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• Does it make the game more fun when the user is forced to progress thru the levels sequentially rather than letting them pick and play?

  - by BeachRunnerJoe

  Hello. For the first time in my game, I'm stuck with a real design dilemma. I guess that's a good thing ;) I'm building a word puzzle game that has five levels, each with 30 puzzles. Currently, the user has to solve one puzzle at a time before moving to the next. However, I'm finding the user occasionally gets stuck on a puzzle, at which point they can no longer play until they solve it. This is obviously bad because many people will just quit playing the game and delete the app since they get frustrated and can't play any other puzzles until the current puzzle is solved. The only elegant solution I can find to helping the player get unstuck is changing the design of the game to allow the users to pick any puzzle to play at any time. This way, if they get stuck, they can come back to it later and at least they have other puzzles to play in the meantime. It's my opinion, however, that this new flow design doesn't make the game as fun as the original flow design where the player has to complete a puzzle before moving to the next. To me, it's like anything else, when you only have one of something, it's more enjoyable, but when you have 30 of something, it's far less enjoyable. In fact, when I present the user with 30 puzzles to choose from that they need to solve before unlocking the next level, it almost seems as tho I'm making them feel like it's work they have to do. I even had a tester voluntarily tell me that being forced to complete a puzzle before moving to the next is more motivating. My questions are... Do you agree/disagree? Do you have any suggestions for how I can help the player get unstuck? Thanks so much in advance for your thoughts! EDIT: I should mention that I've already considered a few other solutions to helping the user get unstuck, but none of them seem like good ideas. They are... Add more hints: Currently, the user gets two hints per puzzle. If I increase the hint count, it only makes the game more easy and still leaves the possibility of the user getting stuck. Add a "Show Solution" button: This seems like a bad idea because it's my opinion this takes the fun out of the game for many people who would probably otherwise solve the puzzle if they didn't have the quick option to see the solution.

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• Best way to remote restart Ubuntu from Windows machine

  - by robsoft

  Background: I'm looking to put a series of Ubuntu machines into retail locations, they're being used as dumb kiosks to show a series of slides onto large LCD panel TV screens. Once installed, they won't have a keyboard or mouse connected but will have a fixed IP on the local network. Everything is configured to auto-start, no automatic updates, no power saving etc - I think we're pretty-much good to go apart from one thing. I need the retail staff to be able to restart the boxes if a problem arises. We have VNC running (now that we've turned off desktop enhancements!) so that we can remotely get into the machines if we need to, but that's not something we would allow the retail staff to do. The machines are going to be physically 'out of the way' (probably in the ceiling space) so the power button is not easily accessible!. I'd like to have some means of allowing the retail staff to restart the Ubuntu machine, from the desktop of one of their Windows terminals. I don't really want to give them some kind of raw terminal access (the command line will frighten them!) and I don't want them to use VNC (as stated above). Ideally there would be an icon on the Windows desktop, they double-click it, reply to a simple 'are you sure?' prompt, and then the Ubuntu box is told to restart. The Windows side of that won't be a problem, we can write something using Delphi, Python & Qt4, whatever - it's the Ubuntu side of it I'm stuck with. Out of sight/view, could I have a Windows program open a terminal across the network and tell Ubuntu to restart? Is this what SSH could be used for (I have never set that kind of thing up). The Windows programming side isn't really an issue, it's just that I'm a total Ubuntu noob and don't know where to start from the platform point of view. The other thing we considered is also having the machine automatically restart itself at a set time each day (obviously out of store hours!). To me, that seems a bit unnecessary (though forcing a restart once a week/month might be worthwhile). Any thoughts or suggestions? Being able to restart the box on demand across the network is my prime requirement.

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• Many sources of movement in an entity system

  - by Sticky

  I'm fairly new to the idea of entity systems, having read a bunch of stuff (most usefully, this great blog and this answer). Though I'm having a little trouble understanding how something as simple as being able to manipualate the position of an object by an undefined number of sources. That is, I have my entity, which has a position component. I then have some event in the game which tells this entity to move a given distance, in a given time. These events can happen at any time, and will have different values for position and time. The result is that they'd be compounded together. In a traditional OO solution, I'd have some sort of MoveBy class, that contains the distance/time, and an array of those inside my game object class. Each frame, I'd iterate through all the MoveBy, and apply it to the position. If a MoveBy has reached its finish time, remove it from the array. With the entity system, I'm a little confused as how I should replicate this sort of behavior. If there were just one of these at a time, instead of being able to compound them together, it'd be fairly straightforward (I believe) and look something like this: PositionComponent containing x, y MoveByComponent containing x, y, time Entity which has both a PositionComponent and a MoveByComponent MoveBySystem that looks for an entity with both these components, and adds the value of MoveByComponent to the PositionComponent. When the time is reached, it removes the component from that entity. I'm a bit confused as to how I'd do the same thing with many move by's. My initial thoughts are that I would have: PositionComponent, MoveByComponent the same as above MoveByCollectionComponent which contains an array of MoveByComponents MoveByCollectionSystem that looks for an entity with a PositionComponent and a MoveByCollectionComponent, iterating through the MoveByComponents inside it, applying/removing as necessary. I guess this is a more general problem, of having many of the same component, and wanting a corresponding system to act on each one. My entities contain their components inside a hash of component type - component, so strictly have only 1 component of a particular type per entity. Is this the right way to be looking at this? Should an entity only ever have one component of a given type at all times?

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• Analysing SQLBits Feedback

  - by jamiet

  Earlier this week I received all the feedback that people offered on my session at SQLBits 7 in York – “SSIS Dataflow Performance Tuning” (the video is available online if you wish to see it). As you may have gathered from previous posts on this blog and my less-SQLy-focused Wordpress blog I am a big fan of collecting and tracking both personal and public data and session feedback lends itself very well to tracking because it is quantitative rather than qualitative; by that I mean attendees are invited to provide marks out of ten rather than (or, in the case of SQLBits, as well as) written comments. The SQLBits feedback is also useful because they use a consistent format – the same questions are asked each time – this means it is particularly easy to to track whether the scores that people give are trending up or down. I suspect that somewhere the SQLBits organisers have a big Analysis Services cube (ok, perhaps its an Excel pivot table) that allows them to analyse these scores per conference, speaker, track etc.… and there’s no reason that we as session speakers cannot do the same thing. To that end I have started to store my feedback in an Excel spreadsheet of my own which in the interests of transparency is available for public viewing (only a web browser required) on SkyDrive at http://cid-550f681dad532637.office.live.com/view.aspx/Public/Misc/Personal%20SQLBits%20Session%20Feedback.xlsx. I have used a pivot table to aggregate all that feedback and here is a screenshot: I am hereby making a public plea to the SQLBits organisers (on the off-chance that they are reading) to please continue to keep the feedback format consistent in the future and I encourage them to publish all of the feedback in an anonymised form. I would also encourage anyone doing conference speaking to track their conference feedback in the same way that I am doing so that you get an insight into whether or not you are improving over time. It is not difficult to setup and maintaining it as you do more sessions takes very little effort. Storing feedback data like this leads me to wider thoughts about well-known conventions and data format standardisation. Let’s imagine a utopia where there were a standard set of questions for capturing session feedback that were leveraged at every conference regardless of subject matter, location or culture; that would give rise to immense cross-conference and cross-discipline analysis – the data analyst in me goes giddy at the thought of it. It is scenarios like this that drive my interest both in data formats such as iCalendar, microformats and RDF, and in emerging movements such as the semantic web and linked data, all things which I have written about in the past. I don’t know whether we will ever reach the stage where every piece of data has structured, descriptive metadata associated with it but I live in hope. @Jamiet

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• Syncing client and server CRUD operations using json and php

  - by Justin

  I'm working on some code to sync the state of models between client (being a javascript application) and server. Often I end up writing redundant code to track the client and server objects so I can map the client supplied data to the server models. Below is some code I am thinking about implementing to help. What I don't like about the below code is that this method won't handle nested relationships very well, I would have to create multiple object trackers. One work around is for each server model after creating or loading, simply do $model->clientId = $clientId; IMO this is a nasty hack and I want to avoid it. Adding a setCientId method to all my model object would be another way to make it less hacky, but this seems like overkill to me. Really clientIds are only good for inserting/updating data in some scenarios. I could go with a decorator pattern but auto generating a proxy class seems a bit involved. I could use a generic proxy class that uses a __call function to allow for original object data to be accessed, but this seems wrong too. Any thoughts or comments? $clientData = '[{name: "Bob", action: "update", id: 1, clientId: 200}, {name:"Susan", action:"create", clientId: 131} ]'; $jsonObjs = json_decode($clientData); $objectTracker = new ObjectTracker(); $objectTracker->trackClientObjs($jsonObjs); $query = $this->em->createQuery("SELECT x FROM Application_Model_User x WHERE x.id IN (:ids)"); $query->setParameters("ids",$objectTracker->getClientSpecifiedServerIds()); $models = $query->getResults(); //Apply client data to server model foreach ($models as $model) { $clientModel = $objectTracker->getClientJsonObj($model->getId()); ... } //Create new models and persist foreach($objectTracker->getNewClientObjs() as $newClientObj) { $model = new Application_Model_User(); .... $em->persist($model); $objectTracker->trackServerObj($model); } $em->flush(); $resourceResponse = $objectTracker->createResourceResponse(); //Id mappings will be an associtave array representing server id resources with client side // id. //This method Dosen't seem to flexible if we want to return additional data with each resource... //Would have to modify the returned data structure, seems like tight coupling... //Ex return value: //[{clientId: 200, id:1} , {clientId: 131, id: 33}];

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• Investment scheme for a PC game the project

  - by Alex Kamen

  Good day everyone, I am working on a PC game project that has 3 phases planned, micro, macro and mmo versions [if confused, see a brief description at the bottom]. I have found a potential investor for the micro version of the game, but naturally, he requested a detailed plan of how the game will pay back. And the problem is that micro version itself is not supposed to be monetized much, other than some ads and limited in-game currency utilization. The idea is that with this combat demo already at hand, it should be possible to get a really large enough investment (millions of dollars) and use it to pay back the initial small one (thousands of dollars) and take the project into macro phase, which will really make profit. This way, everybody is going to win, provided that I can deliver the end-product. Yet while I am confident of that both the conception of the macro and the real game-play of the micro versions are going to be appealing, I don’t know how to obtain any guarantee of that I will be able to get funded once I have the prototype ready. And without that, I won’t receive the funds for the prototype in the first place! To summarize, my question is: how to figure out my future possibilities of getting funded once I have combat demo out, basically “whom to write to and what”. Ideally, I would like some sort of a preliminary agreement with a game publisher, something that would basically state “If the developer provides the product in time and in quality corresponding to the specifications given, the publisher guarantees to allocate funds for distribution and further development, thereby acquiring the right to X part of all future profits”. Does this sound sane? It’s just that I don’t want to sell all of my rights out straight away by taking a big outside investment while the project is in such early stage. I would appreciate if you would share your thoughts on this kind of scheme, and be sure to ask questions as I am sure I must have forgotten to mention a ton of important things, like the fact that initial funds are going to be spent on outsourcing (living in Siberia is really just great). [here’s a brief outline of what each version will feature] [micro] 1) turn based tactical combat rules 2) character development 3) arena/tournament system [macro] 4) ai-ruled dynamic interactive worlds 5) global map adventuring 6) strategic rpg + god simulator gameplay [mmo] 7) Persistent worlds system 8) Social structures system (“guilds/clans”) 9) god-simulation on the mmo scale P.S. Obviously, these features are incremental, so that mmo version has all 9.

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• Managing accounts on a private website for a real-life community

  - by Smudge

  I'm looking at setting-up a walled-in website for a real-life community of people, and I was wondering if anyone has any experience with managing member accounts for this kind of thing. Some conditions that must be met: This community has a set list of real-life members, each of whom would be eligible for one account on the website. We don't expect or require that they all sign-up. It is purely opt-in, but we anticipate that many of them would be interested in the services we are setting up. Some of the community members emails are known, but some of them have fallen off the grid over the years, so ideally there would be a way for them to get back in touch with us through the public-facing side of the site. (And we'd want to manually verify the identity of anyone who does so). Their names are known, and for similar projects in the past we have assigned usernames derived from their real-life names. This time, however, we are open to other approaches, such as letting them specify their own username or getting rid of usernames entirely. The specific web technology we will use (e.g. Drupal, Joomla, etc) is not really our concern right now -- I am more interested in how this can be approached in the abstract. Our database already includes the full member roster, so we can email many of them generated links to a page where they can create an account. (And internally we can require that these accounts be paired with a known member). Should we have them specify their own usernames, or are we fine letting them use their registered email address to log-in? Are there any paradigms for walled-in community portals that help address security issues if, for example, one of their email accounts is compromised? We don't anticipate attempted break-ins being much of a threat, because nothing about this community is high-profile, but we do want to address security concerns. In addition, we want to make the sign-up process as painless for the members as possible, especially given the fact that we can't just make sign-ups open to anyone. I'm interested to hear your thoughts and suggestions! Thanks!

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• Should accessible members of an internal class be internal too?

  - by Jeff Mercado

  I'm designing a set of APIs for some applications I'm working on. I want to keep the code style consistent in all the classes I write but I've found that there are a few inconsistencies that I'm introducing and I don't know what the best way to resolve them is. My example here is specific to C# but this would apply to any language with similar mechanisms. There are a few classes that I need for implementation purposes that I don't necessarily want to expose in the API so I make them internal whereever needed. Generally what I would do is design the class as I normally would (e.g., make members public/protected/private where necessary) and change the visibility level of the class itself to internal. So I might have a few classes that look like this: internal interface IMyItem { ItemSet AddTo(ItemSet set); } internal class _SmallItem : IMyItem { private readonly /* parameters */; public _SmallItem(/* small item parameters */) { /* ... */ } public ItemSet AddTo(ItemSet set) { /* ... */ } } internal abstract class _CompositeItem: IMyItem { private readonly /* parameters */; public _CompositeItem(/* composite item parameters */) { /* ... */ } public abstract object UsefulInformation { get; } protected void HelperMethod(/* parameters */) { /* ... */ } } internal class _BigItem : _CompositeItem { private readonly /* parameters */; public _BigItem(/* big item parameters */) { /* ... */ } public override object UsefulInformation { get { /* ... */ } } public ItemSet AddTo(ItemSet set) { /* ... */ } } In another generated class (part of a parser/scanner), there is a structure that contains fields for all possible values it can represent. The class generated is internal too but I have control over the visibility of the members and decided to make them internal as well. internal partial struct ValueType { internal string String; internal ItemSet ItemSet; internal IMyItem MyItem; } internal class TokenValue { internal static int EQ(ItemSetScanner scanner) { /* ... */ } internal static int NAME(ItemSetScanner scanner, string value) { /* ... */ } internal static int VALUE(ItemSetScanner scanner, string value) { /* ... */ } //... } To me, this feels odd because the first set of classes, I didn't necessarily have to make some members public, they very well could have been made internal. internal members of an internal type can only be accessed internally anyway so why make them public? I just don't like the idea that the way I write my classes has to change drastically (i.e., change all uses of public to internal) just because the class is internal. Any thoughts on what I should do here? It makes sense to me that I might want to make some members of a class declared public, internal. But it's less clear to me when the class is declared internal.

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• You probably have enough

  - by BuckWoody

  This a decidedly non-technical post, and even a little preachy. I post it here because you, the technical professional, are the perfect audience for it. I have enough stuff. I never think so, of course, but I do. I don’t consider myself rich, but if you have a comfortable place to sleep,  enough food to eat and you can plan for your future, you are rich. And when we are rich enough to have “enough” stuff, that usually means we have too much stuff. Stuff costs money that could be put to better use, stuff needs painting, cleaning, fueling, feeding, storage and caring for. Stuff is a burden. So I decided a few years back that I had enough stuff. We gave away a lot of things, and we don’t buy any new (meaning we didn’t have one before)  things – only replacement things. We’d rather “do something” than “have something”. But even so, when birthdays, anniversaries and Christmas rolled around, we got more stuff. So I asked all of my friends and relatives to do something for me.   I ask folks that want to give me a gift (for whatever reason) to donate the price they would have paid for the gift to a charity they care about. This does a few things: They have to find a charity to care about The fact that I made it through a calendar year now actually means something Someone else gets the help they need Everybody feels better No, I’m not saying these things so you’ll think I’m a wonderful person - the reason I’m posting this here is that as a technical professional you probably have enough stuff like I do. So I ask you to try this out. Try it for one birthday, or one Holiday, or even for a year. I can promise this: it will change your life, the life of the person who gives the gift, and the person’s life who receives it. If you do try it, I’d love to have a comment here on your thoughts.

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• Designing Snake AI

  - by Ronald

  I'm new to this gamedev stackechange but have used the math and cs sites before. So, I'm in a competition to create AI for a snake that will compete with 3 other snakes in 5 minute rounds where the rules are much like the traditional Nokia snake game except that there are 4 snakes, the board is 50x50 and there are a number of small obstacles on the field. Like the Nokia game, your snake grows when you get to the fruit and if you crash into yourself, another snake or the wall you die. The game runs with a 50ms delay between moves and the server sends the new game state every 50ms which the code must analyze and what not and output the next move. The winner is the snake who had the longest length at any point in the game. Tie breakers are decided by kills. So far what I have done is implemented an A* graph search from each snake to determine if my snake is the closest to the apple and if it is, it goes for the apple. Otherwise, I made a neat little algorithm to determine the emptiest area of the board, which my snake goes for, to anticipate the next apple. Other than this I have some small survivability checks to ensure my snake isn't walking into a trap that it can't get out and if it does get stuck, I have something to give it a better chance of getting out. ... Anyway, I've tested my snake on a test server and it does quite well. Generally, my strategy of only going for the apple when its a sure thing and finding space when its not makes it grow faster than any other snakes (some snakes do a similar thing but often just go to the middle or a corner) sometimes it wins these trial games but is more often than not beaten by the same snake who seems to have the edge on survivability(my snake grows quicker but then dies somehow and this other snake just plods slowly along and wins on consistency. So I was wondering about any ideas anyone has to try and improve my snake. Or maybe ideas at a new approach to take. My functions and classes are good so changes that might seem drastic shouldn't be too bad. I encourage all ideas. Any thoughts ??

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• Is return-type-(only)-polymorphism in Haskell a good thing?

  - by dainichi

  One thing that I've never quite come to terms with in Haskell is how you can have polymorphic constants and functions whose return type cannot be determined by their input type, like class Foo a where foo::Int -> a Some of the reasons that I do not like this: Referential transparency: "In Haskell, given the same input, a function will always return the same output", but is that really true? read "3" return 3 when used in an Int context, but throws an error when used in a, say, (Int,Int) context. Yes, you can argue that read is also taking a type parameter, but the implicitness of the type parameter makes it lose some of its beauty in my opinion. Monomorphism restriction: One of the most annoying things about Haskell. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the whole reason for the MR is that computation that looks shared might not be because the type parameter is implicit. Type defaulting: Again one of the most annoying things about Haskell. Happens e.g. if you pass the result of functions polymorphic in their output to functions polymorphic in their input. Again, correct me if I'm wrong, but this would not be necessary without functions whose return type cannot be determined by their input type (and polymorphic constants). So my question is (running the risk of being stamped as a "discussion quesion"): Would it be possible to create a Haskell-like language where the type checker disallows these kinds of definitions? If so, what would be the benefits/disadvantages of that restriction? I can see some immediate problems: If, say, 2 only had the type Integer, 2/3 wouldn't type check anymore with the current definition of /. But in this case, I think type classes with functional dependencies could come to the rescue (yes, I know that this is an extension). Furthermore, I think it is a lot more intuitive to have functions that can take different input types, than to have functions that are restricted in their input types, but we just pass polymorphic values to them. The typing of values like [] and Nothing seems to me like a tougher nut to crack. I haven't thought of a good way to handle them. I doubt I am the first person to have had thoughts like these. Does anybody have links to good discussions about this Haskell design decision and the pros/cons of it?

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• Does it make the game more fun when the user is forced to progress through the levels sequentially rather than letting them pick and play?

  - by BeachRunnerJoe

  Hello. For the first time in my game, I'm stuck with a real design dilemma. I guess that's a good thing ;) I'm building a word puzzle game that has five levels, each with 30 puzzles. Currently, the user has to solve one puzzle at a time before moving to the next. However, I'm finding the user occasionally gets stuck on a puzzle, at which point they can no longer play until they solve it. This is obviously bad because many people will probably just quit playing the game and delete the app. The only elegant solution I can find to helping the player get unstuck is changing the design of the game to allow the users to pick any puzzle to play at any time. This way, if they get stuck, they can come back to it later and at least they have other puzzles to play in the meantime. It's my opinion, however, that this new flow design doesn't make the game as fun as the original flow design where the player has to complete a puzzle before moving to the next. To me, it's like anything else, when you only have one of something, it's more enjoyable, but when you have 30 of something, it's far less enjoyable. In fact, when I present the user with 30 puzzles to choose from, I'm concerned I might be making them feel like it's a lot of work they have to do and that's bad. I even had a tester voluntarily tell me that being forced to complete a puzzle before moving to the next is actually motivating. My questions are... Do you agree/disagree? Do you have any suggestions for how I can help the player get unstuck? Thanks so much in advance for your thoughts! EDIT: I should mention that I've already considered a few other solutions to helping the user get unstuck, but none of them seem like good ideas. They are... Add more hints: Currently, the user gets two hints per puzzle. If I increase the hint count, it only makes the game more easy and still leaves the possibility of the user getting stuck. Add a "Show Solution" button: This seems like a bad idea because it's my opinion this takes the fun out of the game for many people who would probably otherwise solve the puzzle if they didn't have the quick option to see the solution.

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• How to refactor a method which breaks "The law of Demeter" principle?

  - by dreza

  I often find myself breaking this principle (not intentially, just through bad design). However recently I've seen a bit of code that I'm not sure of the best approach. I have a number of classes. For simplicity I've taken out the bulk of the classes methods etc public class Paddock { public SoilType Soil { get; private set; } // a whole bunch of other properties around paddock information } public class SoilType { public SoilDrainageType Drainage { get; private set; } // a whole bunch of other properties around soil types } public class SoilDrainageType { // a whole bunch of public properties that expose soil drainage values public double GetProportionOfDrainage(SoilType soil, double blockRatio) { // This method does a number of calculations using public properties // exposed off SoilType as well as the blockRatio value in some conditions } } In the code I have seen in a number of places calls like so paddock.Soil.Drainage.GetProportionOfDrainage(paddock.Soil, paddock.GetBlockRatio()); or within the block object itself in places it's Soil.Drainage.GetProportionOfDrainage(this.Soil, this.GetBlockRatio()); Upon reading this seems to break "The Law of Demeter" in that I'm chaining together these properties to access the method I want. So my thought in order to adjust this was to create public methods on SoilType and Paddock that contains wrappers i.e. on paddock it would be public class Paddock { public double GetProportionOfDrainage() { return Soil.GetProportionOfDrainage(this.GetBlockRatio()); } } on the SoilType it would be public class SoilType { public double GetProportionOfDrainage(double blockRatio) { return Drainage.GetProportionOfDrainage(this, blockRatio); } } so now calls where it used would be simply // used outside of paddock class where we can access instances of Paddock paddock.GetProportionofDrainage() or this.GetProportionOfDrainage(); // if used within Paddock class This seemed like a nice alternative. However now I have a concern over how would I enforce this usage and stop anyone else from writing code such as paddock.Soil.Drainage.GetProportionOfDrainage(paddock.Soil, paddock.GetBlockRatio()); rather than just paddock.GetProportionOfDrainage(); I need the properties to remain public at this stage as they are too ingrained in usage throughout the code block. However I don't really want a mixture of accessing the method on DrainageType directly as that seems to defeat the purpose altogether. What would be the appropiate design approach in this situation? I can provide more information as required to better help in answers. Is my thoughts on refactoring this even appropiate or should is it best to leave it as is and use the property chaining to access the method as and when required?

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• reference list for non-IT driven algorithmic patterns

  - by Quicker

  I am looking for a reference list for non-IT driven algorithmic patterns (which still can be helped with IT implementations of IT). An Example List would be: name; short desc; reference Travelling Salesman; find the shortest possible route on a multiple target path; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem Ressource Disposition (aka Regulation); Distribute a limited/exceeding input on a given number output receivers based on distribution rules; http://database-programmer.blogspot.de/2010/12/critical-analysis-of-algorithm-sproc.html If there is no such list, but you instantly think of something specific, please 'put it on the desk'. Maybe I can compile something out of the input I get here (actually I am very frustrated as I did not find any such list via research by myself). Details on Scoping: I found it very hard to formulate what I want in a way everything is out that I do not need (which may be the issue why I did not find anything at google). There is a database centric definition for what I am looking for in the section 'Processes' of the second example link. That somehow fits, but the database focus sort of drifts away from the pattern thinking, which I have in mind. So here are my own thoughts around what's in and what's out: I am NOT looking for a foundational algo ref list, which is implemented as basis for any programming language. Eg. the php reference describes substr and strlen. That implements algos, but is not what I am looking for. the problem the algo does address would even exist, if there were no computers (or other IT components) the main focus of the algo is NOT to help other algo's chances are high, that there are implementions of the solution or any workaround without any IT support out there in the world however the algo could be benefitialy implemented/fully supported by a software application = means: the problem of the algo has to be addressed anyway, but running an algo implementation with software automates the process (that is why I posted it on stackoverflow and not somewhere else) typically such algo implementations have more than one input field value and more than one output field value - which implies it could not be implemented as simple function (which is fixed to produce not more than one output value) in a normalized data model often times such algo implementation outputs span accross multiple rows (sometimes multiple tables), whereby the number of output rows depends on the input paraters and rows in the table(s) at start time - which implies that any algo implementation/procedure must interact with a database (read and/or write) I am mainly looking for patterns, not for specific implementations. Example: The Travelling Salesman assumes any coordinates, however it does not say: You need a table targets with fields x and y. - however sometimes descriptions are focussed on examples with specific implementations very much - no worries, as long as the pattern gets clear

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• git workflow for separating commits

  - by gman

  Best practices with git (or any VCS for that matter) is supposed to be to have each commit do the smallest change possible. But, that doesn't match how I work at all. For example I recently I needed to add some code that checked if the version of a plugin to my system matched the versions the system supports. If not print a warning that the plugin probably requires a newer version of the system. While writing that code I decided I wanted the warnings to be colorized. I already had code that colorized error message so I edited that code. That code was in the startup module of one entry to the system. The plugin checking code was in another path that didn't use that entry point so I moved the colorization code into a separate module so both entry points could use it. On top of that, in order to test my plugin checking code works I need to go edit UI/UX code to make sure it tells the user "You need to upgrade". When all is said and done I've edited 10 files, changed dependencies, the 2 entry points are now both dependant on the colorization code, etc etc. Being lazy I'd probably just git add . && git commit -a the whole thing. Spending 10-15 minutes trying to manipulate all those changes into 3 to 6 smaller commits seems frustrating which brings up the question Are there workflows that work for you or that make this process easier? I don't think I can some how magically always modify stuff in the perfect order since I don't know that order until after I start modifying and seeing what comes up. I know I can git add --interactive etc but it seems, at least for me, kind of hard to know what I'm grabbing exactly the correct changes so that each commit is actually going to work. Also, since the changes are sitting in the current directory it doesn't seem like it would be easy to run tests on each commit to make sure it's going to work short of stashing all the changes. And then, if it were to stash and then run the tests, if I missed a few lines or accidentally added a few too many lines I have no idea how I'd easily recover from that. (as in either grab the missing lines from the stash and then put the rest back or take the few extra lines I shouldn't have grabbed and shove them into the stash for the next commit. Thoughts? Suggestions? PS: I hope this is an appropriate question. The help says development methodologies and processes

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• Help recovering broken OS (permissions issue)

  - by Guandalino

  (At the bottom there is an important update.) I was doing experiments in order to backup a remote account to my local system, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. I'm not confident with duplicity and probably, due to wrong syntax, some local files have been replaced with remote files. This is just a supposition, I'm not sure this is the real cause of OS corruption. The corruption happened after experimenting with backups, so I think I did something wrong at this regard. I was aware there was a problem when I tried to access a command using sudo: $ sudo ls sudo: unable to open /etc/sudoers: Permission denied sudo: no valid sudoers sources found, quitting sudo: unable to initialize policy plugin This is how /etc/sudoers looks like: $ ls -ald /etc/sudoers -r--r----- 1 root root 788 Oct 2 18:30 /etc/sudoers At this point I tried to reboot and now this is the message I get: The system is running in low graphics mode. Your screen, graphics card and input device settings could not be detected correctly. You will need to configure these yourself. I tried to follow the wizard to configure these settings, but without luck (the system prevents me going on when I press "Next"). The thing that makes me a bit less worried is that all the data on the disk seems readable and I'm able to access them using a live cd. I run memtest and RAM seems to be OK. Do you have any idea about how to recover my system? I'm very glad to provide further information, just let me know what info could be helpful. UPDATE. The issue is about wrong permissions and this is how I discovered: I mounted the root partition of the broken OS on /mnt/broken/ (live CD) and did ls /mnt/broken/. I got a permission denied error, while I expected to have the directory listing. I had to do sudo ls /mnt/broken/ and this worked. Thus without having root permission via sudo it's impossible to access the root of broken os. The current output of ls -ld /mnt/broken/ is: drwxr-x--- 29 1000 812 4096 2012-12-08 21:58 /mnt/broken Any thoughts on how to restore the old (working) set of permissions?

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• How do I keep user input and rendering independent of the implementation environment?

  - by alex

  I'm writing a Tetris clone in JavaScript. I have a fair amount of experience in programming in general, but am rather new to game development. I want to separate the core game code from the code that would tie it to one environment, such as the browser. My quick thoughts led me to having the rendering and input functions external to my main game object. I could pass the current game state to the rendering method, which could render using canvas, elements, text, etc. I could also map input to certain game input events, such as move piece left, rotate piece clockwise, etc. I am having trouble designing how this should be implemented in my object. Should I pass references to functions that the main object will use to render and process user input? For example... var TetrisClone = function(renderer, inputUpdate) { this.renderer = renderer || function() {}; this.inputUpdate = input || function() {}; this.state = {}; }; TetrisClone.prototype = { update: function() { // Get user input via function passed to constructor. var inputEvents = this.inputUpdate(); // Update game state. // Render the current game state via function passed to constructor. this.renderer(this.state); } }; var renderer = function(state) { // Render blocks to browser page. } var inputEvents = {}; var charCodesToEvents = { 37: "move-piece-left" /* ... */ }; document.addEventListener("keypress", function(event) { inputEvents[event.which] = true; }); var inputUpdate = function() { var translatedEvents = [], event, translatedEvent; for (event in inputEvents) { if (inputEvents.hasOwnProperty(event)) { translatedEvent = charCodesToEvents[event]; translatedEvents.push(translatedEvent); } } inputEvents = {}; return translatedEvents; } var game = new TetrisClone(renderer, inputUpdate); Is this a good game design? How would you modify this to suit best practice in regard to making a game as platform/input independent as possible?

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• How do I prevent Ubuntu gradually slowing down to a stop?

  - by user29165

  I really do not know what is causing the problem of my desktop environment (D.E.) gradually slowing down. It seems to happen in Gnome 3.2, LXDE, XFCE, and KDE. I am running Ubuntu 11.10 and this problem started happening from a fresh install. I have noticed that if I restart Gnome or otherwise re-log-in with any of the D.E.s the speed resets to normal. I don't seem to have and memory leaks that account for it and there are not any processes that are using excessive CPU cycles. Due to the symptoms I am guessing that there is an underlying package that interacts with all D.E.s that is the source of the problem. Just to clarify, in extreme situations, if I let the slowdown continue without a restart of the D.E. my system will finally get to a point where everything, even my clock, freezes. The time over which Gnome slows down (noticeably after 17 hrs) is much less than LXDE, or XFCE but eventually they freeze as well. I didn't mention Unity since I haven't used it enough to verify the problem, but I don't see why it should be different. Just in case this is relevant, I Suspend my computer rather than turn it off. I do this because of the greatly reduced load time and the 17 hrs I stated above is actual up-time, not time where the D.E. is actually active. However, the slow down does not seem to be affected by how long the computer has been in suspend mode. I know that it is possible that this problem is due to an interaction between two or more of the applications that I use and as such it may not be able to be duplicated by others. In the end I am just wondering (a) are other people experiencing this issue and (b) does anyone have some advice on where to start looking for a solution if one is not already known. I am even open to the idea of switching to the beta release of 12.04 if anyone thinks it will solve the problem. Edit: I took a video of my latest freeze that you can watch at http://youtu.be/flKUqUzCmdE, sorry about the audio. Edit: Since that video I checked my memory for errors and tried installing the proprietary video drivers. No memory errors were found and the proprietary video drivers made the display unusable so I had to uninstall them. Any thoughts?

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• Is it smart to take a year off from school to get experience?

  - by user134147

  firstly I apologize if this question is not appropriate for the site, but I've seen other similar (though slightly deviant) questions on this sight before and I know the people here are the most qualified to answer my question. Anyways, I'm currently between my sophomore and junior years at a 4 year university, and after a bit of deliberation I've decided on computer science as a major (BA, by the way, as a BS would require me to stay at least an extra year the way our program is set up). I've been interested now in programming for a few months and I've developed a passion for it in a very short time. I began learning C++, migrating to Java recently when I learned my school focuses on this language. Now, I should mention that the concept of higher education has never sat well with me, so part of my motivation for wanting to take time off is to truly challenge myself and see what I can accomplish when I actually try at something. The autodidact in me finds it difficult to focus on my passions while trying to keep a high GPA in unrelated classes. However, I understand the times we live in and therefore would plan to complete my degree after this year. So my question is whether or not the skills I learn in a year off from college could justify the time off from school. Unfortunately, I don't believe I know enough yet to gain any professional experience (internship, etc.) so I would mostly focus my time on learning Java and another language, possibly Wordpress (to gain an understanding of web programming concepts as I have not yet decided what field I want to get into, and to make some money to fund my off-year), and to delve into security concepts, which also interest me. I'm hoping I could work on projects, such as simple applications or contributions to open source software during this time to enhance my resume once I do finish school, so I can find a job out of college easier. I do not want to be the new hire who knows nothing beyond the concepts of his Java textbooks. Does anyone have any input about these thoughts of mine, or any ideas for where I should focus my studies or how high I might set the bar for my work? Thanks a lot everyone!

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• Integrating with a payment provider; Proper and robust OOP approach

  - by ExternalUse

  History We are currently using a so called redirect model for our online payments (where you send the payer to a payment gateway, where he inputs his payment details - the gateway will then return him to a success/failure callback page). That's easy and straight-forward, but unfortunately quite inconvenient and at times confusing for our customers (leaving the site, changing their credit card details with an additional login on another site etc). Intention & Problem description We are now intending to switch to an integrated approach using an exchange of XML requests and responses. My problem is on how to cater with all (or rather most) of the things that may happen during processing - bearing in mind that normally simplicity is robust whereas complexity is fragile. Examples User abort: The user inputs Credit Card details and hits submit. An XML message to the provider's gateway is sent and waiting for response. The user hits "stop" in his browser or closes the window. ignore_user_abort() in PHP may be an option - but is that reliable? might it be better to redirect the user to a "please wait"-page, that in turn opens an AJAX or other request to the actual processor that does not rely on the connection? Database goes away sounds over-complicated, but with e.g. a webserver in the States and a DB in the UK, it has happened and will happen again: User clicks together his order, payment request has been sent to the provider but the response cannot be stored in the database. What approach could I use, using PHP to sort of start an SQL like "Transaction" that only at the very end gets committed or rolled back, depending on the individual steps? Should then neither commit or roll back have happened, I could sort of "lock" the user to prevent him from paying again or to improperly account for payments - but how? And what else do I need to consider technically? None of the integration examples of e.g. Worldpay, Realex or SagePay offer any insight, and neither Google or my search terms were good enough to find somebody else's thoughts on this. Thank you very much for any insight on how you would approach this!

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• Should I use my own public API on my site (via JS)?

  - by newboyhun

  First of all, this question is far more different other 'public api questions' like this: Should a website use its own public API?, second, sorry for my English. You can find the question summarized at the bottom of this question. What I want to achieve is a big website with a public api, so who like programming (like me) and likes my website, can replicate my website's data with a much better approach (of course with some restrictions). Almost everything could be used by the public API. Because of this, I was thinking about making the whole website AJAX driven. There would be parts of the API which would be limited only to my website (domain), like login, registering. There would be only an INTERFACE on the client side, which would use the public and private API to make this interface working. The website would be ONLY CLIENT SIDE, well, I mean, the website would only use AJAX to use the api. How do I imagine this? The website would be like a mobile application, the application only sending a request to a webserver, which returns a json, the application parses it, and uses it to advance in the application. (e.g.: login) My thoughts: Pros: The whole website is built up by javascript, this means I don't need to transfer the html to the client, saving bandwidth. (I hope so) Anyone can use up the data of my website to make their own cool things. (Is this a con or pro? O_O) The public API is always in use, so I can see if there are any error. Cons: Without Javascript the website is unusable. The bad guys easily can load the server with requesting too much data (like Request Per Second 10000), but this can be countered via limiting this with some PHP code and logging. Probably much more work So the question in some words is: Should I build my website around my own api? Is it good to work only on the client side? Is this good for a big website? (e.x.: facebook, yeah facebook is a different story, but could it run with an 'architecture' like this?)

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• Is this a valid implementation of the repository pattern?

  - by user1578653

  I've been reading up about the repository pattern, with a view to implementing it in my own application. Almost all examples I've found on the internet use some kind of existing framework rather than showing how to implement it 'from scratch'. Here's my first thoughts of how I might implement it - I was wondering if anyone could advise me on whether this is correct? I have two tables, named CONTAINERS and BITS. Each CONTAINER can contain any number of BITs. I represent them as two classes: class Container{ private $bits; private $id; //...and a property for each column in the table... public function __construct(){ $this->bits = array(); } public function addBit($bit){ $this->bits[] = $bit; } //...getters and setters... } class Bit{ //some properties, methods etc... } Each class will have a property for each column in its respective table. I then have a couple of 'repositories' which handle things to do with saving/retrieving these objects from the database: //repository to control saving/retrieving Containers from the database class ContainerRepository{ //inject the bit repository for use later public function __construct($bitRepo){ $this->bitRepo = $bitRepo; } public function getById($id){ //talk directly to Oracle here to all column data into the object //get all the bits in the container $bits = $this->bitRepo->getByContainerId($id); foreach($bits as $bit){ $container->addBit($bit); } //return an instance of Container } public function persist($container){ //talk directly to Oracle here to save it to the database //if its ID is NULL, create a new container in database, otherwise update the existing one //use BitRepository to save each of the Bits inside the Container $bitRepo = $this->bitRepo; foreach($container->bits as $bit){ $bitRepo->persist($bit); } } } //repository to control saving/retrieving Bits from the database class BitRepository{ public function getById($id){} public function getByContainerId($containerId){} public function persist($bit){} } Therefore, the code I would use to get an instance of Container from the database would be: $bitRepo = new BitRepository(); $containerRepo = new ContainerRepository($bitRepo); $container = $containerRepo->getById($id); Or to create a new one and save to the database: $bitRepo = new BitRepository(); $containerRepo = new ContainerRepository($bitRepo); $container = new Container(); $container->setSomeProperty(1); $bit = new Bit(); $container->addBit($bit); $containerRepo->persist($container); Can someone advise me as to whether I have implemented this pattern correctly? Thanks!

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• TortoiseSVN hangs in Windows Server 2012 Azure VM

  - by ZaijiaN

  Following @shanselman's article on remoting into an Azure VM for development, I spun up my own VS 2013 VM, and that image runs on WS 2012. Once I was able to remote in, I started installing all my dev tools, including Tortoise SVN 1.8.3 64bit. Things went south once I started attempting to check out code from my personal svn server. It would hang and freeze often, although sometimes it would work - I was able to partially check out projects, but I would get frequent connection time out errors. My personal svn server (VisualSVN 2.7.2) runs at home on a windows 7 machine, and I have a dyndns url pointing to it. I have also configured my router to passthrough all 443 traffic to the appropriate port on the server. I self-signed a cert and made sure it was imported into the VM cert store under trusted root authorities. I have no problems connecting to my svn server from 4-5 other computers & locations. From the Azure VM, in both IE and Chrome, I can access the repository web browser with no issues. There are no outbound firewall restrictions. I have installed other SVN add-ons for Visual Studio (AnkhSVN, VisualSVN) and attempted to connect with my svn server, with largely the same results - random and persistent connection issues (hangs/timeouts). I spun up a completely fresh WS 2008 Azure VM, and installed TortoiseSVN, and had the same results. So I'm at a loss as to what the problem is and how to fix it. Web searches on tortoisesvn and windows server issues doesn't yield any current or relevant information. At this point, i'm guessing that maybe some setting or configuration that MS Azure VM images is the culprit - although I should probably attempt to spin up my own local WS VM to rule out that it's a window server issue. Any thoughts? I hope I'm just missing something really obvious!

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• DriveImage XML fails with a Windows Volume Shadow Service Error

  - by Ssvarc

  I'm trying to image a SATA laptop hard drive, using DriveImageXML, that is attached to my computer via a USB adapter. I'm running Win7 Ultimate 64 bit. DriveXML is returning: Could not initialize Windows Volume Shadow Service (VSS). ERROR C:\Program Files (x86)\Runtime Software\Drivelmage XML\vss64.exe failed to start. ERROR TIMEOUT Make sure VSSVC.EXE is running in your task manager. Click Help for more information. VSSVC.EXE is running in Task Manager, as is VSS64.exe. Looking at the FAQ on the Runtime webpage this turned up: Please verify in Settings-Control Panel-Administrative Tools-Services that the following services are enabled: MS Software Shadow Copy Provider Volume Shadow Copy Also make sure you are able to stop and start these services. Possible reasons for VSS failures: For VSS to work, at least one volume in your computer must be NTFS. If you use only FAT drives, VSS will not function. The required NTFS volume does not need to be identical with the volume you want to image. You should make sure that VSSVC.EXE is running in your task manager. If the problems persist, registering "oleaut.dll" and "oleaut32.dll" using "regsvr32" might help. Both of those services are running and can be started and stopped without issue. Using "regsvr32" to register ""oleaut32.dll" returns successful, but "oleaut.dll" returns: The module "oleaut.dll" failed to load. Make sure the binary is stored at the specified path or debug it to check for problems with the binary or dependent .DLL files. The specified module could not be found. Some other information that might be relevant. Browsing to the drive is successful, but accessing certain folders returns an "access" error. Windows runs a permissions adder that adds the current user profile to the NFTS permissions. Could this be the cause of the issue? DriveImage XML is running as Administrator. Thoughts?

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• SQL Server 2008 Restore from Backup fails with error 3241 'cannot process this media family'

  - by pearcewg

  I am attempting to backup a database from a SQL Server instance on one machine and restore it to another, and I am encountering the frequently discovered 'SQL Server cannot process this media family' error. Each of my instances are SQL Server 2008, but with different patch levels Restore: 10.0.2531.0 Backup: 10.0.1600.22 ((SQL_PreRelease).080709-1414 ) The restore DB is express. Not sure about the backup version. The backup version is on a virtual private server. The restore is on my development box. When I restore to a different database on the source (backup) server, it restores fine. Lots of stuff on google about this issue, some on stackoverflow about this issue, but nothing which is this exact situation. Any thoughts? It should be straightforward to do a backup and restore from one machine to another (having done this thousands of times in with SQL 6.5,7,2000,2005). Any ideas how to restore a database in this situation, which gives this error when attempting to restore? PARTIAL RESOLUTION: When I restored to a different box, running SQL 2008 Express on Windows Server 2003, all worked well. It just wouldn't work on the Windows 7 box. Not sure why. If anyone else has a similar experience, please let me know (there are many similar issues in different forums out there).

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