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• Webcast: Leveraging Mobile And Social Commerce To Deliver A Complete Customer Experience

  - by Michael Hylton

    Mobile and social media are emerging as new channels for customers to interact and transact with brands. Mobile users demand experiences that are relevant and engaging and are designed with the capabilities and constraints of devices in mind. Just having a mobile app or mobile-specific website is not a long-term strategy. Brands must invest in an optimized experience, especially as mobile becomes critical to an overall digital commerce strategy.Debating the merits of using Facebook or not is missing the point when it comes to social media. True innovators are thinking beyond the social channel and are building programs that leverage Facebook data to drive conversions and engagement both on and off Facebook.  Learn how to be more strategic about mobile and social commerce in this informative editorial webcast.Attend this webcast and you will learn: How to leverage mobile and social touchpoints in digital commerce Why having a Facebook page or a mobile app is not enough The benefits of a consistent, personalized and relevant customer experience Strategies for integrating mobile and social into an overall digital commerce strategy Featured Speakers: Peter Sheldon, Senior Analyst, eBusiness & Channel Strategy Professionals, Forrester Research Brenna Johnson, Product Manager, Oracle Commerce Click here to register.

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• Webcast: Leveraging Mobile And Social Commerce To Deliver A Complete Customer Experience

  - by Michael Hylton

    Mobile and social media are emerging as new channels for customers to interact and transact with brands. Mobile users demand experiences that are relevant and engaging and are designed with the capabilities and constraints of devices in mind. Just having a mobile app or mobile-specific website is not a long-term strategy. Brands must invest in an optimized experience, especially as mobile becomes critical to an overall digital commerce strategy.Debating the merits of using Facebook or not is missing the point when it comes to social media. True innovators are thinking beyond the social channel and are building programs that leverage Facebook data to drive conversions and engagement both on and off Facebook.  Learn how to be more strategic about mobile and social commerce in this informative editorial webcast.Attend this webcast and you will learn: How to leverage mobile and social touchpoints in digital commerce Why having a Facebook page or a mobile app is not enough The benefits of a consistent, personalized and relevant customer experience Strategies for integrating mobile and social into an overall digital commerce strategy Featured Speakers: Peter Sheldon, Senior Analyst, eBusiness & Channel Strategy Professionals, Forrester Research Brenna Johnson, Product Manager, Oracle Commerce Click here to register.

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• Personal knowledge base [closed]

  - by AlexLocust

  Possible Duplicate: How do you manage your knowledge base? Hello. Now I am using easy writing pad for scratches while doing some researches, solving troubles or doing workarounds. But.. you now, it's really difficult to remember all details of founded solution and it's alternatives after few months. And writing pad is not wery useful. Usually writing pad doesn't contains half of needed inforation: links founded in internet, output of some test commands and etc. Now I'am looking for a tool for storing information about my researches and it's results. Basic reqirements: ability to store files; ability to store formatted text (kind of HTML will be nice) with hyperlinks and code snippets; tags on notes; easy to use. Now I'am thinking about some kind of file-system organized storage, but I think it will be inconvenient. Another thinks is local wiki or blog. So, my question is: How do you organize you knowlege base? What tools do you use, and what "pros and cons".

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• Is it wise to ask about design decisions made on a product during an interview?

  - by Desolate Planet

  I've been thinking about interview questions lately and I've been reflecting on bad interview experiences I've had in the past. One of particular note is where I had asked the interviewer why the team chose to use Spring over EJB3 in their product. The interviewer pretty much tore my face off, yelling "Because Spring is not the be all and end all of Java software development, do you want this job or not?". In response to this, I told him that this probably wasn't the job for me and I walked out the interview. He told me at the start of the interview that they had high stuff turnover, the product had gone from Modula 3 to Perl to Java then after asking him a technical question, he went in flames. It seemed obvious to me that he was toxic to the company with that kind of attitude. Question: Is it a good idea to probe on architectural choices taken in an interview? If not, why? From my own point of view, an interview is a two-way process. If the interviewers are testing me on my technical skills, I've got every right to ask them the same questions to 1) Figure out what their mindset and attitudes towards developing software solutions are and 2) To figure out if there are in line with how I would approach problems of that kind. It's very possible that the interviewer who got angry was a bad interviewer and forgot that an interview is a two-way process. If I was asked this, I would have simply said something along the lines of wanting to leverage the container more, but I certainly wouldn't have tried to put him in a state of meek capitulation. The interviewer in question was the lead developer in the team.

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• Meaningful concise method naming guidelines

  - by Sam

  Recently I started releasing an open source project, while I was the only user of the library I did not care about the names, but know I want to assign clever names to each methods to make it easier to learn, but I also need to use concise names so they are easy to write as well. I was thinking about some guidelines about the naming, I am aware of lots of guidelines that only care about letters casing or some simple notes. Here, I am looking after guidelines for meaningful concise naming. For example, this could be part of the guidelines I am looking after: Use Add when an existing item is going to be added to a target, Use Create when a new item is being created and added to a target. Use Remove when an existing item is going to be removed from a target, Use delete when an item is going to be removed permanently. Pair AddXXX methods with RemoveXXX and Pair CreateXXX methods with DeleteXXX methods, but do not mix them. The above guidance may be intuitive for native English speakers, but for me that English is my second language I need to be told about things like this.

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• How do you avoid jumping to a solution when under pressure? [closed]

  - by GlenPeterson

  When under a particularly strict programming deadline (like an hour), if I panic at all, my tendency is to jump into coding without a real plan and hope I figure it out as I go along. Given enough time, this can work, but in an interview it's been pretty unsuccessful, if not downright counter-productive. I'm not always comfortable sitting there thinking while the clock ticks away. Is there a checklist or are there techniques to recognize when you understand the problem well enough to start coding? Maybe don't touch the keyboard for the first 5-10 minutes of the problem? At what point do you give up and code a brute-force solution with the hope of reasoning out a better solution later? A related follow-up question might be, "How do you ensure that you are solving the right problem?" Or "When is it most productive to think and design more vs. code some experiments to and figure out the design later?" EDIT: One close vote already, but I'm not sure why. I wrote this in the first person, but I doubt I'm the only programmer to ever choke in an interview. Here is a list of techniques for taking a math test and another for taking an oral exam. Maybe I'm not expressing myself well, but I'm asking if there is a similar list of techniques for handling a programming problem under pressure?

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• How would I implement this application idea?

  - by Mike Wills

  I am a D&D gamer and a developer that has mostly worked with ASP.NET applications professionally. I have written some chat bots in Node.js and I have only played a little with PHP but wrote nothing serious. I have had inspiration to create a site that allows a person to keep track of characters (aka the character sheet). I am thinking of using this as a learning opportunity to learn noSQL and to write a full javascript front-end. I want this application to save the value as I change it. So if I edit the armor class, it is saved immediately instead of waiting until I hit the submit button. I think that will make it easier to use while gaming and not losing anything because I forgot to save the change. I have never done anything like this. How do you implement this style of application? Is there a tutorial or howto to get me on the right path? While I would really like to use ASP.NET but I don't have a Windows server to publish on (and I really can't afford to pay for a service). What language that runs on Linux would work well for this type of application? Note: I feel noSQL would work in this case because of the sheer number of tables required to create something like this in SQL.

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• Dual LAN Printing

  - by Christopher

  I want to use Ubuntu 10.10 Server in a classroom, a computer lab whose bandwidth is provided by a local cable ISP. That's no problem, though the school network has an IP printer that I want to use. I cannot reach the printer through the cable Internet. But, I have two network cards. How is it possible to use both networks at once? eth0 (static 192.168.1.254) is plugged into a four-port router, 192.168.1.1. On the public side of the four-port router is Internet provided by the cable company. I also have the classroom workstations plugged into a switch. The switch is plugged into the four-port router. The whole classroom is wired into the cable Internet. The other NIC, eth1, could it be plugged into an Ethernet jack in the wall? It uses the school network, and I might receive by DHCP an IP address like 10.140.10.100, with the printer on maybe 10.120.50.10. I was thinking about installing the printer on the server so that it could be shared with the workstations. But how does this work? Can I just plug eth1 into the school network and access both LANs? Thanks for any insight, Chris

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• Bot strategy in an arena

  - by joulesm

  I am writing the player's behavior for an arena game, and I'm wondering if you could offer some strategies. I'm writing it in Python, but I'm just interested in the high level game play. Here are the game aspects: Arena is a circle of a given size. The arena's size shrinks every round to help break any ties. Players are much smaller circles, and can be on teams of 1 or 2 players. Players attack by colliding with other players, and based on the physics of the collision (speed of both players, angle), one could force another player out of the arena. Once a player is out of the arena, they are out of the game (for that round). The goal is to be on the only team with players left in the arena. All other players have been pushed (through collisions or mistakes) out of the arena. It is possible for there to be no winner if the last two players exit the arena at the same time. Once the player has been programmed, the game just runs. There is no human intervention in the game. I'm thinking it's easiest to implement a few simple programmatic rules for my player to follow. For example, stay close to center of the arena, attack opponents from the inner side of the arena, etc. Are there any good simple game strategies? Would adding a random aspect to the game help? For example, to avoid predictability by the other team or something. Thanks in advance.

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• GIS-based data visualization and maintenance tool

  - by Dave Jarvis

  Background Looking to leverage an existing GIS system for exploring organizational data. Architecture The following figure represents a high-level overview of the system's desired features: The most basic usage would be as follows: The user visits a web site. The system presents a map (having regions, cities, and buildings). The user drills-down on the map to a particular building. The system provides a basic CRUD interface. The user can view and modify information about personnel (e.g., their assigned teams), equipment (e.g., network appliances), applications, and the building itself (e.g., contact and phone numbers). Ideally, all the components should be open-source (or otherwise free). Problem This must be a small project that needs a quick (but functional) prototype, mostly to confirm whether or not such a system would be useful in the long term. Questions What software components would you use to quickly develop a working prototype? What open-source solutions already exist, if any? Ideas Here is what I am thinking: PostGIS - Define the regions, cities, and sites Google Maps - Display an interactive, clickable map geoJSON - Protocol between PostGIS and Google Maps Seam - CRUD interface Custom Development For example, this would entail: Installation and configuration Configure SSH for remote logins Subversion (or git) PostgreSQL PostGIS Java Tomcat Seam JasperReports Enter GIS information into PostGIS Aggregate data sources into PostgreSQL database Develop starting page for map interface Develop clickable Google Maps interface Develop summary reports Develop CRUD interface using Seam for data maintenance Surely something like this already exists? Thank you!

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• Pricing: Meet or Beat?

  - by charles.knapp

  My home dishwasher started making some really interesting noises. I heard radio advertisements from two retailers who promised to meet any competitor's price. Then, I heard another retailer promising that their everyday prices beat their competitors. That got me to thinking about the power of pricing and promotions in the marketing mix (product, price, placement, promotions, and people). What is more powerful to say in a competitive market: your company will meet a similar offer, or your company will beat the others? Will you sell more if you meet or if you beat? I found that the retailer who promised to beat the others really had the best everyday pricing. Even better for me, another retailer had an exclusive promotional sale for long-term customers. Their loyalty promotion beat the best everyday discounter. So, I got the quality and performance I wanted at a tremendous price. So, I have two challenges for marketers. First, where you really have to compete on price as a dominant factor, give people strong reasons to do business with you. If you try to meet other's prices, make the leap to actually beat and not merely meet. Second, upgrade your firm's capabilities where needed. Oracle offers a complete range of great CRM software for loyalty management, marketing promotions, and pricing management that will help you to grow your business.

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• Podcast Show Notes: Redefining Information Management Architecture

  - by Bob Rhubart-Oracle

  Nothing in IT stands still, and this is certainly true of business intelligence and information management. Big Data has certainly had an impact, as have Hadoop and other technologies. That evolution was the catalyst for the collaborative effort behind a new Information Management Reference Architecture. The latest OTN ArchBeat series features a conversation with Andrew Bond, Stewart Bryson, and Mark Rittman, key players in that collaboration. These three gentlemen know each other quite well, which comes across in a conversation that is as lively and entertaining as it is informative. But don't take my work for it. Listen for yourself! The Panelists(Listed alphabetically) Andrew Bond, head of Enterprise Architecture at Oracle Oracle ACE Director Stewart Bryson, owner and Co-Founder of Red Pill Analytics Oracle ACE Director Mark Rittman, CIO and Co-Founder of Rittman Mead The Conversation Listen to Part 1: The panel discusses how new thinking and new technologies were the catalyst for a new approach to business intelligence projects. Listen to Part 2: Why taking an "API" approach is important in building an agile data factory. Listen to Part 3: Shadow IT, "sandboxing," and how organizational changes are driving the evolution in information management architecture. Additional Resources The Reference Architecture that is the focus of this conversation is described in detail in these blog posts by Mark Rittman: Introducing the Updated Oracle / Rittman Mead Information Management Reference Architecture Part 1: Information Architecture and the Data Factory Part 2: Delivering the Data Factory Be a Guest Producer for an ArchBeat Podcast Want to be a guest producer for an OTN ArchBeat podcast? Click here to learn how to make it happen.

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• Pricing: Meet or Beat?

  - by charles.knapp

  My home dishwasher started making some really interesting noises. It was time to shop. I heard radio advertisements from two retailers who promised to meet any competitor's price. Then, another retailer promised that their everyday prices beat their competitors. That got me to thinking about the power of pricing and promotions in the marketing mix (product, price, placement, promotions, and people). What is more powerful to say in a competitive market: your company will meet a similar offer, or your company will beat the others? Will you sell more if you meet or if you beat? I found that the retailer who promised to beat the others really had the best everyday pricing. I was close to making a purchase. Then, another retailer had an exclusive promotional sale for long-term customers. Their loyalty promotion beat the best everyday discounter. So, I got the quality and performance I wanted at a tremendous price. So, I have two challenges for marketers. First, where you really have to compete on price as a dominant factor, give people strong reasons to do business with you. If you try to meet other's prices, make the leap to actually beat and not merely meet competitor prices. Second, upgrade your firm's capabilities where needed. Oracle offers a complete range of great CRM capabilities for loyalty management, marketing promotions, and pricing management that will help you to grow your business.

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• Crafty.js multiplayer platform game, keeping players in sync

  - by johnwards

  I'm using crafty.js to create a very simple platform game. It doesn't need to stop cheating, it's actually just seeing other players move around, and it doesn't need to have collision detection between players. They are "shadows". How I've gone about it so far is to use http://pubnub.com to send messages between clients. These messages are simple. The first if a new player arrival, the second is a key down and the third is a key up. The code is here: https://github.com/whiteoctober/craftyconcept However I've hit against the old chestnut of keeping everything in sync. At the moment I'm letting the each of the clients decide where to place the other players based on the received key events, I also only move "you" until I get a key press event back from pubsub. My thinking here is to try and keep things in sync! However it isn't perfect, http://www.whiteoctober.co.uk/john/gametest/, things can get out of sync very easily. Key presses arrive in the wrong order etc. Is there any simple solutions to this, I would like to keep it all client side (with pubnub) and not have a central server with positions etc if possible.

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• C# Role Provider for multiple applications

  - by Juventus18

  I'm making a custom RoleProvider that I would like to use across multiple applications in the same application pool. For the administration of roles (create new role, add users to role, etc..) I would like to create a master application that I could login to and set the roles for each additional application. So for example, I might have AppA and AppB in my organization, and I need to make an application called AppRoleManager that can set roles for AppA and AppB. I am having troubles implementing my custom RoleProvider because it uses an initialize method that gets the application name from the config file, but I need the application name to be a variable (i.e. "AppA" or "AppB") and passed as a parameter. I thought about just implementing the required methods, and then also having additional methods that pass application name as a parameter, but that seems clunky. i.e. public override CreateRole(string roleName) { //uses the ApplicationName property of this, which is set in web.config //creates role in db } public CreateRole(string ApplicationName, string roleName) { //creates role in db with specified params. } Also, I would prefer if people were prevented from calling CreateRole(string roleName) because the current instance of the class might have a different applicationName value than intended (what should i do here? throw NotImplementedException?). I tried just writing the class without inheriting RoleProvider. But it is required by the framework. Any general ideas on how to structure this project? I was thinking make a wrapper class that uses the role provider, and explicitly sets the application name before (and after) and calls to the provider something like this: static class RoleProviderWrapper { public static CreateRole(string pApplicationName, string pRoleName) { Roles.Provider.ApplicationName = pApplicationName; Roles.Provider.CreateRole(pRoleName); Roles.Provider.ApplicationName = "Generic"; } } is this my best-bet?

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• Looking for some OO design advice

  - by Andrew Stephens

  I'm developing an app that will be used to open and close valves in an industrial environment, and was thinking of something simple like this:- public static void ValveController { public static void OpenValve(string valveName) { // Implementation to open the valve } public static void CloseValve(string valveName) { // Implementation to close the valve } } (The implementation would write a few bytes of data to the serial port to control the valve - an "address" derived from the valve name, and either a "1" or "0" to open or close the valve). Another dev asked whether we should instead create a separate class for each physical valve, of which there are dozens. I agree it would be nicer to write code like PlasmaValve.Open() rather than ValveController.OpenValve("plasma"), but is this overkill? Also, I was wondering how best to tackle the design with a couple of hypothetical future requirements in mind:- We are asked to support a new type of valve requiring different values to open and close it (not 0 and 1). We are asked to support a valve that can be set to any position from 0-100, rather than simply "open" or "closed". Normally I would use inheritance for this kind of thing, but I've recently started to get my head around "composition over inheritance" and wonder if there is a slicker solution to be had using composition?

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• Session state provider and atomic operations

  - by vtortola

  Hi, I've been thinking about this and it is blowing my mind... How does a session state provider properly works internally? I mean, I tried to write a custom session state provider based on Azure Tables or Blobs, but quickly I realized that because there is no way to ensure an atomic operation or establish a lock, race conditions are suitable to happen when several web servers do operation on that shared information. I know that there is a SQL Server Session State Provider (SQLS-SSP) and people is happy with it, so I guess that it's using some kind of transaction isolation level in order to accomplish some degree of concurrent safety, like checking is the data is lock (a simple column), locking it if not and returning the data in an atomic operation, but is that so? what does happen if the data is lock? does it returns an error? block the call for a while? returns it in read-only fashion? Cloud computing paradigms could be somehow new, but webfarms have been here for a while, so as I'm pretty new on it... do you recommend any good lecture about the topic? Thanks.

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• Naming a class that decides to retrieve things from cache or a service + architecture evaluation

  - by Thomas Stock

  Hi, I'm a junior developer and I'm working on a pet project that I want to learn as much as possible from. I have the following scenario: There's a WCF service that I use to retrieve and update data, lets say Cars. So it's called CarWCFService and has a GetCars(), SaveCar(), ... . It implements interface ICarService. This isn't the Actual WCF service but more like a wrapper around it. Upon retrieving data from the service, I want to store them in local memory, as cache. I have made a class for this called CarCacheService which also implements interface ICarService. (I will explain later why it implements ICarService) I don't want client code to be calling these implementations. Instead, I want to create a third implementation for ICarService that tries to read from the CarCacheService before calling the WCFCarService, stores retrieved data in the CarCacheService, etc. 3 questions: How do I name this third class? I was thinking about something as simple as CarService. This does not really says what the service does exactly, tho. Is the naming for the other classes good? Would this naming and architecture be obvious for future programmers? This is my biggest concern. Does this architecture make sense? The reason that I implement ICarService on the CarCacheService is mainly because it allows me to fake the WCFService while debugging. I can store dummy data in a CarCacheService instance and pass it to the CarService, together with an(other) empty CarCacheService. If I made CacheCarService and WCFService public I could let client code decide if they want to drop the caching and just work directly on the WCFService.

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• eBook editions of programming books

  - by Jon Hopkins

  (I'll get my justification for why this is on topic in early: programming books tend to have fairly specific formatting needs - code samples, tables, images and graphs - which are not common to all book types and are not necessarily well handled by eBook readers. Similarly they're used in different ways - you often dip in and out rather than read cover to cover.) I've just noticed that Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug is available as an eBook edition for the Kindle (and presumably also for other readers) which set me thinking. There are certain advantages to eBook readers for tech books - primarily that you can carry a massive library of what would be heavy physical books around very easily. The downside is that certain eBook readers allegedly aren't particularly well equipped to cope with tables, code samples and so on and a book like Don't Make Me Think presumably makes extensive use of these sorts of things. So, the question, what are your experiences of reading and using programming books on an eBook reader and would you recommend it? I'm specifically interested in the latest generation Kindle but happy to hear about all devices - might be useful to state which one you use in the answer.

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• A new CAPTCHA using sentences?

  - by Xeoncross

  I was just thinking about how recaptcha is getting harder when I thought about another posible solution. Images won't last forever so we will need something else some day - like human logic or emotion. Google and others are trying grouping images by category (find the image that doesn't belong) but that requires a large amount of images and doesn't work for the blind. Anyway, what if a massive collection of text was gathered (public-domain books from each language) and a sentence was shown to the user with 1 (or 2) words that were a select box of choices? Only computers that knew correct English/Spanish/German grammar would be able to tell which of the words belonged in the sentence. Would there be any problems with this approach? I would assume that it would be easy enough for anyone that knew the language that the sentense was displayed in to figure out the answer easier than trying to read the reCAPTCHA text. Plus, storing an insane number of sentences would only take a couple gigabytes of space and wouldn't take anywhere near the CPU time creating images/audio takes. In other words, anyone could host their own captcha system with minimal impact on system performance. Is there a problem with this approach? More specifically I'm looking for the main problem with this approach. migrated from stackoverflow

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• How to organize a programming course?

  - by Bogdan Gavril

  I've been given the task to train our manual testers to become developers in test (write test automation!). some have basic programing knowledge (either dabbling in PHP or reading stuff) and some who have no experience. Note that I do have teaching experience, but with real students, not employees, and one concern is that they will not put extra hours except the 20% management gave them for the transition. Language to be taught and used: C# We have 8 hours per week to do this and should decide if they will make it in 2 months. I am thinking of a combined approach: use a manual such as Head First C# (although I'm not happy with the labs, they're mostly games and I don't want to add UI complexities) have them read from the manual do labs with them, solving more and more difficult problems and explain the theoretical stuff as well have them do a bigger project towards the end Some questions: do you have a better suggestion as far as manuals go? do you have a better aproach? Focus less on labs? what kind of assesments should I use and how often? should I let them do a bigger project (bank system or small game) and how much time should I invest in that? ideeas on labs? other resources ? Any other tips would be most welcomed! Thanks!

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• How to I get a rotated sprite to move left or right?

  - by rphello101

  Using Java/Slick 2D, I'm using the mouse to rotate a sprite on the screen and the directional keys (in this case, WASD) to move the spite. Forwards and backwards is easy, just position += cos(ang)*speed or position -= cos(ang)*speed. But how do I get the sprite to move left or right? I'm thinking it has something to do with adding 90 degrees to the angle or something. Any ideas? Rotation code: int mX = Mouse.getX(); int mY = HEIGHT - Mouse.getY(); int pX = sprite.x+sprite.image.getWidth()/2; int pY = sprite.y+sprite.image.getHeight()/2; double mAng; if(mX!=pX){ mAng = Math.toDegrees(Math.atan2(mY - pY, mX - pX)); if(mAng==0 && mX<=pX) mAng=180; } else{ if(mY>pY) mAng=90; else mAng=270; } sprite.angle = mAng; sprite.image.setRotation((float) mAng); And the movement code (delta is change in time): Input input = gc.getInput(); Vector2f direction = new Vector2f(); Vector2f velocity = new Vector2f(); direction.x = (float) Math.cos(Math.toRadians(sprite.angle)); direction.y = (float) Math.sin(Math.toRadians(sprite.angle)); if(direction.length()>0) direction = direction.normalise(); //On a separate note, what does this line of code do? velocity.x = (float) (direction.x * sprite.moveSpeed); velocity.y = (float) (direction.y * sprite.moveSpeed); if(input.isKeyDown(sprite.up)){ sprite.x += velocity.x*delta; sprite.y += velocity.y*delta; }if (input.isKeyDown(sprite.down)){ sprite.x -= velocity.x*delta; sprite.y -= velocity.y*delta; }if (input.isKeyDown(sprite.left)){ //??? }if (input.isKeyDown(sprite.right)){ //??? }

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• Inconsistent movement / line-of-sight around obstacles on a hexagonal grid

  - by Darq

  In a roguelike game I've been working on, one of my core design goals has been to allow the player to "Play the game, not the grid." In essence, I want the player's positioning to be tactical because of elements in the game world, not simply because some grid tiles are more advantageous than others, in relation to enemies. I am fine with world geometry not being realistic, but it needs to be consistent. In this process I have ran into most of the common problems (Square tiles? Diagonal movement, LOS, corner cases, etc.) and have moved to a hexagonal tile grid. For the most part this has been great, and I've not had too many inconsistencies. Recently however I have been stumped by the following: Points A and B are both distance 4 from the player (red lines). Line-of-sight to both are blocked by walls (black tiles). However, due to the hexagonal grid, A can be reached in 4 moves, whereas B requires 5 moves (blue lines). On a hex grid, "shortest path" seems divorced from "direct path", there may be multiple shortest paths to any point, but there is only one direct path (or two in some situations). This is fine, geometry need not be realistic. However this also seems inconsistent, similar obstacles are more effective in some positions than in others. A player running away from an enemy should be able to run in any direction, increasing the distance between the two actors. However when placing obstacles or traps between themselves and enemies, the player is best served by running in one of the six directions that don't have multiple shortest paths. Is there a way to rationalise this? Am I missing something that makes this behaviour consistent? Or is there a way to make this behaviour consistent? I am most certainly over-thinking this, but as it is one of my goals, I should do it due diligence.

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• Programming and Ubiquitous Language (DDD) in a non-English domain

  - by Sandor Drieënhuizen

  I know there are some questions already here that are closely related to this subject but none of them take Ubquitous Language as the starting point so I think that justifies this question. For those who don't know: Ubiquitous Language is the concept of defining a (both spoken and written) language that is equally used across developers and domain experts to avoid inconsistencies and miscommunication due to translation problems and misunderstanding. You will see the same terminology show up in code, conversations between any team member, functional specs and whatnot. So, what I was wondering about is how to deal with Ubiquitous Language in non-English domains. Personally, I strongly favor writing programming code in English completely, including comments but ofcourse excluding constants and resources. However, in a non-English domain, I'm forced to make a decision either to: Write code reflecting the Ubiquitous Language in the natural language of the domain. Translate the Ubiquitous Language to English and stop communicating in the natural language of the domain. Define a table that defines how the Ubiquitous Language translates to English. Here are some of my thoughts based on these options: 1) I have a strong aversion against mixed-language code, that is coding using type/member/variable names etc. that are non-English. Most programming languages 'breathe' English to a large extent and most of the technical literature, design pattern names etc. are in English as well. Therefore, in most cases there's just no way of writing code entirely in a non-English language so you end up with a mixed languages. 2) This will force the domain experts to start thinking and talking in the English equivalent of the UL, something that will probably not come naturally to them and therefore hinders communication significantly. 3) In this case, the developers communicate with the domain experts in their native language while the developers communicate with each other in English and most importantly, they write code using the English translation of the UL. I'm sure I don't want to go for the first option and I think option 3 is much better than option 2. What do you think? Am I missing other options?

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• Won't boot after installing Ubuntu 12.04 sucessfully

  - by Matt

  I installed 12.04 successfully and rebooted (I took out my installation CD), and selected the newly installed Linux partition to boot from rEFIt. Then it just comes up with this error message: Error loading operating system which could not be more vague. Take that back. I guess it could say just "error." I don't even get to the boot prompt which limits what I can do. I cannot boot into rescue mode. I tried boot-repair, but it took more than 24 hours to check the system configuration, so I gave up on that. I'm running a Mac Mini with its main OS being Mac OS X 10.5.8. I have an alternate OS Windows XP installed, which was virtually destroyed by this Linux installation. I sacrificed my working, speedy Windows partition for something that won't even boot up. What was I thinking. My Mac partition is slow as crap. I've tried installing 12.04 many times with two different disks. The first time, I had one partition for Linux, then I had 2 (swap+main), then 3 (swap, main and BIOS), then 4 which is what I have now (swap, main, BIOS, and boot/grub). The only way I could get through the install without GRUB giving up was if I created a separate partition for it. Which was pointless, because it did install successfully, but it still doesn't boot up at all. Could rEFIt be booting off of the BIOS or one of the other partitions? Because if that's the case, there is no alternative, because Mac itself without rEFIt refuses to recognize a Linux ext4 (or 2 or 3) format partition. Apple always has to make everything so difficult. If I'm not mistaken, rEFIt is the only application of its kind for Mac. I can boot off of the CD back to the install/try screen. This is extremely upsetting, can you guys help? Please?

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