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• How can I get better at explaining complex software processes to developers?

  - by Lostsoul

  I'm really struggling with my software specs. I am not a professional programmer but enjoy doing it for fun and made some software that I want to sell later but I'm not happy with the code quality. So I wanted to hire a real developer to rewrite my software in a more professional way so it will be maintainable by other developers in the future. I read and found some sample specs and made my own by applying their structure to my document and wanted to get my developer friend to read it and give me advice. After an hour and a half he understood exactly what I was trying to do and how I did it(my algorithms,stack,etc.). How can I get better at explaining things to developers? I add many details and explanations for everything(including working code) but I'm unsure the best way I can learn to pass detailed domain knowledge(my software applies big data, machine learning, graph theory to finance). My end goal is to get them to understand as much as possible from the document and then ask anything they do not understand, but right now it seems they need to extract alot of information from me. How can I get better at communicating domain knowledge to developers?

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• Are null references really a bad thing?

  - by Tim Goodman

  I've heard it said that the inclusion of null references in programming languages is the "billion dollar mistake". But why? Sure, they can cause NullReferenceExceptions, but so what? Any element of the language can be a source of errors if used improperly. And what's the alternative? I suppose instead of saying this: Customer c = Customer.GetByLastName("Goodman"); // returns null if not found if (c != null) { Console.WriteLine(c.FirstName + " " + c.LastName + " is awesome!"); } else { Console.WriteLine("There was no customer named Goodman. How lame!"); } You could say this: if (Customer.ExistsWithLastName("Goodman")) { Customer c = Customer.GetByLastName("Goodman") // throws error if not found Console.WriteLine(c.FirstName + " " + c.LastName + " is awesome!"); } else { Console.WriteLine("There was no customer named Goodman. How lame!"); } But how is that better? Either way, if you forget to check that the customer exists, you get an exception. I suppose that a CustomerNotFoundException is a bit easier to debug than a NullReferenceException by virtue of being more descriptive. Is that all there is to it?

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• Using Copyrighted Images

  - by TMP

  I was thinking about developing a sidescrolling platformer very similar to an old Mario and Luigi game for NES. To start out I was thinking about taking the images from a site like this: http://www.mariouniverse.com/sprites/nes/smb3 Which clearly states a copyright. I was wondering how far I am allowed to take these images. I figure I'm probably allowed to use it for personal development, but what if I publish the game as an exe file and send it to some friends? I figured a definite no-no would be selling the game with the copyrighted images included. A secondary question would be whether or not I would be allowed to modify them slightly and then call them my own.

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• Player rewards in games where you normally have nothing to purchase

  - by PeterK

  In many games there are rewards such as gold coins, points, etc. When these rewards can be used to purchase in-game items, it motivates the player to keep playing. Let's say we have an online game, poker, Yatzy etc. What type of reward would keep the players playing if there are few in-game items available to buy, or none at all? What I am looking for is a reward system that entices the players to play more in a game environment where there isn't that much to purchase. For example, there isn't much to buy in a poker or Yatzy game with the gold you win. I guess having some titles that are added to the userid is one way, or maybe purchasing a logo for the id... A leaderboard is another. Any thoughts on this?

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• Designing a user-defined list to be stored in a relational database - Should I include user index?

  - by Zaemz

  By index, I mean, as the user creates the list, each item receives an integer index for its place in that particular list. Since there will be a table of ListItems, I'd prefer to avoid using the name "Index" for the field. Then I was thinking - should I even include the list index in the database? I figured I would because the list would be created in the same fashion every time, then. Or I could order the list for the user based on its actual primary key, since the list items are created in succession anyway... What should I do?

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• Implementing `let` without using a macro

  - by Matt Fenwick

  I'm learning Lisp, and I've just gotten to let, which I don't quite understand (the implementation of). A common definition for it is given in terms of lambda as a macro. However, nowhere have I seen that let must be implemented as a macro or in terms of lambda. Is it possible to define let without using a macro or lambda? I know it can be implemented as a primitive, but I want to know whether it can be implemented in Lisp without creating a macro -- by creating a special form or a function.

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• Can observer pattern be represented by cars and traffic lights?

  - by eeerahul

  I wanted to verify with all of you, if I have a correct Observer Pattern analogy. The scenario is as follows: Consider, at a junction, there is a traffic signal, having red, yellow and green lights respectively. There are vehicles facing the traffic signal post. When it shows red, the vehicles stop, when it shows green, the vehicles move on. In case, it is yellow, the driver must decide whether to go or to stop, depending on whether he/she has crossed the stop line or not. At the same time, there are vehicles that do not care about the signal. They would do as they like. The similarities are that, the Traffic Signal happens to be the subject, notifying its states by glowing the appropriate lights. Those looking at it and following the signal are the ones subscribed to it, and behave according to the state of the subject. Those who do not care about it, are sort-of un-subscribed from the traffic signal. Please tell me, if you think this is a correct analogy or not?

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• How is it possible to write the compiler of a programming language with that language itself [closed]

  - by tugberk

  Possible Duplicate: How could the first C++ compiler be written in C++? You probably heard that Microsoft released a new language called TypeScript which is a the typed superset of JavaScript. The most interesting thing that makes me wonder is the fact that its compiler writen in TypeScript itself. Call me ignorant but I really couldn't figure out in my head how that is possible. This is just like chicken and egg problem in my head because there is no compiler to compile TypeScript's compiler in the first place. How is it possible to write a compiler of the compiler of a programming language with that language?

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• Tiling Problem Solutions for Various Size "Dominoes"

  - by user67081

  I've got an interesting tiling problem, I have a large square image (size 128k so 131072 squares) with dimensons 256x512... I want to fill this image with certain grain types (a 1x1 tile, a 1x2 strip, a 2x1 strip, and 2x2 square) and have no overlap, no holes, and no extension past the image boundary. Given some probability for each of these grain types, a list of the number required to be placed is generated for each. Obviously an iterative/brute force method doesn't work well here if we just randomly place the pieces, instead a certain algorithm is required. 1) all 2x2 square grains are randomly placed until exhaustion. 2) 1x2 and 2x1 grains are randomly placed alternatively until exhaustion 3) the remaining 1x1 tiles are placed to fill in all holes. It turns out this algorithm works pretty well for some cases and has no problem filling the entire image, however as you might guess, increasing the probability (and thus number) of 1x2 and 2x1 grains eventually causes the placement to stall (since there are too many holes created by the strips and not all them can be placed). My approach to this solution has been as follows: 1) Create a mini-image of size 8x8 or 16x16. 2) Fill this image randomly and following the algorithm specified above so that the desired probability of the entire image is realized in the mini-image. 3) Create N of these mini-images and then randomly successively place them in the large image. Unfortunately there are some downfalls to this simplification. 1) given the small size of the mini-images, nailing an exact probability for the entire image is not possible. Example if I want p(2x1)=P(1x2)=0.4, the mini image may only give 0.41 as the closes probability. 2) The mini-images create a pseudo boundary where no overlaps occur which isn't really descriptive of the model this is being used for. 3) There is only a fixed number of mini-images so i'm not sure how random this really is. I'm really just looking to brainstorm about possible solutions to this. My main concern is really to nail down closer probabilities, now one might suggest I just increase the mini-image size. Well I have, and it turns out that in certain cases(p(1x2)=p(2x1)=0.5) the mini-image 16x16 isn't even iteratively solvable.. So it's pretty obvious how difficult it is to randomly solve this for anything greater than 8x8 sizes.. So I'd love to hear some ideas. Thanks

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• What most games would benefit from having

  - by Phil

  I think I've seen "questions" like this on stackoverflow but sorry if I'm overstepping any bounds. Inspired by my recent question and all the nice answers (Checklist for finished game?) I think every gamedev out there has something he/she thinks that almost every game should have. That knowledge is welcome here! So this is probably going to be an inspirational subjective list of some sorts and the point is that anyone reading this question will see a point or two that they've overlooked in their own development and might benefit from adding. I think a good example might be: "some sort of manual or help section. Of course it should be proportional to how advanced the game is. Some users won't need it and won't go looking for it but the other ones that do will become very frustrated if they can't remember how to do something specific that should be in the manual". A bad example might be "good gameplay". Of course every game benefits from this but the answer is not very helpful.

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• How should I implement the repository pattern for complex object models?

  - by Eric Falsken

  Our data model has almost 200 classes that can be separated out into about a dozen functional areas. It would have been nice to use domains, but the separation isn't that clean and we can't change it. We're redesigning our DAL to use Entity Framework and most of the recommendations that I've seen suggest using a Repository pattern. However, none of the samples really deal with complex object models. Some implementations that I've found suggest the use of a repository-per-entity. This seems ridiculous and un-maintainable for large, complex models. Is it really necessary to create a UnitOfWork for each operation, and a Repository for each entity? I could end up with thousands of classes. I know this is unreasonable, but I've found very little guidance implementing Repository, Unit Of Work, and Entity Framework over complex models and realistic business applications.

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• Browser problem for background-size property [migrated]

  - by Sangram

  I am using one picture as my background of header of my blog. CSS i have used is #header-wrapper { height:125px; padding: 0px; margin: 0; background: url("http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_lxBSX0YJV58/TOspWPI1r-I/AAAAAAAAA34/uw872WFS3ME/s1600/headerbg.jpg") top center no-repeat; background-size: 1120px 124px; } original width of an image is 990 px and i made it 1120px using property background-size: 1120px 124px; It looks okay in firefox 4 and Opera 11 but doesn't work in IE 7, Palemoon etc. image size does not increases and remains 990 px. You can check my blog HERE Any help...how can i make it compatible with all browsers ?

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• Storing images in file system and returning URLs or virtually resizing and returning byte arrays?

  - by ismaelf

  I need to create a REST web service to manage user submitted images and displaying them all in a website. There are multiple websites that are going to use this service to manage and display images. The requirements are to have 5 pre-defined image sizes available. The 2 options I see are the following: The web service will create the 5 images, store them in the file system and and store the URL's in the database when the user submits the image. When the image is requested, the web service will return an array of URLs. I see this option to be a little hard on the hard drive. The estimates are 10,000 users per site, and lets say, 100 sites. The heavy processing will be done when the user submits the image and each image is going to be pulled from the File System. The web service will store just the image that the user submits in the file system and it's URL in the database. When the user request images, the web service will get the info from the DB, load the image on memory, create its 5 instances and return an object with 5 image arrays (I will probably cache the arrays). This option is harder on the processor and memory. The heavy processing will be done when the images get requested. A plus I see for option 2 is that it will give me the option to rewrite the URL of the image and make them site dependent (prettier) than having a image repository for all websites. But this is not a big deal. What do you think of these options? Do you have any other suggestions?

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• Is there a standard for machine-readable descriptions of RESTful services?

  - by ecmendenhall

  I've interacted with a few RESTful APIs that provided excellent documentation for humans and descriptive URIs, but none of them seem to return machine-readable descriptions of themselves. It's not too tough to write methods of my own that assemble the right paths, and many language-specific API libraries are already just wrappers around RESTful requests. But the next level of abstraction seems really useful: a library that could read in an API's own machine readable documentation and generate the wrappers automatically, perhaps with a call to some standard URI like base_url + '/documentation' Are there any standards for machine-readable API documentation? Am I doing REST wrong? I am a relatively new programmer, but this seems like a good idea.

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• Moving dozens of existing standalone retail sites to one central inventory database: what should I know going in?

  - by palintropos

  This will be the first project of this scale that I have attempted, and the first time I have run a website at all (much less dozens) using an off-site database. In particular, I'd like to know: what sort of optimizations I should read up on to make this run as smoothly as possible? any pitfalls/gotchas wiser, more experienced folk are aware of I should be on the lookout for, and what damage-control and preventative measures I should take against the nightmare scenario of the main server (hosting the database) having an outage, grinding over 100 websites to a halt (because they have no access to the product data).

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• More Tables or More Databases?

  - by BuckWoody

  I got an e-mail from someone that has an interesting situation. He has 15,000 customers, and he asks if he should have a database for their data per customer. Without a LOT more data it’s impossible to say, of course, but there are some general concepts to keep in mind. Whenever you’re segmenting data, it’s all about boundary choices. You have not only boundaries around how big the data will get, but things like how many objects (tables, stored procedures and so on) that will be involved, if there are any cross-sections of data (do they share location or product information) and – very important – what are the security requirements? From the answer to these types of questions, you now have the choice of making multiple tables in a single database, or using multiple databases. A database carries some overhead – it needs a certain amount of memory for locking and so on. But it has a very clean boundary – everything from objects to security can be kept apart. Having multiple users in the same database is possible as well, using things like a Schema. But keeping 15,000 schemas can be challenging as well. My recommendation in complex situations like this is similar to a post on decisions that I did earlier – I lay out the choices on a spreadsheet in rows, and then my requirements at the top in the columns. I  give each choice a number based on how well it meets each requirement. At the end, the highest number wins. And many times it’s a mix – perhaps this person could segment customers into larger regions or districts or products, in a database. Within that database might be multiple schemas for the customers. Of course, he needs to query across all customers, that becomes another requirement. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Draw "vision cone" / targetting element onto game world

  - by gkimsey

  I'm wanting to indicate various things using a "pie slice" sort of shape as below. Similar to vision cones in stealth game minimaps, or targetting indicators in RTS type games for frontal area attacks. Something generic enough to be used for both would be ideal. I need to be able to procedurally (and efficiently) change things like the slice width and length, color, transparency, position in the world, etc. For my particular situation, there's no concern with elevation, funky terrain, or really any third axis at all as far as this element is concerned. I have two first inclinations on how to accomplish this: 1) Manually generate the vertices for a main triangle, (possibly two, superimposed to get the border effect), a handful more to approximate the arc at the end, and roll it into a mesh. 2) Use some sort of 2D drawing library to create a circle and mask it off at the right angles, render to texture, and use that. For reference, I have some experience with Ogre3D, but I'm not attached to it as this is a mostly academic pursuit at the moment. Other technologies that might be better at accomplishing this are more than welcome. Finally, I'm kind of curious about how to do a "flashlight" or similar 3D effect that could produce the same result, but on all surfaces in the lit area.

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• What patterns book for iOS development contains this specific information? [closed]

  - by Brett Ryan

  I've read several books on iOS development and Objective-C, however what a lot of them teach is how to work with interfaces and all contain the model inside the view controller, i.e. a UITableViewController based view will simply have an NSArray as it's model. I'm interested in what the best practices are for designing the structure of an application. Specifically I'm interested in best practices for the following: How to separate a model from the view controller. I think I know how to do this by simply replacing the NSArray style example with a specific model object, however what I do not know how to do is alert the view when the model changes. For example in .NET I would solve this by conforming to INotifyPropertyChanged and databinding, and similarly with Java I would use PropertyChangeListener. How to create a service model for my domain objects. For example I want to learn the best way to create a service for a hypothetical Widget object to manage an internal DB and also services for communicating with remote endpoints. I need to learn the best ways to do this in a way that interface components can subscribe to events such as widgetUpdated. These services should be singleton classes and some how dependency injected into model/controller objects. Books I've read so far are: Programming in Objective-C (4th Edition) Beginning iOS 5 Development: Exploring the iOS SDK The iOS 5 Developer's Cookbook: Expanded Electronic Edition: Essentials and Advanced Recipes for iOS Programmers Learn Objective-C on the Mac: For OS X and iOS I've also purchased the following updated books but not yet read them. The Core iOS 6 Developer's Cookbook (4th edition Programming in Objective-C (5th Edition) I come from a Java and C# background with 15 years experience, I understand that many of the ways I would do things in these languages may not fit to the ObjC way of developing applications. Would someone be able to provide me with the book on this topic containing this specific subject matter?

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• What are the advantages of storing xml in a relational database?

  - by Chris

  I was poking around the AdventureWorks database today and I noticed that a number of tables (HumanResources.JobCandidate and Sales.Individual for example) have a column which is storing xml data. What I would to know is, what is the advantage of storing basically a database table row's worth of data in another table's column? Doesn't this make it difficult to query off of this information? Or is the assumption that the data won't need to be queried and just needs to be stored?

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• How to calculate production when player is offline

  - by Kaizer

  What is the best way to do for example food growth based on how many food buildings you have? Lets say I have a webbased game where you can build a farm wich generates 60 food units per hour. A player has 1 farm in his possession. What is the best way to keep on producing these units even when the player is offline? Should I do the math when the player get's back online again? If so..how can I do this without having to save his last online time every 5 seconds so I can do some maths with it when he logs back in (datetime.now - lastonlinetime)? Next thing is when the player is online, should I refresh his resource count every 5 seconds or so by going to the database and back? This would seem weird to do for every logged on player. I hope you understand my question. kind regards

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• How to implement a multi-part snake with smooth movement? [closed]

  - by Jamie

  Sorry that i couldnt answer on my previous post but it got closed. I couldnt answer because i had to prepair for my finals. As there were problems with understanding of what im trying to achieve, im going to describe a little bit more in depth. Im creating a game in which you steer a snake. I assume everybody knows how that works. But in my case the snake isnt just propagating in an array element by element. Imagine a 2Dgrid on which the snake moves. Its 10x10 tiles. Lets say one tile is 4x4 meters. The snakes head spawns in the middle of the (3,2) tile (beginning with (0,0)), so its position is (4*3+2,4*2+2)(the 2's are so that the snake is in the middle of the 4x4 tile). And heres where the fun begins. when the snake moves, it doesnt jump to next tile. Instead it moves a fraction of the way there. So lets say the snake is heading to tile (4,2). After it moved once, its position is (4*3+2+0.1,4*2+2), where 0.1 is the fraction of the way it moved. This is done to achieve smooth movement. So now im adding the rest of the body. The rest is supposed to move along the exact same path as the head did. I implemented it so that each part of the body has its own position and direction. Then i apply this algorithm: 1.Move each part in its direction. 2.If a part is in the middle of the tile(which implies all of them are), change each parts direction to the direction of the part proceeding it. As i said before i could make this work, but i cant stop thinking that im overlooking a much easier and cleaner solution. So this is my question. Is there any easier/better/faster way to do this?

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• Mobile Compatibility: traditional website look vs native application ?

  - by Siddiqui

  I have a question related to mobile compatible websites, I have seen two type of websites One in which they adopt traditional website look and adjust website according to mobile screen, if they have lot of information which can not be adjust according to screen then they expand the height of page, so that user can scroll the page to see more information... In the second approach they used native application look means use navigation-bar, tab-bar, tool-bar, scroll-view just like in native applications. Height and width of page adjust according to screen size, if they have more information then they use scroll-view etc... My question is: which approach is better then other, in which approach you feel more comfortable to use website.

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• How to implement string matching based on a pattern

  - by Vincent Rischmann

  I was asked to build a tool that can identify if a string match a pattern. Example: {1:20} stuff t(x) {a,b,c} would match: 1 stuff tx a 20 stuff t c It is a sort of regex but with a different syntax Parentheses indicate an optional value {1:20} is a interval; I will have to check if the token is a number and if it is between 1 and 20 {a,b,c} is just an enumeration; it can be either a or b or c Right now I implemented this with a regex, and the interval stuff was a pain to do. On my own time I tried implementing some kind of matcher by hand, but it turns out it's not that easy to do. By experimenting I ended up with a function that generates a state table from the pattern and a state machine. It worked well until I tried to implement the optional value, and I got stuck and how to generate the state table. After that I searched how I could do this, and that led me to stuff like LL parser, LALR parser, recursive-descent parser, context-free grammars, etc. I never studied any of this so it's hard to know what is relevant here, but I think this is what I need: A grammar A parser which generates states from the grammar and a pattern A state machine to see if a string match the states So my first question is: Is this right ? And second question, what do you recommend I read/study to be able to implement this ?

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• JS / HTML 5 Compatablity issue on iOS 6

  - by Dhaval

  I'm using HTML 5 to play video and there are some content before the video so I'm using flexroll to scroll that whole window. I'm checking it on iPad, now problem is that in iOS 5 its working fine but when I update to iOS 6 then screen is not scrolling only video is scroll up and down, content is as it is in the position. I can't understand what is the exact problem. Is that js compatibility issue or HTML 5 video compatibility issue. Can anyone please help me to figure out, your help will really be appreciated.

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• Does an inventory limit in an MMORPG make sense?

  - by Philipp

  I am currently developing a simple 2d MMORPG. My current focus is the inventory system. I am currently wondering if I should implement a limit on what a player character can carry. Either in form of a maximum weight, a limited number of inventory slots, or a combination of both. Almost every MMORPG I ever played limits inventory space. But plausibility aside, is this really necessary from a gameplay point of view? Maybe it would in fact improve the game experience when I just let the players carry as much stuff as they want. tl;dr: What is the game development rationale behind limiting carrying capacity of player characters?

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