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  • Prims vs Polys: what are the pros and cons of each?

    - by Richard Inglis
    I've noticed that most 3d gaming/rendering environments represent solids as a mesh of (usually triangular) 3d polygons. However some examples, such as Second Life, or PovRay use solids built from a set of 3d primitives (cube, sphere, cone, torus etc) on which various operations can be performed to create more complex shapes. So my question is: why choose one method over the other for representing 3d data? I can see there might be benefits for complex ray-tracing operations to be able to describe a surface as a single mathematical function (like PovRay does), but SL surely isn't attempting anything so ambitious with their rendering engine. Equally, I can imagine it might be more bandwidth-efficient to serve descriptions of generalised solids instead of arbitrary meshes, but is it really worth the downside that SL suffers from (ie modelling stuff is really hard, and usually the results are ugly) - was this just a bad decision made early in SL's development that they're now stuck with? Or is it an artefact of what's easiest to implement in OpenGL?

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  • Is it Bad Practice to use C++ only for the STL containers?

    - by gmatt
    First a little background ... In what follows, I use C,C++ and Java for coding (general) algorithms, not gui's and fancy program's with interfaces, but simple command line algorithms and libraries. I started out learning about programming in Java. I got pretty good with Java and I learned to use the Java containers a lot as they tend to reduce complexity of book keeping while guaranteeing great performance. I intermittently used C++, but I was definitely not as good with it as with Java and it felt cumbersome. I did not know C++ enough to work in it without having to look up every single function and so I quickly reverted back to sticking to Java as much as possible. I then made a sudden transition into cracking and hacking in assembly language, because I felt I was concentrated too much attention on a much too high level language and I needed more experience with how a CPU interacts with memory and whats really going on with the 1's and 0's. I have to admit this was one of the most educational and fun experiences I've had with computers to date. For obviously reasons, I could not use assembly language to code on a daily basis, it was mostly reserved for fun diversions. After learning more about the computer through this experience I then realized that C++ is so much closer to the "level of 1's and 0's" than Java was, but I still felt it to be incredibly obtuse, like a swiss army knife with far too many gizmos to do any one task with elegance. I decided to give plain vanilla C a try, and I quickly fell in love. It was a happy medium between simplicity and enough "micromanagent" to not abstract what is really going on. However, I did miss one thing about Java: the containers. In particular, a simple container (like the stl vector) that expands dynamically in size is incredibly useful, but quite a pain to have to implement in C every time. Hence my code currently looks like almost entirely C with containers from C++ thrown in, the only feature I use from C++. I'd like to know if its consider okay in practice to use just one feature of C++, and ignore the rest in favor of C type code?

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  • Should I make sure arguments aren't null before using them in a function.

    - by Nathan W
    The title may not really explain what I'm really trying to get at, couldn't really think of a way to describe what I mean. I was wondering if it is good practice to check the arguments that a function accepts for nulls or empty before using them. I have this function which just wraps some hash creation like so. Public Shared Function GenerateHash(ByVal FilePath As IO.FileInfo) As String If (FilePath Is Nothing) Then Throw New ArgumentNullException("FilePath") End If Dim _sha As New Security.Cryptography.MD5CryptoServiceProvider Dim _Hash = Convert.ToBase64String(_sha.ComputeHash(New IO.FileStream(FilePath.FullName, IO.FileMode.Open, IO.FileAccess.Read))) Return _Hash End Function As you can see I just takes a IO.Fileinfo as an argument, at the start of the function I am checking to make sure that it is not nothing. I'm wondering is this good practice or should I just let it get to the actual hasher and then throw the exception because it is null.? Thanks.

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  • CSS selectors : should I minimise my use of the class attribute in the HTML or optimise the speed

    - by Laurent Bourgault-Roy
    As I was working on a small website, I decided to use the PageSpeed extension to check if their was some improvement I could do to make the site load faster. However I was quite surprise when it told me that my use of CSS selector was "inefficient". I was always told that you should keep the usage of the class attribute in the HTML to a minimum, but if I understand correctly what PageSpeed tell me, it's much more efficient for the browser to match directly against a class name. It make sense to me, but it also mean that I need to put more CSS classes in my HTML. It also make my .css file a little harder to read. I usually tend to mark my CSS like this : #mainContent p.productDescription em.priceTag { ... } Which make it easy to read : I know this will affect the main content and that it affect something in a paragraph tag (so I wont start to put all sort of layout code in it) that describe a product and its something that need emphasis. However it seem I should rewrite it as .priceTag { ... } Which remove all context information about the style. And if I want to use differently formatted price tag (for example, one in a list on the sidebar and one in a paragraph), I need to use something like that .paragraphPriceTag { ... } .listPriceTag { ... } Which really annoy me since I seem to duplicate the semantic of the HTML in my classes. And that mean I can't put common style in an unqualified .priceTag { ... } and thus I need to replicate the style in both CSS rule, making it harder to make change. (Altough for that I could use multiple class selector, but IE6 dont support them) I believe making code harder to read for the sake of speed has never been really considered a very good practice . Except where it is critical, of course. This is why people use PHP/Ruby/C# etc. instead of C/assembly to code their site. It's easier to write and debug. So I was wondering if I should stick with few CSS classes and complex selector or if I should go the optimisation route and remove my fancy CSS selectors for the sake of speed? Does PageSpeed make over the top recommandation? On most modern computer, will it even make a difference?

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  • What Getters and Setters should and shouldn't do.

    - by cyclotis04
    I've run into a lot of differing opinions on Getters and Setters lately, so I figured I should make it into it's own question. A previous question of mine received an immediate comment (later deleted) that stated setters shouldn't have any side effects, and a SetProperty method would be a better choice. Indeed, this seems to be Microsoft's opinion as well. However, their properties often raise events, such as Resized when a form's Width or Height property is set. OwenP also states "you shouldn't let a property throw exceptions, properties shouldn't have side effects, order shouldn't matter, and properties should return relatively quickly." Yet Michael Stum states that exceptions should be thrown while validating data within a setter. If your setter doesn't throw an exception, how could you effectively validate data, as so many of the answers to this question suggest? What about when you need to raise an event, like nearly all of Microsoft's Control's do? Aren't you then at the mercy of whomever subscribed to your event? If their handler performs a massive amount of information, or throws an error itself, what happens to your setter? Finally, what about lazy loading within the getter? This too could violate the previous guidelines. What is acceptable to place in a getter or setter, and what should be kept in only accessor methods?

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  • How does the verbosity of identifiers affect the performance of a programmer?

    - by DR
    I always wondered: Are there any hard facts which would indicate that either shorter or longer identifiers are better? Example: clrscr() opposed to ClearScreen() Short identifiers should be faster to read because there are fewer characters but longer identifiers often better resemble natural language and therefore also should be faster to read. Are there other aspects which suggest either a short or a verbose style? EDIT: Just to clarify: I didn't ask: "What would you do in this case?". I asked for reasons to prefer one over the other, i.e. this is not a poll question. Please, if you can, add some reason on why one would prefer one style over the other.

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  • Is Area what I am looking for?

    - by Dejan.S
    Hi I'm new to MVC2 or MVC in general. I'm gone do basic app with a backend. Now I been thinking about how I should do with the folders, views, controllers & routes for the AdminFolder. Now I just saw something called Areas. Is that a way to go for me?

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  • what's wrong in File.Exist() method?

    - by Arseny
    Reading some answers with code samples I notice that those where this method mentioned are subjected to criticism. I'm using this method in my code. So I'd like to know if someone give me detailed response whuy this method is not recomemnded and what alternative approaches are?

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  • SQL Server error handling: exceptions and the database-client contract

    - by gbn
    We’re a team of SQL Servers database developers. Our clients are a mixed bag of C#/ASP.NET, C# and Java web services, Java/Unix services and some Excel. Our client developers only use stored procedures that we provide and we expect that (where sensible, of course) they treat them like web service methods. Some our client developers don’t like SQL exceptions. They understand them in their languages but they don’t appreciate that the SQL is limited in how we can communicate issues. I don’t just mean SQL errors, such as trying to insert “bob” into a int column. I also mean exceptions such as telling them that a reference value is wrong, or that data has already changed, or they can’t do this because his aggregate is not zero. They’d don’t really have any concrete alternatives: they’ve mentioned that we should output parameters, but we assume an exception means “processing stopped/rolled back. How do folks here handle the database-client contract? Either generally or where there is separation between the DB and client code monkeys. Edits: we use SQL Server 2005 TRY/CATCH exclusively we log all errors after the rollback to an exception table already we're concerned that some of our clients won't check output paramaters and assume everything is OK. We need errors flagged up for support to look at. everything is an exception... the clients are expected to do some message parsing to separate information vs errors. To separate our exceptions from DB engine and calling errors, they should use the error number (ours are all 50,000 of course)

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  • Best direction for displaying game graphics in C# App

    - by Mike Webb
    I am making a small game as sort of a test project, nothing major. I just started and am working on the graphics piece, but I'm not sure the best way to draw the graphics to the screen. It is going to be sort of like the old Zelda, so pretty simple using bitmaps and such. I started thinking that I could just paint to a Picture Box control using Drawing.Graphics with the Handle from the control, but this seems cumbersome. I'm also not sure if I can use double buffering with this method either. I looked at XNA, but for now I wanted to use a simple method to display everything. So, my question. Using the current C# windows controls and framework, what is the best approach to displaying game graphics (i.e. Picture Box, build a custom control, etc.)

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  • Best approach to send data from a server to an Android device

    - by ElectricDialect
    I am developing an Android app that needs to communicate bi-directionally with a server. By that, I mean either the server or the device can send a message at any time, with an arbitrary amount of time in between messages. Sending data from the device to the server is a common and I think well understood task, but I'm not as sure what the best approach is to go in the opposite direction from the server to the device. I think having the device periodically poll the server may be a bad idea due to latency and the drain on the battery, but I'd be willing to consider this option. My plan at the moment is to send text messages from the server via an email-to-SMS bridge, and to have my app run a service to receive and handle these messages. The question I have is if there are any best practices for this scenario, and if using text messages has some downsides that I have failed to consider. For the sake of this question, I want to assume that users have an unlimited text data plan, so paying per text won't be an issue.

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  • Why is using a common-lookup table to restrict the status of entity wrong?

    - by FreshCode
    According to Five Simple Database Design Errors You Should Avoid by Anith Sen, using a common-lookup table to store the possible statuses for an entity is a common mistake. Why is this wrong? I disagree that it's wrong, citing the example of jobs at a repair service with many possible statuses that generally have a natural flow, eg.: Booked In Assigned to Technician Diagnosing problem Waiting for Client Confirmation Repaired & Ready for Pickup Repaired & Couriered Irreparable & Ready for Pickup Quote Rejected Arguably, some of these statuses can be normalised to tables like Couriered Items, Completed Jobs and Quotes (with Pending/Accepted/Rejected statuses), but that feels like unnecessary schema complication. Another common example would be order statuses that restrict the status of an order, eg: Pending Completed Shipped Cancelled Refunded The status titles and descriptions are in one place for editing and are easy to scaffold as a drop-down with a foreign key for dynamic data applications. This has worked well for me in the past. If the business rules dictate the creation of a new order status, I can just add it to OrderStatus table, without rebuilding my code.

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  • PHP: Where to place return 'false' value?

    - by Mike
    Is one of the following functions better than the other, in terms of where to place the 'return false' statement? Function #1: function equalToTwo($a, $b) { $c = $a + $b; if($c == 2) { return true; } return false; } Function #2: function equalToTwo($a, $b) { $c = $a + $b; if($c == 2) { return true; } else { return false; } } Thanks!

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  • How do you clear your mind after 8-10 hours per day of coding?

    - by Bryan
    Related Question- Ways to prepare your mind before coding?. I'm having a hard time taking my mind off of work projects in my personal time. It's not that I have a stressful job or tight deadlines; I love my job. I find that after spending the whole day writing code & trying to solve problems, I have an extremely hard time getting it out of my mind. I'm constantly thinking about the current project/problem/task all the time. It's keeping me from relaxing, and in the long run it just builds stress. Personal projects help to some extent, but mostly just to distract me. I still have source code bouncing around my head 16 hours a day. I'm still relatively new to the workforce. Have you struggled with this, perhaps as a young developer? How did you overcome it? Can anyone offer general advice on winding down after a long programming session?

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  • The Java interface doesn't declare any exception. How to manage checked exception of the implementat

    - by Frór
    Let's say I have the following Java interface that I may not modify: public interface MyInterface { public void doSomething(); } And now the class implementing it is like this: class MyImplementation implements MyInterface { public void doSomething() { try { // read file } catch (IOException e) { // what to do? } } } I can't recover from not reading the file. A subclass of RuntimeException can clearly help me, but I'm not sure if it's the right thing to do: the problem is that that exception would then not be documented in the class and a user of the class would possibly get that exception an know nothing about solving this. What can I do?

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  • HTTP headers: Last-Modified - how can it mimimize server load?

    - by gotts
    Imagine the following use case: I use an AJAX request for getting some info about Item and use this URL: http://domain/items/show/1 In my database all items have a field called modified_at where we store the moment when this item was previously modified. How can Last-Modified server HTTP header in response can minimize load/reduce requests/increase responsiveness if we need to process this request every time on the server side? It looks like we don't reduce the number of HTTP requests with that response and we don't reduce the load on server. Who needs this anyway?

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  • Simple network gaming, client-server architecture planning.

    - by michal
    Hi, I'm coding simple game which I plan to make multiplayer (over the network) as my university project. I'm considering two scenarios for client-server communication: The physics (they're trivial! I should call it "collision tests" in fact :) ) are processed on server machine only. Therefore the communication looks like Client1->Server: Pressed "UP" Server->Clients: here you go, Client1 position is now [X,Y] Client2->Server: Pressed "fire" Server->Clients: Client1 hit Client2, make Client2 disappear! server receives the event and broadcasts it to all the other clients. Client1->Server: Pressed "UP" Server->Clients: Client1 pressed "UP", recalculate his position!! [Client1 receives this one as well!] Which one is better? Or maybe none of them? :)

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  • Multiple REPLACE function in Oracle

    - by Adnan
    I am using the REPLACE function in oracle to replace values in my string like; SELECT REPLACE('THE NEW VALUE IS #VAL1#','#VAL1#','55') from dual So this is OK to replace one value, but what about 20+, should I use 20+ REPLACE function or is there a more practical solution. All ideas are welcome.

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  • Is it better to adopt the same technologies used at work to be effective on your home projects ?

    - by systempuntoout
    Is it better to start developing an home project using the same technologies used at work to be more productive and effective? I'm not talking about a simple hello world web page but an home project with all bells and whistles that one day, maybe, you could sell on internet. This dilemma is often subject of flames between me and a friend. He thinks that if you want to make a great home-made project you need to use the same technologies used daily at work staying in the same scope too; for example, a c++ computer game programmer should develope an home-made c++ game. I'm pretty sure that developing using the same technologies used at work can be more productive at beginning, but surely less exciting and stimulating of working with other languages\ides\libraries out of your daily job. What's your opinion about that?

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  • I don't like Python functions that take two or more iterables. Is it a good idea?

    - by Xavier Ho
    This question came from looking at this question on Stackoverflow. def fringe8((px, py), (x1, y1, x2, y2)): Personally, it's been one of my pet peeves to see a function that takes two arguments with fixed-number iterables (like a tuple) or two or more dictionaries (Like in the Shotgun API). It's just hard to use, because of all the verbosity and double-bracketed enclosures. Wouldn't this be better: >>> class Point(object): ... def __init__(self, x, y): ... self.x = x ... self.y = y ... >>> class Rect(object): ... def __init__(self, x1, y1, x2, y2): ... self.x1 = x1 ... self.y1 = y1 ... self.x2 = x2 ... self.y2 = y2 ... >>> def fringe8(point, rect): ... # ... ... >>> >>> point = Point(2, 2) >>> rect = Rect(1, 1, 3, 3) >>> >>> fringe8(point, rect) Is there a situation where taking two or more iterable arguments is justified? Obviously the standard itertools Python library needs that, but I can't see it being pretty in maintainable, flexible code design.

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  • How strict should I be in the "do the simplest thing that could possible work" while doing TDD

    - by Support - multilanguage SO
    For TDD you have to Create a test that fail Do the simplest thing that could possible work to pass the test Add more variants of the test and repeat Refactor when a pattern emerge With this approach you're supposing to cover all the cases ( that comes to my mind at least) but I'm wonder if am I being too strict here and if it is possible to "think ahead" some scenarios instead of simple discover them. For instance, I'm processing a file and if it doesn't conform to a certain format I am to throw an InvalidFormatException So my first test was: @Test void testFormat(){ // empty doesn't do anything... processor.validate("empty.txt"); try { processor.validate("invalid.txt"); assert false: "Should have thrown InvalidFormatException"; } catch( InvalidFormatException ife ) { assert "Invalid format".equals( ife.getMessage() ); } } I run it and it fails because it doesn't throw an exception. So the next thing that comes to my mind is: "Do the simplest thing that could possible work", so I : public void validate( String fileName ) throws InvalidFormatException { if(fileName.equals("invalid.txt") { throw new InvalidFormatException("Invalid format"); } } Doh!! ( although the real code is a bit more complicated, I found my self doing something like this several times ) I know that I have to eventually add another file name and other test that would make this approach impractical and that would force me to refactor to something that makes sense ( which if I understood correctly is the point of TDD, to discover the patterns the usage unveils ) but: Q: am I taking too literal the "Do the simplest thing..." stuff?

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  • Constructor Overload Problem in C++ Inherrentance

    - by metdos
    Here my code snippet: class Request { public: Request(void); ……….. } Request::Request(void) { qDebug()<<"Request: "<<"Hello World"; } class LoginRequest :public Request { public: LoginRequest(void); LoginRequest(QDomDocument); …………… } LoginRequest::LoginRequest(void) { qDebug()<<"LoginRequest: "<<"Hello World"; requestType=LOGIN; requestId=-1; } LoginRequest::LoginRequest(QDomDocument doc){ qDebug()<<"LoginRequest: "<<"Hello World with QDomDocument"; LoginRequest::LoginRequest(); xmlDoc_=doc; } When call constructor of Overrided LoginRequest LoginRequest *test=new LoginRequest(doc); I came up with this result: Request: Hello World LoginRequest: Hello World with QDomDocument Request: Hello World LoginRequest: Hello World Obviously both constructor of LoginRequest called REquest constructor. Is there any way to cape with this situation? I can construct another function that does the job I want to do and have both constructors call that function. But I wonder is there any solution?

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