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• Why would one bother marking up properly and semantically?

  - by Madara Uchiha

  Note that I (try) to mark up as semantically as possible because I like they way it looks and feels, but not because I'm aware of any other stunning advantages. The point of my question is to be able to educate others Well, I've seen a lot of articles and tutorials which often state "Let's mark this up in the most semantic possible way". But a strange thought came to me, why? Why would one need (or want) to bother with the specific elements which convey the correct semantic meaning? Specifically, I'm referring to the new HTML5 elements, such as <time>, <output>, or <address>. Especially, if the page "works" (it renders nicely in all browsers). Why would I want to use elements like <time> or <address>, where nothing at all (or at the worst case, a generic <span>) works just as nicely? I'm asking this because I'm seeing a multitude of (very popular) websites (this one included) which does not follow these so-called best practices.

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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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• Sorting for 2D Drawing

  - by Nexian

  okie, looked through quite a few similar questions but still feel the need to ask mine specifically (I know, crazy). Anyhoo: I am drawing a game in 2D (isometric) My objects have their own arrays. (i.e. Tiles[], Objects[], Particles[], etc) I want to have a draw[] array to hold anything that will be drawn. Because it is 2D, I assume I must prioritise depth over any other sorting or things will look weird. My game is turn based so Tiles and Objects won't be changing position every frame. However, Particles probably will. So I am thinking I can populate the draw[] array (probably a vector?) with what is on-screen and have it add/remove object, tile & particle references when I pan the screen or when a tile or object is specifically moved. No idea how often I'm going to have to update for particles right now. I want to do this because my game may have many thousands of objects and I want to iterate through as few as possible when drawing. I plan to give each element a depth value to sort by. So, my questions: Does the above method sound like a good way to deal with the actual drawing? What is the most efficient way to sort a vector? Most of the time it wont require efficiency. But for panning the screen it will. And I imagine if I have many particles on screen moving across multiple tiles, it may happen quite often. For reference, my screen will be drawing about 2,800 objects at any one time. When panning, it will be adding/removing about ~200 elements every second, and each new element will need adding in the correct location based on depth.

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• Windows 8.1 - unfixable grub

  - by Nick

  I have a Gigabyte laptop that came with secure boot and windows 8. After a bit of battling, I managed to get my dual boot with Ubuntu 13.10.. Anyway, I upgraded zindows to 8.1, now grub is gone. I restarted from a live CD and chrooted to my drive. I used boot-repair multiple times (with successful output) both in default and with some advanced options; also reinstalled grub manually... Each time it tries once to boot to grub but gives a message for a very short amount of time. I recorded it and it is a regular bios message "Rebbot and Select proper Boot device of Insert Boot media in selected boot device and press a key" I even tried something called EasyBCD under winblows, it shows the correct boot options, but same there, it is unable to make the linux partition fire up. Anyway, no way to boot my linux box. Does anyone have an idea how to fix this? No need to redirect me to another post with grub reinstall or boot-repair, seen them all... I am thinking of trying this other boot loader, refind, to see if it works http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/index.html Also re-reading this bios message, I'm thinking my partition might not have a boot flag anymore... I'll try that too with parted. Although both grub and win 8 are supposed to fire up from the same boot partition (the EFI one) Please help! thx

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• bash terminal/console strange overlapping behavior

  - by UpKey

  I am using gnome-terminal in Ubuntu 11.10 and seem to get long lines overlapping in the terminal window. When I copy a long command line and paste it into the terminal, the text gets overlapped to the start of the line and often covers the user prompt. If I resize the terminal window, making it wider the overlapping gets undone and everything looks normal. In previous versions of Ubuntu, if a line was too long it would continue on the next line below. Another problem I have noticed that may be related, is when using the up arrow key to show previously typed commands, sometimes instead of the output command line being replaced by the previous command each time the key is pressed, the lines get partially merged. A portion of the old line remains, and the next command gets joined onto the end. This leftover part of a command is persistent and does not get replaced next time the key is pressed, although the insertion point or blinking cursor is at the end of the latest recalled command, and the leftover has no effect if I press enter. Is this problem a bug or some setting that needs fixing? Where do I look for the cause? keyboard? gnome-terminal? bash? Thank you for any help or suggestions offered

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• Xlib: extension "GLX" missing on display ":0". Asus k53s

  - by Steve

  I had everything working fine, I use a number of openGL graphics software, example pymol, mgltools, vmd, ballview, rasmol etc. All of these give the error: Xlib: extension "GLX" missing on display ":0". and fail to initialize. I have an i7 asus k53s with nvidia gforce I need these to do my work. I tried the umblebee fix, and just removing all nvidia drivers, or rolling back. I do not know why these were working then stopped, but did notice a new nvidia console in the mu which I assume was from enabling the automatic nvidia feeds, etc? I also played with the xorg, however have no clue what settings are valid. In addition, the display is 50% of the time not recognized now? It just gives a geeic 640x480 and I have to login and out 10 times to get it to return to a normal setting. When I try and set it manual, there is no other setting allowed from the settings menus, and the terminal changes just get re set every time I log out?

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• Finding the best practice for a game simulating tool

  - by Tougheart

  I'm studying Java right now, and I'm thinking of this tool as my practice project. The game is "League of Legends" in case anyone knows it, I'm not actually simulating the game as in simulating game play, I'm just trying to create a tool that can compare different champions to each other based on their own abilities and items bought inside the game. The game basics are: Every player has a champion in a team of 5 players playing against another team. Each champion has a different set of abilities (usually 4) that s/he uses to do damage to opposing champions. Each champion gets stronger by buying different items, increasing the attack it deals or decreasing the damage received. What I want to do is to create a tool to be used outside the game enabling players to try out different builds for their champions and compare the figures against other champions they usually fight against. The goal is to enable players get a deeper understanding of the different item combinations (builds) that can be used during the games, instead of trying them out in real games which can be somehow very time consuming. What I'm stuck at is the best practice I should follow to make this possible using Java, I can't figure out which classes should inherit from which, should I make champions and items specs in the code or extracted from other files, specially that I'm talking about hundreds of items and champions to use in that tool. I'm self studying Java, and I don't have much practice at it, so I would really appreciate any broad guidelines regarding this, and sorry if my question doesn't fit here, I tried to follow the rules. English isn't my native language, so I'm really sorry if I wasn't clear enough, I would be more than happy to explain anything that's not understood.

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• Advice on reconciling discordant data

  - by Justin

  Let me support my question with a quick scenario. We're writing an app for family meal planning. We'll produce daily plans with a target calorie goal and meals to achieve it for our nuclear family. Our calorie goal will be calculated for each person from their attributes (gender, age, weight, activity level). The weight attribute is the simplest example here. When Dad (the fascist nerd who is inflicting this on his family) first uses the application he throws approximate values into it for Daughter. He thinks she is 5'2" (157 cm) and 125 lbs (56kg). The next day Mom sits down to generate the menu and looks back over what the bumbling Dad did, quietly fumes that he can never recall anything about the family, and says the value is really 118 lbs! This is the first introduction of the discord. It seems, in this scenario, Mom is probably more correct that Dad. Though both are only an approximation of the actual value. The next day the dear Daughter decides to use the program and sees her weight listed. With the vanity only a teenager could muster she changes the weight to 110 lbs. Later that day the Mom returns home from a doctor's visit the Daughter needed and decides that it would be a good idea to update her Daughter's weight in the program. Hooray, another value, this time 117 lbs. Now how do you reconcile these data points? Measurement error, confidence in parties, bias, and more all confound the data. In some idealized world we'd have a weight authority of some nature providing the one and only truth. How about in our world though? And the icing on the cake is that this single data point changes over time. How have you guys solved or managed this conflict?

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• Dedicated server: managed hosting or manage it myself?

  - by ddawber

  We're currently hosting a number of sites on a self-managed dedicated server. Some companies, however, offer a managed dedicated server hosting service. They offer: Roughly the same server spec Ticketing system support Managed daily backups Virtual firewall (but with a limit of 10 IP addresses allowed through at any one time) Now, this managed hosting is at extra expense - somewhere in the region of $500 per month, and the limit on the number of IP addresses they'll manage on the firewall is also a real pain. My thinking is it would be better and cheaper to Stay with the same host since the dedicated box is fine Get an Amazon AWS account and use their server to manage backups; there are a number of good tools that can be used to automate the process Configure iptables so that I have complete control of the firewall I want to know Is a managed virtual firewall likely to be more secure than me configuring iptables? Whether, in your opinion, it's best to let someone else take care of backups? If, from your experience, there's anything else i'm missing that warrants using managed hosting over a DIY service? I think there is some reluctance to not having managed hosting since a managed host in effect takes responsibility for your server, whereas any hardware or security issues with a server that we manage would mean we are forced to hold our hands up when a client site goes down. That said, I personally don't think a managed host does that much in the day to day running of your server (backups are automatic, OS updates are carried out with ease, etc.).

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• How do I make my character slide down high-angled slopes?

  - by keinabel

  I am currently working on my character's movement in Unity3D. I managed to make him move relatively to the mouse cursor. I set a slope limit of 45°, which does not allow the character to walk up the mountains with higher degrees. But he can still jump them up. How do I manage to make him slide down again when he jumped at places with too high slope? Thanks in advance. edit: Code snippet of my basic movement. using UnityEngine; using System.Collections; public class BasicMovement : MonoBehaviour { private float speed; private float jumpSpeed; private float gravity; private float slopeLimit; private Vector3 moveDirection = Vector3.zero; void Start() { PlayerSettings settings = GetComponent<PlayerSettings>(); speed = settings.GetSpeed(); jumpSpeed = settings.GetJumpSpeed(); gravity = settings.GetGravity(); slopeLimit = settings.GetSlopeLimit(); } void Update() { CharacterController controller = GetComponent<CharacterController>(); controller.slopeLimit = slopeLimit; if (controller.isGrounded) { moveDirection = new Vector3(Input.GetAxis("Horizontal"), 0, Input.GetAxis("Vertical")); moveDirection = transform.TransformDirection(moveDirection); moveDirection *= speed; if (Input.GetButton("Jump")) { moveDirection.y = jumpSpeed; } } moveDirection.y -= gravity * Time.deltaTime; controller.Move(moveDirection * Time.deltaTime); } }

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• Storing editable site content?

  - by hmp

  We have a Django-based website for which we wanted to make some of the content (text, and business logic such as pricing plans) easily editable in-house, and so we decided to store it outside the codebase. Usually the reason is one of the following: It's something that non-technical people want to edit. One example is copywriting for a website - the programmers prepare a template with text that defaults to "Lorem ipsum...", and the real content is inserted later to the database. It's something that we want to be able to change quickly, without the need to deploy new code (which we currently do twice a week). An example would be features currently available to the customers at different tiers of pricing. Instead of hardcoding these, we read them from database. The described solution is flexible but there are some reasons why I don't like it. Because the content has to be read from the database, there is a performance overhead. We mitigate that by using a caching scheme, but this also adds some complexity to the system. Developers who run the code locally see the system in a significantly different state compared to how it runs on production. Automated tests also exercise the system in a different state. Situations like testing new features on a staging server also get trickier - if the staging server doesn't have a recent copy of the database, it can be unexpectedly different from production. We could mitigate that by committing the new state to the repository occasionally (e.g. by adding data migrations), but it seems like a wrong approach. Is it? Any ideas how best to solve these problems? Is there a better approach for handling the content that I'm overlooking?

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• Browser automatically refreshes and Home folder window opens

  - by Vikash

  I am facing a very strange problem. Out of the blue, my browser starts refreshing itself infinitely. My first guess was firefox is messing up. I installed chrome. But, it happens in chrome as well. Other than that, sometimes my home folder automatically opens and keep opening itself infinitely. My next guess was Mouse is faulty. Replace the mouse - but same things. This happens even if I remove my keyboard. What can be the reason? This started happening after I installed Ubuntu 10.10 few days back. Earlier on windows, everything was working fine. So, I am a bit skeptical to assume that this is a hardware fault. How to fix this problem? UPDATE: xev gives this kind of result: KeyPress event, serial 36, synthetic NO, window 0x4200001, root 0xb8, subw 0x0, time 29897358, (237,791), root:(1252,842), state 0x10, keycode 65 (keysym 0x20, space), same_screen YES, XLookupString gives 1 bytes: (20) " " XmbLookupString gives 1 bytes: (20) " " XFilterEvent returns: False KeyRelease event, serial 36, synthetic NO, window 0x4200001, root 0xb8, subw 0x0, time 29897603, (237,791), root:(1252,842), state 0x10, keycode 65 (keysym 0x20, space), same_screen YES, XLookupString gives 1 bytes: (20) " " XFilterEvent returns: False

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• share distribution question

  - by facebook-100000781341887

  Hi, I just developed a facebook game(mifia like), but the graphic I make is not good, because it is reference with some existing photo, trace with AI, and coloring it. Therefore, I invite my friend to join me, he is a graphic designer, own a company with his friend (I know both of them), for the share, I expect at least 70% for me, and at most 30% for them (both of them want to join). Therefore, they give me a counter offer, 60% for me and 40% for them, of course, I feel their counter offer is unacceptable because they only build the image in part time, and all the other work just like coding, webhosting...etc, is what I do in full time. Why they said they worth 40% is that they will make a good graphic, they can provide a advertise channel(on local magazine), etc... Actually, I don't think the game need advertisement on local magazine because the game is not target for local... Please give me some comments on this issue(is the share fair? what is the importance of the image of the game, is it worth more than 30%), or can anyone share the experience on this. Thanks in advance.

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• Material System

  - by Towelie

  I'm designing Material/Shader System (target API DX10+ and may be OpenGL3+, now only DX10). I know, there was a lot of topics about this, but i can't find what i need. I don't want to do some kind of compilation/parsing scripts in real-time. So there some artist-created material, written at some analog of CG. After it compiled to hlsl code and after to final shader. Also there are some hard-coded ConstantBuffers, like cbuffer EveryFrameChanging { float4x4 matView; float time; float delta; } And shader use shared constant buffers to get parameters. For each mesh in the scene, getting needs and what it can give (normals, binormals etc.) and finding corresponding permutation of shader or calculating missing parts. Also, during build calculating render states and the permutations or hash for this shader which later will be used for sorting or even giving the ID from 0 to ShaderCount w/o gaps to it for sorting. FinalShader have only 1 technique and one pass. After it for each Mesh setting some shader and it's good to render. some pseudo code SetConstantBuffer(ConstantBuffer::PerFrame); foreach (shader in FinalShaders) SetConstantBuffer(ConstantBuffer::PerShader, shader); SetRenderState(shader); foreach (mesh in shader.GetAllMeshes) SetConstantBuffer(ConstantBuffer::PerMesh, mesh); SetBuffers(mesh); Draw(); class FinalShader { public: UUID m_ID; RenderState m_RenderState; CBufferBindings m_BufferBindings; } But i have no idea how to create this CG language and do i really need it?

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• PASS Summit Preconference and Sessions

  - by Davide Mauri

  I’m very pleased to announce that I’ll be delivering a Pre-Conference at PASS Summit 2012. I’ll speak about Business Intelligence again (as I did in 2010) but this time I’ll focus only on Data Warehouse, since it’s big topic even alone. I’ll discuss not only what is a Data Warehouse, how it can be modeled and built, but also how it’s development can be approached using and Agile approach, bringing the experience I gathered in this field. Building the Agile Data Warehouse with SQL Server 2012 http://www.sqlpass.org/summit/2012/Sessions/SessionDetails.aspx?sid=2821 I’m sure you’ll like it, especially if you’re starting to create a BI Solution and you’re wondering what is a Data Warehouse, if it is still useful nowadays that everyone talks about Self-Service BI and In-Memory databases, and what’s the correct path to follow in order to have a successful project up and running. Beside this Preconference, I’ll also deliver a regular session, this time related to database administration, monitoring and tuning: DMVs: Power in Your Hands http://www.sqlpass.org/summit/2012/Sessions/SessionDetails.aspx?sid=3204 Here we’ll dive into the most useful DMVs, so that you’ll see how that can help in everyday management in order to discover, understand and optimze you SQL Server installation, from the server itself to the single query. See you there!!!!!

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• Model a chain with different elements in Unity 3D

  - by Alex

  I have to model, in unity 3D, a chain that is composed of various elements. some flexible, some rigid. The idea is to realize a human-chain where each person is linked to the other by their hands. I've not tried to implement it yet as i've no idea on what could be a good way to do it. In the game i've to manage a lot of chains of people... maybe also 100 chains composed of 11-15 people. The chain will be pretty simple and there won't be much interaction... Probabily some animation of the people one at time for each chain and some physic reaction (for example pushing a people in a chain should slightle flex the chain) the very problem of this work is that in the chain each object is composed by flexible parts (arms) and rigid parts (the body) and that the connection should remain firm... just like when people handshake... hands are firm and are the wrists to move. i can use C4D to model the meshes. i know this number may cause performance problems, but it's also true i will use low-poly versions of human. (for the real it won't be human, but very simple toonish characters that have harms and legs). So actually i'm trying to find a way to manage this in a way it can work, the performance will be a later problem that i can solve. If there is not a fast 'best-practiced' solution and you have any link/guide/doc that could help me in finding a way to realize this is, it would be very appreciated anyway if you post it. thanks

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• Are there design patterns or generalised approaches for particle simulations?

  - by romeovs

  I'm working on a project (for college) in C++. The goal is to write a program that can more or less simulate a beam of particles flying trough the LHC synchrotron. Not wanting to rush into things, me and my team are thinking about how to implement this and I was wondering if there are general design patterns that are used to solve this kind of problem. The general approach we came up with so far is the following: there is a World that holds all objects you can add objects to this world such as Particle, Dipole and Quadrupole time is cut up into discrete steps, and at each point in time, for each Particle the magnetic and electric forces that each object in the World generates are calculated and summed up (luckily electro-magnetism is linear). each Particle moves accordingly (using a simple estimation approach to solve the differential movement equations) save the Particle positions repeat This seems a good approach but, for instance, it is hard to take into account symmetries that might be present (such as the magnetic field of each Quadrupole) and is this thus suboptimal. To take into account such symmetries as that of the Quadrupole field, it would be much easier to (also) make space discrete and somehow store form of the Quadrupole field somewhere. (Since 2532 or so Quadrupoles are stored this should lead to a massive gain of performance, not having to recalculate each Quadrupole field) So, are there any design patterns? Is the World-approach feasible or is it old-fashioned, bad programming? What about symmetry, how is that generally taken into acount?

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• Are you ready to take a walk in the clouds?

  - by Steve Loethen

  Cloud computing is here, whether we want it or not.  When I say "a walk in the clouds” I am not talking about a pleasant romantic comedy, but a real alternative to hosting applications on-premise.  For years we have had the power to host our web sites on remote systems.  Sure, challenges existed.  Mostly web sites.  I could, with a few clicks, create a account at a myriad of web host sites, put my site in the hands of a remote hosting company, and boom, I was a site on the internet.  But choices, power, and management was limited. Now, we have a set of services to let us approach and power and control we love, but with scalability of the data center.  My personal web site is hosted on a laptop running hyperV in my basement.  I have to manage the machine, patch it, make sure it is powered up.  This is fine for the “hello, this is my dog skippy site” that I maintain. If the football pool I run has an issue, one of the 10 users I have calls or emails me and I go check it out.  All is well. But this falls well below the needs of even the simplest of enterprises.  A business needs a stronger datacenter, a better pipe to the world.  Do I really want to base my business on a dynamic dns and a dsl line from the local phone company? Cloud computing gives us most of what I value (control, a db of my own, updating my site from Visual Studio). Come learn how this technology can transform your business.  If you are a Microsoft shop, or are interested in Microsoft in the cloud, on April 8 and 9, a 2 day free Azure training class is being conducted in Kansas City.  http://www.azurebootcamp.com/city/kansascity Hope to see you there.  If you come, make sure you look me up.

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• Windows Phone Camp Hands On Accelerator Lab in Dallas

  - by Bill Osuch

  Microsoft is hosting another Windows Phone Accelerator lab this December 13-15 in Dallas: Do you have the next million dollar idea that you just can’t find the time to finish?  Do you already have an app for Android and iPhone that you want to expand into new markets?    It’s time to turn your napkin sketches and leverage your hard work into real, sellable apps for Windows Phone in ONE WEEK!  Join us for a special Windows Phone event you don’t want to miss - Windows Phone Accelerator!    In this 3-day developer retreat, we will have experts on hand to help you build, test, pitch, and deploy your app into the Windows Phone Marketplace.  You will have hands on technical assistance, Marketplace subscriptions, and developer phones for testing.    It’s a great chance to get step-by-step advice from Microsoft and community experts and all you have to do is bring your existing app or app idea that you are ready to build.   Seating is limited and registration is not guaranteed.  Get your spot today!   Agenda: Tuesday, 9am-5pm Kick-off Open Lab; 1:1 Meetings   Wednesday, 8:30am-6pm Open Lab; 1:1 Meetings   Thursday, 8:30am-1pm Open Lab; 1:1 Meetings   Thursday, 1pm - 3pm App pitches & Giveaways Register at this link

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• Computer Says No: Mobile Apps Connectivity Messages

  - by ultan o'broin

  Sharing some insight into connectivity messages for mobile applications. Based on some recent ethnography done my myself, and prompted by a real business case, I would recommend a message that: In plain language, briefly and directly tells the user what is wrong and why. Something like: Cannot connect because of a network problem. Affords the user a means to retry connecting (or attempts automatically). Mobile context of use means users use anticipate interruptibility and disruption of task, so they will try again as an effective course of action. Tells the user when connection is re-established, and off they go. Saves any work already done, implicitly. (Bonus points on the ADF critical task setting scale) The following images showing my experience reading ADF-EMG Google Groups notification my (Android ICS) Samsung Galaxy S2 during a loss of WiFi give you a good idea of a suitable kind of messaging user experience for mobile apps in this kind of scenario. Inline connection lost message with Retry button Connection re-established toaster message The UX possible is dependent on device and platform features, sure, so remember to integrate with the device capability (see point 10 of this great article on mobile design by Brent White and Lynn Hnilo-Rampoldi) but taking these considerations into account is far superior to a context-free dumbed down common error message repurposed from the desktop mentality about the connection to the server being lost, so just "Click OK" or "Contact your sysadmin.".

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• Working with Git on multiple machines

  - by Tesserex

  This may sound a bit strange, but I'm wondering about a good way to work in Git from multiple machines networked together in some way. It looks to me like I have two options, and I can see benefits on both sides: Use git itself for sharing, each machine has its own repo and you have to fetch between them. You can work on either machine even if the other is offline. This by itself is pretty big I think. Use one repo that is shared over the network between machines. No need to do git pulls every time you switch machines, since your code is always up to date. Never worry that you forgot to push code from your other non-hosting machine, which is now out of reach, since you were working off a fileshare on this machine. My intuition says that everyone generally goes with the first option. But the downside I see is that you might not always be able to access code from your other machines, and I certainly don't want to push all my WIP branches to github at the end of every day. I also don't want to have to leave my computers on all the time so I can fetch from them directly. Lastly a minor point is that all the git commands to keep multiple branches up to date can get tedious. Is there a third handle on this situation? Maybe some third party tools are available that help make this process easier? If you deal with this situation regularly, what do you suggest?

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• Oracle Customer Experience (CX) Solutions Make Retailers Merry

  - by Tuula Fai

  Tis the season to be jolly. If you’re a retailer, your level of jolliness depends on sales. So you watch trends like U.S. store traffic increasing 3.5% to 308 million on Black Friday but sales actually falling 1.8% to $11.2 billion. Fortunately, by the end of November, retail sales were up 3.7% over the previous year, thanks to life recovering after Hurricane Sandy. And online sales topped $1 billion for the first time ever! Who are the companies improving their sales online? They are big names like Walgreen’s Drugstore.com, Nordstrom’s HauteLook, and Intuit. More importantly, how are they doing it? They use cutting-edge business practices enabled by Oracle’s CX Cloud Service & Support solutions to: Increase conversions rates and order sizes (Customer Acquisition) Enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty (Customer Retention) Reduce contact center costs and improve agent productivity (Operational Efficiency). Acquisition + Retention + Operational Efficiency = Sustainable Growth and Profits. That’s the magic formula for retail customer service success. Don’t take our word for it. Look at the results of these Oracle customers: Walgreen’s Drugstore—30% sales conversion rate on chat sessions with 20% increase in shopping cart size Nordstrom’s HauteLook—40,000+ interactions per month—20% growth over last year— efficiently managed by 40 agents, with no increase in IT costs Intuit—50% increase in customer satisfaction and 70% decrease in cost per interaction Using Oracle’s CX Cloud & Service solutions, these retailers deliver consistent, relevant, and personalized experiences across all touchpoints, including social, mobile, and web. Their ability to connect with customers anytime, anywhere—providing the right answer at the right time—helps them create a defensible advantage in the marketplace. Want to learn more? Please visit http://www.oracle.com/goto/cloudlaunchpad for free resources on delivering exceptional customer service in the Cloud. Also, watch our YouTube channel to learn more about seamless multichannel retail and Winston Furnishings’ exceptional customer experience.

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• How to optimize a box2d simulation in action game?

  - by nathan

  I'm working on an action game and i use box2d for physics. The game use a tiled map. I have different types of body: Static ones used for tiles Dynamic ones for player and enemies Actually i tested my game with ~150 bodies and i have a 60fps constantly on my computer but not on my mobile (android). The FPS drop as the number of body increase. After having profiled the android application, i saw that the World.step took around 8ms in CPU time to execute. Here are few things to note: Not all the world is visible on screen, i use a scrolling system Enemies are constantly moving toward the player so there is alaways to force applied to their body Enemies need to collide between each others Enemies collide with tiles I also now that i can active/desactive or sleep/awake bodies. Considering the fact that only a part of the enemies are possibly displayed on screen, is there any optimizations i can do to reduce the execution time of box2d simulation? I found a guy trying an optimization based on distance of enemies from the player (link). But i seems like he just desactives far bodies (in my case, i could desactive bodies that are not visible). But my enemies need to move even when they are not visible on screen, and applying forces will not workd on inactive bodies. Should i play with sleeping bodies here? Also, enemies are composed by two fixtures and are constantly colliding with each others and with tiles but i really never need to get notified about that. Is there anything i can do to optimize this kind of scenario? Finally, am i wrong to try to run simulation at 60FPS on mobile and should i try to make it run at 30FPS?

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• Does it make sense to write build scripts in C++?

  - by Klaim

  I'm using CMake to generate my projects IDE/makefiles, but I still need to call custom "scripts" to manipulate my compiled files or even generate code. In previous projects I've been using Python and it was OK, but now I'm having serious trouble managing a lot of dependencies in two very big projects I'm working on so I want to minimize the dependencies everywhere. Someone suggested to me to use C++ to write my build scripts instead of adding a language dependency just for that. The projects themeselves already use C++ so there are several advantages that I can see: to build the whole project, only a C++ compiler and CMake would be necessary, nothing else (all the other dependencies are C or C++); C++ type safety (when using modern C++) makes everything easier to get "correct"; it's also the language I know the better so I'm more at ease with it even if I'm able to write some good Python code; potential gain in execution speed (but i don't think it will really be perceptible); However, I think there might be some drawbacks and I'm not sure of the real impact as I didn't try yet: might be longer to write the code (that said I'm not sure because I'm efficient enough in C++ to write something that work quickly, so maybe for this system it wouldn't be so long to write) (compilation time shouldn't be a problem for this case); I must assume that all the text files I'll read as input are in UTF-8, I'm not sure it can be easilly checked at runtime in C++ and the language will not check it for you; libraries in C++ are harder to manage than in scripting languages; I lack experience and forsight so maybe I'm missing advantages and drawbacks. So the question is: does it make sense to use C++ for this? do you have experiences to report and do you see advantages and disadvantages that might be important?

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• How do you plan your asynchronous code?

  - by NullOrEmpty

  I created a library that is a invoker for a web service somewhere else. The library exposes asynchronous methods, since web service calls are a good candidate for that matter. At the beginning everything was just fine, I had methods with easy to understand operations in a CRUD fashion, since the library is a kind of repository. But then business logic started to become complex, and some of the procedures involves the chaining of many of these asynchronous operations, sometimes with different paths depending on the result value, etc.. etc.. Suddenly, everything is very messy, to stop the execution in a break point it is not very helpful, to find out what is going on or where in the process timeline have you stopped become a pain... Development becomes less quick, less agile, and to catch those bugs that happens once in a 1000 times becomes a hell. From the technical point, a repository that exposes asynchronous methods looked like a good idea, because some persistence layers could have delays, and you can use the async approach to do the most of your hardware. But from the functional point of view, things became very complex, and considering those procedures where a dozen of different calls were needed... I don't know the real value of the improvement. After read about TPL for a while, it looked like a good idea for managing tasks, but in the moment you have to combine them and start to reuse existing functionality, things become very messy. I have had a good experience using it for very concrete scenarios, but bad experience using them broadly. How do you work asynchronously? Do you use it always? Or just for long running processes? Thanks.

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