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• How to switch off? [closed]

  - by Xophmeister

  While I've programmed software for many years, I've only recently started doing so professionally and have noticed a bit of a problematic pattern. I hope this is the best place to pose such a question, as I am interested in others' experiences and solutions... Writing software is, by its nature, a cerebral exercise. When coding for my own sake, I would do so until I was satisfied; even if that meant going all night. Now I'm coding in exchange for goods and services, on projects that are inherently uninteresting to me, I want to 'switch off' when it's time to go home. Maybe you consider that to be a 'bad attitude', but I just don't feel that whatever I'm working on is worth caring about after-hours. Besides, my employer doesn't exactly have the infrastructure required to make out-of-office changes; I can't just clone a repo and even remote login is a PITA. Anyway, the problem I'm experiencing is that, while I'm not particularly overworked or stressed, if I'm faced with a problem, my brain will work on a solution. Generally, it won't give up. Hence I can't switch off and, sometimes, the problem or the solution is significant enough that it disrupts my sleep. While, paradoxically, this doesn't seem to affect my coding ability, it can have a profound impact of the rest of my life. I get increasingly low as I get tired. So far, the best solutions I've found are writing little notes on the matter (and, say, e-mailing them back to my work address) and exercise. Neither of these can switch me off entirely and, as the week progresses, exercise especially becomes untenable due to tiredness. TL;DR How can you stop from being a coding zombie?

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• I want to fix a bug. Where do I start?

  - by Ingo Gerth

  Although I am not a professional programmer, I have written a program or two. Yet, nowadays every engineer and scientist learns to program a bit as well, and as such I am used to writing programs in Python, C and MATLAB. Now I want to give back a bit to Ubuntu and its great folks and fix a bug! I had a look at the list of the bitesize campaign and had to find that most of them are not that easy for me to fix as I suspect they require a lot of time to get into the matter, and I do not have that. Still I discovered this one and it looks manageable and like a cool feature to me. As I have never written a patch or released a program to the wild before though, I have no idea where to start. What should be my first step to tackle that problem? Bottom line: Where and how do I start fixing that guy?

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• Learning how to design knowledge and data flow [closed]

  - by max

  In designing software, I spend a lot of time deciding how the knowledge (algorithms / business logic) and data should be allocated between different entities; that is, which object should know what. I am asking for advice about books, articles, presentations, classes, or other resources that would help me learn how to do it better. I code primarily in Python, but my question is not really language-specific; even if some of the insights I learn don't work in Python, that's fine. I'll give a couple examples to clarify what I mean. Example 1 I want to perform some computation. As a user, I will need to provide parameters to do the computation. I can have all those parameters sent to the "main" object, which then uses them to create other objects as needed. Or I can create one "main" object, as well as several additional objects; the additional objects would then be sent to the "main" object as parameters. What factors should I consider to make this choice? Example 2 Let's say I have a few objects of type A that can perform a certain computation. The main computation often involves using an object of type B that performs some interim computation. I can either "teach" A instances what exact parameters to pass to B instances (i.e., make B "dumb"); or I can "teach" B instances to figure out what needs to be done when looking at an A instance (i.e., make B "smart"). What should I think about when I'm making this choice?

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• Can decoupling hurt maintainability in certain situations?

  - by Ceiling Gecko

  Can the fact that the business logic is mapped to interfaces instead of implementations actually hinder the maintenance of the application in certain situations? A naive example with the Java's Hibernate framework would be, that for example (provided I don't have the whole code-base in my head, the project structure is a mess and classes are named with arbitrary names) if I wish to see what's going on in a certain DAO, to see if it actually is doing what it's supposed to do, then instead of traversing backwards up the tree from the point where the data service is invoked (where the tree will end in an interface with no implementation details whatsoever apart from the signature) I have to for example go and look for a configuration XML file to see which class is mapped to said interface as the implementation before being able to access the actual implementation details. Are there any situations where having loose coupling can actually hurt maintainability?

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• Contiguous Time Periods

  It is always better, and more efficient, to maintain referential integrity by using constraints rather than triggers. Sometimes it is not at all obvious how to do this, and the history table, and other temporal data tables, presented problems for checking data that were difficult to solve with constraints. Suddenly, Alex Kuznetsov came up with a good solution, and so now history tables can benefit from more effective integrity checking. Joe explains...

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• Necessary Infrastructure for large project with many components communicating through IPCs

  - by jluzwick

  I have a fairly in depth question which probably doesn't have an exact answer. As a software engineer, I am usually tasked with working on a program or project with minimal understanding of how other components or programs in the project interact with each other. When one program fails in a sea of multiple components and processes, what infrastructure elements are necessary to ensure that the problem can be accurately tracked to the violating application? More specifically, what infrastructure elements should be necessary for this large project and which are optional but very helpful. One such example I can think of is some form of a common logging infrastructure that allows for a developer or tester to easily browse through a log that contains numerous components for messages that might allude to the culprit program along with a "trail" of what happened before the issue occurred. I'm thinking of something similar to Androids alogcat tool. These necessary infrastructure elements should be language-agnostic. While these elements should be understood by all engineers on the team in question, which elements should be understood at great detail by the technical system engineers and what should the individual software engineers be responsible for adding to their tools to allow for such infrastructures to take hold? Please feel free to ask for clarification if something does not make sense as I understand this question is very broad and needs some refinement. I will refine as necessary from the answers and comments I receive. Thanks for any help!

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• How can I support scrolling when using batched rendering for my tiles?

  - by dardanel

  I have tiled map 100*75 and tiles are 32*32 pixel.I want to use batching for performance .I don't figure it out , because of my game needs scrolling and every frame i draw 22*16 tiles (my screen is 20*16 tile) .I thought that batching tiles for every frame .Is it good or any suggestion? edit :to more clarify I want to use occlusion culling and batching at the same time.I thought that drawing only visible areas and batching them together .But there is a something i couldn't figure out .When scrolling screen with translate matrix , if one row become invisible , I bind new row and batch them again.Every batched objects needs to buffer again.So I batch tiles and buffer to VBO every time when one row become invisible .I don't know these way is efficient or not .This is my question .And i am open to any suggestions.

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• Google Currency Convertor JSON API

  - by Gopinath

  There are many live currency conversion services available on the web and the popular one’s among them are – Google, Yahoo, MSN & XE. Among all these four Google is the developer’s darling and it provides a simple JSON API that can be integrated in your applications.  http://www.google.com/ig/calculator?hl=en&q=1USD=?INR Using the API is very simple and it takes two parameters as input. The first parameter “hl” is the language code in which you want output. The second parameter “q” is the conversion query in the format <number><from currency code>=?<to currency code>. In the URL give above the query requests for conversion of 1 USD in INR. JSON output for the above query would be  similar to {lhs: "1 U.S. dollar",rhs: "54.4602984 Indian rupees",error: "",icc: true} Examples: 100 USD in INR  http://www.google.com/ig/calculator?hl=en&q=100USD=?INR Example 2: 1 GBP in INR http://www.google.com/ig/calculator?hl=en&q=1GBP=?INR Example 3: 1 USD in INR, output the data in French language http://www.google.com/ig/calculator?hl=fr&q=1USD=?INR   This is an undocumented service and expect changes at any time. But as long as it works, you got a programmatic way to convert currencies.

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• Game Asset Storage: Archive vs Individual files

  - by David Colson

  As I am in the process of creating a 3D c++ game and I was wondering what would be more beneficial when dealing with game assets with regards to storage. I have seen some games have a single asset file compressed with everything in it and other with lots of little compressed files. If I had lots of individual files I would not need to load a large file at once and use up memory but the code would have to go about file seeking when the level loads to find all the correct files needed. There is no file seeking needed when dealing with one large file, but again, what about all the assets not currently needed that would get loaded with the one file? I could also have an asset file for each level, but then how do I deal with shared assets This has been bothering me for a while so tell me what other advantages and disadvantages are there to either way of doing things.

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• Is the Entity Component System architecture object oriented by definition?

  - by tieTYT

  Is the Entity Component System architecture object oriented, by definition? It seems more procedural or functional to me. My opinion is that it doesn't prevent you from implementing it in an OO language, but it would not be idiomatic to do so in a staunchly OO way. It seems like ECS separates data (E & C) from behavior (S). As evidence: The idea is to have no game methods embedded in the entity. And: The component consists of a minimal set of data needed for a specific purpose Systems are single purpose functions that take a set of entities which have a specific component I think this is not object oriented because a big part of being object oriented is combining your data and behavior together. As evidence: In contrast, the object-oriented approach encourages the programmer to place data where it is not directly accessible by the rest of the program. Instead, the data is accessed by calling specially written functions, commonly called methods, which are bundled in with the data. ECS, on the other hand, seems to be all about separating your data from your behavior.

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• How to deal with elimination of duplicate logic vs. cost of complexity increase?

  - by Gabriel

  I just wrote some code that is very representative of a recurring theme (in my coding world lately): repeated logic leads to an instinct to eliminate duplication which results in something that is more complex the tradeoff seems wrong to me (the examples of the negative side aren't worth posting - but this is probably the 20th console utility I've written in the past 12 months). I'm curious if I'm missing some techniques or if this is really just on of those "experience tells you when to do what" type of issues. Here's the code... I'm tempted to leave it as is, even though there will be about 20 of those if-blocks when I'm done. static void Main(string[] sargs) { try { var urls = new DirectTrackRestUrls(); var restCall = new DirectTrackRestCall(); var logger = new ConsoleLogger(); Args args = (Args)Enum.Parse(typeof(Args), string.Join(",", sargs)); if (args.HasFlag(Args.Campaigns)) { var getter = new ResourceGetter(logger, urls.ListAdvertisers, restCall); restCall.UriVariables.Add("access_id", 1); getter.GotResource += new ResourceGetter.GotResourceEventHandler(getter_GotResource); getter.GetResources(); SaveResources(); } if (args.HasFlag(Args.Advertisers)) { var getter = new ResourceGetter(logger, urls.ListAdvertisers, restCall); restCall.UriVariables.Add("access_id", 1); getter.GotResource += new ResourceGetter.GotResourceEventHandler(getter_GotResource); getter.GetResources(); SaveResources(); } if (args.HasFlag(Args.CampaignGroups)) { var getter = new ResourceGetter(logger, urls.ListCampaignGroups, restCall); getter.GotResource += new ResourceGetter.GotResourceEventHandler(getter_GotResource); getter.GetResources(); SaveResources(); } } catch (Exception e) { Console.WriteLine(e.InnerException); Console.WriteLine(e.StackTrace); }

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• What are some good debugging techniques [closed]

  - by Brad Bruce

  I frequently run into situations where I'm working with other programmers, helping out with debugging issues. Over the years, I've acquired my own techniques for logically breaking down a problem and tracing through it. I see several others who are great at writing programs, but freeze up when debugging. Are there any good resources I can point people to that describe some good debugging techniques?

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• How should UI layer pass user input to BL layer?

  - by BornToCode

  I'm building an n-tier application, I have UI, BL, DAL & Entities (built from POCO) projects. (All projects have a reference to the Entities). My question is - how should I pass user input from the UI to the BL, as a bunch of strings passed to the BL method and the BL will build the object from the parameters, or should I build the objects inside the UI submit_function and send objects as parameters? EDIT: I wrote n-tier application, but what I actually meant was just layers.

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• I just received a complaint from a user of the website I maintain. Should I do anything?

  - by Chris

  I was sent sent a large wall of text from a user of the website I maintain at my job. They are clearly upset for having to deal with a horribly outdated web application that has not seen any serious updates in over 6+ years. No refactoring has been done, the code quality is terrible, the security unchecked, policy compliances ignored, in addition to being ugly and frankly embarrassing. Keep in mind this is a small business but the website is used by hundreds daily. I'm one of two programmers there, and I've been working there for two years. This person says they are about my age (22) and understand technology (but can't use proper grammar). The complaint mentioned awkward pages and actions on the website, but they don't even have a clue as to the depth of the flaws in this website. Now, I would love to honestly tell them that there's a lot wrong with this company and that this application was built when we were in high school. And that while it's not my fault that the website is terrible, I'm the one in position to fix it. But on the other hand, I could just say nothing and ignore it. Would doing this publicly have any advantage to future employees (showing integrity) or would it just be a completely pointless mistake? Odds are, even if I respond only that one person will ever read it. Regardless, I'm probably just going to ignore it and continue starting my project to refactor the website.

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• Sites with overlapping code-bases. Developing multiple sites with little changes

  - by Web Developer

  I have to develop 3 different sites video.com for hosting video audio.com for hosting audio docs.com for hosting docs. domain names for example only Almost 80% of the functionality is the same for all the three, with remaining 20% being completely different features... How do I handle this? How does sites like SO handle this? I am developing this in YII framework and was thinking of having these different features as modules but in this case the menu/code links in html code can become difficult.

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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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• Why do most of us use 'i' as a loop counter variable?

  - by kprobst

  Has anyone thought about why so many of us repeat this same pattern using the same variable names? for (int i = 0; i < foo; i++) { // ... } It seems most code I've ever looked at uses i, j, k and so on as iteration variables. I suppose I picked that up from somewhere, but I wonder why this is so prevalent in software development. Is it something we all picked up from C or something like that? Just an itch I've had for a while in the back of my head.

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• A Tale of Identifiers

  Identifiers aren't locators, and they aren't pointers or links either. They are a logical concept in a relational database, and, unlike the more traditional methods of accessing data, don't derive from the way that data gets stored. Identifiers uniquely identify members of the set, and it should be possible to validate and verify them. Celko somehow involves watches and taxi cabs to illustrate the point.

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• What's wrong with this OpenGL model picking code?

  - by openglNewbie

  I am making simple model viewer using OpenGL. When I want to pick an object OpenGL returns nothing or an object that is in another place. This is my code: GLuint buff[1024] = {0}; GLint hits,view[4]; glSelectBuffer(1024,buff); glGetIntegerv(GL_VIEWPORT, view); glMatrixMode(GL_PROJECTION); glPushMatrix(); glLoadIdentity(); gluPickMatrix(x,y,1.0,1.0,view); gluPerspective(45,(float)view[2]/(float)view[4],1.0,1500.0); glMatrixMode(GL_MODELVIEW); glRenderMode(GL_SELECT); glLoadIdentity(); //I make the same transformations for normal render glTranslatef(0, 0, -zoom); glMultMatrixf(transform.M); glInitNames(); glPushName(-1); for(int j=0;j<allNodes.size();j++) { glLoadName(allNodes.at(j)->id); allNodes.at(j)->Draw(textures); } glPopName(); glMatrixMode(GL_PROJECTION); glPopMatrix(); hits = glRenderMode(GL_RENDER);

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• Should HTTP Verbs Be Used Semantically?

  - by Xophmeister

  If I'm making a web application which integrates with a server-side backend, would it be considered best practice to use HTTP methods semantically? That is, for example, if I'm fetching data (e.g., to populate a menu, etc.), I would use GET, but to update data (e.g., save a record), I would use POST. (I realise there are other methods that may be even more appropriate, but we need to consider browser support.) I can see the benefits of this in the sense that it's effectively a RESTful API, but at a slightly increased development cost. In my previous projects, I've POST'd everything: Is it worth switching to a RESTful mindset simply for the sake of best practice?

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• Is it ethical for a programmer to promote his/her own library?

  - by Kit Menke

  Fairly recently I started maintaining my own open source JavaScript library. I created it to solve a pretty specific need but fairly regularly see questions that can be solved (in whole/part) by using my library. I've always gone ahead to post my answer including my library and make sure to always include a disclosure specifying that I maintain it. I feel for open source projects this may not be such a big deal but where do you draw the line? (ex: commercial products) Is it ethical for a programmer to promote is own library? When is it not?

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• How many textures can usually I bind at once?

  - by Avi

  I'm developing a game engine, and it's only going to work on modern (Shader model 4+) hardware. I figure that, by the time I'm done with it, that won't be such an unreasonable requirement. My question is: how many textures can I bind at once on a modern graphics card? 16 would be sufficient. Can I expect most modern graphics cards to support that amount? My GTX 460 appears to support 32, but I have no idea if that's representative of most modern video cards.

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• When decomposing a large function, how can I avoid the complexity from the extra subfunctions?

  - by missingno

  Say I have a large function like the following: function do_lots_of_stuff(){ { //subpart 1 ... } ... { //subpart N ... } } a common pattern is to decompose it into subfunctions function do_lots_of_stuff(){ subpart_1(...) subpart_2(...) ... subpart_N(...) } I usually find that decomposition has two main advantages: The decomposed function becomes much smaller. This can help people read it without getting lost in the details. Parameters have to be explicitly passed to the underlying subfunctions, instead of being implicitly available by just being in scope. This can help readability and modularity in some situations. However, I also find that decomposition has some disadvantages: There are no guarantees that the subfunctions "belong" to do_lots_of_stuff so there is nothing stopping someone from accidentally calling them from a wrong place. A module's complexity grows quadratically with the number of functions we add to it. (There are more possible ways for things to call each other) Therefore: Are there useful convention or coding styles that help me balance the pros and cons of function decomposition or should I just use an editor with code folding and call it a day? EDIT: This problem also applies to functional code (although in a less pressing manner). For example, in a functional setting we would have the subparts be returning values that are combined in the end and the decomposition problem of having lots of subfunctions being able to use each other is still present. We can't always assume that the problem domain will be able to be modeled on just some small simple types with just a few highly orthogonal functions. There will always be complicated algorithms or long lists of business rules that we still want to correctly be able to deal with. function do_lots_of_stuff(){ p1 = subpart_1() p2 = subpart_2() pN = subpart_N() return assembleStuff(p1, p2, ..., pN) }

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• JavaScript and callback nesting

  - by Jake King

  A lot of JavaScript libraries (notably jQuery) use chaining, which allows the reduction of this: var foo = $(".foo"); foo.stop(); foo.show(); foo.animate({ top: 0 }); to this: $(".foo").stop().show().animate({ top: 0 }); With proper formatting, I think this is quite a nice syntactic capability. However, I often see a pattern which I don't particularly like, but appears to be a necessary evil in non-blocking models. This is the ever-present nesting of callback functions: $(".foo").animate({ top: 0, }, { callback: function () { $.ajax({ url: 'ajax.php', }, { callback: function () { ... } }); } }); And it never ends. Even though I love the ease non-blocking models provide, I hate the odd nesting of function literals it forces upon the programmer. I'm interesting in writing a small JS library as an exercise, and I'd love to find a better way to do this, but I don't know how it could be done without feeling hacky. Are there any projects out there that have resolved this problem before? And if not, what are the alternatives to this ugly, meaningless code structure?

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• Storing a looong lookup table

  - by inquisitive

  Background The product i am working on has a very long lookup-table. the table contains static data and cannot be auto generated. there are about 500 rows and 10 columns. columns have mostly integers and strings. to complicate the matters, there are actually two such tables. every row in table-1 maps to zero-or-more rows in table-2. we use an SQLite database with two tables. the product installer places the SQLite file in the installation directory. the application is written in dot-net and we use ADO to load the data once on startup. now, the lookup table grows. in each release a month, we add about 10 new entries existing entries are adjusted. every release we fine tune existing entries. The problem a team of (10) developers work on the lookup table. Code goes in the SVN, but the little devil the SQLite does not. this prevents multiple developers to work on it. we do take regular backups of the file, but proper versioning is not possible. we never know who did the breaking change. the worse thing is we dont know if there is any change at all. diff'ing databases is tedious if not impossible. the tables are expected to grow quite large in years to come and we would need developers to work in parallel on it. the data is business critical. we need to be able to audit changes made to it. Question What would be a solution for the problems outlines above? one idea was to transform the whole thing to XML and treat it like just another source file. that way SVN can do the versioning and we can work in parallel. but the data shows relational behavior. with XML we loose the unique and foreign-key constraints. also we cant query it with sql like ease. any help here will be appreciated.

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