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• Improved Customer Experience, but at what Cost?

  - by Tony Berk

  We can all probably agree that improving your customers' experience is a good thing. But a key question many people are asking is will it help your organization and, in particular, what are the financial benefits?That's a good question, especially when companies ARE experiencing phenomenal return on investment (ROI). Of course, there are many factors that impact ROI or other measures of success, but we'd like to share some success stories as examples of customer experience in action and delivering positive results. If you would like to learn more about the economics of customer experience, see Brian Curran's presentation at the Oracle Customer Experience Summit last month. In this series of blog posts, we'll share actual customer stories. Today's example is Dell, which uses Oracle Real-Time Decisions (RTD) and Siebel CRM as part of their customer experience portfolio to better understand their customers' needs and wants and provide consistent interactions. Regular readers of this blog are probably familiar with Siebel, but RTD may be new to many of you. RTD is a complete decision management solution that delivers real-time decisions and recommendations and automatically renders decisions within a business process to create tailored messaging for every customer interaction.What does that mean? In the video below, Dell describes how customer experience is important not just for one interaction channel, but across all "vehicles." RTD is helping Dell understand customer behavior and communicate with the customer in a more relevant manner, across all communication  or interaction channels including sales and service call centers, email marketing and online. Dell continues to expand use of RTD because the benefits are showing up in sales, service and marketing results including 19% increase in close rates, faster issue resolution and 40% improvement in revenue per click in email marketing. Click here, to learn more about Oracle Customer Experience and stay tuned for more customer spotlights.

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• Information Spilling Across Object Boundaries

  - by Winston Ewert

  Many times my business objects tend to have situations where information needs to cross object boundaries too often. When doing OO, we want information to be in one object and as much as possible all code dealing with that information should be in that object. However, business rules do not follow this principle giving me trouble. As an example suppose that we have an Order which has a number of OrderItems which refers to an InventoryItem which has a price. I invoke Order.GetTotal() which sums the result of OrderItem.GetPrice() which multiples a quantity by InventoryItem.GetPrice(). So far so good. But then we find out that some items are sold with a two for one deal. We can handle this by having OrderItem.GetPrice() do something like InventoryItem.GetPrice( quantity ) and letting InventoryItem deal with this. However, then we find out that the two-for-one deal only lasts for a particular time period. This time period needs to be based on the date of the order. Now we change OrderItem.GetPrice() to be InventoryItem.GetPrice( quatity, order.GetDate() ) But then we need to support different prices depending on how long the customer has been in the system: InventoryItem.GetPrice( quantity, order.GetDate(), order.GetCustomer() ) But then it turns out that the two-for-one deals apply not just to buying multiple of the same inventory item but multiple for any item in a InventoryCategory. At this point we throw up our hands and just give the InventoryItem the order item and allow it to travel over the object reference graph via accessors to get the information its needs: InventoryItem.GetPrice( this ) TL;DR I want to have coupling in objects, but business rules often force me to access information from all over the place in order to make particular decisions. Are there good techniques for dealing with this? Do others find the same problem?

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• Branching and CI Builds with Agile

  - by Bob Horn

  We follow many agile processes, including automated tests, continuous integration, sprint reviews, etc... We're currently having a debate about how often we should branch release builds. We've been doing two-week sprints and trying to deploy to production at the end of each sprint. Some of us think we should be branching every sprint. Some of us think that's overkill. If a project encompasses three Visual Studio solutions, and we branch every sprint, then that's three branches, and three CI builds to create every two weeks. If we do this for six months, we'll end up with 36 branches and 36 CI builds. There is overhead involved in that. For those of us that think that branching every sprint is overkill, we don't have a very good alternative. On my last project, we deployed some solutions from the Main trunk. Yeah, that's not good, but it saved on some of the overhead. What's the right way to manage branching/releasing and CI builds, using agile, when we have such short (two-week) sprint cycles?

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• From TFS to Git

  - by Saeed Neamati

  I'm a .NET developer and I've used TFS (team foundation server) as my source control software many times. Good features of TFS are: Good integration with Visual Studio (so I do almost everything visually; no console commands) Easy check-out, check-in process Easy merging and conflict resolution Easy automated builds Branching Now, I want to use Git as the backbone, repository, and source control of my open source projects. My projects are in C#, JavaScript, or PHP language with MySQL, or SQL Server databases as the storage mechanism. I just used github.com's help for this purpose and I created a profile there, and downloaded a GUI for Git. Up to this part was so easy. But I'm almost stuck at going along any further. I just want to do some simple (really simple) operations, including: Creating a project on Git and mapping it to a folder on my laptop Checking out/checking in files and folders Resolving conflicts That's all I need to do now. But it seems that the GUI is not that user friendly. I expect the GUI to have a Connect To... or something like that, and then I expect a list of projects to be shown, and when I choose one, I expect to see the list of files and folders of that project, just like exploring your TFS project in Visual Studio. Then I want to be able to right click a file and select check-in... or check-out and stuff like that. Do I expect much? What should I do to easily use Git just like TFS? What am I missing here?

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• Regulating how much to draw based on how much was drawn last frame.

  - by Mike Howard

  I have a 3D game world on an iPhone (limited graphics speed), and I'm already regulating whether I draw each shape on the screen based on it's size and distance from the camera. Something like... if (how_big_it_looks_from_the_camera > constant) then draw What I want to do now is also take into account how many shapes are being drawn, so that in busier areas of the game world I can draw less than I otherwise would. I tried to do this by dividing how_big_it_looks by the number of shapes that were drawn last frame (well, the square root of this but I'm simplifying - the problem is the same). if (how_big_it_looks / shapes_drawn > constant2) then draw But the check happens at the level of objects which represent many drawn shapes, and if an object containing many shapes is switched on, it increases shapes_drawn lots and switches itself back off the next frame. It flickers on and off. I tried keeping a kind of weighted average of previous values, by each frame doing something like shapes_drawn_recently = 0.9 * shapes_drawn_recently + 0.1 * shapes_just_drawn, but of course it only slows the flickering down because of the nature of the feedback loop. Is there a good way of solving this? My project is in Objective-C, but a general algorithm or pseudo-code is good too. Thanks.

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• Current SPARC Architectures

  - by Darryl Gove

  Different generations of SPARC processors implement different architectures. The architecture that the compiler targets is controlled implicitly by the -xtarget flag and explicitly by the -arch flag. If an application targets a recent architecture, then the compiler gets to play with all the instructions that the new architecture provides. The downside is that the application won't work on older processors that don't have the new instructions. So for developer's there is a trade-off between performance and portability. The way we have solved this in the compiler is to assume a "generic" architecture, and we've made this the default behaviour of the compiler. The only flag that doesn't make this assumption is -fast which tells the compiler to assume that the build machine is also the deployment machine - so the compiler can use all the instructions that the build machine provides. The -xtarget=generic flag tells the compiler explicitly to use this generic model. We work hard on making generic code work well across all processors. So in most cases this is a very good choice. It is also of interest to know what processors support the various architectures. The following Venn diagram attempts to show this: A textual description is as follows: The T1 and T2 processors, in addition to most other SPARC processors that were shipped in the last 10+ years supported V9b, or sparcvis2. The SPARC64 processors from Fujitsu, used in the M-series machines, added support for the floating point multiply accumulate instruction in the sparcfmaf architecture. Support for this instruction also appeared in the T3 - this is called sparcvis3 Later SPARC64 processors added the integer multiply accumulate instruction, this architecture is sparcima. Finally the T4 includes support for both the integer and floating point multiply accumulate instructions in the sparc4 architecture. So the conclusion should be: Floating point multiply accumulate is supported in both the T-series and M-series machines, so it should be a relatively safe bet to start using it. The T4 is a very good machine to deploy to because it supports all the current instruction sets.

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• 2D Rectangle Collision Response with Multiple Rectangles

  - by Justin Skiles

  Similar to: Collision rectangle response I have a level made up of tiles where the edges of the level are made up of collidable rectangles. The player's collision box is represented by a rectangle as well. The player can move in 8 directions. The player's velocity is equal in X and Y directions and constant. Each update, I am checking the player's collision against all tiles that are a certain distance away. When the player collides with a rectangle, I am finding the intersection depth and resolving along the most shallow axis followed by the other axis. This resolution happens for both axes simultaneously. See below for two examples of situations where I am having trouble. Moving up-left against the left wall In the scenario below, the player is colliding with two tiles. The tile intersection depth is equal on both axes for the top tile and more shallow in the X axis for the middle tile. Because the player is moving up the wall, the player should slide in an upward direction along the wall. This works properly as long as the rectangle with the more shallow depth is evaluated first. If the equal intersection depth rectangle is evaluated first, there is a chance the player becomes stuck. Moving up-left against the top wall Here is an identical scenario with the exception that the collision is with the top wall. The same problem occurs at the corners when intersection depth is equal for both axes. I guess my overall question is: How can I ensure that collision response occurs on tiles that have non-equal intersection depth before tiles that have equal intersection depth in order to get around the weirdness that occurs at these corners. Sean's answer in the linked question was good, but his solution required having different velocity components in a certain direction. My situation has equal velocities, so there's no good way to tell which direction to resolve at corners. I hope I have made my explanation clear.

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• Office design and layout for agile development

  - by Adam Eberbach

  (moved from stackoverflow) I have found lot of discussions here on about which keyboard, desk, light or colored background is best - but I can't find one addressing the layout of the whole office. We are a company with about 20 employees moving to a new place, something larger. There are two main development practices going on here with regular combination, the back end people often needing to work with the mobile people to arrange web services. There are about twice as many back end people as mobile people. About half of the back end developers are working on-site at any time and while they are almost never all in the office at once at least 5-10 spaces need to be provided - so most of the time the two groups are about equal. We have the chance to arrange desks, partitions and possibly even walls to make the space good. There won't be cash for dot-com frills like catering or massages but now's the time to be planning to avoid ending up with a bunch of desks in a long line. Joel on Software's Bionic Office is an article I've remembered from way back and it has some good ideas but I* (and more importantly the company's owners) are not completely sold on the privacy idea in an environment where we are supposed to be collaborating. This is another great link - The Ultimate Software Development Office Layout - I hadn't even remembered enclosed meeting rooms until reading this. Does the private office stand in the way of agile development? Is the scrum enough forced contact and if you need to bug someone you should need to get up and knock on their door? What design layouts can you point to and why would you recommend them? *I'm not against closed offices at all but would be happy if some other solution can do just as well. If it can't... well, that's what this question is all about.

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• Release/Change management - best aproach

  - by Bob Rivers

  I asked this question an year ago in StackOverflow and never got a good answer. Since Programmers seems to be a better place to ask it, I'll give it a try... What is the better way to work with release management? More specifically what would be the best way to release packages? For example, assuming that you have a relatively stable system, a good quality assurance process (QA), etc. How do you prefer to release new versions? Let's assume that we are talking about a mid to large "centralized" web system (no clients), in-house development. This system can be considered "vital" for a corporate operations. I have a tendency to prefer to do this by releasing packets at regular intervals, not greater than 1 to 3 months. During this period, I will include into the package,fixes and improvements and make the implementation in production environment only once. But I've seen some people who prefer to place small changes in production, but with a greater frequency. The claim of these people is that by doing so, it is easier to identify bugs that have gone through the process of QA: in a package with 10 changes and another with only 1, it is much easier to know what caused the problem in the package with just one change... What is the opinion came from you?

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• What is the safest way to remove a swap partition?

  - by user212062

  I am running Ubuntu 12.04 on a 64-bit HP laptop with a 16 GB flash drive. I do not have a working hard drive right now. When I installed Ubuntu, I created a 2 GB swap partition on sdb1. I have since learned that swap partitions are generally a bad idea on flash drives, so I would like to use my swap space for my other partitions. You can see my partition scheme in the link below. I have read that I just have to comment sdb1 out of the fstab file, boot from a GParted live CD, select swapoff for sdb1, delete/merge with other partition, and everything's good. But, I've also read that messing with sdb1 can change the UUID of sdb2 or sdb3 and cause problems. Is this true? Does initramfs use swap at all? Also, when I get Ubuntu running on my laptop with an internal hard drive, does the swap partition help that much? I have 6 GB of DDR3. Does the rule of 1.5xActual RAM still apply? It seems like quite a bit to me. Thanks for the help! UPDATE: I have removed swap. The process I followed is: Right click swap partition in GParted and selected swapoff. Used # to comment the swap partition out of fstab. I tried to boot from a live GParted CD, but I kept getting an error, so I ran GParted in Ubuntu. Deleted swap partition in GParted. Unmounted /windows. Expanded /windows to take the remaining space. Mounted /windows. The / and /windows partitions each kept their own names and UUIDs, and everything is running fine. I have never seen any swap space being used before, and I don't intend to use the hibernate function, so I think removing swap was a good idea.

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• How to provide value?

  - by Francisco Garcia

  Before I became a consultant all I cared about was becoming a highly skilled programmer. Now I believe that what my clients need is not a great hacker, coder, architect... or whatever. I am more and more convinced every day that there is something of greater value. Everywhere I go I discover practices where I used to roll my eyes in despair. I saw the software industry with pink glasses and laughed or cried at them depending on my mood. I was so convinced everything could be done better. Now I believe that what my clients desperately need is finding a balance between good engineering practices and desperate project execution. Although a great design can make a project cheap to maintain thought many years, usually it is more important to produce quick fast and cheap, just to see if the project can succeed. Before that, it does not really matters that much if the design is cheap to maintain, after that, it might be too late to improve things. They need people who get involved, who do some clandestine improvements into the project without their manager approval/consent/knowledge... because they are never given time for some tasks we all know are important. Not all good things can be done, some of them must come out of freewill, and some of them must be discussed in order to educate colleagues, managers, clients and ourselves. Now my big question is. What exactly are the skills and practices aside from great coding that can provide real value to the economical success of software projects? (and not the software architecture alone)

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• @CodeStock 2012 Review: Leon Gersing ( @Rubybuddha ) - "You"

  "YOU"Speaker: Leon GersingTwitter: @Rubybuddha Site: http://about.me/leongersing I honestly had no idea what I was getting in to when I sat down in to this session. I basically saw the picture of the speaker and knew that it would be a good session. I was completely wrong; it was the BEST SESSION of CodeStock 2012.  In fact it was so good, I texted another coworker attending the conference to get over and listen to Leon. Leon took on the concept of growth in the software development community. He specifically referred David Hansson in his ability to stick to his beliefs when the development community thought that he was crazy for creating Ruby on Rails. If you do not know this story Ruby on Rails is one of the fastest growing web languages today. In addition, he also touched on the flip side of this argument in that we must be open to others ideas and not discard them so quickly because we all come from differing perspectives and can add value to a project/team/community. This session left me with two very profound concepts/quotes: “In order to learn you must do it badly in front of a crowed and fail.” - @Rubybuddha I can look back on my career so far and say that he is correct; I think I have learned the most after failing, especially when I achieved this failure in front of other. “Experts must be able to fail.” - @Rubybuddha I think we can all learn from our own mistakes but we can also learn from others. When respected experts fail it is a great learning opportunity for the entire team as well as the person who failed. When expert admit mistakes and how they worked through them can be great learning tools for other developers so that they know how to avoid specific scenarios and if they do become stuck in the same issue they will know how to properly work their way out of them.

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• Seeking solution for printing-reporting .NET

  - by Parhs

  I am developing an application that prints in separate threads in extreme cases about 20-25 pages per minute to various thermal printers. Currently templates for these are XAML xps documents. All printers have graphics drivers that support EMF/GDI printing. So GDI-EMF is done by operating system resulting in slower performance. Sending raw text for printing is another good solution but doesnt work always , because some clients have old chinese thermal printer that nobody support thus impossible to change codepage / emulation. So it doesnt work always. Also most computers running my software are low end ATOM CPU. So I am thinking to return to GDI, EMF printing and have both Text-Only reports and EMF reports. Another reason i want EMF is because here receipts are signed by Electronic Fiscal Memory device.Most of these dont do good job extracting text from XPS as they dont follow the standard but how windows convert GDI to XPS.Even with text-only mode some of them dont support all character encodings and are impossible to send paper cut command after the sign. I know that using a reporting engine would solve rendering problem but I dont want to buy one. All I want is to be able to show tabular data and insert an image and replaced text.I know there is StringTemplate that could do the generation of template but the problem is i should parse somehow the template and render it using GDI commands. Is there any other solution/approach for this ? Or is there anything ready ?

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• How to start a high school Java/Android development club for 13-17 year olds

  - by PaulHurleyuk

  My wife is a high school maths teacher, and is considering starting a programming club for 13-17 years olds who show an interest. Their interest seems to be around Apps and Android which I have little experience of. The kids would be (presumably) interested in programming, and have a fairly high level of computing knowledge. We would provide them with resources and some knowledge, but hopefully a lot would be self guided. I'm hoping stack overflow'ers can provide some tips or starting points. Specific things I think I'll need are; A development Environment; Currently I'm looking towards Java and Android, developed in Eclipse, probably installed on donated older hardware Some initial direction; There seem to be a plethora or 'start android' tutorials, so some recommendations for good ones are valuable, as are recommended paper books A Target; Some final project they should be shooting for A Route; This is where I'm most stuck, how to lead them through the required Java concepts and learning they would need Some related questions already out there Language+IDE for teaching high school students? Teaching "web design/development" to high-school home-school group. Good sources? How can I bootstrap a software development community at my school?

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• (PHP vs Python vs Perl) vs Ruby [closed]

  - by Dr.Kameleon

  OK, here's what : I've programmed in over 20 different languages and now, because of a large project I'm currently working on for Mac OS X (in Objective-C/Cocoa), I need to make a final decision on which language to use for my background scripting + plugin functionality. Definitely, one factor that'll ultimately influence my decision is which one I'm most familiar with, which is PHP (one of the ugliest languages around, which I however adore... lol), then Python / Perl (the "proven values"... )... and then Ruby (which, to me, is almost confusing and I've only played with it for some time.) Now, here's my considerations : (As previously mentioned) Being familiar with it (anyway, if X is better in my case, I really don't mind studying it from scratch...) Speed Good interaction with the Shell + ease of integration with my Cocoa application Btw, some of the reasons that made me wonder if Ruby would be a good choice is : The hype around it (although, I still don't get why; but that's probably just me...) My major competitor (we're actually talking about the same type of software here) is using Ruby for its backend scripting almost exclusively (ok, along with some BASH). Isn't Ruby considered slower e.g. than Perl? Why did he choose that? Simply, a matter of personal taste? So... your thoughts?

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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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• Script language native extensions - avoiding name collisions and cluttering others' namespace

  - by H2CO3

  I have developed a small scripting language and I've just started writing the very first native library bindings. This is practically the first time I'm writing a native extension to a script language, so I've run into a conceptual issue. I'd like to write glue code for popular libraries so that they can be used from this language, and because of the design of the engine I've written, this is achieved using an array of C structs describing the function name visible by the virtual machine, along with a function pointer. Thus, a native binding is really just a global array variable, and now I must obviously give it a (preferably good) name. In C, it's idiomatic to put one's own functions in a "namespace" by prepending a custom prefix to function names, as in myscript_parse_source() or myscript_run_bytecode(). The custom name shall ideally describe the name of the library which it is part of. Here arises the confusion. Let's say I'm writing a binding for libcURL. In this case, it seems reasonable to call my extension library curl_myscript_binding, like this: MYSCRIPT_API const MyScriptExtFunc curl_myscript_lib[10]; But now this collides with the curl namespace. (I have even thought about calling it curlmyscript_lib but unfortunately, libcURL does not exclusively use the curl_ prefix -- the public APIs contain macros like CURLCODE_* and CURLOPT_*, so I assume this would clutter the namespace as well.) Another option would be to declare it as myscript_curl_lib, but that's good only as long as I'm the only one who writes bindings (since I know what I am doing with my namespace). As soon as other contributors start to add their own native bindings, they now clutter the myscript namespace. (I've done some research, and it seems that for example the Perl cURL binding follows this pattern. Not sure what I should think about that...) So how do you suggest I name my variables? Are there any general guidelines that should be followed?

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• Am I wrong to disagree with A Gentle Introduction to symfony's template best practices?

  - by AndrewKS

  I am currently learning symfony and going through the book A Gentle Introduction to symfony and came across this section in "Chapter 4: The Basics of Page Creation" on creating templates (or views): "If you need to execute some PHP code in the template, you should avoid using the usual PHP syntax, as shown in Listing 4-4. Instead, write your templates using the PHP alternative syntax, as shown in Listing 4-5, to keep the code understandable for non-PHP programmers." Listing 4-4 - The Usual PHP Syntax, Good for Actions, But Bad for Templates <p>Hello, world!</p> <?php if ($test) { echo "<p>".time()."</p>"; } ?> (The ironic thing about this is that the echo statement would look even better if time was a variable declared in the controller because then you could just embed the variable in the string instead of concatenating) Listing 4-5 - The Alternative PHP Syntax, Good for Templates <p>Hello, world!</p> <?php if ($test): ?> <p><?php echo time(); ?> </p><?php endif; ?> I fail to see how listing 4-5 makes the code "understandable for non-PHP programmers", and its readability is shaky at best. 4-4 looks much more readable to me. Are there any programmers who are using symfony that write their templates like those in 4-4 rather than 4-5? Are there reasons I should use one over the other? There is the very slim chance that somewhere down the road someone less technical could be editing it the template, but how does 4-5 actually make it more understandable to them?

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• Migration of PowerBuilder application to multiplatform

  - by Alex Bibiano

  I developed a client/server application with PowerBuilder in the past for medical clinics and done maintenance for it until now. Now, some clients are asking me to develop a release for Mac/Linux and need some advice about what programming language/technology is best suited for it and the learning curve. It’s not a very very big program but I’m the only developer and have done it in my spare time. PowerBuilder is very productive for this kind of projects (database centric), but it’s not multiplatform and it’s hard to sell PowerBuilder application now days (web, .NET, java sells a lot better with his marketing). My programming skills: - I studied C and C++ in the past (university) but never used it on real projects - Have some Java experience but not in desktop applications - Some experience with Ruby on Rails for web projects - Good skills with PowerBuilder and C# (.NET) (there are my main developing languages) My first dilemma is if I change the desktop application to a web interface, but I think the user will lose some user-experience, and some doctors don’t have a clinic (they are alone at home with my software). I think installing a web application (with webserver) for one user will be overwhelming. If I continue developing desktop application, what is at the moment a good framework/toolset to learn having my skills? Somebody has had similar experiences? A lot of thanks

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• Find points whose pairwise distances approximate a given distance matrix

  - by Stephan Kolassa

  Problem. I have a symmetric distance matrix with entries between zero and one, like this one: D = ( 0.0 0.4 0.0 0.5 ) ( 0.4 0.0 0.2 1.0 ) ( 0.0 0.2 0.0 0.7 ) ( 0.5 1.0 0.7 0.0 ) I would like to find points in the plane that have (approximately) the pairwise distances given in D. I understand that this will usually not be possible with strictly correct distances, so I would be happy with a "good" approximation. My matrices are smallish, no more than 10x10, so performance is not an issue. Question. Does anyone know of an algorithm to do this? Background. I have sets of probability densities between which I calculate Hellinger distances, which I would like to visualize as above. Each set contains no more than 10 densities (see above), but I have a couple of hundred sets. What I did so far. I did consider posting at math.SE, but looking at what gets tagged as "geometry" there, it seems like this kind of computational geometry question would be more on-topic here. If the community thinks this should be migrated, please go ahead. This looks like a straightforward problem in computational geometry, and I would assume that anyone involved in clustering might be interested in such a visualization, but I haven't been able to google anything. One simple approach would be to randomly plonk down points and perturb them until the distance matrix is close to D, e.g., using Simulated Annealing, or run a Genetic Algorithm. I have to admit that I haven't tried that yet, hoping for a smarter way. One specific operationalization of a "good" approximation in the sense above is Problem 4 in the Open Problems section here, with k=2. Now, while finding an algorithm that is guaranteed to find the minimum l1-distance between D and the resulting distance matrix may be an open question, it still seems possible that there at least is some approximation to this optimal solution. If I don't get an answer here, I'll mail the gentleman who posed that problem and ask whether he knows of any approximation algorithm (and post any answer I get to that here).

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• Starting out with OpenGL when most tutorials are out of date

  - by AUTO

  I'm sure there are already a bunch of questions like this asked, but the constant updating of the OpenGL library throws them all away, and in a month or two, the answers here will be worthless again. I am ready to start programming in OpenGL using C++. I've got a working compiler (DevCpp; do NOT ask me to switch to VC++, and don't ask me why). Now I'm just looking for a solid tutorial on how to program with OpenGL. My assistant found the tutorial provided by NeHe Productions, but as I've come to find out, it's WAY OUT OF DATE! (although I did pull together a basic window to support an OpenGL canvas) Then I went online, and found the OpenGL SuperBible, which apparently uses freeglut? But what I'd like to know is whether or not SuperBible 5th edition is up to date any longer. The suggestion to freeglut I found said the latest version was 2.6.0 but now it's 2.8.0! Is the OpenGL SuperBible still a good, and fairly up-to-date place to start? Is there a better place to go to learn OpenGL? Am I allowed to simply store freeglut in the DevCpp include directory (maybe in GL), or is there some important procedure? Are there any comments or suggestions that I didn't think to ask since I'm only just beginning? @dreta cleared some things up for me, so now I have a better idea of what to ask: I think I'd like to start out with OpenGL using a wrapper library instead of directly accessing OpenGL.I just think that, for a beginner, it would be easier for me to program and get good results, while I don't yet have to understand all the grimy details (as @stephelton mentioned). The problem is, I can't find any library that doesn't have undefined references to no longer supported functions. Freeglut sounds operational, but it still uses GLU.Does anyone know what I can do?Also, I tried compiling the first SuperBible's source, but I got errors since GLAPI is not being defined as a type, the error originating in the GLU library. I'd like to use the SuperBible, but I don't know how to fix this.

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• Rule of thumb for cost vs. savings for code re-use

  - by Styler

  Is it a good rule of thumb to always write code for the intent of re-using it somewhere down the road? Or, depending on the size of the component you are writing, is it better practice to design it for re-use when it makes sense with regards to time spent on it. What is a good rule of thumb for spending extra time on analysis and design on project components that have "some probability" of being needed later down the road for other things that may or may need this part. For example, if I have the need for project X to do things A, and B. A definitely needs to be written for re-use because it just makes sense to do so. B is very project specific at the moment, and I can hack it all together in a couple days to finish the project on time and give everyone kudos for being a great team, etc. Or if we say, lets spend a whole friggin' 2 weeks figuring out what project Y/Z might need this thing for and spend a load of extra time on on part B because someday we might need to use it on project Y/Z (where the savings will be realized). I'd imagine a perfect world situation would be a nicely crafted combination of project specific vs. re-use architected components given the project. However some code shops might feel it would be a great idea to write everything for the intention of using it at some point down the road.

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• Personalized Pricing

  - by David Dorf

  In past postings I've spent a fair amount of time talking about targeted promotions.  Using a complete view of the customer that includes purchase history, location history, and psychographics gleaned from social media, we can select the offer with the greatest chance of redemption.  This is done to influence shopping behavior, which might be introducing the consumer to a new product line, increasing their basket size, increasing frequency of purchases, etc. Safeway seems to be taking a slightly different approach with their personalized pricing.  In additional to offering electronic coupons and club card offers, they are also providing a personalized price for certain items based on purchase history.  So when Sally want to shop at Safeway, she first checks the "Just for U" website for three types of deals.  She starts by selecting manufacturer coupons to load into her loyalty card, then she checks the Club Card for offers like "buy one get one free." The third step is the interesting one.  Safeway will set a particular lower price for Sally good for 90 days on items she buys often.  Clearly this isn't enforcing a new behavior but rather instilling loyalty.  I would love to know exactly how they are determining the personalized price.  Of course bargain hunters can still stack the three offers so they can, for example, get their $4.99 Oatmeal for $0.72. I like this particular question and answer from their website's FAQ: My offers are not that great. Can I tell you what offers I need? That's a good idea. That functionality is not currently available, but we appreciate your input and are constantly improving our just for U program. Stay tuned for exciting enhancements! I suppose if Safeway is tracking all the purchases, they can easily determine whether the customer if profitable.  As long as the customer stays profitable, why not let them determine a few offers themselves?  Food for thought.

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• How programmers can afford to NOT learn new things.

  - by newbie

  Good day! I am wondering how programmers learn many things because as a career shifter (from engineering to IT), I find it really hard to absorb everything. Three months ago, I learned HTML/CSS/Javascript. Two months ago, I learned mySQL and CCNA1. One month ago I learned C and Java. Now I am trying to learn J2EE. But it seems that I must combine everything I learned then add more into my brain (especially because J2EE is HUGE! -- XML, servlets, JSP, JSTL, EJB, frameworks(Hibernate, Structs, Spring), JDBC... and so on!!!) So I am wondering, how can programmers learn everything, then add something new without being confused of everything! Because Right now, I feel like my brain is going to explode because of information overload! And these knowledge I am trying to acquire are just the BASICS of programming (icing on the cake)! I still need to learn MORE to become a good programmer! And new technology emerges now and then that requires programmers to learn more again.. Learn.. learn.. learn... Any suggestions on how you as a programmer fit all you've learned into your brain? And how do you know which is the right thing for you to learn? Aren't you afraid that what you've learned may be obsolete next year then start learning again...?

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• Sprite Sheets in PyGame?

  - by Eamonn

  So, I've been doing some googling, and haven't found a good solution to my problem. My problem is that I'm using PyGame, and I want to use a Sprite Sheet for my player. This is all well and good, and it would be too, if I wasn't using a Sprite Sheet strip. Basically, if you don't understand, I have a strip of 32x32 'frames'. These frames are all in an image, along side each other. So, I have 3 frames in 1 image. I'd like to be able to use them as my sprite sheet, and not have to crop them up. I have used an awesome, popular and easy-to-use game framework for Lua called LÖVE. LÖVE has these things called "Quads". They are similar to texture regions in LibGDX, if you know what they are. Basically, quads allow you to get parts of an image. You define how large a quad is, and you define parts of an image that way, or 'regions' of an image. I would like to do something similar to this in PyGame, and use a "for" loop to go through the entire image width and height and mark each 32x32 area (or whatever the user defines as their desired frame width and height) and store that in a list or something for use later on. I'd define an animation speed and stuff, but that's for later on. I've been looking around on the web, and I can't find anything that will do this. I found 1 script on the PyGame website, but it crashed PyGame when I tried to run it. I tried for hours trying to fix it, but no luck. So, is there a way to do this? Is there a way to get regions of an image? Am I going about this the wrong way? Is there a simpler way to do this? Thanks! :-)

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