Search Results

Search found 6068 results on 243 pages for 'goal tracking'.

Page 127/243 | < Previous Page | 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134  | Next Page >

• I need some career/education advice regarding computer science [on hold]

  - by user2521987

  So I'm a senior mathematics major this fall and I have only taken three CS classes (Java I, Java II, and C++). This summer, I am participating in a mathematics REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates), and I program in C++ about 8 hours a day...and I find that I absolutely love it. I love using programming to solve math problems in my research. I think I want to pursue a career in programming. I have a few options Stay at my university an extra 1-1.5 years (beyond the 4) and do a double major in Math/CS. This will put me in up to around 7-10k in debt (currently I have no debt and am scheduled to graduate debt free). Then apply to a masters in CS. Apply directly to a masters in CS from a math undergraduate degree. I don't like this idea because I likely won't get into a good program or funded with such little background. Go to graduate school, funded, in applied mathematics and try to further my knowledge in computer science while there. Then apply to a masters in CS. I'm not sure if 1 or 3 would be better. My end goal would be to go to a top 20-30 CS graduate program and to get a cool, good job. What would you recommend?

  Read the article

• Open Source Projects for Beginning Coders?

  - by MattDMo

  After working as a molecular biologist at the bench for many years, I lost my job last year and am thinking about a career change. I've been using open-source software and doing Linux system administration since the mid 90s, and have written/improved some small shell/Perl/PHP scripts, and am very comfortable building from source, but never progressed to creating non-trivial programs de novo. I want to move to actually learning real programming skills and contributing back to the community, with the possible eventual goal of getting into bioinformatics as a career in the future. I'm a stay-at-home dad now, so I have some time on my hands. I've done a lot of research on languages, and have settled on Python as my major focus for now. I'm set up on GitHub, but haven't forked anything yet. I've looked around OpenHatch some, but nothing really grabbed me. I've heard the advice to work on what you use/love, but that category is so broad that I'm having trouble finding any one thing to get started on. What are your suggestions for getting started? How do you pick a project that will welcome your (possibly amateurish) help? With a fairly limited skill set, how do you find a request that you can handle? What are common newbie mistakes to avoid? Any other advice?

  Read the article

• How to refactor a myriad of similar classes

  - by TobiMcNamobi

  I'm faced with similar classes A1, A2, ..., A100. Believe it or not but yeah, there are roughly hundred classes that almost look the same. None of these classes are unit tested (of course ;-) ). Each of theses classes is about 50 lines of code which is not too much by itself. Still this is way too much duplicated code. I consider the following options: Writing tests for A1, ..., A100. Then refactor by creating an abstract base class AA. Pro: I'm (near to totally) safe by the tests that nothing goes wrong. Con: Much effort. Duplication of test code. Writing tests for A1, A2. Abstracting the duplicated test code and using the abstraction to create the rest of the tests. Then create AA as in 1. Pro: Less effort than in 1 but maintaining a similar degree of safety. Con: I find generalized test code weird; it often seems ... incoherent (is this the right word?). Normally I prefer specialized test code for specialized classes. But that requires a good design which is my goal of this whole refactoring. Writing AA first, testing it with mock classes. Then inheriting A1, ..., A100 successively. Pro: Fastest way to eliminate duplicates. Con: Most Ax classes look very much the same. But if not, there is the danger of changing the code by inheriting from AA. Other options ... At first I went for 3. because the Ax classes are really very similar to each other. But now I'm a bit unsure if this is the right way (from a unit testing enthusiast's perspective).

  Read the article

• PDFtk Password Protection Help

  - by Dave W.

  I am using Ubuntu 11.10 and am looking for a solution to password protect a bunch of pdf files in a directory in batch. I came across PDFtk and it looks like it might do what I need, but I've reviewed the command line PDFtk examples and can't figure out if there is a way to do it in batch without having to individually specify the output file name for every file. I'm hoping a command-line guru can take a look at the PDFtk syntax and tell me if there is some trick / command that will allow me to password protect a directory of pdf files (e.g., *.pdf) and overwrite the existing files using the same name, or consistently rename the individual output files without having to specify each output name individually. Here's a link to the PDFtk command line examples page: http://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/ Thanks for your help. I think I've answered my own question. Here's a bash script that appears to do the trick. I'd welcome help evaluating why the code I've commented out doesn't work... #!/bin/bash # Created by Dave, 2012-02-23 # This script uses PDFtk to password protect every PDF file # in the directory specified. The script creates a directory named "protected_[DATE]" # to hold the password protected version of the files. # # I'm using the "user_pw" parameter, # which means no one will be able to open or view the file without # the password. # # PDFtk must be installed for this script to work. # # Usage: ./protect_with_pdftk.bsh [FILE(S)] # [FILE(S)] can use wildcard expansion (e.g., *.pdf) # This part isn't working.... ignore. The goal is to avoid errors if the # directory to be created already exists by only attempting to create # it if it doesn't exists # #TARGET_DIR="protected_$(date +%F)" #if [ -d "$TARGET_DIR" ] #then #echo # echo "$TARGET_DIR directory exists!" #else #echo # echo "$TARGET_DIR directory does not exist!" #fi # mkdir protected_$(date +%F) for i in *pdf ; do pdftk "$i" output "./protected_$(date +%F)/$i" user_pw [PASSWORD]; done echo "Complete. Output is in the directory: ./protected_$(date +%F)"

  Read the article

• JDK8 New Build Infrastructure

  - by kto

  I unintentionally posted this before I verified everything, so once I have verified it all works, I'll updated this post. But this is what should work... Most Interesting Builder in the World: "I don't always build the jdk, but when I do, I prefer The New JDK8 Build Infrastructure. Stay built, my friends." So the new Build Infrastructure changes have been integrated into the jdk8/build forest along side the older Makefiles (newer in makefiles/ and older ones in make/). The default is still the older makefiles. Instructions can be found in the Build-Infra Project User Guide. The Build-Infra project's goal is to create the fastest build possible and correct many of the build issues we have been carrying around for years. I cannot take credit for much of this work, and wish to recognize the people who do so much work on this (and will probably still do more), see the New Build Infrastructure Changeset for a list of these talented and hard working JDK engineers. A big "THANK YOU" from me. Of course, every OS and system is different, and the focus has been on Linux X64 to start, Ubuntu 11.10 X64 in particular. So there are at least a base set of system packages you need. On Ubuntu 11.10 X64, you should run the following after getting into a root permissions situation (e.g. have run "sudo bash"): apt-get install aptitude aptitude update aptitude install mercurial openjdk-7-jdk rpm ssh expect tcsh csh ksh gawk g++ build-essential lesstif2-dev Then get the jdk8/build sources: hg clone http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk8/build jdk8-build cd jdk8-build sh ./get_source.sh Then do your build: cd common/makefiles bash ../autoconf/configure make We still have lots to do, but this is a tremendous start. -kto

  Read the article

• What did Rich Hickey mean when he said, "All that specificity [of interfaces/classes/types] kills your reuse!"

  - by GlenPeterson

  In Rich Hickey's thought-provoking goto conference keynote "The Value of Values" at 29 minutes he's talking about the overhead of a language like Java and makes a statement like, "All those interfaces kill your reuse." What does he mean? Is that true? In my search for answers, I have run across: The Principle of Least Knowledge AKA The Law of Demeter which encourages airtight API interfaces. Wikipedia also lists some disadvantages. Kevlin Henney's Imperial Clothing Crisis which argues that use, not reuse is the appropriate goal. Jack Diederich's "Stop Writing Classes" talk which argues against over-engineering in general. Clearly, anything written badly enough will be useless. But how would the interface of a well-written API prevent that code from being used? There are examples throughout history of something made for one purpose being used more for something else. But in the software world, if you use something for a purpose it wasn't intended for, it usually breaks. I'm looking for one good example of a good interface preventing a legitimate but unintended use of some code. Does that exist? I can't picture it.

  Read the article

• Can too much abstraction be bad?

  - by m3th0dman

  As programmers I feel that our goal is to provide good abstractions on the given domain model and business logic. But where should this abstraction stop? How to make the trade-off between abstraction and all it's benefits (flexibility, ease of changing etc.) and ease of understanding the code and all it's benefits. I believe I tend to write code overly abstracted and I don't know how good is it; I often tend to write it like it is some kind of a micro-framework, which consists of two parts: Micro-Modules which are hooked up in the micro-framework: these modules are easy to be understood, developed and maintained as single units. This code basically represents the code that actually does the functional stuff, described in requirements. Connecting code; now here I believe stands the problem. This code tends to be complicated because it is sometimes very abstracted and is hard to be understood at the beginning; this arises due to the fact that it is only pure abstraction, the base in reality and business logic being performed in the code presented 1; from this reason this code is not expected to be changed once tested. Is this a good approach at programming? That it, having changing code very fragmented in many modules and very easy to be understood and non-changing code very complex from the abstraction POV? Should all the code be uniformly complex (that is code 1 more complex and interlinked and code 2 more simple) so that anybody looking through it can understand it in a reasonable amount of time but change is expensive or the solution presented above is good, where "changing code" is very easy to be understood, debugged, changed and "linking code" is kind of difficult. Note: this is not about code readability! Both code at 1 and 2 is readable, but code at 2 comes with more complex abstractions while code 1 comes with simple abstractions.

  Read the article

• Hack Fest at Devoxx

  - by Yolande Poirier

  On November 11th and 12th, Devoxx attendees will get the chance to build a Java embedded application onsite. During the Raspberry Pi & Leap Motion hands-on labs on Monday and Tuesday mornings, you will learn about Raspberry Pi development with Java embedded using Leap Motion and other sensors. The afternoons are hacking time on a project of your choice. You can get your inspiration from existing projects. You can also use their project source code and improve on already developed applications.  The goal is for you to create something fun and innovative in only a couple of days, no matter your experience in embedded systems.  We provide you with equipment like the Raspberry Pi, sensors, and Leap Motion. Thanks to Stephan Janssen for lending us 10 Leap Motions for the Hack Fest. Raspberry Pi and sensors are pre-configured. You will access the sensors via a web address. You can build a project alone if you want. We also give the opportunity to brainstorm ideas with other attendees and maybe build something more complex. You will get one-on-one help from top-notch coaches. Vinicius Senger has tons of experience with Java and the Raspberry. He runs Java embedded challenges and give training year round. Geert Bevin contributed to many open source projects and his latest venture is with the Leap Motion. Bruno Borges's expertise is in connecting backend logic with great interfaces. Yara Senger is a Java Champion and a great Java embedded mentor.    Don't miss this opportunity! This is your chance to transform your idea into a Raspberry Pi or a Leap Motion application.

  Read the article

• Is there a command to "manually automount" an attached disk?

  - by cheshirekow

  I have an extra hard drive which I use for backups. The label on its one and only partition is "backup". When I open nautilus and click on "backup" it mounds the drive in "/media/backup", and then there's a little eject button next to it's icon in nautilus. If I manually mount the drive by creating a directory and using "sudo mount /dev/sdx /some/dir", the eject icon still shows up in nautilus, but when I press it I get an error because the device was not mounted via whatever it is that mounts it the other way. What I would like is to be able to do this "mount to /media/backup and enable the eject button" via the command line. The goal is to have the device mounted by a script which needs the drive, but then leave it mounted until I manually eject it... if I want to. P.S. I'm aware that I can have the drive auto mounted at startup, but that's not what I'm looking for here, and I'd like to know if this is possible. Clarification: I'm looking for a command to "mount the drive the way nautilus would". This should create the directory "/media/backup", mount the device to that directory, and then when I press the eject button from nautilus, it should unmount the device and delete the directory.

  Read the article

• Moving from a static site to a CMS with new URLs and meta-data for pages

  - by Chris J

  Hi I am in the process of rebuilding a site from static pages to a CMS which will be using mod_rewrite to generate new page URLs. In this process our marketing people and myself have decided to tidy up the descriptions, keywords and titles. Eg: a page which who's URL is currently "website-name/about_us.html" and has a title of "website-name - something not quite page specific" will change to "website-name/about-us/" and title: "about us - website-name" and may have a few keywords and the description changed. Our goal with updating the meta data is to improve our page rankings and try to keep in line with some best practices for SEO. Though our current page rankings are quite good in many aspects, there is room for improvement. All of the pages will also have content changes (like rearranging heading tags, new menu on all pages, new content in footer, extra pieces of dynamic content relating to other pages). In this new site process I plan to use 301 redirects for all the old URLs pointing to the new URLs. My question is what can I expect to happen to the page rankings in Google, in the sort term and long term? Will this be like kicking off a new site which will have to build up trust over time or will the original page rankings have affect?

  Read the article

• 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.

  Read the article

• Joining a company to get experience vs. going alone [closed]

  - by daniels

  My goal is to build a successful web startup, say the next Digg or Twitter, and I am in doubt regarding what is the best route to follow as a programmer. I see basically two options: Get an internship/job with an established online company, so that I could get a mentor and learn from more experienced programmers, learn their processes, methodology and so on. I could do this for 1-2 years, and then quit to start working on my own stuff. Start working on my own projects right away, starting with small ones and moving up gradually. This would give me more control on the things I would be working with, but I would lack contact with more experienced people, so I would need to figure basic things on my own. Doing both is not an option in my opinion, cause I would need to put a lot of effort/time into each if I was to learn/improve as a programmer. So is one route definitely better than the other? Is there a third one I am not considering? Background: I already work by myself developing content-based websites and doing SEO, and I am decent at it so money is not a problem. Last year I started learning to program, first by myself and now I enrolled in a CS degree on a good university.

  Read the article

• Questions before I revamp my rendering engine to use shaders (GLSL)

  - by stephelton

  I've written a fairly robust rendering engine using OpenGL ES 1.1 (fixed-function.) I've been looking into revamping the engine to use OpenGL ES 2.0, which necessitates that I use shaders. I've been absorbing information all day long and still have some questions. Firstly, lighting. The fixed-function pipeline is guaranteed to have at least 8 lights available. My current engine finds lights that are "close" to the primitives being drawn and enables them; I don't know how many lights are going to be enabled until I draw a given model. Nothing is dynamically allocated in GLSL, so I have to define in a shader some number of lights to be used, right? So if I want to stick with 8, should I write my general purpose shader to have 8 lights and then use uniforms to tell it how many / which lights to use? Which brings me to another question: should I be concerned with the amount of data I'm allocating in a shader? Recent video cards have hundreds of "stream processors." If I've got a fragment shader being used on some number of fragments in a given triangle, I assume they must each have their own stack to work on. Are read-only variables copied here, or read when needed? My initial goal is to rework my code so that it is virtually identical to the current implementation. What I have in mind is to create my own matrix stack so that I can implement something along the lines of push/popMatrix and apply all my translations, rotations, and scales to this matrix, then provide the matrix to the vertex shader so that it can make very quick vertex translations. Is this approach sound? Edit: My original intention was to ask if there was a tutorial that would explain the bare minimum necessary to jump from fixed-function to using shaders. Thanks!

  Read the article

• Geekswithblogs.net | Screen Resolutions of our Readers

  - by Jeff Julian

  Yesterday I talked about the Browsers we see being used by our readers driven off of our Google Analytics traffic and today I want to share with you the Screen Resolutions we see.  As a web developer most of my life, it is hard to decide how large you should build your application because typically you have a couple huge high resolution monitors on your desk, but you typical end user is thought to have 1024x768.  With HTML5/CSS3 out, it is a little better coming up with a design that will scale to all resolutions, but it is still nice to know the numbers when it comes to how much real estate do I have on my clients. If you look at these numbers for Geekswithblogs.net, we have a lot of high resolution monitors from users that visit the site.  After a little more investigation of the number you will notice we do not have as much height available as we do width.  If the primary goal of a site is to deliver as much data in the viewable area without scrolling, this becomes a challenge when most of our pages have long pieces of formatted data.  So our challenge is to build skins that use up more of the sides of the content toward the top on larger resolution browsers and then entice the reader to scroll to get the goodies embedded in the content of the posts.  Going to be an interesting battle for sure, but we really need more skin offerings on the site. Technorati Tags: Resolution Statistics,Geekswithblogs.net

  Read the article

• How can I learn more about ADF?

  - by jhpierce -Oracle

  Look to the Oracle Technology Network for a wealth of information, tutorials, best practices and coding examples. The place to start is the Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF) web page. The Oracle ADF page has basic information and downloads for ADF, but the real wealth is in the links to other pages. One of the pages is the Oracle ADF Code Corner,  which is a blog-style column that provides hints, tips and coding examples for ADF developers. The content on this page ranges from easy to complex and often contains advanced programming concepts. The content is inspired by questions asked on the Oracle JDeveloper customer forum on OTN. The ADF Code Corner has many articles that will inspire your imagination and possibly solve your coding problem.How about the Oracle ADF Architecture Square link? The Oracle ADF Architecture Square focuses on architectural issues and developer guidelines for writing ADF software solutions. The goal is to give ADF developers an understanding of the necessary decisions for building a successful ADF application, to offer potential architectural blueprints to choose from when putting the ADF application together, and to provide potential ADF best practices to take back to your development team. The Oracle ADF Mobile link gives information on developing mobile applications for iOS and Android based applications. There are links to ADF Mobile Overview, ADF Mobile demos and ADF Mobile courses.The Sample ADF Applications link lists sample applications and other resources where you can find code samples for ADF. These are complete ADF applications that can be downloaded into JDeveloper and give you insight into coding an application.There are many more links found under the "Learn More" tab that can equip the developer with the knowledge they need to develop their applications. There are links to overview papers, technical resources, related topics and available training. The information you need IS just a click away.

  Read the article

• What is the best way to exploit multicores when making multithread games?

  - by Keeper

  Many people suggest to write a program, and then start optimizing it. But I think that when it's coming to multithreading with multicore, a little think ahead is required. I've read about using threads, and experienced it myself during some courses at the university (still a student). The big question is simple, but a bit abstract: What thread related steps in game design do I need to take, before implementation? Now trying to be more specific. Let's say, as an example, that I'm making a small board game (like Monopoly) that I want to be multithreaded. My goal Is that this multithreaded game will exploit the best of the multicore system, lets say 4-6 cores (like in i7 processors). My answer to this question at the moment is, one thread for each of these four basic components: GUI User Input / Output AI (computer rival) Other game related calculations (like shortest path from A to B, or level up status change) I'm not an expert (yet!), and I'm sure there are better answers out there. Any suggestion, answer, different approach will be helpful. Some thoughts: Maybe splitting the main database is a good way.. (or total disaster.. )

  Read the article

• Sneak Preview - New CodePlex UI

  We have been busy the last several months working to improve the overall experience for the CodePlex community. We have been working through some of the top requested items, such as our big announcement last week enabling Git. Something that is not explicitly on the feature request list are requests to update the web site look and user experience.  As Brian Harry mentioned, the Future of CodePlex is Bright, so it is time to start brightening up the place. Goals As with any sizeable change you need to decide the scope of changes you want to tackle. We decided that we would optimize on incremental improvements verses taking months to get a completely new experience released. Our goals with this user experience work is to refresh the look and feel of the site, introduce new visual elements and set up the site for future structural changes. So this is not the end, just the beginning. Early Views I want to set a few expectations first, these screen shots are not final, and we are still working through the content and final element placement. Feedback is always welcome, just take that in mind as you review the images. New CodePlex Home The navigation changed a good bit on the home page and we have moved the search to a more consistent location across the site.   User Profile Users Home Page The goal was to make it easier to find and take action on common tasks such as creating projects. Project Home Issue Tracker   This should give you a taste of where we are going with the new user experience.     As always we love the feedback, either comment below, find us on Twitter @codeplex or @mgroves84, or create or vote up suggestions.

  Read the article

• Collision with half of a semi-circle

  - by heitortsergent

  I am trying to port a game I made using Flash/AS3, to the Windows Phone using C#/XNA 4.0. You can see it here: http://goo.gl/gzFiE In the flash version I used a pixel-perfect collision between meteors (it's a rectangle, and usually rotated) that spawn outside the screen, and move towards the center, and a shield in the center of the screen(which is half of a semi-circle, also rotated by the player), which made the meteor bounce back in the opposite direction it came from, when they collided. My goal now is to make the meteors bounce in different angles, depending on the position it collides with the shield (much like Pong, hitting the borders causes a change in the ball's angle). So, these are the 3 options I thought of: Pixel-perfect collision (Microsoft has a sample) , but then I wouldn't know how to change the meteor angle after the collision 3 BoundingCircle's to represent the half semi-circle shield, but then I would have to somehow move them as I rotate the shield. Farseer Physics. I could make a shape composed of 3 lines, and use that as the collision object for the shield. Is there any other way besides those? Which would be the best way to do it(it's aimed towards mobile devices, so pixel-perfect is probably not a good choice)? Most of the time there's always a easier/better way than what we think of...

  Read the article

• Faster 2D Collision detection

  - by eShredder

  Recently I've been working on a fast-paced 2d shooter and I came across a mighty problem. Collision detection. Sure, it is working, but it is very slow. My goal is: Have lots of enemies on screen and have them to not touch each other. All of the enemies are chasing the player entity. Most of them have the same speed so sooner or later they all end up taking the same space while chasing the player. This really drops the fun factor since, for the player, it looks like you are being chased by one enemy only. To prevent them to take the same space I added a collision detection (a very basic 2D detection, the only method I know of) which is. Enemy class update method Loop through all enemies (continue; if the loop points at this object) If enemy object intersects with this object Push enemy object away from this enemy object This works fine. As long as I only have <200 enemy entities that is. When I get closer to 300-350 enemy entities my frame rate begins to drop heavily. First I thought it was bad rendering so I removed their draw call. This did not help at all so of course I realised it was the update method. The only heavy part in their update method is this each-enemy-loops-through-every-enemy part. When I get closer to 300 enemies the game does a 90000 (300x300) step itteration. My my~ I'm sure there must be another way to aproach this collision detection. Though I have no idea how. The pages I find is about how to actually do the collision between two objects or how to check collision between an object and a tile. I already know those two things. tl;dr? How do I aproach collision detection between LOTS of entities? Quick edit: If it is to any help, I'm using C# XNA.

  Read the article

• How to turn off screen (DPMS) together with locking session in KDE?

  - by gertvdijk

  First of all, I'm aware a similar question for GNOME is asked here: "Switch off laptop backlight when locking screen". Objective I would like to turn off my screen on locking the session for power saving reasons. Actual problem Locking the screen on Kubuntu (KDE) inevitably triggers the screensaver as far as I can see. There's no screensaver option other than 'Blank screen' together with its background colour set to black that comes just close to my goal. It blanks the screen, but doesn't turn off the screen. Screen's backlight will still be on and not saving any power. Current workaround A workaround via a script + shortcut key is possible, however, it's just a workaround since it doesn't trigger on all ways to lock the session. Therefore, I think it should be possible to have it done more elegantly, for example by providing this option in KDE's configuration dialog of the screensaver. The workaround I am now using is the following. A script that locks the screen and turns off the screen: #!/bin/bash qdbus org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver /ScreenSaver Lock xset dpms force standby and let it run with a shortcut key via a custom menu entry. It works. Here's why I consider it to be a workaround rather than a solution. It doesn't work for other ways to trigger the locking of the session. My actual question(s) Do I need to touching/patching KDE's source? If not what are my options? If so, could someone point me to where I can get started? what do you think is the recommended place in the GUI for configuration? I'm using Kubuntu 12.04 and willing to upgrade to KDE 4.9 or waiting for the 12.10 release.

  Read the article

• Being stupid to get better productivity?

  - by loki2302

  I've spent a lot of time reading different books about "good design", "design patterns", etc. I'm a big fan of the SOLID approach and every time I need to write a simple piece of code, I think about the future. So, if implementing a new feature or a bug fix requires just adding three lines of code like this: if(xxx) { doSomething(); } It doesn't mean I'll do it this way. If I feel like this piece of code is likely to become larger in the nearest future, I'll think of adding abstractions, moving this functionality somewhere else and so on. The goal I'm pursuing is keeping average complexity the same as it was before my changes. I believe, that from the code standpoint, it's quite a good idea - my code is never long enough, and it's quite easy to understand the meanings for different entities, like classes, methods, and relations between classes and objects. The problem is, it takes too much time, and I often feel like it would be better if I just implemented that feature "as is". It's just about "three lines of code" vs. "new interface + two classes to implement that interface". From a product standpoint (when we're talking about the result), the things I do are quite senseless. I know that if we're going to work on the next version, having good code is really great. But on the other side, the time you've spent to make your code "good" may have been spent for implementing a couple of useful features. I often feel very unsatisfied with my results - good code that only can do A is worse than bad code that can do A, B, C, and D. Are there any books, articles, blogs, or your ideas that may help with developing one's "being stupid" approach?

  Read the article

• game play strategy in an arena

  - by joulesm

  I am writing a player's behavior for an arena game, and I'm wondering if you can offer some strategies. I'm writing it in Python, but I'm just interested in the high level game play. Here are the game aspects: Arena is a circle of a given size. The arena size shrinks every round to help break ties. Players are much smaller circles, can be on teams of 1 or 2 players. Players attack by colliding with other players, and based on the physics of the collision (speed of both players, angle), one could force another player out of the arena. Once a player is out of the arena, they are out of the game (for that round). The goal is to be the only team with players left in the arena. All other players have been pushed (through collisions or mistakes) out of the arena. It is possible for there to be no winner if the last two players exit the arena at the same time. Once the player has been programmed, the game just runs. There is no human intervention in the game. I'm thinking it's easiest to implement a few simple programmatic rules for my player to follow. For example, stay close to center of the arena, attack opponents from the inner side of the arena, etc. Are there any good simple game strategies? Would adding a random aspect to the game help? For example, to avoid predictability by the other team or something. Thanks in advance.

  Read the article

• PDF export printing in Internet Explorer [closed]

  - by user619804

  protected static byte[] exportReportToPdf(JasperPrint jasperPrint) throws JRException { JRPdfExporter exporter = new JRPdfExporter(); ByteArrayOutputStream baos = new ByteArrayOutputStream(); exporter.setParameter(JRExporterParameter.JASPER_PRINT, jasperPrint); exporter.setParameter(JRExporterParameter.OUTPUT_STREAM, baos); exporter.setParameter(JRPdfExporterParameter.PDF_JAVASCRIPT, "this.print({bUI: true,bSilent: false,bShrinkToFit: true});"); exporter.exportReport(); return baos.toByteArray(); } We are using code like this to export a PDF document from a Jasper application. The line exporter.setParameter(JRPdfExporterParameter.PDF_JAVASCRIPT, "this.print({bUI: true,bSilent: false,bShrinkToFit: true});"); adds JavaScript to send the PDF document directly to the printer. The expected behavior is that a print dialog will come up with a preview of the PDF document. This works fine most of the time - except I am having problems about one out of every 5-6 times in Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox. What happens is - the print preview dialog with the PDF document does not appear or it appears with a blank document in the preview window. -I've tried a number of different JavaScripts (different params to this.print() via exporter.setParameter -I've tried setting different response headers such as response.setContentType("application/pdf"); response.setHeader("Content-disposition","inline; filename=\"" + reportName + "\""); response.setContentLength(baos.size()); these did not seem to help This seems to be an IE and FF issue. Has anyone ever dealt with this problem? I need to get it to work across all browsers 100% of the time. Perhaps a different approach to accomplish the goal of sending the PDF document export directly to the printer? or a third party library that will work across browsers?

  Read the article

• Architecture : am I doing things right?

  - by Jeremy D

  I'm trying to use a '~classic' layered arch using .NET and Entity Framework. We are starting from a legacy database which is a little bit crappy: Inconsistent naming Unneeded views (view referencing other views, select * views etc...) Aggregated columns Potatoes and Carrots in the same table etc... So I ended with fully isolating my database structure from my domain model. To do so EF entities are hidden from presentation layer. The goal is to permit an easier database refactoring while lowering the impact of it on applications. I'm now facing a lot of challenges and I'm starting to ask myself if I'm doing things right. My Domain Model is highly volatile, it keeps evolving with apps as new fields needs are arising. Complexity of it keeps raising and class it contains start to get a lot of properties. Creating include strategy and reprojecting to EF is very tricky (my domain objects don't have any kind of lazy/eager loading relationship properties): DomainInclude<Domain.Model.Bar>.Include("Customers").Include("Customers.Friends") // To... IFooContext.Bars.Include(...).Include(...).Where(...) Some framework are raping the isolation levels (Devexpress Grids which needs either XPO or IQueryable for filtering and paging large data sets) I'm starting to ask myself if : the isolation of EF auto-generated entities is an unneeded cost. I should allow frameworks to hit IQueryable? Slow slope to hell? (it's really hard to isolate DevExpress framework, any successful experience?) the high volatility of my domain model is normal? Did you have similar difficulties? Any advice based on experience?

  Read the article

• My Obligatory IPad Post

  - by mark.wilcox

  I've had my IPad for about a week now. So I thought I'd write some thoughts down based on my initial experiences. Here are my initial take-aways: 1 - Netflix OnDemand - I'm a movie junkie. I'm now more apt to just start a movie as background sound for my workday (I telecommute - so except for the occasional bark from my dog, it's awfully quiet here if I don't have something going). 2 - The Email Client is really nice and I'm as fast or faster typing when I have the wireless keyboard engaged. Even with onscreen keyboard - I'm already close to 75% of desktop speed 3 - The battery life is incredible - I think this is the first case where a mobile device actually under-promised on battery 4 - It totally has killed the notion of using a normal PC for my wife and mother-in-law - neither of which had wanted an iPhone/iPod Touch or really any Apple device until they got to play with my iPad. The concept of - instant on, easy to hold and touch-based navigation has them hooked. Heck, it has me hooked. My ultimate goal is to be able to have it at least replace the need to take my netbook with me on the road. I haven't had a chance to complete my testing on that front yet - between work, my wife traveling (for a change) and now my wife home sick - I haven't had time to just play with it. But so far my only regret - that I haven't already bought two more for everyone else in my family who wants to use mine. Posted via email from Virtual Identity Dialogue

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134  | Next Page >