dormothenord - Developer IT

Should I be worried about overengineering programming assignments given during interview process?

- by DormoTheNord

I recently had a phone interview with a company. After that phone interview, I was told to complete a short programming assignment (a small program; shouldn't take more than three hours). I'm only directly instructed to complete the assignment and turn in the code. I was given complete freedom to use any language I wished and was not told exactly how to turn in the code. Immediately I planned on throwing it on Github, writing a test suite for it, using Travis-CI (free continuous integration for public Github repositories) to run the test suites, and using CMake to build the Linux makefiles for Travis-CI. That way, not only can I demonstrate that I understand how to use Git, CMake, Travis-CI, and how to write tests, but I can also simply link to the Travis-CI page so they can see the output of the tests. I figured that'd make it a tiny bit more convenient for the interviewer. Since I know those technologies well, it would add essentially no time to the assignment. However, I'm a bit worried that doing all this for a relatively simple task would look bad. Although it wouldn't add much more time at all for me, I don't want them thinking I spend too much time on things that should be simple.

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Detecting a ledge in Box2D

- by DormoTheNord

I'm making a 2D platformer with Box2D. The player needs to be able to grab onto a ledge and pull him/herself up. Right now I have a sensor that extends in every direction from the upper half of the player's body. The logic seems simple enough: if there are tiles inside the sensor and empty space above them, then it's a ledge and the game should act accordingly. The problem is that I can't figure out how to implement that logic with Box2D. Anyone have any ideas?

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Handling window resize with arbitrary aspect ratios

- by DormoTheNord

I'm currently making a 2D game using SFML. I want the aspect ratio to be maintained when the user resizes the window. I also want the game to work with any arbitrary aspect ratio (like any media player would). Here is the code I have so far: void os::GameEngine::setCameraViewport() { sf::FloatRect tempViewport; float viewAspectRatio = (float)aspectRatio.x / aspectRatio.y; float screenAspectRatio = (float)gameWindow.getSize().x / gameWindow.getSize().y; if (viewAspectRatio > screenAspectRatio) { // Viewport is wider than screen, fit on X } else if (viewAspectRatio < screenAspectRatio) { // Screen is wider than viewport, fit on Y } else // window aspect ratio matches view aspect ratio { tempViewport.height = 1; tempViewport.width = 1; tempViewport.left = 0; tempViewport.top = 0; } viewport = tempViewport; camera.setViewport(viewport); gameWindow.setView(camera); } The problem is I'm having trouble with the logic to determine the properties of the viewport.

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Using rsync when files on one end are all lowercase

- by DormoTheNord

I want to rsync a lot of files from a Windows box to a Linux server. The problem is, the files on Windows are all mixed case, and the files on the linux server need to be all lowercase. One solution is to have a script that rsyncs to a different directory on the server, copy the files into the main directory, and then convert them all to lowercase. I'd rather find a more elegant solution, though. I'd prefer a command line application, but I'd be willing to go with a GUI application if that's the best option.

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Is it alright to call len() in a loop's conditional statement?

- by DormoTheNord

In C, it is considered bad practice to call strlen like this: for ( i = 0; strlen ( str ) != foo; i++ ) { // stuff } The reason, of course, is that it is inefficient since it "counts" the characters in a string multiple times. However, in Python, I see code like this quite often: for i in range ( 0, len ( list ) ): # stuff Is this bad practice? Should I store the result of len() in a variable and use that?

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