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• Is my use case diagram correct?

  - by Dummy Derp

  NOTE: I am self studying UML so I have nobody to verify my diagrams and hence I am posting here, so please bear with me. This is the problem I got from some PDF available on Google that simply had the following problem statement: Problem Statement: A library contains books and journals. The task is to develop a computer system for borrowing books. In order to borrow a book the borrower must be a member of the library. There is a limit on the number of books that can be borrowed by each member of the library. The library may have several copies of a given book. It is possible to reserve a book. Some books are for short term loans only. Other books may be borrowed for 3 weeks. Users can extend the loans. 1. Draw a use case diagram for a library. 2. Give a use case description for two use cases: • Borrow copy of book • Extend loan Diagram: Use case description: 1. Borrow a copy of the book: If the person wishes to borrow a book from Derpville Public Library, he/she must be a member of the library in which case they will be allowed to issue a certain number of books. If the person is not a member, the book will not be issued to them for taking away, rather they will have to sit and read in the library. 2. Extending loan: Some books will be lent for 3 weeks while others will be lent for more than 3 weeks in which case the person borrowing has to come to the library and get the date extended. There is a limit on how much the user can extend the date of a particular book.

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• In the Aggregate: How Will We Maintain Legacy Systems?

  - by Jim G.

  NEW YORK - With a blast that made skyscrapers tremble, an 83-year-old steam pipe sent a powerful message that the miles of tubes, wires and iron beneath New York and other U.S. cities are getting older and could become dangerously unstable. July 2007 Story About a Burst Steam Pipe in Manhattan We've heard about software rot and technical debt. And we've heard from the likes of: "Uncle Bob" Martin - Who warned us about "the consequences of making a mess". Michael C. Feathers - Who gave us guidance for 'Working Effectively With Legacy Code'. So certainly the software engineering community is aware of these issues. But I feel like our aggregate society does not appreciate how these issues can plague working systems and applications. As Steve McConnell notes: ...Unlike financial debt, technical debt is much less visible, and so people have an easier time ignoring it. If this is true, and I believe that it is, then I fear that governments and businesses may defer regular maintenance and fortification against hackers until it is too late. [Much like NYC and the steam pipes.] My Question: Do you share my concern? And if so, is there a way that we can avoid the software equivalent of NYC and the steam pipes?

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• Do I need to contact a lawyer to report a GPL violation in software distributed on Apple's App Store?

  - by Rinzwind

  Some company is selling software through Apple's App Store which uses portions of code that I released publicly under the GPL. The company is violating the licensing terms in two ways, by (1) not preserving my copyright statement, and not releasing their code under the GPL license and (2) by distributing my GPL-licensed code through Apple's App Store. (The Free Software Foundation has made clear that the terms of the GPL and those of the App Store are incompatible.) I want to report this to Apple, and ask that they take appropriate action. I have tried mailing them to ask for more information about the reporting process, and have received the automated reply quoted below. The last point in the list of things one needs to provide, the “a statement by you, made under penalty of perjury,” sounds as if they mean some kind of specific legal document. I'm not sure. Does this mean I need to contact a lawyer just to file the report? I'd like to avoid going through that hassle if at all possible. (Besides an answer to this specific question, I'd welcome comments and experience reports from anyone who has already had to deal with a GPL violation on Apple's App Store.) Thank you for contacting Apple's Copyright Agent. If you believe that your work has been copied in a way that constitutes infringement on Apple’s Web site, please provide the following information: an electronic or physical signature of the person authorized to act on behalf of the owner of the copyright interest; a description of the copyrighted work that you claim has been infringed; a description of where the material that you claim is infringing is located on the site; your address, telephone number, and email address; a statement by you that you have a good faith belief that the disputed use is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law; a statement by you, made under penalty of perjury, that the above information in your Notice is accurate and that you are the copyright owner or authorized to act on the copyright owner’s behalf. For further information, please review Apple's Legal Information & Notices/Claims of Copyright Infringement at: http://www.apple.com/legal/trademark/claimsofcopyright.html To expedite the processing of your claim regarding any alleged intellectual property issues related to iTunes (music/music videos, podcasts, TV, Movies), please send a copy of your notice to [email protected] For claims concerning a software application, please send a copy of your notice to [email protected]. Due to the high volume of e-mails we receive, this may be the only reply you receive from [email protected]. Please be assured, however, that Apple's Copyright Agent and/or the iTunes Legal Team will promptly investigate and take appropriate action concerning your report.

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• how to think like a computer scientist java edition exercise 7.2 [on hold]

  - by James Canfield

  I cannot figure out how to write this program, can someone please help me?! The purpose of this method is to practice manipulating St rings. Create a new program called Name.java. This program will take a name string consisting of EITHER a first name followed by a last name (nonstandar d format) or a last name followed by a comma then a first name (standard format). Ie . “Joe Smith” vs. “Smith, Joe”. This program will convert the string to standard format if it is not already in standard format. Write a method called hasComma that takes a name as an argument and that returns a boolean indicating whether it contains a comma. If i t does, you can assume that it is in last name first format. You can use the indexOf String m ethod to help you. Write a method called convertName that takes a name as an argument. It should check whether it contains a comma by calling your hasComma method. If it does, it should just return the string. If not, then it should assume th at the name is in first name first format, and it should return a new string that contains the name converted to last name comma first format. Uses charAt, length, substring, and indexOf methods. In your main program, loop, asking the user for a n ame string. If the string is not blank, call convertName and print the results. The loop terminat es when the string is blank. HINTS/SUGGESTIONS: Use the charAt, length, substring, and indexOf Str ing methods. Use scanner for your input. To get the full line, complete with spaces, use reader.nextLine()

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• Changing CSS classes when different strings are displayed in a text element with jQuery

  - by Nick Maddren

  I'm just wondering if this method would be possible using jQuery HTML and PHP. Basically I have a filtering system were products are listed, some have different attribute values such as Hatchback for example. The text element that holds these PHP echo's also have a css class that implements an icon. I'm just wondering can I alter class's that are added to a html element just by looking at the string? So for example if the string displays "Pick-up" then jQuery alters the class and adds the one associated with the "Pick-up" string? Thanks sorry if this is a little confusing, I can explain more if needed.

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• Organizing Business and Presentation entities

  - by simoneL

  Background I am developing a WPF project. This is the basic structure: User Interface (WPF Project); Interfaces (class library, contains all the interfaces and the entities used by the application; Modules (every module contains the logic of a specific argument, e.g. File Management, and can eventually contains Wpf User Controls). In the WPF Controls, to facilitate the binding operations I have created a BaseViewModel class which contains a Raise method that automates the binding mechanism (for further details, I used a technique similar to that one described in this article). The problem Understand which is the best way to separate Presentation form from the Business form in the entities classes. The case In the Interfaces project I have, for instance, the class User public class User { public virtual string Name { get; set; } // Other properties } In one of the modules I need to use the User class and to bind its properties to the User Interface controls. To do so I have to use a custom implementation of the get and set keywords. At first point, I thought to create a class in the Module called, for instance, ClientUser and override the properties that I need: public class ClientUser : User { private string name; public override string Name { get { return name; } set { Raise(out name, value); } } // Other properties } The problem is the Raise method, which is declared in the BaseViewModel class, but due to C# single inheritance constraint, I can't inherit from both classes. Which is the right way to implement this architecture?

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• Types of quotes for an HTML templating language

  - by Ralph

  I'm developing a templating language, and now I'm trying to decide on what I should do with quotes. I'm thinking about having 3 different types of quotes which are all handled differently: backtick ` double quote " single quote ' expand variables ? yes no escape sequences no yes ? escape html no yes yes Backticks Backticks are meant to be used for outputting JavaScript or unescaped HTML. It's often handy to be able to pass variables into JS, but it could also cause issues with things being treated as variables that shouldn't. My variables are PHP-style ($var) so I'm thinking that might mess with jQuery pretty bad... but if I disable variable expansion w/ backticks then, I'm not sure how would insert a variable into a JS code block? Single Quotes Not sure if escape sequences like \n should be treated as literals or converted. I find it pretty rare that I want to disable escape sequences, but if you do, you could use backticks. So I'm leaning towards "yes" for this one, but that would be contrary to how PHP does it. Double Quotes Pretty certain I want everything enabled for this one. Modifiers I'm also thinking about adding modifiers like @ or r in front of the string that would change some of these options to enable a few more combinations. I would need 9 different quotes or 3 quotes and 2 modifiers to get every combination wouldn't I? My language also supports "filters" which can be applied against any "term" (number, variable, string) so you could always write something like "blah blah $var blah"|expandvars Or "my string"|escapehtml Thoughts? What would you prefer? What would be least confusing/most intuitive?

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• Ruby or Python?

  - by Bobby Tables

  Hi all, This question is extremely subjective and open-ended. It might even sound like something I should just research for myself and make my own decision. But I'd like to put it out there and get some thoughts from others. Long story short - I burned out with the rat race and am on a self-funded sabbatical this year. Much of it is to take a break from the corporate grind and travel around, but I also want to play around with new technologies and do some self-learning projects, to stay up to speed on programming, and well - I just love tinkering with programming, when there's no pressure! Here's the thing: I am a lifetime C/C++/Java programmer. I'm a bit of a squiggly bracket snob since I've been working with this family of languages for my entire programming career. So I'd like to learn a language which isn't so closely syntactically related to this group. What I'm basically looking for is a language which is relatively general purpose, fun to learn, has some new concepts that are different from C++/Java, and has a good community. A secondary consideration is that it has good web development frameworks. A tertiary consideration is that it's not totally academic (read: there are real world jobs out there using it). I've narrowed it down to Ruby or Python. My impression of Ruby is that it is extremely web oriented - that the only real application of it is as a server side scripting language for doing web stuff (mainly Ruby on Rails). For Python I'm not so sure. TL;DR and to put it as succinctly as possible: which of these would be better for a C++/Java guy to learn to get some new perspectives on programming? And which is more open and general purpose and applicable to a wider set of applications? I'm leaning towards Ruby at the moment, but I worry to an extent that it looks like it's used as nothing but a server side web language.

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• Where can I start learning to build web applications in C#

  - by Carson Myers

  So far I've written web sites in PHP, except for a pet project of mine written in Python. I'd like to start learning C# for use on the web, but I have no idea where to start. I know nothing of .Net. Are there any good tutorials or online books etc. which give a brief intro to the .Net environment (specifically C#, and specifically for the web)? I'm not even sure what I need to install. Visual Studio I guess, but what else? Anything special, or will VS do the trick?

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• Is this proper OO design for C++?

  - by user121917

  I recently took a software processes course and this is my first time attempting OO design on my own. I am trying to follow OO design principles and C++ conventions. I attempted and gave up on MVC for this application, but I am trying to "decouple" my classes such that they can be easily unit-tested and so that I can easily change the GUI library used and/or the target OS. At this time, I have finished designing classes but have not yet started implementing methods. The function of the software is to log all packets sent and received, and display them on the screen (like WireShark, but for one local process only). The software accomplishes this by hooking the send() and recv() functions in winsock32.dll, or some other pair of analogous functions depending on what the intended Target is. The hooks add packets to SendPacketList/RecvPacketList. The GuiLogic class starts a thread which checks for new packets. When new packets are found, it utilizes the PacketFilter class to determine the formatting for the new packet, and then sends it to MainWindow, a native win32 window (with intent to later port to Qt).1 Full size image of UML class diagram Here are my classes in skeleton/header form (this is my actual code): class PacketModel { protected: std::vector<byte> data; int id; public: PacketModel(); PacketModel(byte* data, unsigned int size); PacketModel(int id, byte* data, unsigned int size); int GetLen(); bool IsValid(); //len >= sizeof(opcode_t) opcode_t GetOpcode(); byte* GetData(); //returns &(data[0]) bool GetData(byte* outdata, int maxlen); void SetData(byte* pdata, int len); int GetId(); void SetId(int id); bool ParseData(char* instr); bool StringRepr(char* outstr); byte& operator[] (const int index); }; class SendPacket : public PacketModel { protected: byte* returnAddy; public: byte* GetReturnAddy(); void SetReturnAddy(byte* addy); }; class RecvPacket : public PacketModel { protected: byte* callAddy; public: byte* GetCallAddy(); void SetCallAddy(byte* addy); }; //problem: packets may be added to list at any time by any number of threads //solution: critical section associated with each packet list class Synch { public: void Enter(); void Leave(); }; template<class PacketType> class PacketList { private: static const int MAX_STORED_PACKETS = 1000; public: static const int DEFAULT_SHOWN_PACKETS = 100; private: vector<PacketType> list; Synch synch; //wrapper for critical section public: void AddPacket(PacketType* packet); PacketType* GetPacket(int id); int TotalPackets(); }; class SendPacketList : PacketList<SendPacket> { }; class RecvPacketList : PacketList<RecvPacket> { }; class Target //one socket { bool Send(SendPacket* packet); bool Inject(RecvPacket* packet); bool InitSendHook(SendPacketList* sendList); bool InitRecvHook(RecvPacketList* recvList); }; class FilterModel { private: opcode_t opcode; int colorID; bool bFilter; char name[41]; }; class FilterFile { private: FilterModel filter; public: void Save(); void Load(); FilterModel* GetFilter(opcode_t opcode); }; class PacketFilter { private: FilterFile filters; public: bool IsFiltered(opcode_t opcode); bool GetName(opcode_t opcode, char* namestr); //return false if name does not exist COLORREF GetColor(opcode_t opcode); //return default color if no custom color }; class GuiLogic { private: SendPacketList sendList; RecvPacketList recvList; PacketFilter packetFilter; void GetPacketRepr(PacketModel* packet); void ReadNew(); void AddToWindow(); public: void Refresh(); //called from thread void GetPacketInfo(int id); //called from MainWindow }; I'm looking for a general review of my OO design, use of UML, and use of C++ features. I especially just want to know if I'm doing anything considerably wrong. From what I've read, design review is on-topic for this site (and off-topic for the Code Review site). Any sort of feedback is greatly appreciated. Thanks for reading this.

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• What is up with the Joy of Clojure 2nd edition?

  - by kurofune

  Manning just released the second edition of the beloved Joy of Clojure book, and while I share that love I get the feeling that many of the examples are already outdated. In particular, in the chapter on optimization the recommended type-hinting seems not to be allowed by the compiler. I don't know if this was allowable for older versions of Clojure. For example: (defn factorial-f [^long original-x] (loop [x original-x, acc 1] (if (>= 1 x) acc (recur (dec x) (*' x acc))))) returns: clojure.lang.Compiler$CompilerException: java.lang.UnsupportedOperationException: Can't type hint a primitive local, compiling:(null:3:1) Likewise, the chapter on core.logic seems be using an old API and I have to find workarounds for each example to accommodate the recent changes. For example, I had to turn this: (logic/defrel orbits orbital body) (logic/fact orbits :mercury :sun) (logic/fact orbits :venus :sun) (logic/fact orbits :earth :sun) (logic/fact orbits :mars :sun) (logic/fact orbits :jupiter :sun) (logic/fact orbits :saturn :sun) (logic/fact orbits :uranus :sun) (logic/fact orbits :neptune :sun) (logic/run* [q] (logic/fresh [orbital body] (orbits orbital body) (logic/== q orbital))) into this, leveraging the pldb lib: (pldb/db-rel orbits orbital body) (def facts (pldb/db [orbits :mercury :sun] [orbits :venus :sun] [orbits :earth :sun] [orbits :mars :sun] [orbits :jupiter :sun] [orbits :saturn :sun] [orbits :uranus :sun] [orbits :neptune :sun])) (pldb/with-db facts (logic/run* [q] (logic/fresh [orbital body] (orbits orbital body) (logic/== q orbital)))) I am still pulling teeth to get the later examples to work. I am relatively new programming, myself, so I wonder if I am naively looking over something here, or are if these points I'm making legitimate concerns? I really want to get good at this stuff like type-hinting and core.logic, but wanna make sure I am studying up to date materials. Any illuminating facts to help clear up my confusion would be most welcome.

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• Naming methods that do the same thing but return different types

  - by Konstantin Ð.

  Let's assume that I'm extending a graphical file chooser class (JFileChooser). This class has methods which display the file chooser dialog and return a status signature in the form of an int: APPROVE_OPTION if the user selects a file and hits Open /Save, CANCEL_OPTION if the user hits Cancel, and ERROR_OPTION if something goes wrong. These methods are called showDialog(). I find this cumbersome, so I decide to make another method that returns a File object: in the case of APPROVE_OPTION, it returns the file selected by the user; otherwise, it returns null. This is where I run into a problem: would it be okay for me to keep the showDialog() name, even though methods with that name — and a different return type — already exist? To top it off, my method takes an additional parameter: a File which denotes in which directory the file chooser should start. My question to you: Is it okay to call a method the same name as a superclass method if they return different types? Or would that be confusing to API users? (If so, what other name could I use?) Alternatively, should I keep the name and change the return type so it matches that of the other methods? public int showDialog(Component parent, String approveButtonText) // Superclass method public File showDialog(Component parent, File location) // My method

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• Improvements to Joshua Bloch's Builder Design Pattern?

  - by Jason Fotinatos

  Back in 2007, I read an article about Joshua Blochs take on the "builder pattern" and how it could be modified to improve the overuse of constructors and setters, especially when an object has a large number of properties, most of which are optional. A brief summary of this design pattern is articled here [http://rwhansen.blogspot.com/2007/07/theres-builder-pattern-that-joshua.html]. I liked the idea, and have been using it since. The problem with it, while it is very clean and nice to use from the client perspective, implementing it can be a pain in the bum! There are so many different places in the object where a single property is reference, and thus creating the object, and adding a new property takes a lot of time. So...I had an idea. First, an example object in Joshua Bloch's style: Josh Bloch Style: public class OptionsJoshBlochStyle { private final String option1; private final int option2; // ...other options here <<<< public String getOption1() { return option1; } public int getOption2() { return option2; } public static class Builder { private String option1; private int option2; // other options here <<<<< public Builder option1(String option1) { this.option1 = option1; return this; } public Builder option2(int option2) { this.option2 = option2; return this; } public OptionsJoshBlochStyle build() { return new OptionsJoshBlochStyle(this); } } private OptionsJoshBlochStyle(Builder builder) { this.option1 = builder.option1; this.option2 = builder.option2; // other options here <<<<<< } public static void main(String[] args) { OptionsJoshBlochStyle optionsVariation1 = new OptionsJoshBlochStyle.Builder().option1("firefox").option2(1).build(); OptionsJoshBlochStyle optionsVariation2 = new OptionsJoshBlochStyle.Builder().option1("chrome").option2(2).build(); } } Now my "improved" version: public class Options { // note that these are not final private String option1; private int option2; // ...other options here public String getOption1() { return option1; } public int getOption2() { return option2; } public static class Builder { private final Options options = new Options(); public Builder option1(String option1) { this.options.option1 = option1; return this; } public Builder option2(int option2) { this.options.option2 = option2; return this; } public Options build() { return options; } } private Options() { } public static void main(String[] args) { Options optionsVariation1 = new Options.Builder().option1("firefox").option2(1).build(); Options optionsVariation2 = new Options.Builder().option1("chrome").option2(2).build(); } } As you can see in my "improved version", there are 2 less places in which we need to add code about any addition properties (or options, in this case)! The only negative that I can see is that the instance variables of the outer class are not able to be final. But, the class is still immutable without this. Is there really any downside to this improvement in maintainability? There has to be a reason which he repeated the properties within the nested class that I'm not seeing?

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• Designing A 2-Way SSL RESTful API

  - by Mithir

  I am starting to develop a WCF API, which should serve some specific clients. We don't know which devices will be using the API so I thought that using a RESTful API will be the most flexible choice. All devices using the API would be authenticated using an SSL certificate (client side certificate), and our API will have a certificate as well ( so its a 2 Way SSL) I was reading this question over SO, and I saw the answers about authentication using Basic-HTTP or OAuth, but I was thinking that in my case these are not needed, I can already trust the client because it possesses the client-side certificate. Is this design ok? Am I missing anything? Maybe there's a better way of doing this?

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• How do your busiest people transfer their knowledge?

  - by Wikis Commit At Area 51

  We have recently polled our company wide wiki users and found out that there are two large groups of users: people with lots of knowledge but (who claim they have) no time to document people with time but (who claim they have) not enough knowledge worth documenting Each group covered almost 50% of the users! How do your companies handle this? That is, how do you encourage your busiest / most knowledgeable people to share their knowledge?

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• How to represent a tree structure in NoSQL

  - by Vlad Nicula

  I'm new to NoSQL and have been playing around with a personal project on the MEAN stack (Mongo ExpressJs AngularJs NodeJs). I'm building a document editor of sorts that manages nodes of data. Each document is actually a tree. I have a CRUD api for documents, to create new trees and a CRUD api for nodes in a given document. Right now the documents are represented as a collection that holds everything, including nodes. The children parent relationship is done by ids. So the nodes are an map by id, and each node has references to what nodes are their children. I chose this "flat" approach because it is easier to get a node by id from a document. Being used to having a relation table between nodes and documents, a relation table between nodes and children nodes I find it a bit weird that I have to save the entire "nodes" map each time I update a node. Is there a better way to represent such a data type in NoSQL?

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• Code Measuring and Metrics Tools?

  - by David

  I'm in the process of setting up a build server for personal projects. This server will handle all the normal CI stuff, including running large suites of tests (unit, integration, automated UI). While I'm working out the kinks for including code coverage output with MSTest, it occurs to me that there may be lots of tools out there which give me additional metrics other than just code coverage. FxCop comes to mind as an example. Though I'm sure there are others. Anything that can generate useful reportable data and metrics would be good. Whether it's class dependency charts (looking for Law of Demeter violations, for example), analyses of the uses of classes/functions (looking for a function that isn't used in the system other than just the tests, for example), and so on. I'm not sure the right way to formulate the question, since polling questions or "What's your favorite code analysis tool" aren't very good. But I'm essentially just looking for recommendations on what metrics to gather and the tools that can gather them. The eventual vision for something like this is to have the CI server run a bunch of automated tests and analysis tools and track performance metrics over time. Imagine a dashboard full of graphs plotting these metrics over time. The lines should all relatively be at an equilibrium, and if one starts to stray toward the negative then it's an early indication of problems with the code. In the age old struggle to quantify code quality with management, this sounds like a potentially helpful means of doing just that.

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• What's the best Open Source code you've ever seen?

  - by Andrew Theken

  Part of the value of Open Source is to provide great example code to people getting started with a new platform or language. What's the best Open Source code you've encountered, and why do you like your choice? Any language will do, but I'm particularly interested in the best examples of Objective-C you can point out. Obviously this is an open-ended question, so I'll leave the question open for a while and see what kinds of answers we get. Thanks!

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• Will LAMP meet the following needs?

  - by Telis Duvoir

  I remember a few years back, when I had a web-site I wanted to develop, that many people recommended I go the LAMP route. Unfortunately, I never got around to studying/practicing that. I'm currently revisiting the web-site idea. The web-site will be dynamic, transactional, and hopefully end up with around 1,000,000 pv/mo and 300,000 members within 18 months. Will LAMP adequately support a site like that (i.e. have you seen it under a site with those specs)?

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• Why should I use Zend_Application?

  - by Billy ONeal

  I've been working on a Zend Framework application which currently does a bunch of things through Zend Application and a few resource plugins written for it. However, looking at this codebase now, it seems to me that using Zend_Application just makes things more complicated; and a plain, more "traditional" bootstrap file would do a better job of being transparent. This is even more the case because the individual components of Zend -- Zend_Controller, Zend_Navigation, etc. -- don't reference Zend_Application at all. Therefore they do things like "Well just call setRoute and be on your way," and the user is left scratching their head as to how to implement that in terms of the application.ini configuration file. This is not to say that one can't figure out what's going on by doing spelunking through the ZF source code. My problem with that approach is that it's to easy to depend on something that's an implementation detail, rather than a contract, and that all it seems to do is add an extra layer of indirection that one must wade through to understand an application. I look at pre ZF 1.8 example code, before Zend_Application existed, and everywhere I see plain bootstrap files that setup the MVC framework and get on their way. The code is clear and easy to understand, even if it is a bit repetitive. I like the DRY concept that Application gets you, but particularly when I'm assuming first people looking at the app's code aren't really familiar with Zend at all, I'm considering blowing away any dependence I have on Zend_Application and returning to a traditional bootstrap file. Now, my concern here is that I don't have much experience doing this, and I don't want to get rid of Zend_Application if it does something particularly important of which I am unaware, or something of that nature. Is there a really good reason I should keep it around?

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• Why is it impossible to produce truly random numbers?

  - by Vinoth Kumar

  I was trying to solve a hobby problem that required generating a million random numbers. But I quickly realized, it is becoming difficult to make them unique. I picked up Algorithm Design Manual to read about random number generation. It has the following paragraph that I am fully not able to understand. Unfortunately, generating random numbers looks a lot easier than it really is. Indeed, it is fundamentally impossible to produce truly random numbers on any deterministic device. Von Neumann [Neu63] said it best: “Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin.” The best we can hope for are pseudo-random numbers, a stream of numbers that appear as if they were generated randomly. Why is it impossible to produce truly random numbers in any deterministic device? What does this sentence mean?

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• How to make a system time-zone sensitive?

  - by Jerry Dodge

  I need to implement time zones in a very large and old Delphi system, where there's a central SQL Server database and possibly hundreds of client installations around the world in different time zones. The application already interacts with the database by only using the date/time of the database server. So, all the time stamps saved in both the database and on the client machines are the date/time of the database server when it happened, never the time of the client machine. So, when a client is about to display the date/time of something (such as a transaction) which is coming from this database, it needs to show the date/time converted to the local time zone. This is where I get lost. I would naturally assume there should be something in SQL to recognize the time zone and convert a DateTime field dynamically. I'm not sure if such a thing exists though. If so, that would be perfect, but if not, I need to figure out another way. This Delphi system (multiple projects) utilizes the SQL Server database using ADO components, VCL data-aware controls, and QuickReports (using data sources). So, there's many places where the data goes directly from the database query to rendering on the screen, without any code to actually put this data on the screen. In the end, I need to know when and how should I get the properly converted time? There must be a standard method for this, and I'm hoping SQL Server 2008 R2 has this covered...

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• GPL vs plugin interfaces not designed with a specific application in mind

  - by Kristóf Marussy

  I am not seeking or in need of legal advice, but an interesting though experiment came to my mind. Imagine the following situtation (I cannot really think about a concrete example and I am unsure if a real manifestation even exists): there is a free (libre) api A licensed under some permissive license or even LGPL. Non-free application B implements this api in order host plugins, but there are other free software doing the same thing. Moreover, there is plugin C acting as a plugin under api A. It links to library D, that is under GPL, so C is also under GPL. Plugins using A are loaded into hosts via a dlopen-like mechanism and use complex data structure for host-plugin communication. Neither B nor C distribute any files that may be required for A to function properly (like headers containing the structure definitions of A or dynamic libraries containing helper functions for A written by the authors of A), but such things may exist. Now some user installs application B and plugin C on his machine, along with anything that may be required for api A to function properly. Then he proceeds and loads C into B and creates some intellectual property with B which is not a piece of software. Did a GPL violation happend at some point, and if so, who violated GPL and why? The authors of C violate D's license by making C possible to be used in non-free host B? This is a possibility because they can't give and exception of GPL (like one described in http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLPluginsInNF or http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#LinkingOverControlledInterface) due to D's license terms. The authors of B violate C's and D's license by making C possible to be loaded in B? This is a possibility because http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#NFUseGPLPlugins disallows the mechanisms A uses for communitation between the free and non-free modules. The authors of A, because the api may be used (and in this case, was used) for communication between GPL'd and non-free software. This would be extremely absurd. The user, because at the moment of loading B into C, he made a derived work of C. I think this is impossible, because he does not distribute it. But would the situation change is he decided to release a configuration file of B which makes B load C as a plugin? Nobody, because A counts as a 'system library', and both B and C directly interact only with A, not eachother. In a sane world, this would happen... A concrete example of A could be some kind of audio (think LADSPA) or image processing api. However, I could find no such interface (that is free software, generic and is also implemented by commercial tools). A real-world example could also be quite enlightening.

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• How to create contracts in python

  - by recluze

  I am just moving to python from Java and have a question about the way the two do things. My question relates to contracts. An example: an application defines an interface that all plugins must implement and then the main application can call it. In Java: public interface IPlugin { public Image modify(Image img); } public class MainApp { public main_app_logic() { String pluginName = "com.example.myplugin"; IPlugin x = (IPlugin) Class.forName(pluginName); x.modify(someimg); } } The plugin implements the interface and we use reflection in main app to call it. That way, there's a contract between the main app and the plugin that both can refer to. How does one go about doing something similar in Python? And also, which approach is better? p.s. I'm not posting this on SO because I'm much more concerned with the philosophy behind the two approaches.

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• Is it possible to write a program that pipes the sound from one computer through the sound card of another?

  - by Kenneth

  I have a case where I need to use one computer's sound card to play sound but I want the sound to be generated at another computer that's on the same network as the other. Ideally the program that does this would only run on the computer that was generating the sound, though I'm fairly certain that isn't possible based on the research I have been doing. What ever I do with it though the solution would need to be such that the computer actually playing the sound would be secure. Thanks for any input.

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