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• Exporting de-aggregated data

  - by Ben

  I'm currently working on a data export feature for a survey application. We are using SQL2k8. We store data in a normalized format: QuestionId, RespondentId, Answer. We have a couple other tables that define what the question text is for the QuestionId and demographics for the RespondentId... Currently I'm using some dynamic SQL to generate a pivot that joins the question table to the answer table and creates an export, its working... The problem is that it seems slow and we don't have that much data (less than 50k respondents). Right now I'm thinking "why am I 'paying' to de-aggregate the data for each query? Why don't I cache that?" The data being exported is based on dynamic criteria. It could be "give me respondents that completed on x date (or range)" or "people that like blue", etc. Because of that, I think I have to cache at the respondent level, find out what respondents are being exported and then select their combined cached de-aggregated data. To me the quick and dirty fix is a totally flat table, RespondentId, Question1, Question2, etc. The problem is, we have multiple clients and that doesn't scale AND I don't want to have to maintain the flattened table as the survey changes. So I'm thinking about putting an XML column on the respondent table and caching the results of a SELECT * FROM Data FOR XML AUTO WHERE RespondentId = x. With that in place, I would then be able to get my export with filtering and XML calls into the XML column. What are you doing to export aggregated data in a flattened format (CSV, Excel, etc)? Does this approach seem ok? I worry about the cost of XML functions on larger result sets (think SELECT RespondentId, XmlCol.value('//data/question_1', 'nvarchar(50)') AS [Why is there air?], XmlCol.RinseAndRepeat)... Is there a better technology/approach for this? Thanks!

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• Artifacts when trying to draw background grid without anti-aliasing in a QGraphicsScene

  - by estan

  Hi folks, I'm trying to draw a background grid in the drawBackground() function of my QGraphicsScene subclass: void Scene::drawBackground(QPainter *painter, const QRectF &rect) { const int gridSize = 50; const int realLeft = static_cast<int>(std::floor(rect.left())); const int realRight = static_cast<int>(std::ceil(rect.right())); const int realTop = static_cast<int>(std::floor(rect.top())); const int realBottom = static_cast<int>(std::ceil(rect.bottom())); // Draw grid. const int firstLeftGridLine = realLeft - (realLeft % gridSize); const int firstTopGridLine = realTop - (realTop % gridSize); QVarLengthArray<QLine, 100> lines; for (qreal x = firstLeftGridLine; x <= realRight; x += gridSize) lines.append(QLine(x, realTop, x, realBottom)); for (qreal y = firstTopGridLine; y <= realBottom; y += gridSize) lines.append(QLine(realLeft, y, realRight, y)); //painter->setRenderHint(QPainter::Antialiasing); painter->setPen(QPen(QColor(220, 220, 220), 0.0)); painter->drawLines(lines.data(), lines.size()); // Draw axes. painter->setPen(QPen(Qt::lightGray, 0.0)); painter->drawLine(0, realTop, 0, realBottom); painter->drawLine(realLeft, 0, realRight, 0); } However, unless I turn on anti-aliasing, moving items around will sometimes leave artifacts in the grid (areas where it's not drawn). It seems it mostly happens at low zoom levels, when the view is zoomed out a bit. Any ideas what I might be doing wrong here? I'd really don't want to turn anti-aliasing on since the lines are strictly horizontal and vertical, and I'd like them to be as crisp as possible. Any help is much appriciated, Regards, Elvis

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• How can a software agency deliver quality software/win projects?

  - by optician

  I currently work for a bespoke software agency. Does anyone have any experience of how to win well priced work? It seems there is so much competition from offshore/bedroom program teams, that cost is extremely competetive these days. I feel that it is very different compared to a software product company or an internal it department, in terms of budget. As someone else said before, we only ever really get to version 1.0 of a lot of our software, unless the client is big enough. In which case it doesn't make business sense to spend ages making the software the best we can. Its like we are doing the same quality of work of internal it. Also a Lot of our clients are not technically minded and so therefor will not pay for things they don't understand. As our company does not have the money to turn down work it often goes that we take on complicated work for far too little money. I have got a lot better at managing change and keeping tight specs etc. It is still hard.

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• ZeroMQ REQ/REP on ipc:// and concurrency

  - by Metiu

  I implemented a JSON-RPC server using a REQ/REP 0MQ ipc:// socket and I'm experiencing strange behavior which I suspect is due to the fact that the ipc:// underlying unix socket is not a real socket, but rather a single pipe. From the documentation, one has to enforce strict zmq_send()/zmq_recv() alternation, otherwise the out-of-order zmq_send() will return an error. However, I expected the enforcement to be per-client, not per-socket. Of course with a Unix socket there is just one pipeline from multiple clients to the server, so the server won't know who it is talking with. Two clients could zmq_send() simultaneously and the server would see this as an alternation violation. The sequence could be: ClientA: zmq_send() ClientB: zmq_send() : will it block until the other send/receive completes? will it return -1? (I suspect it will with ipc:// due to inherent low-level problems, but with TCP it could distinguish the two clients) ClientA: zmq_recv() ClientB: zmq_recv() so what about tcp:// sockets? Will it work concurrently? Should I use some other locking mechanism to work around this?

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• Creating C++ client app for some abstract windows server - how to manage TCP connection to server speed?

  - by Kabumbus

  So we have some server with some address port and ip. we are developing that server so we can implement on it what ever we need for help. What are standard/best practices for data transfer speed management between C++ windows client app and server (C++)? My main point is in how to get how much data can be uploaded/downloaded from/to client via his low speed network to my relatively super fast server. (I need it for set up of his live stream Audio/Video bit rate) My try on explaining number 3. We do not care how fast is our server. It is always faster than needed. We care about client tyring to stream out to our server his media. he streams encoded (via ffmpeg) live video data to our server. But he has say ADSL with 500kb/s of outgoing traffic. Also he uses some ICQ or what so ever so he has less than 500 kb/s per second. And he wants to stream live video! So we need to set up our ffmpeg to encode video with respect to the bit rate user can provide. We develop server side and client side. We need a way of finding out how much user can upload per second currently (so value can change dynamically over time)

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• Android: Resolution issue while saving image into gallery

  - by Luca D'Amico

  I've managed to programmatically take a photo from the camera, then display it on an imageview, and then after pressing a button, saving it on the Gallery. It works, but the problem is that the saved photo are low resolution.. WHY?! I took the photo with this code: Intent cameraIntent = new Intent(android.provider.MediaStore.ACTION_IMAGE_CAPTURE); startActivityForResult(cameraIntent, CAMERA_PIC_REQUEST); Then I save the photo on a var using : protected void onActivityResult(int requestCode, int resultCode, Intent data) { if (requestCode == CAMERA_PIC_REQUEST) { thumbnail = (Bitmap) data.getExtras().get("data"); } } and then after displaying it on an imageview, I save it on the gallery with this function: public void SavePicToGallery(Bitmap picToSave, File savePath){ String JPEG_FILE_PREFIX= "PIC"; String JPEG_FILE_SUFFIX= ".JPG"; String timeStamp = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyyMMdd_HHmmss").format(new Date()); String imageFileName = JPEG_FILE_PREFIX + timeStamp + "_"; File filePath = null; try { filePath = File.createTempFile(imageFileName, JPEG_FILE_SUFFIX, savePath); } catch (IOException e) { // TODO Auto-generated catch block e.printStackTrace(); } FileOutputStream out = null; try { out = new FileOutputStream(filePath); } catch (FileNotFoundException e) { // TODO Auto-generated catch block e.printStackTrace(); } picToSave.compress(CompressFormat.JPEG, 100, out); try { out.flush(); } catch (IOException e) { // TODO Auto-generated catch block e.printStackTrace(); } try { out.close(); } catch (IOException e) { // TODO Auto-generated catch block e.printStackTrace(); } //Add the pic to Android Gallery String mCurrentPhotoPath = filePath.getAbsolutePath(); MediaScannerConnection.scanFile(this, new String[] { mCurrentPhotoPath }, null, new MediaScannerConnection.OnScanCompletedListener() { public void onScanCompleted(String path, Uri uri) { } }); } I really can't figure out why it lose so much quality while saved.. Any help please ? Thanks..

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• How do I serialise a graph in Java without getting StackOverflowException?

  - by Tim Cooper

  I have a graph structure in java, ("graph" as in "edges and nodes") and I'm attempting to serialise it. However, I get "StackOverflowException", despite significantly increasing the JVM stack size. I did some googling, and apparently this is a well known limitation of java serialisation: that it doesn't work for deeply nested object graphs such as long linked lists - it uses a stack record for each link in the chain, and it doesn't do anything clever such as a breadth-first traversal, and therefore you very quickly get a stack overflow. The recommended solution is to customise the serialisation code by overriding readObject() and writeObject(), however this seems a little complex to me. (It may or may not be relevant, but I'm storing a bunch of fields on each edge in the graph so I have a class JuNode which contains a member ArrayList<JuEdge> links;, i.e. there are 2 classes involved, rather than plain object references from one node to another. It shouldn't matter for the purposes of the question). My question is threefold: (a) why don't the implementors of Java rectify this limitation or are they already working on it? (I can't believe I'm the first person to ever want to serialise a graph in java) (b) is there a better way? Is there some drop-in alternative to the default serialisation classes that does it in a cleverer way? (c) if my best option is to get my hands dirty with low-level code, does someone have an example of graph serialisation java source-code that can use to learn how to do it?

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• Visual studio erroneous errors when building a website?

  - by Curtis White

  Visual Studio 2008 shows a lot of erroneous errors when building a website (not a web project) in the errors list. These errors are usually corrected (removed) when I rebuild the site a couple times but they cost me wasted time. Is there anyway to hide the erroneous errors? Update: I've decided to look into this to see if I could reproduce it. This is the exact behavior I am seeing, using the website model, I type some invalid syntax on a page. The errors list fills up with errors. I correct the error and the errors list does not update. I build the project and the errors list still shows the errors but the build shows as build completed. I build the project a second time and the errors list is cleared. My question is there anyway to make the errors list clear on the first build? I thought it might have something to do with page build vs website build but it seems to make no difference. I am not using any third party dlls on this website.

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• Multi-reader IPC solution?

  - by gct

  I'm working on a framework in C++ (just for fun for now), that lets the user write plugins that use a standard API to stream data between each other. There's going to be three basic transport mechanisms for the data: files, sockets, and some kind of IPC piping system. The system is set up so that for the non-file transport, each stream can have multiple readers. IE once a server socket it setup, multiple computers can connect and stream the data. I'm a little stuck at the multi-reader IPC system though. All my plugins run in threads so they live in the same address space, so some kind of shared memory system would work fine, I was thinking I'd write my own circular buffer with a write pointer and read pointers chassing it around the buffer, but I have my doubts that I can achieve the same performance as something like linux pipes. I'm curious what people would suggest for a multi-reader solution to something like this? Is the overhead for pipes or domain sockets low enough that I could just open a connection to each reader and issue separate writes to each reader? This is intended to be significant volumes of data (tens of mega-samples/sec), so performance is a must.

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• Is Google Mock a good mocking framework ?

  - by des4maisons

  I am pioneering unit testing efforts at my company, and need need to choose a mocking framework to use. I have never used a mocking framework before. We have already chosen Google Test, so using Google Mock would be nice. However, my initial impressions after looking at Google Mock's tutorial are: The need for re-declaring each method in the mocking class with a MOCK_METHODn macro seems unnecessary and seems to go against the DRY principle. Their matchers (eg, the '_' in EXPECT_CALL(turtle, Forward(_));) and the order of matching seem almost too powerful. Like, it would be easy to say something you don't mean, and miss bugs that way. I have high confidence in google's developers, and low confidence in my own ability to judge mocking frameworks, never having used them before. So my question is: Are these valid concerns? Or is there no better way to define a mock object, and are the matchers intuitive to use in practice? I would appreciate answers from anyone who has used Google Mock before, and comparisons to other C++ frameworks would be helpful.

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• Safari Web Inspector is not updating when I update an element with ajax

  - by Ashley

  I have a checkout page http://www.oipolloi.com/oipolloi/shop/viewbasket.php with multiple ajax calls after certain items update (EG look up postage cost when country is changed, then update discount boxes etc). I've asked for help in the past about the best method of making sure ALL calls have returned before allowing the form to be submitted for payment processing: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2290372/how-do-i-prevent-form-submission-until-multiple-ajax-calls-have-finished-jquery I was fairly happy that the logic in the finished solution was correct, but I have still been receiving reports that people using Safari are able to submit the form without the ajax calls returning properly. I have tried using the Safari Web Inspector to debug but it seems that when you Inspect Element, then update an element with an ajax call, the Inspector doesn't seem to update. I am updating hidden fields, so it's hard to be able to know whether the problem lies with the DOM not being updated properly, or the Inspector itself. I'm using Safari 4.0.5 on PC and you can reproduce the problem above by looking for a div id="countryFieldsBilling" with Web Inspector. It should contain three hidden fields that are initially empty. You can try to make it update (or not) by choosing a country from the select menu at the bottom of 'Shipping Address' box, and then clicking the 'click to use Shipping Address' link at the top of the 'Billing Address' just below. The behaviour I am seeing is that the country chosen in the shipping select gets copied correctly to the country in the billing select, but the hidden inputs in the Web Inspector do not get updated. When these hidden inputs do not get updated, this causes the problem that Mac Safari users report. If you can let me know either how to get Web Inspector to work properly, or something else I may have missed in the behaviour of Mac Safari that may cause these problems, that would be great. Thanks in advance

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• TicTacToe strategic reduction

  - by NickLarsen

  I decided to write a small program that solves TicTacToe in order to try out the effect of some pruning techniques on a trivial game. The full game tree using minimax to solve it only ends up with 549,946 possible games. With alpha-beta pruning, the number of states required to evaluate was reduced to 18,297. Then I applied a transposition table that brings the number down to 2,592. Now I want to see how low that number can go. The next enhancement I want to apply is a strategic reduction. The basic idea is to combine states that have equivalent strategic value. For instance, on the first move, if X plays first, there is nothing strategically different (assuming your opponent plays optimally) about choosing one corner instead of another. In the same situation, the same is true of the center of the walls of the board, and the center is also significant. By reducing to significant states only, you end up with only 3 states for evaluation on the first move instead of 9. This technique should be very useful since it prunes states near the top of the game tree. This idea came from the GameShrink method created by a group at CMU, only I am trying to avoid writing the general form, and just doing what is needed to apply the technique to TicTacToe. In order to achieve this, I modified my hash function (for the transposition table) to enumerate all strategically equivalent positions (using rotation and flipping functions), and to only return the lowest of the values for each board. Unfortunately now my program thinks X can force a win in 5 moves from an empty board when going first. After a long debugging session, it became apparent to me the program was always returning the move for the lowest strategically significant move (I store the last move in the transposition table as part of my state). Is there a better way I can go about adding this feature, or a simple method for determining the correct move applicable to the current situation with what I have already done?

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• Multithreaded linked list traversal

  - by Rob Bryce

  Given a (doubly) linked list of objects (C++), I have an operation that I would like multithread, to perform on each object. The cost of the operation is not uniform for each object. The linked list is the preferred storage for this set of objects for a variety of reasons. The 1st element in each object is the pointer to the next object; the 2nd element is the previous object in the list. I have solved the problem by building an array of nodes, and applying OpenMP. This gave decent performance. I then switched to my own threading routines (based off Windows primitives) and by using InterlockedIncrement() (acting on the index into the array), I can achieve higher overall CPU utilization and faster through-put. Essentially, the threads work by "leap-frog'ing" along the elements. My next approach to optimization is to try to eliminate creating/reusing the array of elements in my linked list. However, I'd like to continue with this "leap-frog" approach and somehow use some nonexistent routine that could be called "InterlockedCompareDereference" - to atomically compare against NULL (end of list) and conditionally dereference & store, returning the dereferenced value. I don't think InterlockedCompareExchangePointer() will work since I cannot atomically dereference the pointer and call this Interlocked() method. I've done some reading and others are suggesting critical sections or spin-locks. Critical sections seem heavy-weight here. I'm tempted to try spin-locks but I thought I'd first pose the question here and ask what other people are doing. I'm not convinced that the InterlockedCompareExchangePointer() method itself could be used like a spin-lock. Then one also has to consider acquire/release/fence semantics... Ideas? Thanks!

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• How to easily Generate Synth Chords Sounds in Android?

  - by barata7

  How to easily Generate Synth Chords Sounds in Android? I wanna be able to generate dynamically an in game Music using 8bit. Tried with AudioTrack, but did not get good results of nice sounds yet. Any examples out there? I have tried the following code without success: public class BitLoose { private final int duration = 1; // seconds private final int sampleRate = 4200; private final int numSamples = duration * sampleRate; private final double sample[] = new double[numSamples]; final AudioTrack audioTrack; public BitLoose() { audioTrack = new AudioTrack(AudioManager.STREAM_MUSIC, sampleRate, AudioFormat.CHANNEL_CONFIGURATION_MONO, AudioFormat.ENCODING_PCM_8BIT, numSamples, AudioTrack.MODE_STREAM); audioTrack.play(); } public void addTone(final int freqOfTone) { // fill out the array for (int i = 0; i < numSamples; ++i) { sample[i] = Math.sin(2 * Math.PI * i / (sampleRate / freqOfTone)); } // convert to 16 bit pcm sound array // assumes the sample buffer is normalised. final byte generatedSnd[] = new byte[numSamples]; int idx = 0; for (final double dVal : sample) { // scale to maximum amplitude final short val = (short) ((((dVal * 255))) % 255); // in 16 bit wav PCM, first byte is the low order byte generatedSnd[idx++] = (byte) (val); } audioTrack.write(generatedSnd, 0, sampleRate); } public void stop() { audioTrack.stop(); }

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• Algorithm for assigning a unique series of bits for each user?

  - by Mark

  The problem seems simple at first: just assign an id and represent that in binary. The issue arises because the user is capable of changing as many 0 bits to a 1 bit. To clarify, the hash could go from 0011 to 0111 or 1111 but never 1010. Each bit has an equal chance of being changed and is independent of other changes. What would you have to store in order to go from hash - user assuming a low percentage of bit tampering by the user? I also assume failure in some cases so the correct solution should have an acceptable error rate. I would an estimate the maximum number of bits tampered with would be about 30% of the total set. I guess the acceptable error rate would depend on the number of hashes needed and the number of bits being set per hash. I'm worried with enough manipulation the id can not be reconstructed from the hash. The question I am asking I guess is what safe guards or unique positioning systems can I use to ensure this happens.

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• What's the best Linux backup solution?

  - by Jon Bright

  We have a four Linux boxes (all running Debian or Ubuntu) on our office network. None of these boxes are especially critical and they're all using RAID. To date, I've therefore been doing backups of the boxes by having a cron job upload tarballs containing the contents of /etc, MySQL dumps and other such changing, non-packaged data to a box at our geographically separate hosting centre. I've realised, however that the tarballs are sufficient to rebuild from, but it's certainly not a painless process to do so (I recently tried this out as part of a hardware upgrade of one of the boxes) long-term, the process isn't sustainable. Each of the boxes is currently producing a tarball of a couple of hundred MB each day, 99% of which is the same as the previous day partly due to the size issue, the backup process requires more manual intervention than I want (to find whatever 5GB file is inflating the size of the tarball and kill it) again due to the size issue, I'm leaving stuff out which it would be nice to include - the contents of users' home directories, for example. There's almost nothing of value there that isn't in source control (and these aren't our main dev boxes), but it would be nice to keep them anyway. there must be a better way So, my question is, how should I be doing this properly? The requirements are: needs to be an offsite backup (one of the main things I'm doing here is protecting against fire/whatever) should require as little manual intervention as possible (I'm lazy, and box-herding isn't my main job) should continue to scale with a couple more boxes, slightly more data, etc. preferably free/open source (cost isn't the issue, but especially for backups, openness seems like a good thing) an option to produce some kind of DVD/Blu-Ray/whatever backup from time to time wouldn't be bad My first thought was that this kind of incremental backup was what tar was created for - create a tar file once each month, add incrementally to it. rsync results to remote box. But others probably have better suggestions.

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• Am I understanding premature optimization correctly?

  - by Ed Mazur

  I've been struggling with an application I'm writing and I think I'm beginning to see that my problem is premature optimization. The perfectionist side of me wants to make everything optimal and perfect the first time through, but I'm finding this is complicating the design quite a bit. Instead of writing small, testable functions that do one simple thing well, I'm leaning towards cramming in as much functionality as possible in order to be more efficient. For example, I'm avoiding multiple trips to the database for the same piece of information at the cost of my code becoming more complex. One part of me wants to just not worry about redundant database calls. It would make it easier to write correct code and the amount of data being fetched is small anyway. The other part of me feels very dirty and unclean doing this. :-) I'm leaning towards just going to the database multiple times, which I think is the right move here. It's more important that I finish the project and I feel like I'm getting hung up because of optimizations like this. My question is: is this the right strategy to be using when avoiding premature optimization?

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• Webserver sending corrupt or corrupting served files

  - by NotIan

  EDIT: Looks like the problem was a rootkit that corrupted a bunch of low level linux commands, including top, ps, ifconfig, netstat and others. The problem was resolved by taking all web files off the server and wiping it. A dedicated server we operate is having a strange issue. Files are not be sent complete or are showing up with garbage data. Example: http://sustainablefitness.com/images/banner_bootcamps.jpg To make matters more confusing this corruption does NOT happen when the files are served as https, (I would post a link, but I don't have enough rep points, just add an 's' after http in the link above.) When I throw load at the server, I get dozens of (swapd)s in top this is the only thing that really jumps out. I can't post images but ( imgur.com / ZArSq.png ) is a screenshot of top. I have tried a lot of stuff so far, I am willing to try anything that I can. A dedicated server we operate is having a strange issue. Files are not be sent complete or are showing up with garbage data. Example: http://sustainablefitness.com/images/banner_bootcamps.jpg To make matters more confusing this corruption does NOT happen when the files are served as https, (I would post a link, but I don't have enough rep points, just add an 's' after http in the link above.) When I throw load at the server, I get dozens of (swapd)s in top this is the only thing that really jumps out. I can't post images but ( imgur.com / ZArSq.png ) is a screenshot of top. I have tried a lot of stuff so far, I am willing to try anything that I can.

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• New desktop GUI developer; can choose any platform...

  - by alexantd

  I'm planning a client-server product for a tiny, low-volume, high-cost vertical market. One of the components of the product will be a desktop application, simple to moderate in complexity, for data entry and uploading to a central server from remote PCs and/or Macs via SOAP. The server is a Java web app. Customers will be choosing their platform (Windows or Mac) based on what the client app runs on, so my options are wide-open here. However, I will be developing on a Mac and have a strong allergy to MS-specific technologies (sorry). The app will not need to run on any non-desktop-computer devices and I have total freedom to say it will support X but not Y or Z without any negative consequences (quite the luxury, to be sure). I have a lot of experience in server-side development but very little in desktop GUI stuff, and am evaluating my options on the client - basically what do I want to commit to learning over the next 6+ months. I have server-side Java experience as well as a brief dabble in iPhone development, which went OK. Overall I'm looking for: Ease of learning & development IDE support Healthy surrounding ecosystem (libraries, tools, help, etc.) Quality documentation My options as I see them, in rough order of how I'm currently mentally ranking them: Java Swing Cocoa Java SWT JavaFX Adobe AIR XULRunner Am I leaving anything out?

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• SSL + Jquery + Ajax

  - by chobo2

  Hi I starting too look at a bit of security into my site. My site I would consider a very low security risk as it has really no personal information from the user other than email. However the security risk will go up a bit as I am partnering with a company and the initial password for this companies users will be the same password they use essentially to get onto the network and every piece of software. So I have up my security( what is fine by me...I wanted to get around to this anyways). So one of my security concerns is this. A user logs in. form submit(non ajax is done). Password is hashed & Salted and compared to one in the database. Reject or let them proceed. So this uses no jquery or ajax but is just asp.net mvc and C#. Still if my understanding is right the password is sent in clear text. So if a use SSL and I would not need to worry about that is this correct? If that is true is that all I need? Second the user can change their password at anytime. This is done through ajax. So when the password is sent it is sent in clear text( and I can verify this by looking at firebug). So if I have SSL enabled on this page is that all I need or do I need to do more? So I am just kinda confused of what I need to make the password being sent to the server(both ajax and full post ways secure). I am not sure if I need to do more then SSL or if that is enough and if it is not enough what is the next layer of security?

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• Calculating collision for a moving circle, without overlapping the boundaries

  - by Robert Vella

  Let's say I have circle bouncing around inside a rectangular area. At some point this circle will collide with one of the surfaces of the rectangle and reflect back. The usual way I'd do this would be to let the circle overlap that boundary and then reflect the velocity vector. The fact that the circle actually overlaps the boundary isn't usually a problem, nor really noticeable at low velocity. At high velocity it becomes quite clear that the circle is doing something it shouldn't. What I'd like to do is to programmatically take reflection into account and place the circle at it's proper position before displaying it on the screen. This means that I have to calculate the point where it hits the boundary between it's current position and it's future position -- rather than calculating it's new position and then checking if it has hit the boundary. This is a little bit more complicated than the usual circle/rectangle collision problem. I have a vague idea of how I should do it -- basically create a bounding rectangle between the current position and the new position, which brings up a slew of problems of it's own (Since the rectangle is rotated according to the direction of the circle's velocity). However, I'm thinking that this is a common problem, and that a common solution already exists. Is there a common solution to this kind of problem? Perhaps some basic theories which I should look into?

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• Solr : how do i index and search several fields?

  - by sbrattla

  Hi, I've set up my first 'installation' of Solr, where each index (document) represents a musical work (with properties like number (int), title (string), version (string), composers (string) and keywords (string)). I've set the field 'title' as the default search field. However, what do I do when I would like to do a query on all fields? I'd like to give users the opportunity to search in all fields, and as far as I've understood there is at least two options for this: (1) Specify which fields the query should be made against. (2) Set up the Solr configuration with copyfields, so that values added to each of the fields will be copied to a 'catch-all'-like field which can be used for searching. However, in this case, i am uncertain how things would turn out when i take into consideration that the data types are not all the same for the various fields (the various fields will to a lesser og greater degree go through filters, but as copyfield values are taken from their original fields before the values have been run through their original fields' filters, i would have to apply one single filter to all values on the copyfield. This, again, would result in integers being 'filtered' just as strings would). Is this a case where i should use copyfields? At first glance, it seems a bit more 'flexible' to rather just search on all fields. However, maybe there's a cost? All feedback appreciated! Thanks!

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• How I May Have Taken A Wrong Path in Programming

  - by Ygam

  I am in a major stump right now. I am a BSIT graduate, but I only started actual programming less than a year ago. I observed that I have the following attitude in programming: I tend to be more of a purist, scorning unelegant approaches to solving problems using code I tend to look at anything in a large scale, planning everything before I start coding, either in simple flowcharts or complex UML charts I have a really strong impulse on refactoring my code, even if I miss deadlines or prolong development times I am obsessed with good directory structures, file naming conventions, class, method, and variable naming conventions I tend to always want to study something new, even, as I said, at the cost of missing deadlines I tend to see software development as something to engineer, to architect; that is, seeing how things relate to each other and how blocks of code can interact (I am a huge fan of loose coupling) i.e the OOP thinking I tend to combine OOP and procedural coding whenever I see fit I want my code to execute fast (thus the elegant approaches and refactoring) This bothers me because I see my colleagues doing much better the other way around (aside from the fact that they started programming since our first year in college). By the other way around I mean, they fire up coding, gets the job done much faster because they don't have to really look at how clean their codes are or how elegant their algorithms are, they don't bother with OOP however big their projects are, they mostly use web APIs, piece them together and voila! Working code! CLients are happy, they get paid fast, at the expense of a really unmaintainable or hard-to-read code that lacks structure and conventions, or slow executions of certain actions (which the common reasoning against would be that internet connections are much faster these days, hardware is more powerful). The excuse I often receive is clients don't care about how you write the code, but they do care about how long you deliver it. If it works then all is good. Now, did my "purist" approach to programming may have been the wrong way to start programming? Should I just dump these purist concepts and just code the hell up because I have seen it: clients don't really care how beautifully coded it is?

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• DNS protocol message example

  - by virtual-lab

  hello there, I am trying to figure out how to send out DNS messages from an application socket adapter to a DNSBL. I spent the last two days understanding the basics, including experimenting with WireShark to catch an example of message exchanged. Now I would like to query the DNS without using dig or host command (I'm using Ubuntu); how can I perform this action at low level, without the help of these tools in wrapping the request in a proper DNS message format? How the message should be post it? Hex or String? Thanks in advance for any help. Regards Alessandro Ilardo Comment added I am investigating on JDev and Oracle SOA. The platform provides a Socket Adapter which simply apply a transformation (XSLT) and send the message straight to the socket. How the payload parameters (ex. the host I'm looking up) are wrapped within the message is left to the developer. So basically I have an idea on how the all DNS message is structured, but rather than put everything on JDev stright away I'd like to make some tests on my own just to make sure I got a valid message format. So, I am not using any specific language (I don't even understand why they moved my question from serverfault) and I don't want to use any tools which would hide part of the message, such as the header. I know they work well btw. I guess this stuff has something to do with packet injection. Someone suggested me to use telnet, but I've only used for SMTP or HTTP, I haven't got a clue on how it works for DNS request. Does it make more sense now?

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• iPhone development - app design patterns

  - by occulus

  There are tons of resources concerning coding on the iPhone. Most of them concern "how do I do X", e.g. "setup a navigation controller", or "download text from a URL". All good and fine. What I'm more interested in now are the questions that follow the simpler stuff - how to best structure your complex UI, or your app, or the common problems that arise. To illustrate: a book like "Beginning iPhone 3 Development" tells you how to set up a multi viewcontroller app with an top 'switcher' viewcontroller that switches between views owned by other view controllers. Fine, but you're only told how to do that, and nothing about the problems that can follow: for example, if I use their paradigm to switch to a UINavigationViewController, the Navigation bar ends up too low on the screen, because UINavigationViewController expects to be the topmost UIViewController (apparently). Also, delegate methods (e.g. relating to orientation changes) go to the top switcher view controller, not the actual controller responsible for the current view. I have fixes for these things but they feel like hacks which makes me unhappy and makes me feel like I'm missing something. One productive thing might be to look at some open source iPhone projects (see this question). But aside from that?

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