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  • Parsing mathematical experssions with two values that have parenthesis and minus signs

    - by user45921
    I'm trying to parse equations like these which only has two values or the square root of a certain value from a text file: 100+100 -100-100 -(100)+(-100) sqrt(100) by the minues signs, parenthesis and the operator symbol in the middle and the square root, and I have no idea how to start off... I've got the file part done and the simple calculation parts except that I couldnt get my program to solve the equations in the above. #include <stdio.h> #include <string.h> #include <stdlib.h> #include <math.h> main(){ FILE *fp; char buff[255], sym,sym2,del1,del2,del3,del4; double num1, num2; int ret; fp = fopen("input.txt","r"); while(fgets(buff,sizeof(buff),fp)!=NULL){ char *tok = buff; sscanf(tok,"%lf%c%lf",&num1,&sym,&num2); switch(sym){ case '+': printf("%lf\n", num1+num2); break; case '-': printf("%lf\n", num1-num2); break; case '*': printf("%lf\n", num1*num2); break; case '/': printf("%lf\n", num1/num2); break; default: printf("The input value is not correct\n"); break; } } fclose(fp); } that is what have I written for the other basic operations without parenthesis and the minus sign for the second value and it works great for the simple ones. I'm using a switch method to calculate the add, sub, mul and divide but I'm not sure how to properly use the sscanf function (if I am not using it properly) or if there is another way using a function like strtok to properly parse the parenthesis and the minus signs. Any kind help?

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  • Writing Acceptance test cases

    - by HH_
    We are integrating a testing process in our SCRUM process. My new role is to write acceptance tests of our web applications in order to automate them later. I have read a lot about how tests cases should be written, but none gave me practical advices to write test cases for complex web applications, and instead they threw conflicting principles that I found hard to apply: Test cases should be short: Take the example of a CMS. Short test cases are easy to maintain and to identify the inputs and outputs. But what if I want to test a long series of operations (eg. adding a document, sending a notification to another user, the other user replies, the document changes state, the user gets a notice). It rather seems to me that test cases should represent complete scenarios. But I can see how this will produce overtly complex test documents. Tests should identify inputs and outputs:: What if I have a long form with many interacting fields, with different behaviors. Do I write one test for everything, or one for each? Test cases should be independent: But how can I apply that if testing the upload operation requires that the connect operation is successful? And how does it apply to writing test cases? Should I write a test for each operation, but each test declares its dependencies, or should I rewrite the whole scenario for each test? Test cases should be lightly-documented: This principles is specific to Agile projects. So do you have any advice on how to implement this principle? Although I thought that writing acceptance test cases was going to be simple, I found myself overwhelmed by every decision I had to make (FYI: I am a developer and not a professional tester). So my main question is: What steps or advices do you have in order to write maintainable acceptance test cases for complex applications. Thank you.

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  • How to REALLY start thinking in terms of objects?

    - by Mr Grieves
    I work with a team of developers who all have several years of experience with languages such as C# and Java. Most of them are young enough to have been shown OOP as a standard way to develop software in university and are very comfortable with concepts such as inheritance, abstraction, encapsulation and polymorphism. Yet, many of them, and I have to include myself, still tend to create classes which are meant to be used in a very functional fashion. The resulting software is often several smaller classes which correctly represent business objects which get passed through larger classes which only supply ways to modify and use those objects (functions). Large complex difficult-to-maintain classes named Manager are usually the result of such behaviour. I can see two theoretical reasons why people might write this type of code: It's easy to start thinking of everything in terms of the database Deep down, for me, a computer handling a web request feels more like a functional operation than an object oriented operation when you think about Request Handlers, Threads, Processes, CPU Cores and CPU operations... I want source code which is easy to read and easy to modify. I have seen excellent examples of OO code which meet these objectives. How can I start writing code like this? How I can I really start thinking in an object oriented fashion? How can I share such a mentality with my colleagues?

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  • My new favourite traceflag

    - by Dave Ballantyne
    As we are all aware, there are a number of traceflags.  Some documented, some semi-documented and some completely undocumented.  Here is one that is undocumented that Paul White(b|t) mentioned almost as an aside in one of his excellent blog posts. Much has been written about residual predicates and how a predicate can be pushed into a seek/scan operation.  This is a good thing to happen,  it does save a lot of processing from having to be done.  For the uninitiated though: If we have a simple SELECT statement such as : the process that SQL Server goes through to resolve this is : The index IX_Person_LastName_FirstName_MiddleName is navigated to find the first “Smith” For each “Smith” the middle name is checked for being a null. Two operations!, and the execution plan doesnt fully represent all the work that is being undertaken. As you can see there is only a single seek operation, the work undertaken to resolve the condition “MiddleName is not null” has been pushed into it.  This can be seen in the properties. “Seek predicate” is how the index has been navigated, and “Predicate” is the condition run over every row,  a scan inside a seek!. So the question is:  How many rows have been resolved by the seek and how many by the scan ?  How many rows did the filter remove ? Wouldn’t it be nice if this operation could be split ?  That exactly what traceflag 9130 does. Executing the query: That changes the plan rather dramatically, and should be changing how we think about the index seek itself.  The Filter operator has been added and, unsurprisingly, the condition in this is “MiddleName is not null” So it is now evident that the seek operation found 103 Smiths and 60 of those Smiths had a non-null MiddleName. This traceflag has no place on a production system,  dont even think about it

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  • How do you convince the client their application's backend needs a rewrite?

    - by Richard DesLonde
    I have been supporting a LOB winforms application for a client the last 3 years. The application is built with a simple monolithic architecture and uses .NET 2.0. The application is a core part of their operations and its longevity is paramount. It needs to evolve with their evolving business processes, as well as implement improved functionality etc....this brings me to believe that this application needs an overhaul of sorts on the back-end. The problem is changing a back-end is "invisible"...i.e. the user never actually sees it. It's a quality of the system that is changing (stability, maintainability, reliability, longevity), not some functional requirement that will be easily seen...i.e. the ROI is not obvious. There is a lot of new functionality to be added to the front-end as well (user experience). I am considering a strategy of changing the back-end over time...i.e. when making a change or adding a feature to the front-end, change those components in the back-end that are affected, eventually you get to everything. How do I convince the client that we need to rebuild the back-end?

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  • Central renderer for a given scene

    - by Loggie
    When creating a central rendering system for all game objects in a given scene I am trying to work out the best way to go about passing the scene to the render system to be rendered. If I have a scene managed by an arbitrary structure, i.e., an octree, bsp trees, quad-tree, kd tree, etc. What is the best way to pass this to the render system? The obvious problem is that if simply given the root node of the structure, the render system would require an intrinsic knowledge of the structure in order to traverse the structure. My solution to this is to clip all objects outside the frustum in the scene manager and then create a list of the objects which are left and pass this simple list to the render system, be it an array, a vector, a linked list, etc. (This would be a structure required by the render system as a means to know which objects should be rendered). The list would of course attempt to minimise OpenGL state changes by grouping objects that require the same rendering operations to be performed on them. I have been thinking a lot about this and started searching various terms on here and followed any additional information/links but I have not really found a definitive answer. The case may be that there is no definitive answer but I would appreciate some advice and tips. My question is, is this a reasonable solution to the problem? Are there any improvements that I could make? Are there any caveats I should know about? Side question: Am I right in assuming that octrees, bsp trees, etc are all forms of BVH?

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  • What is the best approach to solve a factory method problem which has to be an instance?

    - by Iago
    I have to add new funcionality in a web service legacy project and I'm thinking what is the best approach for a concrete situation. The web service is simple: It receives a XML file, unmarshalling, generates response's objects, marshalling and finally it sends the response as a XML file. For every XML files received, the web service always responds with the same XML structure. What I have to do is to generate a different XML file according to the XML received. So I have a controller class which has all marshalling/unmarshalling operations, but this controller class has to be an instance. Depending on XML received I need some marshalling methods or others. Trying to make few changes on legacy source, what is the best approach? My first approach was to do a factory method pattern with the controller class, but this class has to be an instance. I want to keep, as far as it goes, this structure: classController.doMarshalling(); I think this one is a bit smelly: if(XMLReceived.isTypeOne()) classController.doMarshallingOne(); else if(XMLReceived.isTypeTwo()) classController.doMarshallingTwo(); else if(XMLReceived.isTypeThree()) classController.doMarshallingThree(); else if ... I hope my question is well understood

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  • Cleaning Up After Chrome

    - by Mark Treadwell
    I find Google Chrome, which I have no interest in, is continually getting installed on machines in my house, mostly due to Adobe Shockwave bringing it along as an install package. (Family members are agreeing to the download, not realizing the Chrome is getting dropped as well.) My major issue after uninstalling Chrome is that you can no longer click on links in Outlook emails. There is a lot on the web about this, and Google has not been proactive at fixing their uninstaller. I have now added a registry file to my Win64 systems to reset the problem registry keys and clear the error. This registry file is pretty simple. It merely resets HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\.htm, HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\.html, and HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\.shtml back to their default values of "htmlfile". Chrome takes over the handling of these file extensions because its default install is to make itself the default web browser. The Chrome uninstalled fails to clear/reset them. In troubleshooting this, I looked in my registry based on the web info on the Chrome uninstall problem. Since my system had never had Chrome installed, my registry did not have the problem keys. To troubleshoot, I installed (ugh!) and uninstalled Chrome. Sure enough, Chrome left the expected debris with a value string of "ChromeHTML.PR2EPLWMBQZK3BY7Z2BFBMFERU" or something similar. Resetting these values fixed the problem. I see that Chrome leaves quite a bit of debris behind in the registry. I guess it is creating the keys then leaving them behind, even though their presence (with bad data) subsequently affects operations.

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  • What's the best way to compare blocks in a matching game that can be multiple colors?

    - by Ryan Detzel
    I have a match 3-4 game and the blocks can be one of 7 colors. There are an addition 7 blocks that are a mix of the original 7 colors so for example there is a red and blue block and there is also a red/blue block which can be matched with either the red or the blue. My original thought is just to use binary operations so. int red = 0x000000001; int blue = 0x000000010; int redblue = 0x000000011; Then just do an & operation so see if they match. Does this sound like a decent plan or am I over complicating it? edit: Better yet so it's more readable. int red = 1; int blue = 2; int red_blue = 3; int yellow = 4; int red_yellow = 5; maybe as defines or static vars?

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  • Any algorithm to dedicate a set of known resources to a set of known requirements (scheduling)

    - by Saeed Neamati
    I'm developing an application to help school principals in dedicating teachers to classes and courses over the hours of a week (scheduling). The scenario is roughly something like this: User enters the list of teachers and their free times into the system User enters the list of courses for this semester User enters the list of available classes into the system Well, up to here, there is no big deal. Just simple CRUD operations and nothing extraordinary. However, now what makes this system useful is that the application should automatically and based on an algorithm create the semester scheduling. I think you've got the main idea here. For example application should suggest that teacher A should go to class 1 for mathematics, and at the same time teacher B should go to class 2 for physics. This way all of the classes would be dedicated to lessons and teacher times won't overlap each other. Piece a cake for school principal. However, I can't find a good algorithm for this resource dedication. I mean it seems hard to me. Searching Google resulted in articles from different websites, but they are of no help and use to me. For example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_allocation or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheduling_(production_processes) Is there any algorithm out there, or any application or engine which can help me here? Does this requirements have a known name, like for example time scheduling engine? Any help would be appreciated.

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  • Which architecture should I choose for this project?

    - by Jichao
    I have a project. The server which based on a phone PCI-board is responsible for received phone calls from the customer and then redirect the phone calls to the operators. I have decided to code the server using c++ programming language and qt framework because the PCI-board SDK's interface is c/c++ originated and for the sake of portability. The server need to send the information of the the customer to the operator while ringing the operator and the ui interface of the operator client should be browser-based. Now the key problem is how could the server notify the operator that there is a phone call for he/she. One architecture I have considered is like this, The operator browser client use ajax pooling the web server to check whether there is call to the client; the web server pooling the database server to check whether there is call; the desktop server(c++) wait for the phone calls and set the information in the database. The other operations such as hang up the phone call from the client, retransfer the phone call to the other operator also use this architecture. Then, is there any way other than pooling the server(js code setInterval('getDail', 1000)) to decide whether there is a call to the operator? Is this architecture feasible or should I use some terrific techniques that I do know such as web services,xml-rpc, soap???

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  • How can I mark a pixel in the stencil buffer?

    - by János Turánszki
    I never used the stencil buffer for anything until now, but I want to change this. I have an idea of how it should work: the gpu discards or keeps rasterized pixels before the pixel shader based on the stencil buffer value on the given position and some stencil operation. What I don't know is how would I mark a pixel in the stencil buffer with a specific value. For example I draw my scene and want to mark everything which is drawn with a specific material (this material could be looked up from a texture so ideally I should mark the pixel in the pixel shader), so that later when I do some post processing on my scene I would only do it on the marked pixels. I didn't find anything on the internet besides how to set up a stencil buffer and explaining the different stencil operations. I was expecting to find some System-Value semantics like SV_Depth to write to in the pixel shader (because the stencil buffer shares the same resource with the depth buffer in D3D11), but there is no such thing on MSDN. So how should I do this? If I am misunderstanding something please help me clear that up.

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  • Partner Webcast – Oracle Weblogic 12c for New Projects - 07 Nov 2013

    - by Thanos Terentes Printzios
    Fast-growing organizations need to stay agile in the face of changing customer, business or market requirements. Oracle WebLogic Server 12c is the industry's best application server platform that allows you to quickly develop and deploy reliable, secure, scalable and manageable enterprise Java EE applications.WebLogic Server Java EE applications are based on standardized, modular components. WebLogic Server provides a complete set of services for those modules and handles many details of application behavior automatically, without requiring programming. New project applications are created by Java programmers, Web designers, and application assemblers. Programmers and designers create modules that implement the business and presentation logic for the application. Application assemblers assemble the modules into applications that are ready to deploy on WebLogic Server. Build and run high-performance enterprise applications and services with Oracle WebLogic Server 12c, available in three editions to meet the needs of traditional and cloud IT environments. Join us, in this webcast, as we will show you how WebLogic Server 12c helps you building and deployingenterprise Java EE applications with support for new features for lowering cost of operations, improving performance, enhancing scalability. Agenda Oracle WebLogic Server Introduction Application Development on WebLogic Using Java EE Overview of the Application Deployment Process Monitoring Application Performance Q&A November 07th, 2013 -  9am UTC/11am EET Delivery FormatThis FREE online LIVE eSeminar will be delivered over the Web. Registrations received less than 24hours prior to start time may not receive confirmation to attend. Duration: 1 hour REGISTER NOW For any questions please contact us at partner.imc-AT-beehiveonline.oracle-DOT-com Stay Connected Oracle Newsletters

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  • How to collaborate on features using github

    - by Robert Dailey
    github encourages 1 fork per user, so that that user can work independently on a feature and then request that feature to be accepted into the main repository via pull request. However, what if 2 developers need to collaborate on that feature? What is the ideal workflow for this? I could see a number of options: Both developers fork the original repository. Each developer pulls/pushes changes between each other's repository. This seems like a lot of work (tiny micro operations) and also creates a delay between changes, so increases the window for conflicts. Developer 1 forks from the main repository, developer 2 forks from developer 1. Same as #1 mainly but hopefully simplifies Developer 2's life a little? Developer 1 gives Developer 2 permissions to his own fork, so they both work out of the same central repository. Not sure if this is ideal. I'm also curious where branches come into this. Obviously there would be a branch for the feature itself but that branch can't exist in a single place, it would have to exist on multiple forks and be synchronized. Basically just really confused about this workflow, would like an approach for how this can be best accomplished.

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  • How to decide if I should take a profit sharing offer or insist on hard cash

    - by Icode4food
    I am currently the sole developer at the very beginning stages of what I think could be a successful startup. My question is simply how to go about determining if I am interested in accepting a permanent stock in the enterprise or if I should insist on hard cash. This startup is seeking venture capital and it is looking likely that they will get something, I don't know how much. I know very little about the business plan or financial operations at all. The founders have experience with other startup type devours that have been successful. From a business perspective I have a reasonable amount of confidence in them. However, I have never met them face to face. They have offered me a partnership in the project but I'm fairly confident that I don't want to do that. I have done some work for them and they really like me so I'm not to afraid of loosing the position all together. I am a young developer with no experience with this sort of thing and need some experience to point me in the right direction. How to I begin to evaluate how much stock or what percentage of the profit should I ask for? Any suggestions at all would be appreciated! P.S. Any suggestions for better tags?

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  • Handling Types for Real and Complex Matrices in a BLAS Wrapper

    - by mga
    I come from a C background and I'm now learning OOP with C++. As an exercise (so please don't just say "this already exists"), I want to implement a wrapper for BLAS that will let the user write matrix algebra in an intuitive way (e.g. similar to MATLAB) e.g.: A = B*C*D.Inverse() + E.Transpose(); My problem is how to go about dealing with real (R) and complex (C) matrices, because of C++'s "curse" of letting you do the same thing in N different ways. I do have a clear idea of what it should look like to the user: s/he should be able to define the two separately, but operations would return a type depending on the types of the operands (R*R = R, C*C = C, R*C = C*R = C). Additionally R can be cast into C and vice versa (just by setting the imaginary parts to 0). I have considered the following options: As a real number is a special case of a complex number, inherit CMatrix from RMatrix. I quickly dismissed this as the two would have to return different types for the same getter function. Inherit RMatrix and CMatrix from Matrix. However, I can't really think of any common code that would go into Matrix (because of the different return types). Templates. Declare Matrix<T> and declare the getter function as T Get(int i, int j), and operator functions as Matrix *(Matrix RHS). Then specialize Matrix<double> and Matrix<complex>, and overload the functions. Then I couldn't really see what I would gain with templates, so why not just define RMatrix and CMatrix separately from each other, and then overload functions as necessary? Although this last option makes sense to me, there's an annoying voice inside my head saying this is not elegant, because the two are clearly related. Perhaps I'm missing an appropriate design pattern? So I guess what I'm looking for is either absolution for doing this, or advice on how to do better.

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  • Does LINQ require significantly more processing cycles and memory than lower-level data iteration techniques?

    - by Matthew Patrick Cashatt
    Background I am recently in the process of enduring grueling tech interviews for positions that use the .NET stack, some of which include silly questions like this one, and some questions that are more valid. I recently came across an issue that may be valid but I want to check with the community here to be sure. When asked by an interviewer how I would count the frequency of words in a text document and rank the results, I answered that I would Use a stream object put the text file in memory as a string. Split the string into an array on spaces while ignoring punctuation. Use LINQ against the array to .GroupBy() and .Count(), then OrderBy() said count. I got this answer wrong for two reasons: Streaming an entire text file into memory could be disasterous. What if it was an entire encyclopedia? Instead I should stream one block at a time and begin building a hash table. LINQ is too expensive and requires too many processing cycles. I should have built a hash table instead and, for each iteration, only added a word to the hash table if it didn't otherwise exist and then increment it's count. The first reason seems, well, reasonable. But the second gives me more pause. I thought that one of the selling points of LINQ is that it simply abstracts away lower-level operations like hash tables but that, under the veil, it is still the same implementation. Question Aside from a few additional processing cycles to call any abstracted methods, does LINQ require significantly more processing cycles to accomplish a given data iteration task than a lower-level task (such as building a hash table) would?

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  • Ubuntu 13.10 Unity doesn't load after upgrade

    - by William
    Just upgraded to Ubuntu 13.10 only to find that Unity won't load (login freezes, after doing ctrl+alt+F1, logging in and then doing startx, I get a blank desktop and the mouse pointer, and nothing else). I can right click, but the only operations that work are "create new file" and "create new folder". For example, "change desktop background" doesn't work. Also, after doing a few right clicks and choosing "change desktop background", I get a warning message box: "compiz closed unexpectedly." Guest login works fine. Tried creating a new user, but I experience the same thing with the new user. Tried removing all configuration files from my home directory... same thing. Doing dconf reset -f /org/compiz/ gives an error "error spawning command line..." Doing unity --reset also gives errors. Tried uninstalling unity (and compiz) and reinstalling, but that doesn't help. Tried reconfiguring lightdm, didn't help. I don't have any proprietary drivers installed. Once again, the funny thing is that the guest session works fine.

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  • How do I throttle a command in a terminal window?

    - by To Do
    I needed to run convert with a lot of images at the same time. The command took quite a while but this doesn't bother me. The issue is that this command rendered my computer unusable while the command was running (for about 15 minutes). So is it possible to throttle the command by limiting resources (processor and memory) to the command, directly from the command line? This can only work if I add something to the same line before pressing Enter because once I start the process the computer slows so much that it is impossible for example to switch to "System monitor" and reduce priority. Edit: top and iotop results I managed to run top and sudo iotop >iotop.txt while doing one of these convert operations. (The iotop.txt file produced is difficult to read) Results of top: PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 14275 username 20 0 4043m 3.0g 1448 D 7.0 80.4 0:16.45 convert Results of iotop: [?1049h[1;24r(B[m[4l[?7h[?1h=[39;49m[?25l[39;49m(B[m[H[2JTotal DISK READ: 1269.04 K/s | Total DISK WRITE:[59G0.00 B/s (B[0;7m TID PRIO USER DISK READ DISK WRITE SWAPIN(B[0;1;7m IO(B[0;7m COMMAND [3;2H(B[m2516 be/4 username 350.08 K/s 0.00 B/s 0.00 % 0.00 % zeitgeist-datahub 7394 be/4 username 568.88 K/s 0.00 B/s 77.41 % 0.00 % --rendere~.530483991[5;1H14275 idle username 350.08 K/s 0.00 B/s 37.49 % 0.00 % convert S~f test.pdf[6;2H2048 be/4 root[6;24H0.00 B/s 0.00 B/s 0.00 % 0.00 % [kworker/3:2] [5G1 be/4 root[7;24H0.00 B/s 0.00 B/s 0.00 % 0.00 % init Furthermore, even after the process ends, the computer does not return to the previous performance. I found a way around this by running sudo swapoff -a followed by sudo swapon -a

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  • Mercurial says "nothing changed", but it did. Sometimes my software is too clever.

    - by user12608033
    It seems I have found a "bug" in Mercurial. It takes a shortcut when checking for differences in tracked files. If the file's size and modification time are unchanged, it assumes its contents are unchanged: $ hg init . $ cp -p .sccs2hg/2005-06-05_00\:00\:00\,nicstat.c nicstat.c $ ls -ogE nicstat.c -rw-r--r-- 1 14722 2012-08-24 11:22:48.819451726 -0700 nicstat.c $ hg add nicstat.c $ hg commit -m "added nicstat.c" $ cp -p .sccs2hg/2005-07-02_00\:00\:00\,nicstat.c nicstat.c $ ls -ogE nicstat.c -rw-r--r-- 1 14722 2012-08-24 11:22:48.819451726 -0700 nicstat.c $ hg diff $ hg commit nothing changed $ touch nicstat.c $ hg diff diff -r b49cf59d431d nicstat.c --- a/nicstat.c Fri Aug 24 11:21:27 2012 -0700 +++ b/nicstat.c Fri Aug 24 11:22:50 2012 -0700 @@ -2,7 +2,7 @@ * nicstat - print network traffic, Kb/s read and written. Solaris 8+. * "netstat -i" only gives a packet count, this program gives Kbytes. * - * 05-Jun-2005, ver 0.81 (check for new versions, http://www.brendangregg.com) + * 02-Jul-2005, ver 0.90 (check for new versions, http://www.brendangregg.com) * [...] Now, before you agree or disagree with me on whether this is a bug, I will also say that I believe it is a feature. Yes, I feel it is an acceptable shortcut because in "real" situations an edit to a file will change the modification time by at least one second (the resolution that hg diff or hg commit is looking for). The benefit of the shortcut is greatly improved performance of operations like "hg diff" and "hg status", particularly where your repository contains a lot of files. Why did I have no change in modification time? Well, my source file was generated by a script that I have written to convert SCCS change history to Mercurial commits. If my script can generate two revisions of a file within a second, and the files are the same size, then I run afoul of this shortcut. Solution - I will just change my script to apply the modification time from the SCCS history to the file prior to commit. A "touch -t " will do that easily.

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  • Are these advanced/unfair interview questions regarding Java concurrency?

    - by sparc_spread
    Here are some questions I've recently asked interviewees who say they know Java concurrency: Explain the hazard of "memory visibility" - the way the JVM can reorder certain operations on variables that are unprotected by a monitor and not declared volatile, such that one thread may not see the changes made by another thread. Usually I ask this one by showing code where this hazard is present (e.g. the NoVisibility example in Listing 3.1 from "Java Concurrency in Practice" by Goetz et al) and asking what is wrong. Explain how volatile affects not just the actual variable declared volatile, but also any changes to variables made by a thread before it changes the volatile variable. Why might you use volatile instead of synchronized? Implement a condition variable with wait() and notifyAll(). Explain why you should use notifyAll(). Explain why the condition variable should be tested with a while loop. My question is - are these appropriate or too advanced to ask someone who says they know Java concurrency? And while we're at it, do you think that someone working in Java concurrency should be expected to have an above-average knowledge of Java garbage collection?

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  • Name of the Countdown Numbers round problem - and algorithmic solutions?

    - by Dai
    For the non-Brits in the audience, there's a segment of a daytime game-show where contestants have a set of 6 numbers and a randomly generated target number. They have to reach the target number using any (but not necessarily all) of the 6 numbers using only arithmetic operators. All calculations must result in positive integers. An example: Youtube: Countdown - The Most Extraordinary Numbers Game Ever? A detailed description is given on Wikipedia: Countdown (Game Show) For example: The contentant selects 6 numbers - two large (possibilities include 25, 50, 75, 100) and four small (numbers 1 .. 10, each included twice in the pool). The numbers picked are 75, 50, 2, 3, 8, 7 are given with a target number of 812. One attempt is (75 + 50 - 8) * 7 - (3 * 2) = 813 (This scores 7 points for a solution within 5 of the target) An exact answer would be (50 + 8) * 7 * 2 = 812 (This would have scored 10 points exactly matching the target). Obviously this problem has existed before the advent of TV, but the Wikipedia article doesn't give it a name. I've also saw this game at a primary school I attended where the game was called "Crypto" as an inter-class competition - but searching for it now reveals nothing. I took part in it a few times and my dad wrote an Excel spreadsheet that attempted to brute-force the problem, I don't remember how it worked (only that it didn't work, what with Excel's 65535 row limit), but surely there must be an algorithmic solution for the problem. Maybe there's a solution that works the way human cognition does (e.g. in-parallel to find numbers 'close enough', then taking candidates and performing 'smaller' operations).

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  • Generic rule parser for RPG board game rules - how to do it?

    - by burzum
    I want to build a generic rule parser for pen and paper style RPG systems. A rule can involve usually 1 to N entities 1 to N roles of a dice and calculating values based on multiple attributes of an entity. For example: Player has STR 18, his currently equipped weapon gives him a bonus of +1 STR but a malus of DEX -1. He attacks a monster entity and the game logic now is required to run a set of rules or actions: Player rolls the dice, if he gets for example 8 or more (base attack value he needs to pass is one of his base attributes!) his attack is successfully. The monster then rolls the dice to calculate if the attack goes through it's armor. If yes the damage is taken if not the attack was blocked. Besides simple math rules can also have constraints like applying only to a certain class of user (warrior vs wizzard for example) or any other attribute. So this is not just limited to mathematical operations. If you're familiar with RPG systems like Dungeon and Dragons you'll know what I'm up to. My issue is now that I have no clue how to exactly build this the best possible way. I want people to be able to set up any kind of rule and later simply do an action like selecting a player and a monster and run an action (set of rules like an attack). I'm asking less for help with the database side of things but more about how to come up with a structure and a parser for it to keep my rules flexible. The language of choice for this is php by the way.

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  • TXPAUSE : polite waiting for hardware transactional memory

    - by Dave
    Classic locks are an appropriate tool to prevent potentially conflicting operations A and B, invoked by different threads, from running at the same time. In a sense the locks cause either A to run before B or vice-versa. Similarly, we can replace the locks with hardware transactional memory, or use transactional lock elision to leverage potential disjoint access parallelism between A and B. But often we want A to wait until B has run. In a Pthreads environment we'd usually use locks in conjunction with condition variables to implement our "wait until" constraint. MONITOR-MWAIT is another way to wait for a memory location to change, but it only allows us to track one cache line and it's only available on x86. There's no similar "wait until" construct for hardware transactions. At the instruction-set level a simple way to express "wait until" in transactions would be to add a new TXPAUSE instruction that could be used within an active hardware transaction. TXPAUSE would politely stall the invoking thread, possibly surrendering or yielding compute resources, while at the same time continuing to track the transaction's address-set. Once a transaction has executed TXPAUSE it can only abort. Ideally that'd happen when some other thread modifies a variable that's in the transaction's read-set or write-set. And since we're aborting all writes would be discarded. In a sense this gives us multi-location MWAIT but with much more flexibility. We could also augment the TXPAUSE with a cycle-count bound to cap the time spent stalled. I should note that we can already enter a tight spin loop in a transaction to wait for updates to address-set to cause an abort. Assuming that the implementation monitors the address-set via cache-coherence probes, by waiting in this fashion we actually communicate via the probes, and not via memory values. That is the updating thread signals the waiter via probes instead of by traditional memory values. But TXPAUSE gives us a polite way to spin.

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  • Debugger for file I/O development?

    - by datenwolf
    Okay, the question title may be a bit cryptic. But it aptly describes what I'm looking for: I think every experienced coder went through this numerous times: You get a binary file format specification, you implement the reader for it, and… nothing works like expected. So you run your code in the debugger, go execute through the code line by line, every header field is read in seemingly correct, but when it comes to the bulk data, offset and indices no longer match up. What would really help in this situation was a binary file viewer, that shows you the progress of your file pointer, as you step through the code, and ideally would also highlight all memory maps. Then you could see the context of the current I/O operations, most notably those darn "off-by-one" mistakes, which are even more annoying when reading a file. Implementing such a debugger should not be too hard. traces on the process' file descriptors/handles and triggers on the I/O functions, to update the display. Only: I don't know of such a kind of debugger to exist. Do I just lack knowledge about the existance of such a tool, or is there really no such thing?

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