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• Exploring your database schema with SQL

  In the second part of Phil's series of articles on finding stuff (such as objects, scripts, entities, metadata) in SQL Server, he offers some scripts that should be handy for the developer faced with tracking down problem areas and potential weaknesses in a database.

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• What's a nice explanation for pointers?

  - by Macneil

  In your own studies (on your own, or for a class) did you have an "ah ha" moment when you finally, really understood pointers? Do you have an explanation you use for beginner programmers that seems particularly effective? For example, when beginners first encounter pointers in C, they might just add &s and *s until it compiles (as I myself once did). Maybe it was a picture, or a really well motivated example, that made pointers "click" for you or your student. What was it, and what did you try before that didn't seem to work? Were any topics prerequisites (e.g. structs, or arrays)? In other words, what was necessary to understand the meaning of &s and *, when you could use them with confidence? Learning the syntax and terminology or the use cases isn't enough, at some point the idea needs to be internalized. Update: I really like the answers so far; please keep them coming. There are a lot of great perspectives here, but I think many are good explanations/slogans for ourselves after we've internalized the concept. I'm looking for the detailed contexts and circumstances when it dawned on you. For example: I only somewhat understood pointers syntactically in C. I heard two of my friends explaining pointers to another friend, who asked why a struct was passed with a pointer. The first friend talked about how it needed to be referenced and modified, but it was just a short comment from the other friend where it hit me: "It's also more efficient." Passing 4 bytes instead of 16 bytes was the final conceptual shift I needed.

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• Appropriate level of granularity for component-based architecture

  - by Jon Purdy

  I'm working on a game with a component-based architecture. An Entity owns a set of Component instances, each of which has a set of Slot instances with which to store, send, and receive values. Factory functions such as Player produce entities with the required components and slot connections. I'm trying to determine the best level of granularity for components. For example, right now Position, Velocity, and Acceleration are all separate components, connected in series. Velocity and Acceleration could easily be rewritten into a uniform Delta component, or Position, Velocity, and Acceleration could be combined alongside such components as Friction and Gravity into a monolithic Physics component. Should a component have the smallest responsibility possible (at the cost of lots of interconnectivity) or should related components be combined into monolithic ones (at the cost of flexibility)? I'm leaning toward the former, but I could use a second opinion.

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• Overloading interface buttons, what are the best practices?

  - by XMLforDummies

  Imagine you'll have always a button labeled "Continue" in the same position in your app's GUI. Would you rather make a single button instance that takes different actions depending on the current state? private State currentState = State.Step1; private ContinueButton_Click() { switch(currentState) { case State.Step1: DoThis(); currentState = State.Step2; break; case State.Step2: DoThat(); break; } } Or would you rather have something like this? public Form() { this.ContinueStep2Button.Visible = false; } private ContinueStep1Button_Click() { DoThis(); this.ContinueStep1Button.Visible = false; this.ContinueStep2Button.Visible = true; } private ContinueStep2Button_Click() { DoThat(); }

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• Stuff you should have learned in school but didn't pay attention to at the time

  - by HLGEM

  This question made me think that there was a better question to ask. What did you learn in school that you didn't care about at the time, but turned out to be useful or you had to relearn in the workplace because you had it in school, but didn't retain the information and you needed it? (I mean for software related jobs.) I think this might help college students identify some of what they really should be paying attention to while they are in school.

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• Should code comments have scope?

  - by Rig Veda

  I am asking this because I have seen places where, whoever coded initially had provided proper comments, but later on modifications were made to the code but the comments were left untouched. I remember reading somewhere " Don't get suckered in by the comments, debug only code". So is it a good/ relevant/ practical idea that tells the scope of the comments so as to prompt the developer for editing the comment. Your thoughts.

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• Achieving certain rendering styles

  - by milesmeow

  I'm trying to assess the difficulty of creating a rendering style that is more like the game Okami and the Quake mods (as shown on this page...search for 'okami','quake npr'). Here's a better page describing the Quake rendering mod. Can a game engine such as Unity be used and programmed to achieve these kind of rendering styles? I'm doing research and am totally new to this so any insight into this would help tremendously.

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• Would you use UML if it kept stakeholders from requesting changes frequently?

  - by Huperniketes

  As much as programmers hate to document their code/system and draw UML (especially, Sequencing, Activity and State machine diagrams) or other diagramming notation, would you agree to do it if it kept managers from requesting a "minor change" every couple of weeks? IOW, would you put together visual models to document the system if it helped you demonstrate to managers what the effect of changes are and why it takes so long to implement them? (Edited to help programmers understand what type of answer I'm looking for.) 2nd edit: Restating my question again, "Would you be willing to use some diagramming notation, against your better nature as a programmer, if it helped you manage change requests?" This question isn't asking if there might be something wrong with the process. It's a given that there's something wrong with the process. Would you be willing to do more work to improve it?

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• Should I provide fallbacks for HTML5/CSS3 elements in a web page at this point?

  - by Abluescarab

  I'm wondering if I should bother providing a fallback for HTML5 tags and attributes and CSS3 styling at this point in time. I know that there's probably still a lot of people out there who use older versions of browsers and HTML5/CSS3 are still fairly new. I read this article: Should I use non-standard tags in a HTML page for highlighting words? and one answer mentioned that people kind of "cheat" with older browsers by using the new tags and attributes, but styling them in CSS to ensure they show up right. This question: Relevance of HTML5: Is now the time? was asked about two years ago and I don't know how relevant it is anymore. For example, I want to use the placeholder and required attributes in a web form I'm building and it has no labels to show what each <input> is. How do I handle this, or do I bother?

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• Biggest mistake you've ever made

  - by Rogue Coder

  Similar to the question I read on Server Fault, what is the biggest mistake you've ever made in an IT related position. Some examples from friends: I needed to do some work on a production site so I decided to copy over the live database to the beta site. Pretty standard, but when I went to the beta site it was still pulling out-of-date info. OOPS! I had copied the beta database over to the live site! Thank god for backups. And for me, I created a form for an event that was to be held during a specific time range. Participants would fill out the form for a chance to win, and we would send the event organizers a CSV from the database. I went into the database, and found ONLY 1 ENTRY, MINE. Upon investigating, it appears as though I forgot an auto increment key, and because of the server setup there was no way to recover the lost data. I am aware this question is similar to ones on Stack Overflow but the ones I found seemed to receive generic answers instead of actual stories :) What is the biggest coding error/mistake ever…

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• Displaying performance data per engine subsystem

  - by liortal

  Our game (Android based) traces how long it takes to do the world logic updates, and how long it takes to a render a frame to the device screen. These traces are collected every frame, and displayed at a constant interval (currently every 1 second). I've seen games where on-screen data of various engine subsystems is displayed, with the time they consume (either in text) or as horizontal colored bars. I am wondering how to implement such a feature?

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• How to handle mutiple API calls using javascript/jquery

  - by James Privett

  I need to build a service that will call multiple API's at the same time and then output the results on the page (Think of how a price comparison site works for example). The idea being that as each API call completes the results are sent to the browser immediately and the page would get progressively bigger until all process are complete. Because these API calls may take several seconds each to return I would like to do this via javascript/jquery in order to create a better user experience. I have never done anything like this before using javascript/jquery so I was wondering if there was any frameworks/advice that anyone would be willing to share.

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• airplanes operating system and choice of programing language

  - by adhg

  I was wondring if anyone knows what is the operating system used in commercial airplanes (say Boeing or Airbus). Also, what is the (preferred) real-time programing language? I heard that Ada is used in Boeing, so my question is - why Ada? what are the criteria the Boeing-guys had to choose this language? (I guess Java wouldn't be a great choice if the exactly in lift off the garbage collector wakes up). Thanks!

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• Get Hands On with Raspberry Pi via Free OS-Building Course

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  Cambridge University is now offering a free 12-segment course that will guide you through building an OS from scratch for the tiny Raspberry Pi development board–learn the ins and outs of basic OS design on the cheap. You’ll need a Raspberry Pi board, a computer running Windows, OS X, or Linux, and an SD card, as well as a small amount of free software. The 12-part tutorial starts you off with basic OS theory and then walks you through basic control of the board, graphics manipulation, and, finally, creating a command line interface for your new operating system. Hit up the link below to read more and check out the lessons. Baking Pi – Operating Systems Development HTG Explains: What The Windows Event Viewer Is and How You Can Use It HTG Explains: How Windows Uses The Task Scheduler for System Tasks HTG Explains: Why Do Hard Drives Show the Wrong Capacity in Windows?

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• Is there a way to procedurally generate the history of a world?

  - by pdusen

  I am somewhat intrigued by the diagram found here representing 1800 years of cultural history in an imaginary world some guy created. This sort of thing would seem to have strong applications for game development, insofar as world design. It looks like he did this diagram by hand. What I'm interested in is seeing if there is a way to create this sort of diagram programatically. If you were tasked with generating diagrams in the style of the above from random values, how would you go about it? Are there any particular data structures or algorithms that you would consider?

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• Creating an expandable, cross-platform compatible program "core".

  - by Thomas Clayson

  Hi there. Basically the brief is relatively simple. We need to create a program core. An engine that will power all sorts of programs with a large number of distinct potential applications and deployments. The core will be an analytics and algorithmic processor which will essentially take user-specific input and output scenarios based on the information it gets, whilst recording this information for reporting. It needs to be cross platform compatible. Something that can have platform specific layers put on top which can interface with the core. It also needs to be able to be expandable, for instance, modular with developers being able to write "add-ons" or "extensions" which can alter the function of the end program and can use the core to its full extent. (For instance, a good example of what I'm looking to create is a browser. It has its main core, the web-kit engine, for instance, and then on top of this is has a platform-specific GUI and can also have add-ons and extensions which can change the behavior of the program.) Our problem is that the extensions need to interface directly with the main core and expand/alter that functionality rather than the platform specific "layer". So, given that I have no experience in this whatsoever (I have a PHP background and recently objective-c), where should I start, and is there any knowledge/wisdom you can impart on me please? Thanks for all the help and advice you can give me. :) If you need any more explanation just ask. At the moment its in the very early stages of development, so we're just researching all possible routes of development. Thanks a lot

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• Mac mini 2012 graphic upgrade for UE4 Unity3D Blender

  - by DaCrAn

  I have a mac mini (late 2012) i7, 16gb ram Vengeance graphic card intel HD4000. I buy recently a thunderbolt expansion PCIE whit support a graphic card PCIE 2.0 16x whit space for Full leght card. I have dubts about what graphic card gona give me the best results for using the Unreal Engine 4 UE4 or Unity3D, and Blender. My badget cover a Nvidia Quadro K4000 3gb or ATI Firepro W7000 4gb. Any recomendation? What professional graphic card can be better for design games in 3D? Thanks. DaCrAn

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• Infix vs Prefix Notation - Which do you prefer?

  - by Jetti

  I have been learning Clojure and looking at Scheme and CL which introduced me to the world of prefix notation. At first I didn't like it but it is still starting to grow on me. To be honest though, there are still long calculations that are difficult for me to understand but I think that is an issue of me needing more exposure/practice and I'll get it. But that leads me to the question: Which type of notation do you prefer and why?

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• Tangent basis calculation problem

  - by Kirill Daybov

  I have the problem with seams with calculating a tangent basis in my application. I'm using a seems to be right algorithm, but it gives wrong result on the seams. What am I doing wrong? Is there a problem with an algorithm, or with the model? The designer says that our models with our normal maps are rendered correctly in Xoliul Shader Plugin in 3Ds Max, so there should be a way to calculate correct tangent basis programmatically. Here's an example of the problem I'm talking about. Steps, I've already taken: - Tried different algorithm (from Gamasutra, I can't post the link because I don't have enough reputation yet). I got wrong, much worse, results; - Tried to average basis vectors for vertexes are used in multiple faces; - Tried to average basis vectors for vertexes that have same world coordinates (this would be obviously wrong solution, but I've tried it anyway).

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• Is it better to build HTML Code string on the server or on the client side?

  - by Ionut

  The result of the following process should be a html form. This form's structure varies from one to user. For example there might be a different number of rows or there may be the need for rowspan and colspan. When the user chooses to see this table an ajax call is made to the server where the structure of the table is decided from the database. Then I have to create the html code for the table structure which will be inserted in the DOM via JavaScript. The following problem comes to my mind: Where should I build the HTML code which will be inserted in the DOM? On the server side or should I send some parameters in the ajax call method and process the structure there? Therefore the main question involves good practice when it comes to decide between Server side processing or client side processing. Thank you!

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• Naming: objectAction or actionObject?

  - by DocSalvage

  The question, Stored procedure Naming conventions?, and Joel's excellent Making Wrong Code Look Wrong article come closest to addressing my question, but I'm looking for a more general set of criteria to use in deciding how to name modules containing code (classes, objects, methods, functions, widgets, or whatever). English (my only human language) is structured as action-object (i.e closeFile, openFile, saveFile) and since almost all computer languages are based on English, this is the most common convention. However, in trying to keep related code close together and still be able to find things, I've found object-action (i.e. fileClose, fileOpen, fileSave) to be very attractive. Quite a number of non-English human languages follow this structure as well. I doubt that one form is universally superior, but when should each be used in the pursuit of helping to make sure bad code looks bad?

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• Is it good to review programs with seniors and boss even if it is working fine?

  - by Himanshu

  In my company, before delivery of any project, my boss asks my seniors to review programs written by me or other team members or sometimes boss also sits with us for review. I think it is a good way of getting knowledge, but sometimes when programs are working fine, they don't work same after review and I need to look again into my program. They says that review helps to optimize program and query execution, but can we prefer optimization over actual functioning of program?

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• Does my JavaScript look big in this?

  - by benhowdle89

  As programmers, you have certain curtains to hide behind with your code. With PHP all of your code is server side preprocessed, so this never see's the light of day as far as the user is concerned. If you have maybe rushed through some code for a deadline, as long as it functions correctly then the user never needs to know how many expletives you've inserted into the comments. However with more and more applications being written for the web, with a desktop feel implemented by AJAX and popular frameworks like jQuery being banded around to every Tom, Dick and Harry, how can a programmer maintain some dignity and hide his/her JavaScript code without it being flaunted like dirty laundry when the users hit Right Click-View Source or Inspect Element. Are there any ways to hide JavaScript application logic/code?

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• How do you author code

  - by garbagecollector

  This is something I was never taught. I have seen alot of different types of authoring styles. I code primarily in Java and Python. I was wondering if there was a standard authoring style or if everything is freestyle. Also if you answer would you mind attaching the style you use to author files that your create at home or at work. I usually just go @author garbagecollector @company garbage inc.

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• Has any language become greatly popular for something other than its intended purpose?

  - by Jon Purdy

  Take this scenario: A programmer creates a language to solve some problem. He then releases this language to help others solve problems like it. Another programmer discovers it's actually much better for some different category of problems. By virtue of this new application, the language then becomes popular for that application primarily. Are there any instances of this actually occurring? Put another way, does the intended purpose of a language have any bearing on how it's actually used, or whether it becomes popular? Is it even important that a language have an advertised purpose?

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