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• Silverlight Cream Monday WP7 App Review # 2

  - by Dave Campbell

  Today's Review (alphabetic order): GooNews, Grocery Shopping List, Need for Speed, SurfCube, and United Nations News. I'm a day late if these are going to be 'Monday' posts, but there are lots of apps, lots of goodness, and lots of email, so I might try to do 2 a week, we'll see. So once again I've got a small review of 5 apps that are either on my phone or have been. Disclaimers at the end. In this Issue:   GooNews is a very cool app from Shawn Wildermuth (AgiliTrain). I don't know if he uses this as a demo during his instruction, but it definitely serves a purpose... wanna pick up the top news items from Google on a never-ending basis? ... this is it. You can add your own keyword searches, and send stories to InstaPaper or share via email. I like this because it brings me the news quickly and updated, and works great. GooNews is by AgiliTrain and is Free This was a request by the author, and actually surprised me. I'm a big one for lists, but I would have just done a OneNote list to SkyDrive and to my phone. This app is a lot more than that, but will take you some setup to make it be 'yours'. For obvious reasons, there are no unit prices on things, so you have to set that up to get some idea of the cost of what you're shopping for. But if you do that, you'll get a nice total. Lots of thought went into the various categories and you can add your own. There's a bit of animation on the category selection that's nice. He seems to have covered all the bases necessary to use this, even shopping 'plans' that can be saved, and emailing of lists. As I said, I'm more of a raw list person, but if you take the time to set this up, it should work very nicely for you. Grocery Shopping List is by Grocery Shopper and is $0.99 ($1.99 after Feb 1) with a free trial. This was my 2nd commercial game I bought, and the one I've played the most. I ran the trial, thought it worked great, and bought it. I've had a lot of fun with this... there's no gas pedal.. your foot is in the carbeurator from the GO!, and unless you wanna tap the screen and brake like a little girl, just hang onto the steering wheel (the phone), and guide your way through. Hours of fun and challenges here. I like this because it's got some challenge to it, and the cars seem to be very realistic in their reactions. Need for Speed Undercover is by Electronic Arts is $4.99 and has a free trial. SurfCube Browser is another app by the folks that did the GuitarTuner I reviewed on Monday. You have to see SurfCube to believe it. You've probably seen the YouTube video, if not check SilverlightCream number 1017. The app works very solid, and just as the video demonstrates. I downloaded and tried this, and it immediately did 2 things: bought it, and pinned it to my start page. I like this because it's fun to work with, and it works great as a browser. I'm about *this* close to replacing the IE tile on my front page with SurfCube. SurfCube Browser is by Kinabalu Innovation Limited and is $1.99 and has a free trial. Coming in with another News app is United Nations News by Justin Angel. This is definitely a news aggregator for 'grown ups'... news, photos, videos, and radio broadcsts from the international community all in one very slick app. This is an amazingly well thought-out and complete app. Even better yet, Justin has the code on CodePlex. A very well-done International news aggregator. United Nations News is by Justin Angel and is Free. A few disclaimers: Feel free to write me about your app and tell me about it. While it would be very cool to receive a whole bunch of xap files to review, at this point, for technical reasons, I'm unable to side-load my device. Since I plan on only doing this one day a week (twice if I find time), and only 5, I may never get caught up, so if you send me some info, be patient. Re: games ... remember I'm old... I'm from the era of Colossal Cave and Zork. Duke-Nukem 2D and Captain Comic were awesome. I don't own an XBOX or any other game system, so take game reviews from my perspective -- who knows, it may be refreshing :) I won't pay for an app or game just to try it. If you expect me to test-drive your app, it's going to have to have a Free Trial. I'm still playing with the format, comments are welcome. I decided I should alphabetize the list today... so there's no order implied Let me know what you think of the idea of doing reviews, or the layout/whatever, and Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• How to fix hibernate / suspend with proprietary nVidia driver?

  - by Chris

  Hi, I've just got an Dell Precision M6500 that comes with an nVidia card. Together with Kubunutu 10.10 and the proprietary nvidia driver suspend to disk or RAM does not work. It's allways ending with a running system and a locked screen (i.e. I can just enter my password and everything is as before - it's never sleeping) Can someone please help me to debug this issue? Where should I look for information? None of the log files seem to show an obvious error... Thanks, Chris

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• Modularity through HTTP

  - by Michael Williamson

  As programmers, we strive for modularity in the code we write. We hope that splitting the problem up makes it easier to solve, and allows us to reuse parts of our code in other applications. Object-orientation is the most obvious of many attempts to get us closer to this ideal, and yet one of the most successful approaches is almost accidental: the web. Programming languages provide us with functions and classes, and plenty of other ways to modularize our code. This allows us to take our large problem, split it into small parts, and solve those small parts without having to worry about the whole. It also makes it easier to reason about our code. So far, so good, but now that we’ve written our small, independent module, for example to send out e-mails to my customers, we’d like to reuse it in another application. By creating DLLs, JARs or our platform’s package container of choice, we can do just that – provided our new application is on the same platform. Want to use a Java library from C#? Well, good luck – it might be possible, but it’s not going to be smooth sailing. Even if a library exists, it doesn’t mean that using it going to be a pleasant experience. Say I want to use Java to write out an XML document to an output stream. You’d imagine this would be a simple one-liner. You’d be wrong: import org.w3c.dom.*; import java.io.*; import javax.xml.transform.*; import javax.xml.transform.dom.*; import javax.xml.transform.stream.*; private static final void writeDoc(Document doc, OutputStream out) throws IOException { try { Transformer t = TransformerFactory.newInstance().newTransformer(); t.setOutputProperty(OutputKeys.DOCTYPE_SYSTEM, doc.getDoctype().getSystemId()); t.transform(new DOMSource(doc), new StreamResult(out)); } catch (TransformerException e) { throw new AssertionError(e); // Can't happen! } } Most of the time, there is a good chance somebody else has written the code before, but if nobody can understand the interface to that code, nobody’s going to use it. The result is that most of the code we write is just a variation on a theme. Despite our best efforts, we’ve fallen a little short of our ideal, but the web brings us closer. If we want to send e-mails to our customers, we could write an e-mail-sending library. More likely, we’d use an existing one for our language. Even then, we probably wouldn’t have niceties like A/B testing or DKIM signing. Alternatively, we could just fire some HTTP requests at MailChimp, and get a whole slew of features without getting anywhere near the code that implements them. The web is inherently language agnostic. So long as your language can send and receive text over HTTP, and probably parse some JSON, you’re about as well equipped as anybody. Instead of building libraries for a specific language, we can build a service that almost every language can reuse. The text-based nature of HTTP also helps to limit the complexity of the API. As SOAP will attest, you can still make a horrible mess using HTTP, but at least it is an obvious horrible mess. Complex data structures are tedious to marshal to and from text, providing a strong incentive to keep things simple. By contrast, spotting the complexities in a class hierarchy is often not as easy. HTTP doesn’t solve every problem. It probably isn’t such a good idea to use it inside an inner loop that’s executed thousands of times per second. What’s more, the HTTP approach might introduce some new problems. We often need to add a thin shim to each application that we wish to communicate over HTTP. For instance, we might need to write a small plugin in PHP if we want to integrate WordPress into our system. Suddenly, instead of a system written in one language, we’re maintaining a system with several distinct languages and platforms. Even then, we should strive to avoid re-implementing the same old thing. As programmers, we consistently underestimate both the cost of building a system and the ongoing maintenance. If we allow ourselves to integrate existing applications, even if they’re in unfamiliar languages, we save ourselves those development and maintenance costs, as well as being able to pick the best solution for our problem. Thanks to the web, HTTP is often the easiest way to get there.

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• PostgreSQL 9.1, pgadmin III, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, support functions

  - by Chaz SLiger

  When pgAdmin III is used to open a PostgreSQL database the following message appears. There does not seem to be any obvious package listed in the Ubuntu Software Center for this. The server lacks instrumentation functions. pgadmin III uses some support functions that are not available by default in all PostgreSQL versions. These enable some tasks that make life easier when dealing with log files and configuration files. The adminpack is installed and activated by default if you are running the one-click installer of PostgreSQL. On Unix, you may have to install the contrib package, either with your package installer tool or by compilation.

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• Is a Single Texture Cube Map Possible?

  - by smoth190

  I'm currently developing a test project to explore OpenGL 3 texturing abilities. I have a simple cube, made of 8 vertices and 36 indices. I want each of the cubes faces to have a different texture, so I devised this texture: I made it obvious which sections I want visible (I hope...). In Direct3D, I once made a skybox, and I used a cubemap. However, I had to split it into 6 different textures. This is annoying and hard to manage, it would be nice to have just one texture. Is this even possible? I read somewhere that I could do this by duplicating vertices, is that a good idea? Someone else said I could do it in the shader, but that also baffles me...

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• How can I get a list of installed programs and corresponding size of each in Ubuntu?

  - by Philip Baker

  I would like to have a list of the installed software on my machine, with the disk space consumed by them. A previous answer here says "you can do this via GUI in Synaptic". This doesn't mean anything to me. I don't know what GUI is, and when I click on Synaptic, I do not get anything like the display shown in the answer, i.e. with "Settings ? Preferences" and "Columns and Fonts". In Windows, you just select 'Programs and Applications' in the Control Panel, and the list comes up immediately, with sizes. Is there something similar and simple with Ubuntu? Could the size of each program be included on the list of installed software? This would be the most obvious place to put it.

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• Isometric algorithm producing tiles in wrong draw order

  - by David

  I've been toying with isometric and I just cant get the tiles to be in the right order. I'm probably missing something obvious and I just can't see it. Even at the risk of looking stupid, here's my code: for (int i = 0; i < Tile.MapSize; i++) { for (int j = 0; j < Tile.MapSize; j++) { spriteBatch.Draw( Tile.TileSetTexture, new Rectangle( (-j * Tile.TileWidth / 2) + (i * Tile.TileWidth / 2), (i * (Tile.TileHeight - 9) / 2) - (-j * (Tile.TileHeight - 9) / 2), Tile.TileWidth, Tile.TileHeight), Tile.GetSourceRectangle(tileID), Color.White, 0.0f, new Vector2(-350, -60), SpriteEffects.None, 1.0f); } } And here's what I end up with: messed up map Yep, bit of an issue. If anyone could help, I'd appreciate it.

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• What to do with database in dev/production phases of a website?

  - by TheLQ

  For a while now I've been keeping a website I'm developing in the standard dev/production phases. Its been pretty simple: Mercurial repo for dev, repo for production. Do work in dev, get approved, push to production. But now I'm trying to apply this process to a new website that has a database and am struggling on how to figure out a development strategy. What I didn't mention above is that I do all my work on my own repo, push it to dev, then later push it to production, so its 3 different servers. So how do I manage my database? The obvious solution of mysqldump every commit isn't going to happen, and a dump at the end of the day isn't all that helpful when you want to undo later one change that happened in the middle of the day. What is the best way to accomplish this?

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• Programming languages specifications ebooks

  - by Oxinabox

  In this talk Jon Skeet talks about the advantages of reading programming language specifications. I have an Ebook Reader (a Sony, one of the better ones for PDF's, though EPub is still much better). Does anyone know any sources for specifications, optimised for ebook readersm that can be downloaded? I expect someone would have gone through the effort of optimising the websites for ebook reader reading, ideally: EPUB Format (though pdf will do) Annotated (eg XML) Most specifications I find don't have obvious download links. I'm having trouble googling because everytime I seach for say: "F# Spec EPUB" or "Python Spec PDF" most of the results are for the EPUB or PDF specifications.

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• How do I hire testers by giving them a buggy app for testing their efficiency?

  - by Jay

  My boss wants to recruit testers based on their testing efficiency (number of bugs identified). So, he's shortlisted 5 people and I need to give them an app full of bugs and see how they fare in reporting obvious bugs, and hidden bugs. I know.... it kind of sounds weird. I guess, this is just like the coding world, where you hire a programmer by assessing his/her programming ability (which is a little easier). Once hired, these testers would be testing a java swing app, so their familiarity of testing frameworks/tools is not really required. So, my question here is - How do I go about finding buggy apps (web/non-web), preferably java ones, that I can have the shortlisted testers have a go at? How would you go about this task if your boss asks you to do so? I am kind of clueless at this point - I googled a bit, thought about finding new apps on sourceforge with lots of bugs, but both approaches didn't work for me.

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• What are the preferred documentation tools for the major programming languages?

  - by Dave Peck

  I'm interested in compiling a list of major programming languages and their preferred documentation toolsets. To scope this a bit: The exact structure of the answer may vary from language to language, but there appear to be two aspects common to all languages: (1) in-code syntax for documentation, and (2) documentation generators that make use of said syntax. There are also cases where generators are used independent of code. For example, tutorial-style documentation is common in the Python world and is often disconnected from underlying code. Many languages have multiple commonly-used documentation strategies and tool chains, and I'd love to capture this. Finally, there are cross-language tools like Doxygen that also have some traction and would be worth noting here. Here are some obvious target languages to start with: Python, Ruby, Java, C#, PHP, Objective-C, C/C++, Haskell, Erlang, Scala, Clojure If this question catches on, I'll try and keep this section updated with the most recent list. Thanks!

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• Dealing with blackhat SEO companies and low quality link building competitors [closed]

  - by Mikko Ohtamaa

  I have often faced a case where the competitors of my client use SEO blackhat tactics where they contact a SEO company to do link building for their websites and products. Here is an example of a typical case of a fake blog created only for link building purposes A very low content article http://marshallfab.com/fundus-camera-explained.html in obvious fake blog: no author information, partially machine generated text, all blog posts are solely about link building Following the link you get to the promoted company page http://www.patternless.com/ ... which, unsurprisingly, links the SEO company homepage in the footer text http://www.affordableseofl.com/ ... who are not shy to advertise their Extremely aggressive SEO plan Does Google have any feedback channel where one could submit cases like this, so that Google would punish the link builders? Are there any means to bring these blackhat companies to pushame to damage their reputation?

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• Worst practices in C++, common mistakes ...

  - by Felix Dombek

  After reading this famous rant by Linus Torvalds, I wondered what actually are all the bad things programmers might do in C++. I'm explicitly not referring to typography errors or bad program flow as treated in this question and answers, but to more high-level errors which are not detected by the compiler and do not result in obvious bugs at first run, complete design errors, things which are improbable in C but are likely to be done by newcomers who don't understand the full implications of their code. I also welcome answers pointing out a huge performance decrease where it would not usually be expected. An example of what one of my professors once told me: You have used somewhat too many instances of unneeded inheritance and virtuality. Inheritance makes a design much more complicated (and inefficient because of the RTTI (run-time type inference) subsystem), and it should therefore only be used where it makes sense, e.g. for the actions in the parse table." [I wrote an LR(1) parser generator.] "Because you make intensive use of templates, you practically don't need inheritance."

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• How to install Chrome browser properly via command line?

  - by Bad Learner

  Setting up and managing an Ubuntu server all by myself, in coming months, is a part of my current plans. Hence, I am planning a swtich from Windows to Linux - - Ubuntu. I now need to get some grip on the command line, since I am all used to Windows' GUI. Anyway... the most obvious start is installing apps on my computer, and I thought I should learn to do it via CLI. And this is what I did: $ apt-cache search chrome browser the results showed that the proper term is "chrome-browser," so... $ sudo apt-get install chrome-browser And then "Y" for the Y/n question. But the installation threw errors. (I do not have my PC at hand, so can't mention what error exactly.) Does someone see anything wrong with the commands I issued? I am probably missing some command(s) in between, I think.

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• Anonymous function vs. separate named function for initialization in jquery

  - by Martin N.

  We just had some controversial discussion and I would like to see your opinions on the issue: Let's say we have some code that is used to initialize things when a page is loaded and it looks like this: function initStuff() { ...} ... $(document).ready(initStuff); The initStuff function is only called from the third line of the snippet. Never again. Now I would say: Usually people put this into an anonymous callback like that: $(document).ready(function() { //Body of initStuff }); because having the function in a dedicated location in the code is not really helping with readability, because with the call on ready() makes it obvious, that this code is initialization stuff. Would you agree or disagree with that decision? And why? Thank you very much for your opinion!

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• How To Prevent Your Computer From Waking Up Accidentally

  - by Chris Hoffman

  If you find your Windows computer waking from sleep for no apparent reason, your computer is either being woken up by a hardware device – such as your mouse — or scheduled task set to wake your computer. In some cases, the cause may not be obvious. For example, if your laptop occasionally wakes up for no apparent reason, it’s possible that the floor is shaking a bit, causing the mouse to vibrate slightly and wake the computer. Java is Insecure and Awful, It’s Time to Disable It, and Here’s How What Are the Windows A: and B: Drives Used For? HTG Explains: What is DNS?

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• How to use GCC 4.7 in place of 4.6 (Ubuntu 12.04)

  - by Larz Conwell

  So I'm working on a project and I wanted to use some C11 features for C. To use those features GCC 4.7 is required, so I went to synaptic and looked up 4.7, and I found the packages gcc-4.7-base so I installed it[1]. So now that gcc-4.7-base is installed I expected to be able to use 4.7, but no, when I do gcc --version it still shows 4.6.3 even more, when I try to directly call 4.7(via /usr/bin/gcc-4.7) it doesn't exist, though a gcc-4.6 executable does exist. How do I "activate" GCC 4.7? I read here, you do some crazy stuff with update-alternatives, but it doesn't work for me as the gcc-4.7 executable doesn't actually exist on my machine. Notes: 1. I also saw gcc-4.6-base, so I figured I'd uninstall it, but synaptic attempted to remove every package I had installed and install a Java runtime, so for obvious reason I decided not to remove it.

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• How to unit test image processing code?

  - by rold2007

  I'm working in image processing (mainly OCR) and I wonder how I should integrate unit tests in my development. I'm already using unit tests for more "common" type of code but when dealing with image processing code I'm not sure how to deal with it. This kind of code always need some image data input/output and mocking this is not obvious. For now I'm mostly doing integration tests but they take a while to run and I would like some ideas on how to break down this kind of code into unit tests so that I can run them more quickly.

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• USB Audio Device Loopback Through Speakers

  - by matto1990

  I have a USB turntable which when plugged in to my ubuntu 10.10 machine appears in the audio settings as an input device (USB PnP Audio Device Analog Stereo) like a microphone. What I'd like to be able to do it to have the sound for that audio device played back through the audio output (speaker or whatever). I'm not too worried if there's a slight delay between the audio coming in and it being played out through the speakers. As far as I'm aware this is refereed to as software loopback. I can achieve exactly what I want if I open Audacity, enable software loopback and press record. Obvious this isn't ideal as I don't really want it recording what I'm playing all the time. I know this is possible because of the Audacity example however I'd like to know if there's a way to do it without it recording. I've search around for a while for a piece of software that does this, however I couldn't get anything even close. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

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• Has anyone used RemObjects' Hydra to mix a large Delphi project with new C# additions?

  - by robsoft

  (Hopefully this is deemed suitable for Programmers, not StackOverflow - I could imagine it getting closed at SO because there's no obvious 'right' answer.) We have a large Delphi 2007 VCL project that uses things like DBXpress, Report Builder, DevExpress and TMS components (both visual and non-visual) etc. For reasons I won't bore you with, the company would like to start adding new modules to the program using .Net (via C# in particular). Rewriting from scratch isn't an option and given the heavy use of Report Builder and various other bits of Delphi-specific 3rd party code, I suspect that using something like TurnSharp to regenerate a C# project wouldn't work well either. Ideally we want to keep our Win32 VCL Delphi code but add new modules (plug-ins, sections of contained functionality like wizards etc) via C#. So we're considering RemObjects' Hydra, and in the next few weeks will probably have a go at evaluating it on a smaller-but-representative project first. I wondered if anyone had experience of doing this kind of thing with Hydra...?

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• Frequent GUI pauses in Ubuntu 13.04 / Unity / Intel HD4000

  - by Simon

  I'm experiencing very frequent (and regular) GUI pauses on my system. Every 30 seconds (pretty much exactly) the GUI will freeze for maybe .25 to .5 seconds. The mouse stops moving, keys stop echoing and a stopwatch timer briefly pauses. I'm using the Intel Graphics driver available from: https://download.01.org/gfx/ubuntu/13.04/main I've looked in a few places and tried a few things for a solution: I've checked cron and anacron for scheduled processes. I've disabled background processes (eg mysql, postgres, apache) not that these were doing anything anyway I've checked the following posts and tried the suggestions there: Unity GUI pauses/freezes for less than a few seconds How to go about troubleshooting frequent system pauses I've watched the system using top and System Monitor and there are no spikes (or even blips) of cpu usage when the pauses occur. There are no obvious error messages in dmesg or syslog There is loads of free RAM (8GB+) and no swap usage If it helps it's a ZooStorm i5 laptop with a HD4000 GPU, 16GB Ram and an SSD. Any help / suggestions would be very gratefully received.

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• Any significant performance cost to using BlendState.Premultiplied?

  - by Donutz

  Normally I guess you'd use BlendState.AlphaBlend because normally when you load your textures through the pipeline they're already premultiplied. However, if you're loading textures at runtime from PNGs or some such, you have to loop through the pixels and premultiply them, which can take a long time if you've got a lot of textures to load. So it looks (haven't tried it) like using BlendState.Premultiplied instead of BlendState.AlphaBlend should handle non-premultiplied textures and produce the same visual result, without all the startup costs. I have to wonder if there's a non-obvious cost to doing this, like a huge drop in performance or something. Anyone know?

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• What are some concepts people should understand before programming "big" projects?

  - by Abafei

  A person new to programming may be able to make a good small program. However, when starting to work on anything bigger than a small (think 1 C source file or Python module) program, there are some general concepts which become much more important when working on "big" (think many Python modules or C files) programs; one example is modularity, another is having a set aim. Some of these may be obvious to people who went to school to learn programming; however, people like me who did not go to programming classes sometimes have to learn these things from experience, possibly creating failed projects in the meantime. ================================================== Please explain what the concept is, and why the concept becomes more important for big programs than by small programs. Please give only 1 concept per answer.

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• Dynamic Quad/Oct Trees

  - by KKlouzal

  I've recently discovered the power of Quadtrees and Octrees and their role in culling/LOD applications, however I've been pondering on the implementations for a Dynamic Quad/Oct Tree. Such tree would not require a complete rebuild when some of the underlying data changes (Vertex Data). Would it be possible to create such a tree? What would that look like? Could someone point me in the correct direction to get started? The application here would, in my scenario, be used for a dynamically changing spherical landscape with over 10,000,000 verticies. The use of Quad/Oct Trees is obvious for Culling & LOD as well as the benefits from not having to completely recompute the tree when the underlying data changes.

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• Code Smell: Inheritance Abuse

  - by dsimcha

  It's been generally accepted in the OO community that one should "favor composition over inheritance". On the other hand, inheritance does provide both polymorphism and a straightforward, terse way of delegating everything to a base class unless explicitly overridden and is therefore extremely convenient and useful. Delegation can often (though not always) be verbose and brittle. The most obvious and IMHO surest sign of inheritance abuse is violation of the Liskov Substitution Principle. What are some other signs that inheritance is The Wrong Tool for the Job even if it seems convenient?

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