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• Cities from Space: A Tour of Urban Planning Patterns

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  While many cities developed haphazardly and organically with little structured planning, other cities were developed following strict organization–organization that reveals itself beautifully when seen from space. Wired magazine shares a roundup of ten well-planned cities viewed with a satellite’s eye. Among the roundup our favorite is the oldest, seen in the photo above: This nine-pointed fortress is perhaps the best example of a planned city from the Renaissance. Palmanova was built in 1593 and is located in the northeastern corner of Italy near the border with Slovenia. It was intended to be home to a completely self-reliant utopian community that could also defend itself against the Ottomans. It had three guarded entrances, ramparts between each of the star points and eventually a moat. Sadly, nobody was willing to move there. Eventually it was used as free housing for pardoned criminals. Today it is a national monument, a tourist destination and home to around 5,000 people. Hit up the link below to check out the other nine well-planned entries in the roundup. How To Boot Your Android Phone or Tablet Into Safe Mode HTG Explains: Does Your Android Phone Need an Antivirus? How To Use USB Drives With the Nexus 7 and Other Android Devices

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• Dreaded SQLs

  - by lavanyadeepak

  Dreaded SQLs We used to think that a SQL statement without a where clause is only dangerous right since running that on a server TSQL is just going to impact the entire table like waving the magic wand. For that reason we should cultivate the habit first to write the statement as select and then to modify the select portion as update. Within the T-SQL Window, I would normally prefer the following first: select * from employee where empid in (4,5) and then once I am satisfied with the results, I would go ahead with the following change: --select * delete from employee where empid in (4,5) Today I just discovered another coding horror. This would typically be applicable in a stored procedure and with respect to variable nomenclature. It is always desirable to have a suitable nomenclature for parameters distinct from the column names and internal variables. This would help quicker debugging of the stored procedures besides enhancing the readability. Else in a quick bout of enthusiasm a statement like   if (@CustomerID = @CustomerID) [when the latter is intended to denote the column name and there is a superflous @ prepended], zeroing in on the problem would be little tricky. Had there been a still powerful nomenclature rules then debugging would have been more straight-forward and simpler right?

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• Why is Ubuntu unmounting my primary hard drive?

  - by Twisol

  I'm running Ubuntu 10.10 on my laptop (an Asus G73j), dual-booting Windows 7 if that matters. After using the computer for couple of hours or so, I get a popup complaining that a file was unmounted, then my GNOME desktop panels disappear. I can't save any unsaved work (the file browser shows "Filesystem" as totally empty), and other programs break in odd ways (like Chrome can't browse to any new pages, but keeps current ones going... at least I still have Pandora to listen to when this happens!). I've tried looking in the system logs to no avail; I'm assuming that it can't write any errors to the logs because, of course, the logs are on the primary hard drives. This started happening maybe a few days ago. Yesterday I upgraded from 10.4, but I believe it was happening before then. Any advice for figuring this out? EDIT: It just happened again, and I heard a small little clicky sound from the hard drive about five seconds before things went south. I'm thinking I should start backing up ASAP. In response to a comment, here's the dmesg output: http://askubuntu.pastebin.com/uYGshBay Also, the SMART status says the disk has a few bad sectors, and the detailed data says there are 14. It says it passed the self-assessment though. Lastly, this doesn't seem to be happening when I'm on Windows. I recently re-enabled ureadahead (which I disabled ages ago because it was causing Ubuntu to hang at the startup logo), could that be the source of the problem? I've disabled it again to see.

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• What does SVN do better than git?

  - by doug

  No question that the majority of debates over programmer tools distill to either personal choice (by the user) or design emphasis, i.e., optimizing design according to particular uses cases (by the tool builder). Text Editors are probably the most prominent example--a coder who works on a Windows at work and codes in Haskell on the Mac at home, values cross-platform and compiler integration and so chooses Emacs over Textmate, etc. It's less common that a newly introduced technology is genuinely, demonstrably superior to the extant options. I wonder if this is in fact the case with version-control systems, in particular, centralized VCS (CVS, SVN) versus distributed VCS (git, hg)? I used SVN for about five years, and SVN is currently used where I work. A little less than three years ago, I switched to git (and gitHub) for all of my personal projects. I can think of a number of advantages of git over subversion (and which for the most part abstract to advantages of distributed over centralized VCS), but I cannot think of one contra example--some task (that's relevant and arises in a programmers usual workflow) that subversion does better than git. The only conclusion I have drawn from this is that I don't have any data--not that git is better, etc. My guess is that such counter-examples exist, hence this question.

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• Picking the right license

  - by nightcracker

  Hey, I have some trouble with picking the right license for my works. I have a few requirements: Not copyleft like the GNU (L)GPL and allows for redistribution under other licenses Allows other people to redistribute your (modified) work but prevents that other people freely make money off my work (they need to ask/buy a commercial license if they want to) Compatible with the GNU (L)GPL Not responsible for any damage caused by my work Now, I wrote my own little license based on the BSD and CC Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 licenses, but I am not sure if it will hold in court. Copyright <year> <copyright holder>. All rights reserved. Redistribution of this work, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met: 1. All redistributions must attribute <copyright holder> as the original author or licensor of this work (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). 2. All redistributions must be for non-commercial purposes and free of charge unless specific written permission by <copyright holder> is given. This work is provided by <copyright holder> "as is" and any express or implied warranties are disclaimed. <copyright holder> is not liable for any damage arising in any way out of the use of this work. Now, you could help me by either: Point me to an existing license which is satisfies my requirements Confirm that my license has no major flaws and most likely would hold in court Thanks!

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• Build vs Rebuild

  - by prash

  Build means compile and link only the source files that have changed since the last build, while Rebuild means compile and link all source files regardless of whether they changed or not. Build is the normal thing to do and is faster. Sometimes the versions of project target components can get out of sync and rebuild is necessary to make the build successful. In practice, you never need to Clean. Build or Rebuild Solution builds or rebuilds all projects in the your solution, while Build or Rebuild <project name> builds or rebuilds the StartUp project. To set the StartUp project, right click on the desired project name in the Solution Explorer tab and select Set as StartUp project. The project name now appears in bold. Compile just compiles the source file currently being edited. Useful to quickly check for errors when the rest of your source files are in an incomplete state that would prevent a successful build of the entire project. Ctrl-F7 is the shortcut key for Compile. All source files that have changed are saved when you request a build/rebuild, so you don't have to save them first. When you run your executable (F5 or Ctrl-F5), Visual Studio saves all your changed source files and builds anything that changed, so you don't need to explicitly do those steps every time. This allows for quick "trial and error" debugging. Incidentally, if you like those little Visual Studio keyboard shortcuts, you can download posters of the C# and the VB.Net ones, respectively (I am personally a big fan of using keyboard shortcuts :) ).   Visual Studio 2010 http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=92ced922-d505-457a-8c9c-84036160639f   Visual Studio 2005 C#: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=c15d210d-a926-46a8-a586-31f8a2e576fe&DisplayLang=en VB.NET: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=6bb41456-9378-4746-b502-b4c5f7182203&DisplayLang=en

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• Ubuntu 14.04: Fine tuning Touchpad for ThinkPad S431

  - by ramgorur

  I am using Ubuntu 14.04 on Lenovo ThinkPad S431. The touchpad is very bumpy, tricky to use. Slides down with a small touch, sometimes jerks erratically. I have tried to modify the settings in /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-synaptics.conf file as below -- Section "InputClass" Identifier "touchpad catchall" Driver "synaptics" MatchIsTouchpad "on" MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*" Option "JumpyCursorThreshold" "250" Option "VertResolution" "100" # Option "HorizResolution" "65" # Option "MinSpeed" "1" # Option "MaxSpeed" "1" # Option "AccelerationProfile" "1" # Option "AdaptiveDeceleration" "8" # Option "ConstantDeceleration" "1" # Option "VelocityScale" "128" Option "HorizHysteresis" "150" Option "VertHysteresis" "150" EndSection There are lots of options here, does anyone know how to get a fine-tuned values for the above options (for ThinkPad S431)? The Hysteresis values seems to alleviate the problem a little bit, but failed to get a perfect result. EDIT: According to this bug report for ThinkPad X230 (+X230t), I set these values and quite good for now -- Option "VertResolution" "100" Option "HorizResolution" "65" Option "MinSpeed" "1" Option "MaxSpeed" "1" Option "AccelerationProfile" "2" Option "AdaptiveDeceleration" "16" Option "ConstantDeceleration" "16" Option "VelocityScale" "32" Option "HorizHysteresis" "50" Option "VertHysteresis" "50" and then you need to increase the cursor speed manually from the Unity mouse settings. But I am still looking for a fully functional (possibly with all the gestures) and a fine-tuned touchpad settings for S431. Further help is appreciated.

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• How do I interpolate air drag with a variable time step?

  - by Valentin Krummenacher

  So I have a little game which works with small steps, however those steps vary in time, so for example I sometimes have 10 Steps/second and then I have 20 Steps/second. This changes automatically depending on how many steps the user's computer can take. To avoid inaccurate positioning of the game's player object I use y=v0*dt+g*dt^2/2 to determine my objects y-position, where dt is the time since the last step, v0 is the velocity of my object in the beginning of my step and g is the gravity. To calculate the velocity in the end of a step I use v=v0+g*dt what also gives me correct results, independent of whether I use 2 steps with a dt of for example 20ms or one step with a dt of 40ms. Now I would like to introduce air drag. For simplicity's sake I use a=k*v^2 where a is the air drag's acceleration (I am aware that it would usually result in a force, but since I assume 1kg for my object's mass the force is the same as the resulting acceleration), k is a constant (in this case I'm using 0.001) and v is the speed. Now in an infinitely small time interval a is k multiplied by the velocity in this small time interval powered by 2. The problem is that v in the next time interval would depend on the drag of the last which again depends on the v of the last interval and so on... In other words: If I use a=k*v^2 I get different results for my position/velocity when I use 2 steps of 20ms than when I use one step of 40ms. I used to have this problem for my position too, but adding +g*dt^2/2 to the formula for my position fixed the problem since it takes into account that the position depends on the velocity which changes slightly in every infinitely small time interval. Does something like that exist for air drag too? And no, I dont mean anything like Adding air drag to a golf ball trajectory equation or similar, for that kind of method only gives correct results when all my steps are the same. (I hope you can understand my intermediate english, it's not my main language so I would like to say sorry for all the silly mistakes I might have made in my question)

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• Can you help diagnose why this laptop running ubantu has crashed and seemingly died

  - by krhodes

  Love any suggestions you have to this problem. My laptop had Window Vista on previously (sorry). Something went wrong, I can't remember, and I tried to reinstall but couldn't, installed a replacement second hand HD, and installed Ubantu instead. It worked ok for a little while, before crashing. I ended up reloading Ubantu three times. It works for a while after (say 3-5 hrs of domestic web browsing), and then crashes. When I turn it on now, it comes up with some options to restart in safe mode, run tests and so on. I can't get it to start normally. I'm not going to re-install again. Below are screen shots of what happens when I follow some of these test options. These screen shots mean nothing to me. Any ideas? Surely I can fix this.... http://i1219.photobucket.com/albums/dd434/keithrhodes1/P1050109.jpg http://i1219.photobucket.com/albums/dd434/keithrhodes1/P1050105.jpg Thanks in advance for any suggestions Keith

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• Working with the ADF DVT Map Component

  - by Shay Shmeltzer

  The map component provided by the ADF Faces DVT set of components is one that we are always ending up using in key demos - simply because it is so nice looking, but also because it is quite simple to use. So in case you need to show some geographical data, or if you just want to impress your manager, here is a little video that shows you how to create two types of maps. The first one is a color themed map - where you show different states with different colors based on the value of some data point there. The other is a point theme - basically showing specific locations on the map. For both cases I'm using the Oracle provided mapviewer instance at http://elocation.oracle.com/mapviewer. You can find more information about using the map component in the Web User Interface Developer's Guide here and in the tag doc and components demo. For the first map the query I'm using (on the HR demo schema in the Oracle DB) is: SELECT     COUNT(EMPLOYEES.EMPLOYEE_ID) , Department_name , STATE_PROVINCE FROM     EMPLOYEES,     DEPARTMENTS,     LOCATIONS WHERE employees.department_id=departments.department_idand Departments.location_id=locations.location_idGROUP BY Department_name,    LOCATIONS.STATE_PROVINCE

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• What technical details should a programmer of a web application consider before making the site public?

  - by Joel Coehoorn

  What things should a programmer implementing the technical details of a web application consider before making the site public? If Jeff Atwood can forget about HttpOnly cookies, sitemaps, and cross-site request forgeries all in the same site, what important thing could I be forgetting as well? I'm thinking about this from a web developer's perspective, such that someone else is creating the actual design and content for the site. So while usability and content may be more important than the platform, you the programmer have little say in that. What you do need to worry about is that your implementation of the platform is stable, performs well, is secure, and meets any other business goals (like not cost too much, take too long to build, and rank as well with Google as the content supports). Think of this from the perspective of a developer who's done some work for intranet-type applications in a fairly trusted environment, and is about to have his first shot and putting out a potentially popular site for the entire big bad world wide web. Also, I'm looking for something more specific than just a vague "web standards" response. I mean, HTML, JavaScript, and CSS over HTTP are pretty much a given, especially when I've already specified that you're a professional web developer. So going beyond that, Which standards? In what circumstances, and why? Provide a link to the standard's specification.

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• Copy to USB memory stick really slow?

  - by Eloff

  When I copy files to the USB device, it takes much longer than in windows (same usb device, same port) it's faster than USB 1.0 speeds (1MB/s) but much slower than USB 2.0 speeds (12MB/s). To copy 1.8GB takes me over 10 minutes (it should be < 3 min.) I have two identical SanDisk Cruzer 8GB sticks, and I have the same problem with both. I have a super talent 32GB USB SSD in the neighboring port and it works at expected speeds. The problem I seem to see in the GUI is that the progress bar goes to 90% almost instantly, completes to 100% a little slower and then hangs there for 10 minutes. Interrupting the copy at this point seems to result in corruption at the tail end of the file. If I wait for it to complete the copy is successful. Any ideas? dmesg output below: [64059.432309] usb 2-1.2: new high-speed USB device number 5 using ehci_hcd [64059.526419] scsi8 : usb-storage 2-1.2:1.0 [64060.529071] scsi 8:0:0:0: Direct-Access SanDisk Cruzer 1.14 PQ: 0 ANSI: 2 [64060.530834] sd 8:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg4 type 0 [64060.531925] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdd] 15633408 512-byte logical blocks: (8.00 GB/7.45 GiB) [64060.533419] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdd] Write Protect is off [64060.533428] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdd] Mode Sense: 03 00 00 00 [64060.534319] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdd] No Caching mode page present [64060.534327] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdd] Assuming drive cache: write through [64060.537988] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdd] No Caching mode page present [64060.537995] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdd] Assuming drive cache: write through [64060.541290] sdd: sdd1 [64060.544617] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdd] No Caching mode page present [64060.544619] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdd] Assuming drive cache: write through [64060.544621] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdd] Attached SCSI removable disk

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• how does HDR work?

  - by dotminic

  I'm trying to understand what HDR is and how it works. I understand the basic concepts and have an slight idea of how it is implemented with D3D/hlsl. However it's still pretty foggy. Say I'm rendering a sphere with a texture of the earth and a small point list of vertices to act as stars, how would I render this in HDR ? Here are a few things I'm confused about: I'm guessing, I can't use just any basic image format for the texture as the values would be limited to [0, 255] and clamped to [0, 1] in a shader. Same goes for the back buffer, I take it the format needs to be a float point format ? What are the other steps involved ? Surely there has to be more than just using floating point formats to render to a render target and then apply some bloom as a post process ? (considering the output will be 8bpp anyway) Basically, what are the steps for HDR ? How does it work ? I can't seem to find any good papers / articles that describe the process, other than this one, but it seems to skim over the basics a little, so it's confusing.

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• How can one-handed work in Ubuntu be eased?

  - by N.N.

  My right hand is temporarily immobilized and I would like to do some minor general work on my computer. Mostly web browsing, mailing and file and directory browsing and editing. For this I currently use Firefox, Thunderbird, Nautilus and the GNOME terminal (I have already asked a specific question about Emacs). Are there ways to ease such, or any other general, one-handed work in Ubuntu? I have found http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2391805/how-can-i-remain-productive-with-one-hand-completely-immobilized but that is not exactly what I am asking for. I want to ease whatever little time spent one-handed in Ubuntu and this is also interesting for situations where there is no injury involved, such as when one hand is occupied. I do realize I should avoid unnecessary strain. The main thing that is much slower one-handed is writing. Since I am only temporarily immobilized it seems to make no sense learn a new keyboard layout. I would be surprised if I managed to learn and become more effective with a new keyboard layout (than one-handed QWERTY) before I can use my other hand again. What I have already found: Sticky keys for making it easier to enter keyboard commands. When writing one-handed there are more cases of where it is useful to paste in phrases rather than to reenter them. It is easier to use Super+S rather than CtrlAlt+arrow keys to switch work space.

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• How do you avoid name similarities between your classes and the native ones?

  - by Oscar

  I just ran into an "interesting problem", which I would like your opinion about: I am developing a system and for many reasons (meaning: abstraction, technology independence, etc) we create our own types for exchanging information. For instance: if there is a method which is called SendEmail and is invoked by the business logic, it way have a parameter of type OurCompany.EMailMessage, which is an object which is completely technology independent and contains only "business relevant data" (for instance, no information abut head encoding). Inside the SendEmail function, we get this information from our EMailMEssage object and create a MailMessage (this one is technolgy specific) object so it can be sent over the network. As you can already notice, our class has a very similar name to the "native" language class. The problem is: this is exactly what they are, email messages, so it is hard to find another meaningful name for them. Do you have this problem often? How do you manage it? Edit: @mgkrebbs just commented about using fully qualified names. This is our current approach, but a little bit too verbose, IMHO. I would like something cleaner, if possible.

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• How to factorize code in Unreal Kismet (i.e. "Material Function"s for Kismet)

  - by Georges Dupéron

  In the Unreal Development Kit, when using the Material Editor, one can factorize frequently-used groups of nodes by creating a Material Function (content Browser ? right-click ? new matrial function, IIRC). When defining the behaviour of some actor in Kismet, one can easily have a dozen nodes involved. If I have many actors that share the same behaviour, then I'll copy-paste these nodes, and change the variables so they point to the other actors. This leads to inconsistencies (a modification in the behaviour of an actor isn't propagated in the copy-pasted nodes), complexity (you end up with hundreds of nodes), and generally useless effort. My question is : Can I create a "kismet function", just like a material function ? Note: I'd rather avoid using UnrealScript. I don't even know where to type UnrealScripts, don't know where the documentation is and more generally don't have enough time to invest in learning UnrealScript. This "kismet function" feature must be usable by graphists (with little programming knowledge). If a (simple) script suffices to add this feature in the Kismet editor, so that one can create several "functions" without using UnrealScript, then fine, but I don't really want to have to write a script each time I want to factorize a few nodes. Thanks for any information !

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• Teach Your Kid to Code Coming to Philly.NET

  - by Steve Michelotti

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/michelotti/archive/2014/05/20/teach-your-kid-to-code-coming-to-philly.net.aspxTomorrow night (Wednesday, May 21) my son and I will be at Philly.NET presenting Teach Your Kid to Code. Bring your kid out to Philly.NET with you for a fun evening! After our first talk, I’ll then be giving an introduction to TypeScript. Of any presentation I’ve ever given, this is my favorite: Have you ever wanted a way to teach your kid to code? For that matter, have you ever wanted to simply be able to explain to your kid what you do for a living? Putting things in a context that a kid can understand is not as easy as it sounds. If you are someone curious about these concepts, this is a “can’t miss” presentation that will be co-presented by Justin Michelotti (6th grader) and his father. Bring your kid with you to Philly.NET for this fun and educational session. We will show tools you may not have been aware of like SmallBasic and Kodu – we’ll even throw in a little Visual Studio and JavaScript. Concepts such as variables, conditionals, loops, and functions will be covered while we introduce object oriented concepts without any of the confusing words. Kids are not required for entry!

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• Proper method to update and draw from game loop?

  - by Lost_Soul

  Recently I've took up the challenge for myself to create a basic 2d side scrolling monster truck game for my little brother. Which seems easy enough in theory. After working with XNA it seems strange jumping into Java (which is what I plan to program it in). Inside my game class I created a private class called GameLoop that extends from Runnable, then in the overridden run() method I made a while loop that handles time and such and I implemented a targetFPS for drawing as well. The loop looks like this: @Override public void run() { long fpsTime = 0; gameStart = System.currentTimeMillis(); lastTime = System.currentTimeMillis(); while(game.isGameRunning()) { currentTime = System.currentTimeMillis(); long ellapsedTime = currentTime - lastTime; if(mouseState.leftIsDown) { que.add(new Dot(mouseState.getPosition())); } entities.addAll(que); game.updateGame(ellapsedTime); fpsTime += ellapsedTime; if(fpsTime >= (1000 / targetedFPS)) { game.drawGame(ellapsedTime); } lastTime = currentTime; } The problem I've ran into is adding of entities after a click. I made a class that has another private class that extends MouseListener and MouseMotionListener then on changes I have it set a few booleans to tell me if the mouse is pressed or not which seems to work great but when I add the entity it throws a CME (Concurrent Modification Exception) sometimes. I have all the entities stored in a LinkedList so later I tried adding a que linkedlist where I later add the que to the normal list in the update loop. I think this would work fine if it was just the update method in the gameloop but with the repaint() method (called inside game.drawGame() method) it throws the CME. The only other thing is that I'm currently drawing directly from the overridden paintComponent() method in a custom class that extends JPanel. Maybe there is a better way to go about this? As well as fix my CME? Thanks in advance!!!

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• Getting started on Large Projects

  - by Mercfh

  So I just graduated from my College with a B.S. in Comp. Science (although it was a good school, we're the only accredited CS department in our state.....for w/e that means lol) I feel like im a decent programmer, not amazing....but not terrible. Anyways I got my first job about 2 weeks ago, it's a pretty entry level job: firmware development/tester (I know I know people look down on testers...but I gotta start somewhere). Anyways there isn't a whole lot of coding to be had right now (mostly simple stuff) but here soon I have the option of helping out with development (which is what I want to do) Thing is....I have NEVER worked on a huge project. I mean in school sure we had "group" projects but nothing really big. So I'm not super familiar with HUGE classes and such (main language was C++)....Is this something I'll just get used to with time? Some fellow students were used to that with internships and such...but I never got that chance. My job was mostly a "one man job" kinda thing. Mostly little things. Plus in class we never did huge projects anyways. So how do you guys I guess "plan" out these things? Do you use a whiteboard and plan out classes and such....or what. Also...another worry of mine is that I have to use google......ALOT for examples of code, because sometimes I just don't get how something works. Is this normal? It makes me feel sorta.....stupid I guess. I mean "technically" i've had 4-5 years coding experience......but it really only feels like I had 2 years of REAL experience. If that makes any sense? Thanks

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• Thoughts on exception handling.

  - by AndyScott

  Was working on a windows form app (something I haven't done in a while), adding threading and logging so that it would work a little more smoothly and have a record of who did what.  I was just about at the point where I was going to check it into source control when I noticed that the Output window was showing "A first chance exception of type 'System.InvalidCastException' occurred in mscorlib.dll", so I googled it.  In reading some threads about the error, I came across the following comment and it got me thinking: "In addition, while they should be avoided if possible, exceptions are a quite legitimate part of program execution. It's their going unhandled that is a real issue, because that means crashy, crashy." How do you normally use exception handling?  I feel that exceptions are intended to handle errors in code (in my experience generally related to bad data making its way into the system).  Now don't get me wrong, I understand that exceptions happen and should be dealt with, but I feel that they are a "last resort" to keep a program from crashing, but should never be a way to pass data or continue logical processing that could be handled in standard code flow. I mention this, because I have seen it done. What do you think?

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• Why is CS never a topic of conversation of the layman? [closed]

  - by hydroparadise

  Granted, every profession has it's technicalities. If you are an MD, you better know the anatomy of the human body, and if you are astronomer, you better know your calculus. Yet, you don't have to know these more advance topics to know that smoking might give you lung cancer because of carcinogens or the moon revolves around the earth because of gravity (thank you Discovery Channel). There's sort of a common knowledge (at least in more developed countries) of these more advanced topics. With that said, why are things like recursive descent parsing, BNF, or Turing machines hardly ever mentioned outsided 3000 or 4000 level classes in a university setting or between colleagues? Even back in my days before college in my pursuit of knowledge on how computers work, these very important topics (IMHO) never seem to get the light of day. Many different sources and sites go into "What is a processor?" or "What is RAM?", or "What is an OS?". You might get lucky and discover something about programming languages and how they play a role in how applications are created, but nothing about the tools for creating the language itself. To extend this idea, Dennis Ritchie died shortly after Steve Jobs, yet Dennis Ritchie got very little press compared to Steve Jobs. So, the heart of my question: Does the public in general not care to hear about computer science topics that make the technology in their lives work, or does the computer science community not lend itself to the general public to close the knowledge gap? Am I wrong to think the general public has the same thirst for knowledge on how things work as I do? Please consider the question carefully before answering or vote closing please.

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• Loading images in XNA 4.0; "Cannot Open File" Problems

  - by user32623

  Okay, I'm writing a game in C#/XNA 4.0 and am utterly stumped at my current juncture: Sprite animation. I understand how it works and have all the code in place, but my ContentLoader won't open my file... Basically, my directory looks like this: //WindowsGame1 - "Game1.cs" - //Classes - "NPC.cs" - Content Reference - //Images - "Monster.png" Inside my NPC class, I have all the essential drawing functions, i.e. LoadContent, Draw, Update. And I can get the game to find the correct file and attempt to open it, but when it tries, it throws an exception and tells me it can't open the file. This is how my code in my NPC class looks: Texture2D NPCImage; Vector2 NPCPosition; Animation NPCAnimation = new Animation(); public void Initialize() { NPCAnimation.Initialize(NPCPosition, new Vector2(4, 4)); } public void LoadContent(ContentManager Content) { NPCImage = Content.Load<Texture2D>("_InsertImageFilePathHere_"); NPCAnimation.AnimationImage = NPCImage; } The rest of the code is irrelevant at this point because I can't even get the image to load. I think it might have to do with a directory problem, but I also know little to nothing about spriting or working with images or animations in my code. Any help is appreciated. Not sure if I provided enough information here, so let me know if more is needed! Also, what would be the correct way to direct that Content.Load to Monster.png given the current directory situation? Right now I just have it using the full path from the C:// drive. Thanks in advance!

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• Where to find common database abbreviations in Spanish

  - by jmh_gr

  I'm doing a little pro bono work for an organization in Central America. I'm ok at Spanish and my contacts are perfectly fluent but are not techincal people. Even if they don't care what I call some fields in a database I still want to make as clean a schema as possible, and I'd like to know what some typical abbreviations are for field / variable names in Spanish. I understand abbreviations and naming conventions are entirely personal. I'm not asking for the "correct" or "best" way to abbreviate database object names. I'm just looking for references to lists of typical abbreviations that would be easily recognizable to a techincally competent native Spanish speaker. I believe I am a decent googler but I've had no luck on this one. For example, in my company (where English is the primary language) 'Date' is always shortened to 'DT', 'Code' to 'CD', 'Item' to 'IT', etc. It's easy for the crowds of IT temp workers who revolve through on various projects to figure out that 'DT' stands for 'Date', 'YR' for 'Year', or 'TN' for 'Transaction' without even having to consult the official abbreviations list.

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• decent use-case for goto in c?

  - by Robz

  I really hesitate to ask this, because I don't want to "solicit debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion" but I'm new to C and want to gain more insight into common patterns used in the language. I recently heard some distaste for the goto command, but I've also recently found a decent use-case for it. Code like this: error = function_that_could_fail_1(); if (!error) { error = function_that_could_fail_2(); if (!error) { error = function_that_could_fail_3(); ...to the n-th tab level! } else { // deal with error, clean up, and return error code } } else { // deal with error, clean up, and return error code } If the clean-up part is all very similar, could be written a little prettier (my opinion?) like this: error = function_that_could_fail_1(); if(error) { goto cleanup; } error = function_that_could_fail_2(); if(error) { goto cleanup; } error = function_that_could_fail_3(); if(error) { goto cleanup; } ... cleanup: // deal with error if it exists, clean up // return error code Is this a common or acceptable use-case of goto in C? Is there a different/better way to do this?

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• That Tool is cURLy

  When you just use IE, Firefox or Chrome it can be easy to forget that HTTP is about more then just going to check the latest tech news at Engadget. It is a full and rich protocol, and a great way to experience that richness is the powerful command line utility cURL. cURL has a lot of options, but the syntax starts out simple. You can retrieve the contents of a web page with a simple curl http://blogs.claritycon.com/. The results should be the full text of the web page, tags and all. From there, you can use X to specify the HTTP verb to use, POST, PUT, DELETE, PATCH, etc and d to specify the payload of a POST or PUT. I have found cURL to be incredibly useful for two scenarios. First, as a good way to test basic web services. Second, while working a bit with CouchDB and another document based database, cURL has helped me learn more about RESTful APIs, including different verbs and response codes. cURL is a mainstay in our environments and programming languages precisely because it is simple, powerful and discoverable. I encourage more .NET developers to take a look, bask on the command line for a while and enjoy the plain text of the web. And this excellent logo:     -- Relevant Links -- Its not always the case with manuals, but the manual for cURL is quite useful: http://curl.haxx.se/docs/manual.html To make your command line look a little nicer (and more powerful) on Windows, check out Console and add some transparency effects: http://sourceforge.net/projects/console/Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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