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• Whats a good host for an active vBulletin site?

  - by Kyle

  I've been switching hosts using a VPS each time and I'm just really not sure I'm finding the right VPS's. I've used a VPS from burst.net & rubyringtech and I just feel like it's slowly killing my site because of the slow speed. I really don't know if it's the network or the VPS itself but I really wish to fix this. When I TOP into the VPS peak times it shows this: top - 03:18:56 up 16:33, 1 user, load average: 1.33, 1.40, 1.33 Tasks: 30 total, 1 running, 29 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu(s): 27.2%us, 13.6%sy, 0.0%ni, 59.2%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Mem: 1048576k total, 679712k used, 368864k free, 0k buffers Swap: 0k total, 0k used, 0k free, 0k cached And pages take atleast a good 2-3 minutes to load. I have only like 50-60 members on the forum also. I had a shared hosting account and the forum was lightning fast.... Is a VPS a bad idea? :\ What should I do to fix this? I'm running lighttpd with xcache, and the latest mysql + php version. The server is a intel i7 2600 w/ 1gb uplink (I think the 1gb uplink is a lie because I've tested the network and the highest download speed I've seen was 20mb/s from a code.google page) All in all I've seen people talking about linode. Should I try them? I honestly don't need a dedicated server yet it's only 50-70 members online. What should I do? I really want a VPS because I enjoy root access. Does anyone have any suggestions?

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• what's a good approach to working with multiple databases?

  - by Riz

  I'm working on a project that has its own database call it InternalDb, but also it queries two other databases, call them ExternalDb1 and ExternalDb2. Both ExternalDb1 and ExternalDb2 are actually required by a few other projects. I'm wondering what the best approach for dealing with this is? Currently, I've just created a project for each of these external databases and then generated Edmx and entities using the entity-framework approach. My thought was that I could then include these projects in any of my solutions that require access to these databases. Also, I don't have any separate business layers. I just have a solution like below: Project.Domain ExternalDb1Project.Domain ExternalDb2Project.Domain Project.Web So my Domain projects contain the data access as well as the POCOs generated by Entity Framework and any business logic. But I'm not sure if this is a good approach. For example if I want to do Validation in my Project.Domain on the entities in the InternalDb, it's fine. But if I want to do Validation for entities from either of the ExternalDbs, then I wonder where it should go? To be more specific, I retrieve Employees from ExternalDb1Project.Domain. However, I want to make sure they are Active. Where should this Validation go? How to architect a project like this at a high level? Also, I want to make sure that I use IoC for my data contexts so I can create Fakes when writing tests. I wonder where the interfaces for these various data contexts would reside?

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• What would be a good opensource software for graphing circles, circular regions, and regions bounded by curves and/or arcs?

  - by Michael Dykes

  Hullo all. I have just started s job with Chegg, and my 1st assignment has me writign solutions for Stewart's Essential Calculus. I am dealing with the chapter on multiple integration, and need a good open-source software that I can easily use to draw regions (domains) that would require multiple integrals: i.e. circular regions, portions of circles, regions bounded by curves and/or arcs, and at some point 3D pictures. In most of these cases, I am not working with an exact equation or perhaps need to draw the region bounded by r (radius) between 1 and 2, and the angle theta bounded between pi/4 and 3 pi/4. I am not too terribly familiar with programs like Corel Draw, but the documents I have from this company suggest Corel Draw. So I think I am looking for an open-source free program like Corel Draw or something similar. Any additional suggestions would also be appreciated. I know I can do most, if not all of this using TikZ, but the learning curve is a bit steep, and at the moment I an on a time constraint. Thanks.

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• Book Giveaway: We Have 10 Free Copies of the 4-Hour Chef (The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, Learning Anything, and Living the Good Life)

  - by The Geek

  The 4-Hour Chef isn’t just a cookbook. It’s a choose-your-own-adventure guide to the world of rapid learning from the best-selling author of the 4-Hour Workweek, and we’ve got 10 free copies for How-To Geek readers. Want more information? Here’s the description of the book, from the Amazon page. The 4-Hour Chef is a five-stop journey through the art and science of learning: 1. META-LEARNING. Before you learn to cook, you must learn to learn. META charts the path to doubling your learning potential. 2. THE DOMESTIC. DOM is where you learn the building blocks of cooking. These are the ABCs (techniques) that can take you from Dr, Seuss to Shakespeare. 3. THE WILD. Becoming a master student requires self-sufficiency in all things. WILD teaches you to hunt, forage, and survive. 4. THE SCIENTIST. SCI is the mad scientist and modernist painter wrapped into one. This is where you rediscover whimsy and wonder. 5. THE PROFESSIONAL. Swaraj, a term usually associated with Mahatma Gandhi, can be translated as “self-rule.” In PRO, we’ll look at how the best in the world become the best in the world, and how you can chart your own path far beyond this book. Still not sold? There’s more information and pictures over on the Amazon page for the book. The 4-Hour Chef: The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, Learning Anything, and Living the Good Life Why Your Android Phone Isn’t Getting Operating System Updates and What You Can Do About It How To Delete, Move, or Rename Locked Files in Windows HTG Explains: Why Screen Savers Are No Longer Necessary

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• Computer Science graduate. Master or full-time job? [closed]

  - by Alex

  Possible Duplicate: Is a Master's worth it? I have just gotten my Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science and I have to make choice. Whether to continue with my full-time job I just got or put the job slightly in the background and concentrate on getting a Master's degree. I am currently working as an embedded C developer in a small company. The cool thing is that, because the team is quite small, my engineering ideas really play a part in the final product. Not to mention that I get to work on very different areas of embedded programming: device drivers and development of a Real Time OS. I am very enthusiastic about my job and what I do. On the other hand, in my country there isn't really a master's degree that focuses on embedded development so my gain from getting this degree will mainly in the field of general computer science knowledge. That being said, is it worth giving up all my spare time which I now use to study different areas of embedded devices and work mainly to get a degree rather than pure knowledge and experience in the field I want to work in?

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• How are certain analytics metrics (time on site, etc.) usually distributed?

  - by a barking spider

  I'm not sure if I've come to the right place to ask this question, but I'm gathering some information for a research project. We're trying to design an experiment that'll heavily involve web analytics, and I'm trying to figure out some sensible values of mean +/- standard deviation for the following visitor-level (i.e., visitor 1 spends 2 minutes on site, visitor 2 spends 1 minute -- mean 1.5 +/- 0.71...) metrics: time spent on site page views If time allowed, we would put up the sites and gather the information ourselves, but we have a grant deadline coming up. I realize that even though these the distributions of these quantities are probably going to be heavily skewed towards zero, we'll need some reasonable figures or estimates of these figures in order to do sample size calculations, etc. Anyway, I'm not sure where else I'd turn, and I certainly have had a difficult time finding these values in the prior literature. If someone could direct me to a paper with the right information, or if you have these figures on hand (perhaps taken directly from your logs!) -- that would be amazing, and I'd love to hear from you. Thanks in advance, and even though I'm not allowed to reveal too much, rest assured that this info'll be applied towards a good cause :)

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• Isn't Java a quite good choice for desktop applications?

  - by tactoth

  At present most applications are still developed with C++, painfully. Lack of portability, in compatible libraries, memory leaks, slow compilation, and poor productivity. Even if you pick only a single from these shortages, it's still a big headache. However the surprising truth is that C++ remains the first choice for desktop applications. Compared to C++ Java has lots of advantages. The success in server side development shows that the language itself is good, Swing is also thought to be as programmer friendly as the highly recognized QT framework (No, never say even a single word about MFC!). All the disadvantages of C++ listed above has a solution in Java. "Performance!", Well that might still be the problem but to my experience it's a slight problem. I'd been using Java to decode some screen video and generate key frames. The video has a duration of more than 1 hour. The time spent on an average machine is just 1 minute. With C++ I don't expect even faster speed. In recent days there are many news on the JIT performance improvements, that make us feel Java is gradually becoming very suitable for desktop development, without people realizing it. Isn't it?

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• How to build a good service layer in ASP.NET?

  - by Swippen

  I have looked through some questions, technologies for building a good service layer but I have some questions regarding this that I need help with. First some information of what I have for requirements. We currently have a number of web applications that talk to each other in a spiderweb looking way (all talking to each other in a confusing way via webservices and database data). We want to change this so that all applications go through a service layer where we can work more with cache and encapsulate common functionality and more. We want this layer to also have a Web API so that 3rd party clients can consume information from the service. The problem I see is that if we build the service layer with say MVC4 Web API don't we need to communicate between the application using the webAPI meaning we have to construct URLs and consume JSON/Xml. That does not sound too effective. I assume a better method would be working with entities and WCF to communicate between the application but then we might loose the Web API magic? So the question is if there is a way to consume a service layer as both a Web API (JSON/XML) and as a more backend service layer with entities. If we are forced to use 2 different service layers we might have to duplicate some functionality and other bad things. Hope the question is clear enough and please ask if you need any more information.

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• Any good reason to open files in text mode?

  - by Tinctorius

  (Almost-)POSIX-compliant operating systems and Windows are known to distinguish between 'binary mode' and 'text mode' file I/O. While the former mode doesn't transform any data between the actual file or stream and the application, the latter 'translates' the contents to some standard format in a platform-specific manner: line endings are transparently translated to '\n' in C, and some platforms (CP/M, DOS and Windows) cut off a file when a byte with value 0x1A is found. These transformations seem a little useless to me. People share files between computers with different operating systems. Text mode would cause some data to be handled differently across some platforms, so when this matters, one would probably use binary mode instead. As an example: while Windows uses the sequence CR LF to end a line in text mode, UNIX text mode will not treat CR as part of the line ending sequence. Applications would have to filter that noise themselves. Older Mac versions only use CR in text mode as line endings, so neither UNIX nor Windows would understand its files. If this matters, a portable application would probably implement the parsing by itself instead of using text mode. Implementing newline interpretation in the parser might also remove some overhead of using text mode, as buffers would need to be rewritten (and possibly resized) before returning to the application, while this may be less efficient than when it would happen in the application instead. So, my question is: is there any good reason to still rely on the host OS to translate line endings and file truncation?

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• Is it a good practice to create a list of definitions for all symbols and words in a programming language?

  - by MrDaniel

  After arriving at this point in Learning Python The Hard Way I am wondering if this is a good practice to create a list of symbols and define what they do as noted in bold below, for every programming language. This seems reasonable, and might be very useful to have when jumping between programming languages? Is this something that programmers do or is it just a waste of effort? Exercise 22: What Do You Know So Far? There won't be any code in this exercise or the next one, so there's no WYSS or Extra Credit either. In fact, this exercise is like one giant Extra Credit. I'm going to have you do a form of review what you have learned so far. First, go back through every exercise you have done so far and write down every word and symbol (another name for 'character') that you have used. Make sure your list of symbols is complete. Next to each word or symbol, write its name and what it does. If you can't find a name for a symbol in this book, then look for it online. If you do not know what a word or symbol does, then go read about it again and try using it in some code. You may run into a few things you just can't find out or know, so just keep those on the list and be ready to look them up when you find them. Once you have your list, spend a few days rewriting the list and double checking that it's correct. This may get boring but push through and really nail it down. Once you have memorized the list and what they do, then you should step it up by writing out tables of symbols, their names, and what they do from memory. When you hit some you can't recall from memory, go back and memorize them again.

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• Is it a good idea to dynamically position and size controls on a form or statically set them?

  - by CrystalBlue

  I've worked mostly with interface building tools such as xCode's Interface Builder and Visual Studio's environment to place forms and position them on screens. But I'm finding that with my latest project, placing controls on the form through a graphical interface is not going to work. This more has to do with the number of custom controls I have to create that I can't visually see before hand. When I first tackled this, I began to position all of my controls relative to the last ones that I created. Doing this had its own pros and cons. On the one hand, this gave me the opportunity to set one number (a margin for example) and when I changed the margin, the controls all sized correctly to one another (such as shortening controls in the center while keeping controls next to the margin the same). But this started to become a spiders-web of code that I knew wouldn't go very far before getting dangerous. Change one number and everything re sizes, but remove one control and you've created many more errors and size problems for all the other controls. It became more surgery then small changes to controls and layout. Is there a good way or maybe a preferred way to determine when I should be using relative or absolute positioning in forms?

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• Is this JS code a good way for defining class with private methods?

  - by tigrou

  I was recently browsing a open source JavaScript project. The project is a straight port from another project in C language. It mostly use static methods, packed together in classes. Most classes are implemented using this pattern : Foo = (function () { var privateField = "bar"; var publicField = "bar";     function publicMethod() { console.log('this is public');     } function privateMethod() { console.log('this is private'); } return {   publicMethod : publicMethod, publicField : publicField }; })(); This was the first time I saw private methods implemented that way. I perfectly understand how it works, using a anonymous method. Here is my question : is this pattern a good practice ? What are the actual limitations or caveats ? Usually i declare my JavaScript classes like that : Foo = new function () { var privateField = "test"; this.publicField = "test";     this.publicMethod = function()     { console.log('this method is public'); privateMethod();     } function privateMethod() { console.log('this method is private'); } }; Other than syntax, is there any difference with the pattern show above ?

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• What would be a good way to request comments?

  - by WarpEnterprises

  In the project/team I'm working the frequency of comments is a little low. One reason might be that it is not clear to the long-time devs what lines in the code really needs a comment (each part of the project has quite fixed devs). To increase this we plan to let team members review the code and check in "requests for comments", which the main dev of that part should replace with useful comments. Do you think this could work? If "yes": what tags should we use to mark? (e.g. //TODO please comment) Can you think of alternatives for this process? Edit: I appreciate your answers about best practice in commenting and writing code, and I completey agree. But my question targets the cases where refactoring is not an option (not wanting to change working code, not wanting to "accuse" main dev of producing code that needs refactoring,...) - so only more or better comments are an option (at least for this question).

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• Will you still play a good Red Alert 3 mission map? [closed]

  - by W.N.

  I've been creating a RA3 mission map (play in Skirmish), most likely a remake of RA2 Yuri "To the Moon" mission, with more interesting elements. However, because of my work, the process was corrupted for more than a year. And now, I see that very few people still play RA3. So, should I continue making this map? Because there're still a lot of work to complete this map. I can assure you, the mission will be interesting. However, if few people play it, there's no need to waste time to it. Please give me some advice. Thank you.

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• What's a good algorithm for a random, uneven distribution of a fixed amount of a resource?

  - by NickC

  Problem I have X, a positive integer, of some resource, R. There are N potential targets. I want to distribute all of R to the N targets in some "interesting" way. "Interesting" means: Some targets may not get any R. It should rarely be near even (with a majority of target getting near X/N of the resource). There should be at least a small chance of one target getting all of R. Bad solutions The naive approach would be to pick a random target and give one R to it and repeat X times. This would result in too even of an approach. The next idea is to pick a random number between 1 and X and give it to a random target. This results in too large of a number (at least X/2 on average) being given to one target. Question This algorithm will be used frequently and I want the distribution to be interesting and uneven so that the surprise doesn't wear off for users. Is there a good algorithm for something in between these two approaches, that fits the definition of interesting above?

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• Good way of handling class instances in game development?

  - by Bugster

  I'm a new indie game developer, and I've made a few games, but often times when coding I wonder "Is this the way most people do it? Am I doing it wrong?" because I'd like to become a game developer some day, and I really want to get rid of bad practices in time. The way I'm doing it right now is like this: #include <some libraries> #include "Some classes" int main() { Class1 a; Class2 b; Class3 c; a.init(); b.init(); c.init(); // game logic; } Now as I see the game grow, I have more and more classes to initialize and create instances of. This is clean but I'm not sure if this is standard practice. Is this a regular way of creating instances of your game classes or is there a cleaner and more efficient way to do it?

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• How do you quantify competency in terms of time (years)?

  - by o.k.w

  While looking for a job via agencies some time ago, I kept having questions from the recuitment agents or in the application forms like: How many years of experience do you have in: Oracle ASP.NET J2EE etc etc etc.... At first I answered faithfully... 5yrs, 7yrs, 2 yrs, none, few months etc etc.. Then I thought; I can be doing something shallow for 7 years and not being competent at it simply because I am just doing a minor support for a legacy system running SQL2000 which requires 10 days of my time for the past 7 years. Eventualy I declined to answers such questions. I wonder why do they ask these questions anymore. Anyone who just graduated with a computer science can claim 3 to 4 years experience in anything they 'touched' in the cirriculum, which to me can be equivalent to zero or 10 years depending how you look at it. It might hold true decades ago where programmers and IT skills are of very different nature. I might be wrong but I really doubt 'time' or 'years' are a good gauge of competency or experience anymore. Any opinion/rebuttal are welcome!

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• How to get a good picture of the health of a level-based game from analytics?

  - by ADB

  I am designing a level-based game where the user completes the level 1, then 2, 3 and so on. There are 200 levels and each is rather short: 60-ish seconds. I am tracking Each played, completed (cleared for the first time), failed and cleared level Milestones: number of players to reach level 1, 5, 10, etc. Also for number of failed and played levels. Separate new players from returning ones. However, I still find it difficult to get a clear picture of what is going on from the stats. So what are the best practices for determining where I am losing players?

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• Why most people change from being a contractor to full time at my companies, but not the other way around?

  - by ????

  I have seen most people changed from being a contractor to being a full time employee, but not the other way around. And that happened in startups that had maybe 20% chance of IPO or being acquired, and another that had maybe a 50% chance. As far as I know, the rate (even for a 3 year experience graphics designer, or a programmer), can be $75 to $80 an hour. While a programmer with 15 years of experience may get $120,000 per year. So, the programmer with 15 years of programming experience earns $10,000 per month. At the same time, the programmer with 3 year of experience or the graphics designer will get $14,000 per month ($80 x 22 days x 8 hours). I know I have to buy my own insurance, but I can't imagine buying those for $4,000 each month... maybe $200, $300 at most. I probably need to pay Social Security (FICA) both way (myself and as self-employed = $210 x 2), but still, each month there will be extra $3,000 of income. So is the above calculation correct? But most often, I do see contractors wanting or becoming full time, but not full time employees becoming a contractor. Does somebody know what the reason is?

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• Build-time dependency resolving coming to Entity Framework. Now, how about those BI tools too?

  - by jamiet

  Three months ago I wrote a blog post entitled Some thoughts on Visual Studio database references and how they should be used for SQL Server BI where I shared some thoughts on a feature available to database developers in Visual Studio 2010 that I would love to see added to SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS), Analysis Services (SSAS) and Reporting Services (SSRS). In there I said: Over the past few weeks I have been making heavy use of the Database tools in Visual Studio 2010 and one of the features that has most impressed me has been database references.   Database references allow you to have stored procedures in your database project that refer to objects (tables, views, stored procedures etc…) that exist in other database projects and hence when you build your database project it is able to resolve those references.   It occurred to me that similar functionality would be incredibly useful for SQL Server Integration Services(SSIS), Analysis Services (SSAS) & Reporting Services (SSRS) projects. After all reports, packages and data source views are rife with references to database objects – why shouldn’t we be able to have design-time dependency checking in our BI projects the same way that database and .Net developers do? In that blog post I shared links to three Connect submissions where I requested this feature be added to SSIS, SSAS & SSRS. In addition I also submitted a request that the feature be extended to .Net projects so that any reference to a database object in a .Net assembly can be resolved at build time. That Connect submission is at [Entity FX] Use database references to constrain the EDM and overnight it received this comment from Microsoft: We have been working on this feature for a while and and will be available soon This is really good news - it improves the Microsoft developer ecosystem by ensuring invalid references to database references get caught at build time (ideally as part of a Continuous integration build) rather than run time. [Hopefully it might nip this code-first nonsense in the bud too (Ooo...way to incite flame comments :) ) ]. If you want to see this feature in action then check out a video from Teched Europe last month entitled SQL Server Developer Tools Code-named "Juneau" where it is demo'd by Lance Delano and Tim Laverty.   The point of this blog post though is not just to draw attention to this forthcoming feature for .Net developers, it is to ask you to petition Microsoft to get this feature added to SSIS/SSAS/SSRS too. After all, we already know (from the video above) that the feature is coming to this new code-name Juneau development environment plus we also know that Juneau will be the development environment for SSIS/SSAS/SSRS as well - is it really much of a stretch to expect the BI tools to have access to this great feature too? I don't think so and if you agree with me then I urge you to vote and add a comment to the Connection submissions that are requesting this feature. They are at: [SSAS] Declare Object Dependancies [SSRS] Declare Object Dependancies [SSIS] Declare Object Dependancies (Update, Apparently someone at Microsoft has deemed it necassary to set this to private and I am not able to change it back even though I submitted it. You can still vote on the other two though.) Let's close that SQL Developer Gap!   @Jamiet    

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• How to seek to a specific time in a RTP stream?

  - by Cipi

  I am streaming a prerecorded H264 video that has the following structure: [I] [x] [x] [x] [I] [x] [x] [x] [I]... In between the IDR (I-s in my structure) I have 32 (only 3 presented here) other frames (all other stuff that is not IDR like SEI, SPS, PPS... X-es) Now, let assume that the timing of my frames is such: TIME: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 FRAME: [I] [x] [x] [x] [I] [x] [x] [x] [I]... Now i want to seek to the time 4. If I seek to that frame, and send it, the picture gets messed up because the decoder needs a IDR to decode it properly, so I resorted to finding the appropriate IDR (in this case one with the time 1) and sending it as the frame with the time 4. So now the picture is decoded properly, all is well... but... If my GOV is 32, and I need to send the non IDR frame that has the index 31, and if the time span between it and the corresponding IDR is 3 seconds, I actually get 3 seconds earlier then the time I want. Now, this is not precise, because I cannot seek to the half of the GOV time span. Also, I cant set smaller GOV, so I want other ideas... My other idea was to send the last known IDR, and then send all other non IDR frames that come before the one I want, only I would set for all of them RTP-TIME to be the same as the corresponding IDR. In this case the picture gets decoded perfectly, but now in the above case, 3 seconds that follow non IDR frame with the wanted time get fast paced in the decoder/player (there is no instantaneous seek)... Any ideas? Or I can only seek to IDR-s and not the frames in between?

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• Is the Joel Test really a good gauging tool?

  - by henry

  I just learned about the Joel Test. I have been computer programmer for 22 years, but somehow I never heard about it before. I consider my best job so far to be this small investment managing company with 30 employees and only three people in the IT department. I am no longer with them, but I had being working there for five years – my longest streak with any given company. To my surprise they scored extremely poor on the Joel Test. The only two questions I would answer “yes” are #4: Do you have a bug database? And #9: Do you use the best tools money can buy? Everything else is either “sometimes” or straight “no”. Here is what I liked about the company however: Good pay. They bragged about it to my face, and I bragged about it to their face, so it was almost like a family environment. I always knew the big picture. When writing code to solve a particular problem there were no ambiguity about the business nature of that problem. Even though we did not always had written specifications we could ask business users a question anytime, often yelling it across the floor. I could even talk to executives any time I felt like doing it: no appointment necessary. Immediate feedback. Once we implement a solution and make business users happy they immediately let us know that, we (programmers) become heroes of the moment. No red tape. I could always buy any tools I deemed necessary, and design solutions the way my professional judgment dictates. Flexibility. If I had mid-day dental appointment that is near my house rather than near the office, I would send email to the company: "FYI: I work from home today". As long as one of three IT guys was on the floor (to help traders in case their monitors go dark) they did not care where two others were. So the question thus becomes: How valuable is the Joel Test? Why bother with it?

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• In a state machine, is it a good idea to separate states and transitions?

  - by codablank1

  I have implemented a small state machine in this way (in pseudo code): class Input {} class KeyInput inherits Input { public : enum { Key_A, Key_B, ..., } } class GUIInput inherits Input { public : enum { Button_A, Button_B, ..., } } enum Event { NewGame, Quit, OpenOptions, OpenMenu } class BaseState { String name; Event get_event (Input input); void handle (Event e); //event handling function } class Menu inherits BaseState{...} class InGame inherits BaseState{...} class Options inherits BaseState{...} class StateMachine { public : BaseState get_current_state () { return current_state; } void add_state (String name, BaseState state) { statesMap.insert(name, state);} //raise an exception if state not found BaseState get_state (String name) { return statesMap.find(name); } //raise an exception if state or next_state not found void add_transition (Event event, String state_name, String next_state_name) { BaseState state = get_state(state_name); BaseState next_state = get_state(next_state_name); transitionsMap.insert(pair<event, state>, next_state); } //raise exception if couple not found BaseState get_next_state(Event event, BaseState state) { return transitionsMap.find(pair<event, state>); } void handle(Input input) { Event event = current_state.get_event(input) current_state.handle(event); current_state = get_next_state(event, current_state); } private : BaseState current_state; map<String, BaseState> statesMap; //map of all states in the machine //for each couple event/state, this map stores the next state map<pair<Event, BaseState>, BaseState> transitionsMap; } So, before getting the transition, I need to convert the key input or GUI input to the proper event, given the current state; thus the same key 'W' can launch a new game in the 'Menu' state or moving forward a character in the 'InGame' state; Then I get the next state from the transitionsMap and I update the current state Does this configuration seem valid to you ? Is it a good idea to separate states and transitions ? And I have some kind of trouble to represent a 'null state' or a 'null event'; What initial value can I give to the current state and which one should be returned by get_state if it fails ?

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• what would be a good way to implement/render a 2d tiled map for a browser game?

  - by jj_

  I've made this little rpg ruby game I did while learning and now I'd like to make it into a browser game. I've already set up Sinatra framework to serve it, so what I am looking for, before everything else, is a way to represent the game map in browser (location attributes are stored in db). A new map is randomly generated by code for each new game at each game start. For now forget db, and let's say a map (say 100x100 "squares") is stored as a tridimensional array. (x,y, ...) Last "dimension" of array stores who & what is at that map cell: a player, a building, whatever. So all I have to do is render those "squares" or array cells to a 2d tiled map in the browser. The map does not need to refresh or be dynamically fetched as you scroll it, (at least at this stage of development) but, a technology which would allow me to do so in future would be a good reason for choosing it. Things that I thought of: html tables, html5 canvas, some js framework which is designed exactly with this purpose (which I do not know of = please advice). Yes I know about gamequery-js framework, but I've never used it, and I don't know if it's going to slow down everything down to inusability as I'm adding new features (scrolling, ajax). I really don't know of any other alternatives.. maybe there are lighter approaches? Easier or more minimalistic ways ? More targeted js framework which is the right tool for the job? Maybe just some html canvas code, or even simple image maps, or images with absolute positioning will be enough? The thing is I'd like to start simple, and then gradually make it better, so, as I said before, I'd prefer something that will give me room for improvement or is headed toward new web tendencies but which will also give me a bit of gratification in the beginning :) So.. advices are needed! And appreciated! :) Thanks p.s. Flash is excluded because I don't like it.

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• Are there any good Java/JVM libraries for my Expression Tree architecture?

  - by Snuggy

  My team and I are developing an enterprise-level application and I have devised an architecture for it that's best described as an "Expression Tree". The basic idea is that the leaf nodes of the tree are very simple expressions (perhaps simple values or strings). Nodes closer to the trunk will get more and more complex, taking the simpler nodes as their inputs and returning more complex results for their parents. Looking at it the other way, the application performs some task, and for this it creates a root expression. The root expression divides its input into smaller units and creates child expressions, which when evaluated it can use to build it's own result. The subdividing process continues until the simplest leaf nodes. There are two very important aspects of this architecture: It must be possible to manipulate nodes of the tree after it is built. The nodes may be given new input values to work with and any change in result for that node needs to be propagated back up the tree to the root node. The application must make best use of available processors and ultimately be scalable to other computers in a grid or in the cloud. Nodes in the tree will often be updating concurrently and notifying other interested nodes in the tree when they get a new value. Unfortunately, I'm not at liberty to discuss my actual application, but to aid understanding a little bit, you might imagine a kind of spreadsheet application being implemented with a similar architecture, where changes to cells in the table are propagated all over the place to other cells that need the result. The spreadsheet could get so massive that applying multi-core multi-computer distributed system to solve it would be of benefit. I've got my prototype "Expression Engine" working nicely on a single multi-core PC but I've started to run into a few concurrency issues (as expected because I haven't been taking too much care so far) so it's now time to start thinking about migrating the Engine to a more robust library, and that leads to a number of related questions: Is there any precedent for my "Expression Tree" architecture that I could research? What programming concepts should I consider. I realise this approach has many similarities to a functional programming style, and I'm already aware of the concepts of using futures and actors. Are there any others? Are there any languages or libraries that I should study? This question is inspired by my accidental discovery of Scala and the Akka library (which has good support for Actors, Futures, Distributed workloads etc.) and I'm wondering if there is anything else I should be looking at as well?

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