Search Results

Search found 7513 results on 301 pages for 'actual'.

Page 117/301 | < Previous Page | 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124  | Next Page >

• Floating point undesireable in highly critical code?

  - by Kirt Undercoffer

  Question 11 in the Software Quality section of "IEEE Computer Society Real-World Software Engineering Problems", Naveda, Seidman, lists fp computation as undesirable because "the accuracy of the computations cannot be guaranteed". This is in the context of computing acceleration for an emergency braking system for a high speed train. This thinking seems to be invoking possible errors in small differences between measurements of a moving object but small differences at slow speeds aren't a problem (or shouldn't be), small differences between two measurements at high speed are irrelevant - can there be a problem with small roundoff errors during deceleration for an emergency braking system? This problem has been observed with airplane braking systems resulting in hydroplaning but could this actually happen in the context of a high speed train? The concern about fp errors seems to not be well-founded in this context. Any insight? The fp is used for acceleration so perhaps the concern is inching over a speed limit? But fp should be just fine if they use a double in whatever implementation language. The actual problem in the text states: During the inspection of the code for the emergency braking system of a new high speed train (a highly critical, real-time application), the review team identifies several characteristics of the code. Which of these characteristics are generally viewed as undesirable? The code contains three recursive functions (well that one is obvious). The computation of acceleration uses floating point arithmetic. All other computations use integer arithmetic. The code contains one linked list that uses dynamic memory allocation (second obvious problem). All inputs are checked to determine that they are within expected bounds before they are used.

  Read the article

• Is there an open source clone of a game in the Total War Series?

  - by sinekonata

  I loved Shogun:Total War gameplay and then later on spent weeks re-enacting historical wars and battles with Europa Barbarorum. It's a mod for Rome:TW that focuses on historical accuracy in the peoples, units, sounds, visuals, everything from macro mechanics to actual battles (e.g. a lot more missiles). Since that time I kind of turned my back on Windows cause it sucks and use Linux cause Mac sucks even worse. So as I miss that game (Eur. Barb.) and consider it the most realistic RTS to date, I'd like to know if there are any free and open source alternatives to it because ever since I'm under linux, I became addicted to FOSS so I also turned my back on paying (even kickstarters) for closed source, pay to play games. I have found a clone/alternative for everyone of the best games like Minecraft, CSS, Natural Selection, TA/SupCom etc... It's kind of the last one I need. The Spring engine is amazing for example, is there another open source project of the source in current development? Or would Spring itself be enough (it certainly looks capable) to make it? Thanks in advance guys...

  Read the article

• Installing Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  As has become customary when the product team releases a new patch, SP or version I like to document the install. This post seams almost redundant as I had no problems, but I think that is as valuable to other thinking of installing the Service Pack as all the problems that we sometimes get. As per Brian's post I am Installing Visual Studio Team Foundation Server Service Pack 1 first and indeed as this is a single server local deployment I need to install both. If I only install one it will leave the other product broken. Figure: Hopefully this will be more uneventful It takes a little while for your system to be checked to see what components need updating. On my main computer this was pretty quick, but on the laptop it took some time. Figure: There are a lot of components to update With this update also comes an update to .NET as well as many other components. Figure: I downloaded the full 1.5GB’s, but you could do a web install It depends on how good you internet connection is to how long it would take to download, but as I am now in the US I decided not to trust the internet connection speeds. It took around 30-40 minutes to download the full thing which is a little slow. Figure: I did not need to download, but that would increase the install time So on my main computer again this was fast, but again on my netbook this took a little while. Figure: The actual install took around 30-40 minutes (2 hours on netbook) I was pretty impressed with the speed of the install, and as Team Explore is now out of the box with Visual Studio 2010 I don’t get the problem of the SP being installed before Team Explorer and having a disjointed experience Figure: As I suspected, no problems with the install Figure: Checking in Visual Studio shows that all the servicing points were successful This was an easy experience even if the SP was over 1.5GB’s to download Hopefully I will be discovering things that work better for a good while to come, as well as not seeing holes in the product that I had no encountered yet. What were your experiences of installing Visual Studio 2010 Service pack 1?

  Read the article

• From a DDD perspective is a report generating service a domain service or an infrastructure service?

  - by Songo

  Let assume we have the following service whose responsibility is to generate Excel reports: class ExcelReportService{ public String generateReport(String fileFormatFilePath, ResultSet data){ ReportFormat reportFormat = new ReportFormat(fileFormatFilePath); ExcelDataFormatterService excelDataFormatterService = new ExcelDataFormatterService(); FormattedData formattedData = excelDataFormatterService.format(data); ExcelFileService excelFileService = new ExcelFileService(); String reportPath= excelFileService.generateReport(reportFormat,formattedData); return reportPath; } } This is pseudo code for the service I want to design where: fileFormatFilePath: path to a configuration file where I'll keep the format of my excel file (headers, column widths, number of columns,..etc) data: the actual records returned from the database. This data can't be used directly coz I might need to make further calculations to the data before inserting them to the excel file. ReportFormat: Value object to hold the report format, has methods like getHeaders(), getColumnWidth(),...etc. ExcelDataFormatterService: a service to hold any logic that need to be applied to the data returned from the database before inserting it to the file. FormattedData: Value object the represents the formatted data to be inserted. ExcelFileService: a wrapper top the 3rd party library that generates the excel file. Now how do you determine whether a service is an infrastructure or domain service? I have the following 3 services here: ExcelReportService, ExcelDataFormatterService and ExcelFileService?

  Read the article

• The best way to learn how to extend Orchard

  - by Bertrand Le Roy

  We do have tutorials on the Orchard site, but we can't cover all topics, and recently I've found myself more and more responding to forum questions by pointing people to an existing module that was solving a similar problem to the one the question was about. I really like this way of learning by example and from the expertise of others. This is one of the reasons why we decided that modules would by default come in source code form that we compile dynamically. it makes them easy to understand and easier to modify for your own purposes. Hackability FTW! But how do you crack open a module and look at what's inside? You can do it in two different ways. First, you can just install the module from the gallery, directly from your Orchard instance's admin panel. Once you've done that, you can just look into your Modules directory under the web site. There is now a subfolder with the name of the new module that contains a csproj that you can open in Visual Studio or add to your Orchard solution. Second, you can simply download the package (it's NuGet) and rename it to a .zip extension. NuGet being based on Zip, this will open just fine in Windows Explorer: What you want to dig into is the Content/Modules/[NameOfTheModule] folder, which is where the actual code is. Thanks to Jason Gaylord for the idea for this post.

  Read the article

• Learning Programming during the job?

  - by Hossein

  Introduction: I have read and heard advice, about learning programming by accepting programming projects. I need real assistance to understand this, because: Problem: Although, it would seem to me that one would gain much more technical knowledge by doing, real world projects, if one doesn't know much about a technology, it would add much more risk to the actual delivery of the final product! Even the smallest of real world projects could be too much for a newbie. There is a contradiction here: You need to know the job to do it! and It's recommended to do the job, in order to learn it! Question: Any personal experiences in this case would be very pleasant to know while describing: How new was the subject to you? didn't have a clue at all? Or, did you have experience with similar technologies? Was it a solo project or were you in a team? If team, then did others help you with learning it? Did it work as expected? Did you deliver on time? Do you recommend this approach to others as well?

  Read the article

• How to analyze data

  - by Subhash Dike

  We are working on an application that allows user to search/read some content in a particular domain. We wanted to add some capability in the app which can suggest user some content based on the usage pattern (analyze data based on frequency and relevance). Currently every time user search or read something we do store that information in backend database. We would like to use this data to present some additional content to user. Could someone explain what kind of tools will be required for such a job and any example? And what this concept is called, data analysis? data mining? business intelligence? or something else? Update: Sorry for being too broad, here is an example SQL Database (Just to give an idea, actual db is little different with normalization and stuff) Table: UserArticles Fields: UserName | ArticleId | ArticleTitle | DateVisited | ArticleCategory Table: CategoryArticles Fields: Category | Article Title | Author etc. One Category may have one more articles. One user may have read the same article multiple times (in this case we place additional entry in the user article table. Task: Use the information availabel in UserArticle table and rank categories in order which would be presented to user automatically in other part of application. Factors to be considered are frequency and recency. This might be possible through simple queries or may require specialized tools. Either way, the task is what mention above. I am not too sure which route to take, hence the question. Thoughts??

  Read the article

• Why isn't there a typeclass for functions?

  - by Steve314

  I already tried this on Reddit, but there's no sign of a response - maybe it's the wrong place, maybe I'm too impatient. Anyway... In a learning problem I've been messing around with, I realised I needed a typeclass for functions with operations for applying, composing etc. Reasons... It can be convenient to treat a representation of a function as if it were the function itself, so that applying the function implicitly uses an interpreter, and composing functions derives a new description. Once you have a typeclass for functions, you can have derived typeclasses for special kinds of functions - in my case, I want invertible functions. For example, functions that apply integer offsets could be represented by an ADT containing an integer. Applying those functions just means adding the integer. Composition is implemented by adding the wrapped integers. The inverse function has the integer negated. The identity function wraps zero. The constant function cannot be provided because there's no suitable representation for it. Of course it doesn't need to spell things as if it the values were genuine Haskell functions, but once I had the idea, I thought a library like that must already exist and maybe even using the standard spellings. But I can't find such a typeclass in the Haskell library. I found the Data.Function module, but there's no typeclass - just some common functions that are also available from the Prelude. So - why isn't there a typeclass for functions? Is it "just because there isn't" or "because it's not so useful as you think"? Or maybe there's a fundamental problem with the idea? The biggest possible problem I've thought of so far is that function application on actual functions would probably have to be special-cased by the compiler to avoid a looping problem - in order to apply this function I need to apply the function application function, and to do that I need to call the function application function, and to do that...

  Read the article

• Augmenting functionality of subclasses without code duplication in C++

  - by Rob W

  I have to add common functionality to some classes that share the same superclass, preferably without bloating the superclass. The simplified inheritance chain looks like this: Element -> HTMLElement -> HTMLAnchorElement Element -> SVGElement -> SVGAlement The default doSomething() method on Element is no-op by default, but there are some subclasses that need an actual implementation that requires some extra overridden methods and instance members. I cannot put a full implementation of doSomething() in Element because 1) it is only relevant for some of the subclasses, 2) its implementation has a performance impact and 3) it depends on a method that could be overridden by a class in the inheritance chain between the superclass and a subclass, e.g. SVGElement in my example. Especially because of the third point, I wanted to solve the problem using a template class, as follows (it is a kind of decorator for classes): struct Element { virtual void doSomething() {} }; // T should be an instance of Element template<class T> struct AugmentedElement : public T { // doSomething is expensive and uses T virtual void doSomething() override {} // Used by doSomething virtual bool shouldDoSomething() = 0; }; class SVGElement : public Element { /* ... */ }; class SVGAElement : public AugmentedElement<SVGElement> { // some non-trivial check bool shouldDoSomething() { /* ... */ return true; } }; // Similarly for HTMLAElement and others I looked around (in the existing (huge) codebase and on the internet), but didn't find any similar code snippets, let alone an evaluation of the effectiveness and pitfalls of this approach. Is my design the right way to go, or is there a better way to add common functionality to some subclasses of a given superclass?

  Read the article

• Languages on a resume: Is it better to put "C/C++" or "C, C++"?

  - by Kevin

  I'm graduating in a couple of weeks, and my resume (as expected) lists the languages that I've had experience with. Previously I've put "C/C++", however back then I didn't have that much experience with these two languages as I do now. Now that I've formally learned these two languages, it has become evident to me (and anyone who really knows these languages) that they are similar, and completely disimilar at the same time. Sure, most C code is compilable C++ code, but syntax and incorporation of library functions is pretty much where these similarities end. In most non-trivial problems, chances are that the desirable C++ solution will be different from the desirable C solution. My question: Will recruiters take note or care about whether you put "C/C++" as opposed to "C, C++"? Will they assume a lack of knowledge of the workings of either because of the inclusion of the first form, or perhaps see the inclusion of the second form as a potential "resume beefer" (listing them as 2 languages, instead of "one")? Furthermore, for jobs that you've applied to that were particularly interested in these two langauges, did the interview process include questions about the differences between C programming and C++ programming (so, about actual programming techniques, not only the extra paradigms in the latter)?

  Read the article

• Publishing a game -- any way to target both WP7 and Win8 Store?

  - by Rei Miyasaka

  I'm at a dilemma which seems should soon become an important issue for a lot of developers. If I build a game in XNA, I won't be able to publish it on the Windows 8 Store, as it would be a classic application -- and classic applications can't be sold on the store. If I build a game in Metro DirectX, I would be able to sell it on the Store, but porting it to Windows Phone would involve porting it to Reach XNA, which in fact would likely involve more effort even than porting to OS X or Android -- both of which support C++. Of all the WinRT API that is supported on C++/JS/.NET, DirectX can only be programmed from C++. It's also unlikely that Microsoft will update Windows 7 or Vista to support the new DirectX features, although that would make the Metro DirectX the first new version of DirectX to stop supporting the immediate predecessor OS. If I build a game in Pre-Win8 DirectX 9/10/11, I won't be able to sell it on the Windows Store or Windows Phone, but I could sell it on something like Steam. It would also involve the most amount of manual plumbing. In fact, DirectWrite, despite being part of DirectX 11, doesn't talk to Direct3D. I'm getting really tired of all these restrictions -- artificial and otherwise -- and I'm coming to a point where I'm considering switching to a platform with a less fragmented API, like Android or Mac/iOS. As far as bringing a game into market goes, excluding the actual market share of any platforms that I might consider, what other factors would help me in making a decision? Just a few years ago this question was a lot easier to answer: if you were primarily concerned with Windows platforms, all you had to answer was whether you wanted DirectX, XNA, or something like SlimDX. If you made the wrong decision, no biggie -- all you really would have lost is XBox and the fairly small Windows Phone market.

  Read the article

• Architecture of an action multiplayer game from scratch

  - by lcf

  Not sure whether it's a good place to ask (do point me to a better one if it's not), but since what we're developing is a game - here it goes. So this is a "real-time" action multiplayer game. I have familiarized myself with concepts like lag compensation, view interpolation, input prediction and pretty much everything that I need for this. I have also prepared a set of prototypes to confirm that I understood everything correctly. My question is about the situation when game engine must be rewind to the past to find out whether there was a "hit" (sometimes it may involve the whole 'recomputation' of the world from that moment in the past up to the present moment. I already have a piece of code that does it, but it's not as neat as I need it to be. The domain logic of the app (the physics of the game) must be separated from the presentation (render) and infrastructure tools (e.g. the remote server interaction specifics). How do I organize all this? :) Is there any worthy implementation with open sources I can take a look at? What I'm thinking is something like this: -> Render / User Input -> Game Engine (this is the so called service layer) -> Processing User Commands & Remote Server -> Domain (Physics) How would you add into this scheme the concept of "ticks" or "interactions" with the possibility to rewind and recalculate "the game"? Remember, I cannot change the Domain/Physics but only the Game Engine. Should I store an array of "World's States"? Should they be just some representations of the world, optimized for this purpose somehow (how?) or should they be actual instances of the world (i.e. including behavior and all that). Has anybody had similar experience? (never worked on a game before if that matters)

  Read the article

• Input/Output console window in XNA

  - by Will Bagley

  I am currently making a simple game in XNA but am at a point where testing various aspect gets a bit tricky, especially when you have to wait till you have 1000 score to see if your animation is playing correctly etc. Of course i could just edit the starting variable in the code before I launched but I have recently been interested in trying to implement a console style window which can print out values and take input to alter public variables during run-time. I am aware that VS has the immediate window which achieves a similar thing but i would prefer mine is an actual part of the game with the intention that the user may have limited access to it in the future. Some of the key things i have yet to find an answer to after looking around for a while are: how i would support free text entry how i would access variables during runtime how i would edit these variable I have also read about using a property grid from windows form aps (and partially reflection) which looked like it could simplify a lot of things but i am not sure how I would get that running inside my XNA game window or how i would get it to not look out of place (as the visual aspect of is seems to be aimed just for development time viewing). All in all I'm quite open to any suggestions on how to approach this task as currently I'm not sure where to start. Thanks in advance.

  Read the article

• Cropping images & SEO

  - by user1181950

  So I have a page with a bunch of images with largely varying sizes. Also the layout of the page is such that the images are all in the shape of square tiles, so just resizing will cause distorted images. What I've been doing previously is when users upload images, I resize and crop them appropriately and display the new image as the thumbnail and load full image when user clicks on it. However, I just realized this is an issue with SEO as google will crawl the thumbnails and stick the thumbnails on Google Images instead of the full images. Is there any way to show a cropped/resized image but have Google Image show the full image? I can do something with css using an enclosing div and overflow:hidden, but I'd imagine the performance on that would be pretty bad. Any suggestions? Thanks! PS. I saw this (Make google index the actual image not the thumbnail), but in my case I have users continuously uploading images, and the database of images is always changing and pretty big (thousands), so sitemap will be pretty unwieldy..

  Read the article

• Friday Tips #6, Part 2

  - by Chris Kawalek

  Here is a question about updating Oracle VM: Question: How can I perform Oracle VM 3 server updates from Oracle VM Manager? Answer by Gregory King, Principal Best Practices Consultant, Oracle VM Product Management: Server Update Manager is a built-in feature of the Oracle VM Manager. Basically, Server Update Manager automatically configures YUM updates on all the Oracle VM Servers, pointing each to our Unbreakable Linux Network (ULN) update channel for Oracle VM. The servers periodically check with our Oracle YUM repository and notify the Oracle VM Manager that an update is available for each server. Actual server updates must be triggered by the Oracle VM administrator – they are not executed automatically. At this point, you can use the Oracle VM Manager to put a server into maintenance mode which live migrates all the running Oracle VM Guests to other Oracle VM Servers in the server pool. Once all the Oracle VM Guests have been migrated, the Oracle VM administrator can trigger the update on the server. The entire process is documented in the Installation and Upgrade Guide of Oracle VM Documentation so I won’t spend time detailing the steps. However, configuring the Server Update Manager is exceedingly simple. Simply navigate to the Tools and Resources tab in the Oracle VM Manager, select the link for Server Update Manager and ensure the following values are added to the text boxes as shown in the illustration below: YUM Base URL: http://public-yum.oracle.com/repo/OracleVM/OVM3/latest/x86_64 YUM GPG Key: file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-oracle Every server in the pool will be automatically configured for YUM updates once you choose the Apply button. Many thanks to Greg and Rick for providing the answers to this week's questions. If you want to ask us something, hit up Twitter and use hashtag #AskOracleVirtualization. See you next week! -Chris 

  Read the article

• Adsense: You have rejected ad requests, which will result in lost revenue

  - by Chankey Pathak

  Got an alert on my adsense account which says You have rejected ad requests, which will result in lost revenue. The following ad units have made ad requests with incorrect site information. This occurs when the URL of the server from which the ad unit has been served differs from the URL of the actual page where the ad will be displayed. Learn how to fix these errors. So the solution is that I'll have to use "google_page_url = "http://myurl.com/fullpath";" I'm using wordpress, what should be the URL for google_page_url? For example my website is www.technostall.com. Should I put www.technostall.com there or should I give the path of each post? That is not good because I'm using a sidebar widget for sidebar ad unit. I can't change google_page_url for each page. What should I do? This error is appearing only on my sidebar/navigation ad units. Is using google_page_url = document.location; fine?

  Read the article

• PHP safe_mode is a pain, looking for advice (Ubuntu 12.04 server, public webserver)

  - by user73279

  Maybe askUbuntu isn't the right forum or I haven't provided the right search query but I haven't seen anything in my searching of askUbuntu on PHP safe_mode. I get lots of Windows Safe Mode and Ubuntu Safe Mode results but not PHP safe_mode. So I keep running into one issue after another regarding PHP safe_mode. (I write a lot of my own PHP code for various site maintenance tools and such.) I know safe_mode is going away in the next version of PHP but I still see a fair amount of advice recommending that you leave it enabled. I've recently consolidated from 3 servers down to 1 and at least one of those old servers had safe_mode disabled without any issues. (The lack of issues may have simply been a matter of good luck.) None of the previous 3 gave me this much trouble so I'm guessing so additional php.ini/PHP safe_mode setting was turned on for the new server. I primarily run WordPress for my websites with a few MediaWiki sites sprinkled in. And I am currently running into an issue using WordPress's auto update feature as it doesn't seem to be able to use fopen. WordPress is not relaying the actual error message to me but since I was just able to update the plugins I'm using this is a safe_mode problem. I've had a lot of safe_mode issues since consolidating to this new server. Long story short, the advice I'd seen to use safe_mode was all at least 2 years old. Do I really need it? If I disable PHP safe_mode are there a good set of security measures I should implement - i.e. chmod 640 /var/www/..., add this to your .htaccess, etc - to protect my server/sites? Thanks

  Read the article

• Location of development solutions on disk - Common or upto the individual

  - by dreza

  In our team meeting today a senior member brought up the proposal that we should be having a common location/structure for our development solutions. A couple of his points were: Making it common meant when talking about projects and emailing stuff everyone is on the same wavelength and knows where to look. If there is ever the need to hard code a location path then it will work across all developers pc's. He had a more few points to back up his suggestion but I unfortunately got distracted during the discussion and so didn't hear all of them. I have no issue with the idea and can see it's merits but I was wondering if it is common or even recommended that all developers place their code in the same folder structure. Or do developers like to have the flexibility of location solutions where-ever they want? We currently use SVN for our version control. In this case his recommendation was to place all code in: c:\Work\Development\<Customer>\<project>\Code\<solution>\ the code I guess actual path is irrelevant for this question but added for completeness.

  Read the article

• After upgrading to trusty, ALSA midi connection (aconnect) doesn't seem to work right

  - by SougonNaTakumi

  Previously in kubuntu 13.10 I was able to open vmpk or plug in a midi keyboard, and provided that TiMidity was running in server mode, I could run aconnect [keyboard port (129:0 for vmpk)] 14:0 aconnect 14:0 128:0 and I could play the keyboard and get sound. But now, a while after upgrading to trusty, I tried to do that, and didn't get any sound. TiMidity itself still plays files fine, but if I try to play them with aplaymidi, I still just get silence. Oddly, the midi files are clearly being read. When I ran (where 130:0 was vmpk's input port) aplaymidi -p 130:0 ~/path/to/midi.mid vmpk was highlighting notes on the piano as if it were playing the midi. One time I tried this, TiMidity (?) very briefly played a fraction of a second of the first chord of my song before everything went silent and vmpk just highlighted the first voice on the keyboard as usual. Now the weirdest part of this is that probably about 40% of the time, when I've played at least one note with either aplaymidi or vmpk, when I run aconnect -x I get a sudden burst of a note or chord from my speakers (that is, if I played one note, I get a note; if I played multiple sequential notes, they turn into a chord), as if the notes were being queued up but not being played and that somehow liberated them. I have no idea what's going on there. A little while ago I remember having a problem with Audacity playing wav files sped up and also locking up if I tried to pause it, which it stopped doing when I set the audio devices to the actual audio devices rather than pulse. But now when I checked again, it's doing the opposite: it won't play audio at all and/or acts weirdly if I don't set the audio devices to pulse, and either way will very occasionally randomly do the speeding up thing regardless. Oddly in the midst of what's looking like a pretty screwed up sound system, sound in VLC and Firefox has been working fine and if I play a wav file with aplay ~/path/to/sound.wav that works fine too. Any idea what I could do to figure out what's wrong with ALSA and/or fix it?

  Read the article

• New XAML-Based User Group started in Birmingham, Alabama.

  - by mbcrump

  I’m pleased to announce that a new XAML-Based User Group has started in Birmingham, Alabama. The group is being hosted by Michael Crump and Jonathan Marbutt. The reason is very simple: we feel that Birmingham needs a fresh start. We are both very passionate about .NET and are hoping to share our experiences with the community. We have created a site (http://allaboutxaml.net) and our first meetup is now scheduled. We are here to discuss all things that have to do with xaml. This includes Silverlight, WPF, Windows Phone 7, Surface, Lightswitch and Silverlight with SharePoint 2010. We: believe strongly in xaml and are passionate about what we talk about. believe in an open-forum. believe a user group should be FUN as well as educational. do not claim to be an expert on anything, we are here to share. record every presentation and put it on the web for others to benefit. meet monthly but are flexible on the actual date. do our events outside of technical colleges. have families and our meetings start and stop on time. welcome new speakers. welcome adult beverages. Our first meeting is going to be on February 15th, 2011 (6PM), at Logan's on HWY 280. It is going to be more of a meetup than a meeting. I would like to discuss current xaml-based projects that you are working on and get to know one another. If you are interested in coming then please sign up here so that we know how many to expect. Please visit our site to find out more about us: http://allaboutxaml.net.

  Read the article

• Dealing with bad/incomplete/unclear specifications?

  - by eagerMoose

  I'm working on a project where our dev team gets the specifications from the business part of the company. Both the business management and the IT management require estimates and deadline projections, as they should. The good thing is that estimates are mostly made by the actual developers who get to do the required features. The bad thing is that the specifications are usually either too simple (it turns out you're left with a lot of question marks over your head because a lot of information seems to be missing) or too complex(up to the point that you can't even visualize where everything would "fit" in the app). More often than not, the business part of the specs are either incomplete or unaware of what can and can't be done (given the previously implemented business logic). Dev team is given about a day per new spec to give an estimate and we do try to clear uncertainties, usually by meeting up with whoever did the spec. Most of the times it turns out that spec writers haven't really thought everything through, and it's usually only when we start designing and developing that we end up in trouble, as a lot of the spec seems to have holes. How do you deal with this? Are you generous on estimates in advance?

  Read the article

• Procedural content (settlement) generation

  - by instancedName

  I have, lets say, something like a homework or assignment to do. Roughly said I need to write an algorithm (pseudo code is not necessary, just in depth description) of procedure that would generate settlements, environment and a people to populate it with, as part of some larger world generation procedure. The genre of game is not specified, it could be any genre (rpg, strategy, colony simulation etc.) where interacting with large and extensive world is central to the game. Procedure should be called once per settlement. At the time of calling, world generation procedure makes geography, culture and history input available. Output should be map of the village and it's immediate area, and various potential additional information like myths, history, demographic facts etc. Bonus would be quest ant similar stuff, but that not really my focus at the moment. I will leave quality of the output for later when I actually dig little deeper into this topic. I am free to change parameters as long as I have strong explanation for doing so. Setting of the game is undetermined so I am free to use anything that I like the most. Ok, so my actual question is: Can anyone who has some experience in this field of game design recommend me some good literature, or point me in the direction where I should look/reed/study? I'm somewhat experienced game programmer, but I've never been into game design till now so any help will be great. I want to do this assignment as good as I can. As for deadline, it's not strictly set, but lets say I don't want it to take longer then few weeks, one month at worst case.

  Read the article

• Really slow wireless internet on 12.04 with HP dv6 6070ca

  - by Joe

  I was recently running the previous version of Ubuntu through Wine, and everything was working great. I decided to upgrade to pangolin when I saw it came out. After upgrading the internet was very slow (the estimated time on the updates was something like 4 days). I thought maybe this had something to do with the Wine installation, so I decided to finally do an actual dual boot. I partitioned my drive all nice and neat, but I made the mistake of connecting to the internet for the installation, and clicking the option to install updates and restricted extras. This was in the morning, circa 6 am. Fast forward to the evening, the installation is frozen at around 75%. In frustration I gave the ol girl a hard shut-down, which effectively rendered my machine useless. I used the thumb drive to reinstall Ubuntu, this time without connecting to the internet. Installed nice and easy, no problems, but the internet is still ridiculously slow. It took me about 20 minutes of frustration and hitting stop and reload repeatedly to even get this question page to open. This is important to me as now Windows won't even boot and I have to use ubuntu for the time being but I can't even bear to turn on my laptop due to the frustration that immediately ensues. Please help! Oh, and I'm relatively new so if there are some terminal commands that spew out info you guys would find useful let me know what they are and I'll post back the information.

  Read the article

• Collision planes confusion

  - by Jeffrey

  I'm following this tutorial by thecplusplusguy and in the linked video he explain that for example for the world basement and walls we need to create the actual rendered (shown to the player) walls and then duplicate them, place them in the same coordinates as the rendered walls and call them collision (by defining their material to collision). Then it defines in the Object loader function that those objects with material == collision are collision planes and should not be rendered but just used to check collision. Now I'm pretty confused. Why would we add this kind of complexity to a problem that can easily be solved by a simple loadObject(string plane_object, bool check_collision);: Creating only the walls object (by loading .obj file in plane_object) Define them also as collision planes whenever the check_collision is set to true In this case we have lowered the complexity of his method and make it more flexible and faster to develop (faster because we don't always have to make a copy for each plane and flexible because we don't hardcode the Object loader). The only case in which this method could not work is when we need hidden collision planes, and for that we could modify the loadObject() function like this: loadObject(string plane_object, bool check_collision = true, bool hide_object = false); Creating only the walls object (by loading .obj file in plane_object) Define them also as collision planes whenever the check_collision is set to true And add the ability to actually show the object or hide it based on hide_object. The final question is: am I right? What would the possible problem encountered with my solution versus his?

  Read the article

• How to Generate a Create Table DDL Script Along With Its Related Tables

  - by Compudicted

  Have you ever wondered when creating table diagrams in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) how slickly you can add related tables to it by just right-clicking on the interesting table name? Have you also ever needed to script those related tables including the master one? And you discovered you have dozens of related tables? Or may be no SSMS at your disposal? That was me one day. Well, creativity to the rescue! I Binged and Googled around until I found more or less what I wanted, but it was all involving T-SQL, yeah, a long and convoluted CROSS APPLYs, then I saw a PowerShell solution that I quickly adopted to my needs (I am not referencing any particular author because it was a mashup): 1: ########################################################################################################### 2: # Created by: Arthur Zubarev on Oct 14, 2012 # 3: # Synopsys: Generate file containing the root table CREATE (DDL) script along with all its related tables # 4: ########################################################################################################### 5:   6: [System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName('Microsoft.SqlServer.SMO') | out-null 7:   8: $RootTableName = "TableName" # The table name, no schema name needed 9:   10: $srv = new-Object Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Smo.Server("TargetSQLServerName") 11: $conContext = $srv.ConnectionContext 12: $conContext.LoginSecure = $True 13: # In case the integrated security is not used uncomment below 14: #$conContext.Login = "sa" 15: #$conContext.Password = "sapassword" 16: $db = New-Object Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Smo.Database 17: $db = $srv.Databases.Item("TargetDatabase") 18:   19: $scrp = New-Object Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Smo.Scripter($srv) 20: $scrp.Options.NoFileGroup = $True 21: $scrp.Options.AppendToFile = $False 22: $scrp.Options.ClusteredIndexes = $False 23: $scrp.Options.DriAll = $False 24: $scrp.Options.ScriptDrops = $False 25: $scrp.Options.IncludeHeaders = $True 26: $scrp.Options.ToFileOnly = $True 27: $scrp.Options.Indexes = $False 28: $scrp.Options.WithDependencies = $True 29: $scrp.Options.FileName = 'C:\TEMP\TargetFileName.SQL' 30:   31: $smoObjects = New-Object Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Smo.UrnCollection 32: Foreach ($tb in $db.Tables) 33: { 34: Write-Host -foregroundcolor yellow "Table name being processed" $tb.Name 35: 36: If ($tb.IsSystemObject -eq $FALSE -and $tb.Name -eq $RootTableName) # feel free to customize the selection condition 37: { 38: Write-Host -foregroundcolor magenta $tb.Name "table and its related tables added to be scripted." 39: $smoObjects.Add($tb.Urn) 40: } 41: } 42:   43: # The actual act of scripting 44: $sc = $scrp.Script($smoObjects) 45:   46: Write-host -foregroundcolor green $RootTableName "and its related tables have been scripted to the target file." Enjoy!

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124  | Next Page >