and still have not been able to figure what they are doing. That happens regularly. Also, a few hours later, I am able to see my site normally. Hope this makes sense. I suspect there myst be some database DoS that allows them to inject a redirect of some sort into my admin area, thus redirecting the user to said directory (install.php). But that's just me. I really have no clue what else could they be doing. I looked at the source code from several php files and noted some of them don't include a ? tag. Could that be an issue? My hosting company is iPage, I've contacted them and they say there's nothing wrong with my files. Anyone have a clue? I can paste the code to any source file.

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• Self Service Reporting With PowerPivot

  - by blakmk

  There are so many cool new features in Sql 2008 release 2 it was difficult for me to pick a topic for T-SQL Tuesday . But the one that I am now a secret fan of, I once resented for its creation. Let me explain, for years I have encountered reporting systems cobbled together in tools like Access and Excel built by "database hobbyists" who had no formal training in database design or best practices. They would take their monstrosities as far as they could go before ultimatley it stopped working or the person that wrote it left the company. At that point it would become the resident DBA's problem to support it as a Live application. So when I first heard of Power Pivot, a sense of Deja Vu overtook me and I felt like the guy in the Ausin Powers movie , knowing the inevitable is coming but somehow unsure how to get out of the way. But when I eventually saw it in action, I quickly realised that it is a very powerful tool. It has a much smaller "time to market" than traditional BI architectures. Combined with the new features of Excel, some pretty impressive dashboards can be produced.Of course PowerPivot is not a magic bullet and along with potential scalability issues there are the usual issues such as master data management and data quality that cannot be overcome easily with power pivot. As a tool though, it has potential. Traditional BI is expensive, both in terms of time and the amount of resources it takes to deliver the system. The time lag between an analyst or a commercial accountant requesting reports and the report being delivered can make a huge commercial difference. I have observed companies where empowered end users become extremely productive when allowed to plough in to various disperate datasets. It may not be the correct way or the most sustainable but its cheap and quick. In these times when budgets are being slashed and we are forced to deliver more with less, why not empower the end user in a tool that is designed for exactly this task.... @blakmk  

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• Questions about Code Reviews

  - by bamboocha

  My team plans to do Code Review and asked me to make a concept what and how we are going to make our Code Reviews. We are a little group of 6 team members. We use an SVN repository and write programs in different languages (mostly: VB.NET, Java, C#), but the reviews should be also possible for others, yet not defined. Basically I am asking you, how are you doing it, to be more precise I made a list of some questions I got: 1. Peer Meetings vs Ticket System? Would you tend to do meetings with all members, rather than something like a ticket system, where the developer can add a new code change and some or all need to check and approve it? 1. What tool? I made some researches on my own and it showed that Rietveld seems to be the program to use for non-git solutions. Do you agree/disagree and why? 2. A good workflow to follow? 3. Are there good ways to minimize the effort for those meetings even more? 4. What are good questions, every code reviewer should follow? I already made a list with some questions, what would you append/remove? are there any magic numbers in the code? do all variable and method names make sense and are easily understandable? are all querys using prepared statement? are all objects disposed/closed when they are not needed anymore? 5. What are your general experiences with it? What's important? Things to consider/prevent/watch out?

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• Penne alla MVP

  - by Valter Minute

  I’m sorry for the long silence on this blog and the long delay in replying to the friends that commented on my articles. I’ve been quite busy in the last weeks and I spent a lot of time traveling around Italy (not for pleasure!). In the meantime I’ve been renewed as an MVP on April the 1st (nice date to renew someone with such a bad sense of humor…). I decided to celebrate my MVP award with a new recipe (to be honest, I celebrated by eating the results of this recipe!) and I decided to call it “penne alla MVP”… just because I’m not good in finding nice names for my recipes. Ingredients (for 4 people): 360g pasta (penne or other short pasta) 300g small shrimps 1 cup of whipped cream 2 tablespoons of olive oil 1 small leek 1 glass of beer (I used Hoegaarden dutch white beer… but just because I like it and I finished the rest of the bootle while cooking) Chives Salt, pepper Prepare the pasta by boiling it in salted water, as usual. In the meantime chop the leek in very small bits, heat the oil inside a pan and when the oil is hot, drop the leek chops and let them cook for a few minutes. Add the shrimps and the glass of beer. Let them cook inside beer until they are cooked (if you used pre-cooked shrimps a couple of minutes would be enough to heat them and gave them the flavour of beer). Add the whipped cream and mix it well with the shrimps and the sauce. Dry the pasta and drop the sauce on top of it and then add the chives finely chopped.

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• Choosing Technology To Include In Software Design

  How many of us have been forced to select one technology over another when designing a new system? What factors do we and should we consider? How can we ensure the correct business decision is made? When faced with this type of decision it is important to gather as much information possible regarding each technology being considered as well as the project itself. Additionally, I tend to delay my decision about the technology until it is ultimately necessary to be made. The reason why I tend to delay such an important design decision is due to the fact that as the project progresses requirements and other factors can alter a decision for selecting the best technology for a project. Important factors to consider when making technology decisions: Time to Implement and Maintain Total Cost of Technology (including Implementation and maintenance) Adaptability of Technology Implementation Team’s Skill Sets Complexity of Technology (including Implementation and maintenance) orecasted Return On Investment (ROI) Forecasted Profit on Investment (POI) Of the factors to consider the ROI and POI weigh the heaviest because the take in to consideration the other factors when calculating the profitability and return on investments.For a real world example let us consider developing a web based lead management system for a new company. This system can either be hosted on Microsoft Windows based web server or on a Linux based web server. Important Factors for this Example Implementation Team’s Skill Sets Member 1  Skill Set: Classic ASP, ASP.Net, and MS SQL Server Experience: 10 years Member 2  Skill Set: PHP, MySQL, Photoshop and MS SQL Server Experience: 3 years Member 3  Skill Set: C++, VB6, ASP.Net, and MS SQL Server Experience: 12 years Total Cost of Technology (including Implementation and maintenance) Linux Initial Year: $5,000 (Random Value) Additional Years: $3,000 (Random Value) Windows Initial Year: $10,000 (Random Value) Additional Years: $3,000 (Random Value) Complexity of Technology Linux Large Learning Curve with user driven documentation Estimated learning cost: $30,000 Windows Minimal based on Teams skills with Microsoft based documentation Estimated learning cost: $5,000 ROI Linux Total Cost Initial Total Cost: $35,000 Additional Cost $3,000 per year Windows Total Cost Initial Total Cost: $15,000 Additional Cost $3,000 per year Based on the hypothetical numbers it would make more sense to select windows based web server because the initial investment of the technology is much lower initially compared to the Linux based web server.

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• Is `break` and `continue` bad programming practice?

  - by Mikhail

  My boss keeps mentioning nonchalantly that bad programmers use break and continue in loops. I use them all the time because they make sense; let me show you the inspiration: function verify(object) { if (object->value < 0) return false; if (object->value > object->max_value) return false; if (object->name == "") return false; ... } The point here is that first the function checks that the conditions are correct, then executes the actual functionality. IMO same applies with loops: while (primary_condition) { if (loop_count > 1000) break; if (time_exect > 3600) break; if (this->data == "undefined") continue; if (this->skip == true) continue; ... } I think this makes it easier to read & debug; but I also don't see a downside. Please comment.

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• Flickering when accessing texture by offset

  - by TravisG

  I have this simple compute shader that basically just takes the input from one image and writes it to another. Both images are 128/128/128 in size and glDispatchCompute is called with (128/8,128/8,128/8). The source images are cleared to 0 before this compute shader is executed, so no undefined values should be floating around in there. (I have the appropriate memory barrier on the C++ side set before the 3D texture is accessed). This version works fine: #version 430 layout (location = 0, rgba16f) uniform image3D ping; layout (location = 1, rgba16f) uniform image3D pong; layout (local_size_x = 8, local_size_y = 8, local_size_z = 8) in; void main() { ivec3 sampleCoord = gl_GlobalInvocationID.xyz; imageStore(pong, imageLoad(ping,sampleCoord)); } Reading values from pong shows that it's just a copy, as intended. However, when I load data from ping with an offset: #version 430 layout (location = 0, rgba16f) uniform image3D ping; layout (location = 1, rgba16f) uniform image3D pong; layout (local_size_x = 8, local_size_y = 8, local_size_z = 8) in; void main() { ivec3 sampleCoord = gl_GlobalInvocationID.xyz; imageStore(pong, imageLoad(ping,sampleCoord+ivec3(1,0,0))); } The data that is written to pong seems to depend on the order of execution of the threads within the work groups, which makes no sense to me. When reading from the pong texture, visible flickering occurs in some spots on the texture. What am I doing wrong here?

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• How to handle multiple effect files in XNA

  - by Adam 'Pi' Burch

  So I'm using ModelMesh and it's built in Effects parameter to draw a mesh with some shaders I'm playing with. I have a simple GUI that lets me change these parameters to my heart's desire. My question is, how do I handle shaders that have unique parameters? For example, I want a 'shiny' parameter that affects shaders with Phong-type specular components, but for an environment mapping shader such a parameter doesn't make a lot of sense. How I have it right now is that every time I call the ModelMesh's Draw() function, I set all the Effect parameters as so foreach (ModelMesh m in model.Meshes) { if (isDrawBunny == true)//Slightly change the way the world matrix is calculated if using the bunny object, since it is not quite centered in object space { world = boneTransforms[m.ParentBone.Index] * Matrix.CreateScale(scale) * rotation * Matrix.CreateTranslation(position + bunnyPositionTransform); } else //If not rendering the bunny, draw normally { world = boneTransforms[m.ParentBone.Index] * Matrix.CreateScale(scale) * rotation * Matrix.CreateTranslation(position); } foreach (Effect e in m.Effects) { Matrix ViewProjection = camera.ViewMatrix * camera.ProjectionMatrix; e.Parameters["ViewProjection"].SetValue(ViewProjection); e.Parameters["World"].SetValue(world); e.Parameters["diffuseLightPosition"].SetValue(lightPositionW); e.Parameters["CameraPosition"].SetValue(camera.Position); e.Parameters["LightColor"].SetValue(lightColor); e.Parameters["MaterialColor"].SetValue(materialColor); e.Parameters["shininess"].SetValue(shininess); //e.Parameters //e.Parameters["normal"] } m.Draw(); Note the prescience of the example! The solutions I've thought of involve preloading all the shaders, and updating the unique parameters as needed. So my question is, is there a best practice I'm missing here? Is there a way to pull the parameters a given Effect needs from that Effect? Thank you all for your time!

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• Personalisation of the Ubuntu interface

  - by Ben

  It's quite hard to phrase this question as the answer is very subjective and I don't know the right terminology to ask for what I want, but I will try my best. I love linux and would love to use it full-time as my main OS but the one think I have a problem with is the look of it. In my opinion it looks like it was designed for a child and I like my computer to look stylish rather than dated (this is opinion obviously). I like the look of OSX but there are certain things that I don't like, so no, I am not asking the age old question of "how do I make ubunutu look like OSX"...most of the attempts I have seen of this have been pretty poor when put up against the real thing so I just want to take certain things from it. Things I'd like to take from OSX: Spotlight (I don't like the Unity dashboard-esque thingy) Expose Spaces Dock (at the bottom) Icons (apart from the apple one) Look of file manager - its more pleasant to navigate around the file system. Closing an application window doesn't actually quit the program, so when you next launch it - it is instantaneous. Global menu (at the top) What are the latest Ubuntu alternatives to these? When it comes to actually changing the look of Ubuntu what should I be looking at? I know the following exists: Shell theme Icons Fonts ...but is there anything else I need to look into to actually change the look? I hear the term "Window Manager" thrown around, but I don't actually know what that is. What are good sources for reviews/links to the latest and greatest customisation techniques? Ubuntu now comes with Unity which I don't like very much. What are my alternatives? Should I look into Gnome3 or switch to classic desktop which is Gnome2 if I recall correctly? I hope I haven't put too much in one question and that it makes sense. Thanks.

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• MMORPG design for time-limited players

  - by Philipp

  I believe that there is a significant market of players who would enjoy the exploration and interaction aspects of MMORPGs, but simply don't have the time for the endless grinding marathons which are part of the average MMORPG. MMORPGs are all about interaction between players. But when different players have different amounts of time to invest into a game, those with less time to spend will soon lack behind their power-leveling friends and won't be able to interact with them anymore. One way to solve this would be to limit the progress a player can achieve per day, so that it simply doesn't make sense to play more than one or two hours a day. But even the busiest casual players sometimes like to spend a whole sunday afternoon playing a video game. Just stopping them after two hours would be really frustrating. It also creates a pressure to use the daily progress limit every day, because otherwise the player would feel like wasting something. This pressure would be detrimental for casual gamers. What else could be done to level the playing field between those players who play 40+ hours a week and those who can't play more than 10?

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• CheckMemoryAllocationGame Sample

  - by Michael B. McLaughlin

  Many times I’ve found myself wondering how much GC memory some operation allocates. This is primarily in the context of XNA games due to the desire to avoid generating garbage and thus triggering a GC collection. Many times I’ve written simple programs to check allocations. I did it again recently. It occurred to me that many XNA developers find themselves asking this question from time to time. So I cleaned up my sample and published it on my website. Feel free to download it and put it to use. It’s rather thoroughly commented. The location where you insert the code you wish to check is in the Update method found in Game1.cs. The default that I put in is a line of code that generates a new Guid using Guid.NewGuid (which, if you’re curious, does not create any heap allocations). Read all of the comments in the Update method (at the very least) to make sure that your code is measured properly. It’s important to make sure that you meaningfully reference any thing you create after the second call to get the memory or else (in Release configuration at least) you will likely get incorrect results. Anyway, it should make sense when you read the comments and if not, feel free to post a comment here or ask me on Twitter. You can find my utilities and code samples page here: http://www.bobtacoindustries.com/developers/utils/Default.aspx To download CheckMemoryAllocationGame’s source code directly: http://www.bobtacoindustries.com/developers/utils/CheckMemoryAllocationGame.zip (If you’re looking to do this outside of the context of an XNA game, the measurement code in the Update method can easily be adapted into, e.g., a C# Windows Console application. In the past I mostly did that, actually. But I didn’t feel like adding references to all the XNA assemblies this time and… anyway, if you want you can easily convert it to a console application. If there’s any demand for it, I’ll do it myself and update this post when I get a chance.)

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• How to dissuade a customer who just learned a technology and wants to use it everywhere?

  - by MainMa

  My customer recently discovered what is URL Rewriting, without completely understanding what it is, how it works and the pros and cons of it. Now, he asks for lots of strange changes in actual requirements of current projects and changes in old projects in order to implement what he believes is URL Rewriting. On one hand, I'm annoyed being asked to do things which doesn't make any sense instead of doing real work. On the other hand, I can't tell my customer that he doesn't understand anything in the subject despite his interest in it. I think many people have had situations when their manager or their customer just learned a new buzzword or a new technology, and he loved it so much than he wanted to use it in every project, everywhere, rewrite the whole codebase just to use this new thing, etc. Also, I've recently read something related on Programmers.SE where people told about their experiences when there was a huge buzz around XML, and some managers would ask to introduce XML in every project just to show to everyone that they have used it. So those who have been in similar situation, how have you managed it?

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• Deferred Rendering With Diffuse,Specular, and Normal maps

  - by John

  I have been reading up on deferred rendering and I am trying to implement a renderer using the Sponza atrium model, which can be found here, as my sandbox.Note I am also using OpenGL 3.3 and GLSL. I am loading the model from a Wavefront OBJ file using Assimp. I extract all geometry information including tangents and bitangents. For all the aiMaterials,I extract the following information which essentially comes from the sponza.mtl file. Ambient/Diffuse/Specular/Emissive Reflectivity Coefficients(Ka,Kd,Ks,Ke) Shininess Diffuse Map Specular Map Normal Map I understand that I must render vertex attributes such as position ,normals,texture coordinates to textures as well as depth for the second render pass. A lot of resources mention putting colour information into a g-buffer in the initial render pass but do you not require the diffuse,specular and normal maps and therefore lights to determine the fragment colour? I know that doesnt make since sense because lighting should be done in the second render pass. In terms of normal mapping, do you essentially just pass the tangent,bitangents, and normals into g-buffers and then construct the tangent matrix and apply it to the sampled normal from the normal map. Ultimately, I would like to know how to incorporate this material information into my deferred renderer.

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• What features are helpful when performing remote debugging / diagnostics?

  - by Pemdas

  Obviously, the easiest way to solve a bug is to be able to reproduce it in-house. However, sometimes that is not practical. For starters, users are often not very good at providing you with useful information. Customer Service: "what seems to be the issue?" User: "It crashed!" To further compound that, sometimes the bug only occurs under certain environmentally conditions that can not be adequately replicated in-house. With that in mind, it is important to build some sort of diagnostic framework into your product. What types of built-in diagnostic tools have you used or seen used? Logging seems to be the predominate method, which makes sense. We have a fairly sophisticated logging frame work in place with different levels of verbosity and the ability to filter on specific modules (actually we can filter down to the granularity of a single file). Error logs are placed strategically to manufacture a pretty good representation of a stack trace when an error occurs. We don't have the luxury of 10 million terabytes of disk space since I work on embedded platforms, so we have two ways of getting them off the system: a serial port and a syslog server. However, an issue we run into sometimes is actually getting the user to turn the logs on. Our current framework often requires some user interaction.

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