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• When should one use "out" parameters?

  - by qegal

  In Objective-C, there are several methods like initWithContentsOfFile:encoding:error: where one passes in a reference to an NSError object for the error: parameter. In this example, the value of the NSError object passed in can change based on what goes on at runtime when the method is being called and whether the body of the method was executed in a certain way successfully. In a way I think of this NSError object as sort of like a second return value from the method, and only differs from an object anObject in the statement return anObject; in that when this statement is called, execution leaves the method. So my question is, not only in the context of error handling in Objective-C, but in general, when should one use an "out" parameter in place of returning said value in a return statement?

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• Sprite/Tile Sheets Vs Single Textures

  - by Reanimation

  I'm making a race circuit which is constructed using various textures. To provide some background, I'm writing it in C++ and creating quads with OpenGL to which I assign a loaded .raw texture too. Currently I use 23 500px x 500px textures of which are all loaded and freed individually. I have now combined them all into a single sprite/tile sheet making it 3000 x 2000 pixels seems the number of textures/tiles I'm using is increasing. Now I'm wondering if it's more efficient to load them individually or write extra code to extract a certain tile from the sheet? Is it better to load the sheet, then extract 23 tiles and store them from one sheet, or load the sheet each time and crop it to the correct tile? There seems to be a number of way to implement it... Thanks in advance.

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• Creating basic ACPI event makes the system unusably slow

  - by skerit

  I want to change a few settings on my laptop when I switch to battery power. I created a new event in /etc/acpi/events/cust-battery and it looks like this: event=battery action=/home/skerit/power.sh I put a simple command in the power.sh file: echo This is a test >> /home/skerit/powertest Now, when I tail this file it shows "This is a test" 4-5 times upon switching to battery power. However, the system becomes totally unstable. It slows down significantly. I can't change anything in the terminal. The terminal and certain parts of the screen (like the gnome system monitor applet) go blank from time to time. What can be the cause of that? It's a simple echo that gets executed a few times!

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• Is Unity's Random seeded automatically?

  - by Lohoris

  I seem to recall Unity's Random is automatically seeded; checking the documentation it doesn't say it outright, but a certain interpretation of their words might seem to imply it. The seed is normally set from some arbitrary value like the system clock before the random number functions are used. This prevents the same run of values from occurring each time a game is played and thus avoids predictable gameplay. However, it is sometimes useful to produce the same run of pseudo-random values on demand by setting the seed yourself. (emphasis added)

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• Scan-Line Z-Buffering Dilemma

  - by Belgin

  I have a set of vertices in 3D space, and for each I retain the following information: Its 3D coordinates (x, y, z). A list of pointers to some of the other vertices with which it's connected by edges. Right now, I'm doing perspective projection with the projecting plane being XY and the eye placed somewhere at (0, 0, d), with d < 0. By doing Z-Buffering, I need to find the depth of the point of a polygon (they're all planar) which corresponds to a certain pixel on the screen so I can hide the surfaces that are not visible. My questions are the following: How do I determine to which polygon does a pixel belong to so I could use the formula of the plane which contains the polygon to find the Z-coordinate? Are my data structures correct? Do I need to store something else entirely in order for this to work? I'm just projecting the vertices onto the projection plane and joining them with lines based on the pointer lists.

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• how to "think in templates", i.e. how to know that a problem can be solved using templates and how to adapt to it?

  - by sap

  I decided to improve my knowledge of template meta-programming, i know the syntax and rules and been playing with counteless examples from online resources. i understand how powerfull templates can be and how much compile time optimization they can provide but i still cant "think in templates", that is, i cant seem to know by myself if a certain problem could best be solved with templates (instead of something else) and if it can, how to adapt that problem to templates. so what im asking is, is there some kind of online resource or maybe book that teaches how to identify problems that could best be solved with templates and how to adapt that problem. basically i want to learn to "think in templates". already asked on stackoverflow but once again people just redirected me to resources on how to use templates, when im really asking is how to know when to use template meta-programming and how to adapt that problem to templates. thanks in advance.

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• No More NCrunch For Me

  - by Steve Wilkes

  When I opened up Visual Studio this morning, I was greeted with this little popup: NCrunch is a Visual Studio add-in which runs your tests while you work so you know if and when you've broken anything, as well as providing coverage indicators in the IDE and coverage metrics on demand. It recently went commercial (which I thought was fair enough), and time is running out for the free version I've been using for the last couple of months. From my experiences using NCrunch I'm going to let it expire, and go about my business without it. Here's why. Before I start, let me say that I think NCrunch is a good product, which is to say it's had a positive impact on my programming. I've used it to help test-drive a library I'm making right from the start of the project, and especially at the beginning it was very useful to have it run all my tests whenever I made a change. The first problem is that while that was cool to start with, it’s recently become a bit of a chore. Problems Running Tests NCrunch has two 'engine modes' in which it can run tests for you - it can run all your tests when you make a change, or it can figure out which tests were impacted and only run those. Unfortunately, it became clear pretty early on that that second option (which is marked as 'experimental') wasn't really working for me, so I had to have it run everything. With a smallish number of tests and while I was adding new features that was great, but I've now got 445 tests (still not exactly loads) and am more in a 'clean and tidy' mode where I know that a change I'm making will probably only affect a particular subset of the tests. With that in mind it's a bit of a drag sitting there after I make a change and having to wait for NCrunch to run everything. I could disable it and manually run the tests I know are impacted, but then what's the point of having NCrunch? If the 'impacted only' engine mode worked well this problem would go away, but that's not what I found. Secondly, what's wrong with this picture? I've got 445 tests, and NCrunch has queued 455 tests to run. So it's queued duplicate tests - in this quickly-screenshotted case 10, but I've seen the total queue get up over 600. If I'm already itchy waiting for it to run all my tests against a change I know only affects a few, I'm even itchier waiting for it to run a lot of them twice. Problems With Code Coverage NCrunch marks each line of code with a dot to say if it's covered by tests - a black dot says the line isn't covered, a red dot says it's covered but at least one of the covering tests is failing, and a green dot means all the covering tests pass. It also calculates coverage statistics for you. Unfortunately, there's a couple of flaws in the coverage. Firstly, it doesn't support ExcludeFromCodeCoverage attributes. This feature has been requested and I expect will be included in a later release, but right now it doesn't. So this: ...is counted as a non-covered line, and drags your coverage statistics down. Hmph. As well as that, coverage of certain types of code is missed. This: ...is definitely covered. I am 100% absolutely certain it is, by several tests. NCrunch doesn't pick it up, down go my coverage statistics. I've had NCrunch find genuinely uncovered code which I've been able to remove, and that's great, but what's the coverage percentage on this project? Umm... I don't know. Conclusion None of these are major, tool-crippling problems, and I expect NCrunch to get much better in future releases. The current version has some great features, like this: ...that's a line of code with a failing test covering it, and NCrunch can run that failing test and take me to that line exquisitely easily. That's awesome! I'd happily pay for a tool that can do that. But here's the thing: NCrunch (currently) costs $159 (about £100) for a personal licence and $289 (about £180) for a commercial one. I'm not sure which one I'd need as my project is a personal one which I'm intending to open-source, but I'm a professional, self-employed developer, but in any case - that seems like a lot of money for an imperfect tool. If it did everything it's advertised to do more or less perfectly I'd consider it, but it doesn't. So no more NCrunch for me.

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• Help assigning Product id for ecommerce site?

  - by Stanford Sequeira

  I am starting an eCommerce marketplace, I am new to eCommerce, but I am taking it up as a challenge. I will have multiple vendors on my site. and they will upload their products through csv.- for bulk upload however there will be certain popular products already listed in the database, they can add those to their listing(like amazon for 3rd party sellers). I have no idea how to assign product codes for every product, can you help me out? im taking about something like amazons asin number. or may be is it possible to let vendors assign their own numbers? how does that work?

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• How can I have a Bluetooth Keyboard Auto-Connect at Startup?

  - by Grant

  I have a bluetooth keyboard for my HTPC. I pair it with my computer via bluetooth, and it works fine. However, when I turn off the keyboard or my computer, it has to connect again (which requires me entering a passcode on the computer and keyboard) when I turn them back on. I've looked through many forums and through that I have found that I'm missing some seemingly vital bluetooth files: /etc/default/bluetooth /etc/init.d/bluetooth /etc/bluetooth/hcid.conf In the instructions that I've found online so far, I must change certain lines in any of these files. I am unable to, since they do not exist. Am I missing a dependency or something? I've also tried installing Blueman but that didn't help at all. I'm running Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick). Original post: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1643386&highlight=bluetooth

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• Importance of frequency of keywords for SEO [closed]

  - by Calle

  Possible Duplicate: keyword stuffing in SEO I've seen a few posts on here and elsewhere that talk about the amount of unique keywords used, or aimed, for in a text. But how important is the frequency of keywords for SEO optimized copy, the higher the better? Is there a certain percentage to aim at? For example, I currently have copy aimed for a specific keyword. The rate of this keyword is that it makes up 2% of all words. Is this too low? Too high? The higher the better?

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• Adding a list of "recent articles" affects SEO

  - by Groo

  We have a site which has a sidebar with sections (or "widgets" if you like) showing stuff like "Recent Articles", "Other Articles by this User", "Similar Articles" etc. The issue is, Google seems to take these links very seriously. In fact, if I have only a single article which is closely related to a certain phrase (and several other pages link to it in their sidebars), when I do a Google search, it lists all those other pages highlighting that one link to the page that should actually be the most relevant one. And these pages don't even mention the phrase anywhere else. It there a common approach with adding these sidebar links? For example, I might add them through ajax after the page is loaded, but then crawlers will have harder time finding them?

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• What is the traditional way to maintain extensibility in a database-driven application like this?

  - by Jsess

  I'm working on a simple application for a game in Java that allows a user to record whether they have collected a given item and how much experience it contains. This will work for multiple item types (weapons, armor) and each will have its own tab with a list of all items that qualify under it. Making changes as new types are added is not such a big deal (if a clothing slot is added, for instance), but new items are added to the game all the time in biweekly patches, and I'm not sure what the traditional/customary way to make sure the application is user-extensible without requiring me to would be. Whether that would be adding a configuration menu that allows users to add news items (new rows to the local SQLite database) or a text file with something similar, but I'm certain there's a well-accepted way to do this that I'm not aware of. I'm new to databases and ignorant of the solution, so what's the professional/futureproof way to do this?

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• What stack of technologies should I use for my online game?

  - by Vee Bee

  I built a TicTacToe game to learn the .Net MVC3 framework. The basic functionality works (display board, make a move, detect winning move etc.) What I'd like to do is make it a "real" application - well-architected and using the right technology at the right layer. For instance, I'm currently saving every move to the database via a service call, which feels klugey and may become a bottleneck if this was an MMO game. How do you determine a good architecture (or right set of technologies) to use in a situation like this? I'd like to learn not just what to do, but why certain decisions are better than others. I noticed a similar thread here but it just offered opinions without explaining WHY something would be better (e.g. why Node instead of MVC3, etc.)

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• Rehosting content from another server

  - by Lana_M

  We have a set of static pages that will augment a customer's existing site. The pages will not reside on the customer's servers for logistical reasons and because we need to maintain control of the content. The plan is for the customer to set up a mod_rewrite rule that will funnel certain types of URLs to a single server-side handler script that will grab the appropriate file from a CDN and just output its content. This illustrates the approach: <?php echo(file_get_contents(str_replace($customer_host, $cdn_host, $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']))); ?> Can anyone think of pitfalls or offer up a different approach? Is there some way to circumvent a script altogether?

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• Requirement, architecture data capture tool

  - by Deno

  Are there any tools available for the following use case: I am planning to write a complex application and now I just know about the basic functional requirments. I am refining the functionality with more and more details. I am also writing down how to implement this in software architecture perspective. I am in a situation where there are multiple ways implement a certain functionality and based on the selected approach, other parts of the program will also change. At this moment, I don't want to decide on the approach to use, I just want to list down all the options, present to a wider audience and get it finalized. Are there any standard software tools to do this? I know I can use MS excel or some mind mapper tools, but just thinking of some standard tools (not just for programmers, but for managers and other) availability Thanks, Den

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• Is it a bad practice to include all the enums in one file and use it in multiple classes?

  - by Bugster

  I'm an aspiring game developer, I work on occasional indie games, and for a while I've been doing something which seemed like a bad practice at first, but I really want to get an answer from some experienced programmers here. Let's say I have a file called enumList.h where I declare all the enums I want to use in my game: // enumList.h enum materials_t { WOOD, STONE, ETC }; enum entity_t { PLAYER, MONSTER }; enum map_t { 2D, 3D }; // and so on. // Tile.h #include "enumList.h" #include <vector> class tile { // stuff }; The main idea is that I declare all enums in the game in 1 file, and then import that file when I need to use a certain enum from it, rather than declaring it in the file where I need to use it. I do this because it makes things clean, I can access every enum in 1 place rather than having pages openned solely for accessing one enum. Is this a bad practice and can it affect performance in any way?

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• Implementing a Custom Coherence PartitionAssignmentStrategy

  - by jpurdy

  A recent A-Team engagement required the development of a custom PartitionAssignmentStrategy (PAS). By way of background, a PAS is an implementation of a Java interface that controls how a Coherence partitioned cache service assigns partitions (primary and backup copies) across the available set of storage-enabled members. While seemingly straightforward, this is actually a very difficult problem to solve. Traditionally, Coherence used a distributed algorithm spread across the cache servers (and as of Coherence 3.7, this is still the default implementation). With the introduction of the PAS interface, the model of operation was changed so that the logic would run solely in the cache service senior member. Obviously, this makes the development of a custom PAS vastly less complex, and in practice does not introduce a significant single point of failure/bottleneck. Note that Coherence ships with a default PAS implementation but it is not used by default. Further, custom PAS implementations are uncommon (this engagement was the first custom implementation that we know of). The particular implementation mentioned above also faced challenges related to managing multiple backup copies but that won't be discussed here. There were a few challenges that arose during design and implementation: Naive algorithms had an unreasonable upper bound of computational cost. There was significant complexity associated with configurations where the member count varied significantly between physical machines. Most of the complexity of a PAS is related to rebalancing, not initial assignment (which is usually fairly simple). A custom PAS may need to solve several problems simultaneously, such as: Ensuring that each member has a similar number of primary and backup partitions (e.g. each member has the same number of primary and backup partitions) Ensuring that each member carries similar responsibility (e.g. the most heavily loaded member has no more than one partition more than the least loaded). Ensuring that each partition is on the same member as a corresponding local resource (e.g. for applications that use partitioning across message queues, to ensure that each partition is collocated with its corresponding message queue). Ensuring that a given member holds no more than a given number of partitions (e.g. no member has more than 10 partitions) Ensuring that backups are placed far enough away from the primaries (e.g. on a different physical machine or a different blade enclosure) Achieving the above goals while ensuring that partition movement is minimized. These objectives can be even more complicated when the topology of the cluster is irregular. For example, if multiple cluster members may exist on each physical machine, then clearly the possibility exists that at certain points (e.g. following a member failure), the number of members on each machine may vary, in certain cases significantly so. Consider the case where there are three physical machines, with 3, 3 and 9 members each (respectively). This introduces complexity since the backups for the 9 members on the the largest machine must be spread across the other 6 members (to ensure placement on different physical machines), preventing an even distribution. For any given problem like this, there are usually reasonable compromises available, but the key point is that objectives may conflict under extreme (but not at all unlikely) circumstances. The most obvious general purpose partition assignment algorithm (possibly the only general purpose one) is to define a scoring function for a given mapping of partitions to members, and then apply that function to each possible permutation, selecting the most optimal permutation. This would result in N! (factorial) evaluations of the scoring function. This is clearly impractical for all but the smallest values of N (e.g. a partition count in the single digits). It's difficult to prove that more efficient general purpose algorithms don't exist, but the key take away from this is that algorithms will tend to either have exorbitant worst case performance or may fail to find optimal solutions (or both) -- it is very important to be able to show that worst case performance is acceptable. This quickly leads to the conclusion that the problem must be further constrained, perhaps by limiting functionality or by using domain-specific optimizations. Unfortunately, it can be very difficult to design these more focused algorithms. In the specific case mentioned, we constrained the solution space to very small clusters (in terms of machine count) with small partition counts and supported exactly two backup copies, and accepted the fact that partition movement could potentially be significant (preferring to solve that issue through brute force). We then used the out-of-the-box PAS implementation as a fallback, delegating to it for configurations that were not supported by our algorithm. Our experience was that the PAS interface is quite usable, but there are intrinsic challenges to designing PAS implementations that should be very carefully evaluated before committing to that approach.

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• Earliest use of Comments as Semantically Meaningful Things in a Program?

  - by Alan Storm

  In certain corners of the PHP meta-programming world, it's become fashionable to use PHPDoc comments as a mechanism for providing semantically meaningful information to a program. That is, other code will parse the doc blocks and do something significant with the information encoded in those comments. Doctrine's annotations and code generation are an example of this. What's the earliest (or some early) use of this technique? I have vague memories of some early java Design by Contract implementations doing similar things, but I'm not sure of those folks were inventing the technique, or if they got it from somewhere. Mainly asking so I can provide some historical context for PHP developers who haven't come across the technique before, and are distrustful of it because it seems a little crazy pants.

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• Can a plug-in access a database server?

  - by Black Panther

  At my work place, we use an external client's web application monitor and respond to support tickets of our clients. the problem with that application is that it does not house a field to enter the actual effort (hours worked on a particular ticket) to be stored in the database. What is needed to write a plug-in for Internet Explorer that would get triggered on a button click on a certain webpage and save some data in an external database? That is, if the support personnel is closing the ticket after resolving it, is it possible to invoke that plugin that asks the personnel to enter the effort spent on that ticket and store it in an external database? We can't modify the web application as it is vendor supplied and not an in-house product.

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• Good practices in screen states management?

  - by DevilWithin

  I wonder what are the best ways to organize different screens in a game? I am thinking of it like this: Inheriting a base State class, and overriding update and render methods, to handle the current screen. Then, under certain events a StateManager is able to activate another Screen State, and the game screen changes as only the current State is rendered. On the activation of a new screen, effects like fading could be added, and also the same goes for its deactivation. This way a flow of screen could be made. By saying when A ends, B starts, allowing for complex animations etc. Toughts?

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• Is there a name for this use of the State design pattern?

  - by Chris C

  I'm looking to see if there is a particular name for this style of programming a certain kind of behavior into a program. Said program runs in real time, in an update loop, and the program uses the State design pattern to do some work, but it's the specific way it does the work that I want to know about. Here's how it's used. - Object Foo constructed, with concrete StateA object in it - First loop runs --- Foo.Run function calls StateA.Bar --- in StateA.Bar replace Foo's state to StateB - Second loop runs --- Foo.Run calls StateB.Bar - Third loop runs --- Foo.Run calls StateB.Bar - Fourth loop --- etc. So in short, Foo doesn't have an explicit Initialize function. It will just have Run, but Run will do something unique in the first frame to initialize something for Foo and then replace it with a different action that will repeat in all the frames following it- thus not needing to check if Foo's already initialized. It's just a "press start and go" action. What would you call implementing this type of behavior?

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• how to remap Ctrl to Escape if pressed and released on its own

  - by psvm

  I want to remap Control, so that: A. If it is pressed and released with no other key, it acts as Escape. B. If it is pressed & held together with another key, it acts as Control (no change in behavior in this case). I'm aware of How do I remap certain keys?, so I suspect it may be done with xmodmap. But that answer does not explain how to map the modifier keys. I looked into the examples and grammar sections of the xmodmap manpage, but they do not explain that. The answer in Remapping Caps Lock to Control and Escape (not the usual way) mention that it is not possible to do that to CapsLock, since it is a Lock key, but I hope this may be possible to do it with Control which is a mod key. A solution with something different than xmodmap will also be accepted. (I'm running Xmonad in Ubuntu 12.04, so perhaps there is a way to set this up in xmonad.hs?)

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• Restricting access to sites

  - by Paul

  I'm having some problems configuring my local proxy server so that it would restrict access to certain websites. The proxy server I'm using is Squid; I edited its configuration file found in /etc/squid/squid.conf to include the following: acl wikipedia dstdomain .wikipedia.org http_access deny wikipedia I tried to redirect elinks to use Squid. According to Squid's config file, it listens to port 3128, so in /etc/elinks/elinks.conf I added the following: set protocol.http.proxy.host = "localhost:3128" I also restarted Squid with sudo /etc/init.d/squid restart, but I can still access the banned websites using Elinks. What did I do wrong?

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• Resources for creating a turn-by-turn navigation system

  - by benwad

  I'm trying to create a kind of turn-by-turn satellite navigation system using the iOS SDK. I get the directions from the server and draw them on the map, then I keep getting location updates from the iPhone's GPS chip. Currently I start by finding the nearest turning point then, each time the user comes within a certain distance of the next turning point, a verbal cue is given and the turning point index is incremented. This is a delicate system and I'd like to make it more robust so I can tell when the user is going the wrong direction etc. Basically I'm looking for some literature about turn-by-turn navigation, in terms of tracking the user's progress and whether they're going the right direction. I'd have thought there's a lot of research out there but I can't seem to find anything apart from simple tutorials on how to use a given SDK or directions API. Can anyone direct me to a good run-through of the various techniques used in software such as TomTom or Google Maps Navigation?

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• Why are there different programming languages [closed]

  - by Velizar Hristov

  I'm not asking about the usefulness of the languages that do exist already: I already know, and agree, that different languages are better for different purposes. However, why don't they just have a single language that can do it all? Why, when C# was created, they didn't keep everything from C and C++ and just add a few things, so that it can be used as both a low-level and high-level language? I see no harm in adding all kinds of commands to a single language that would allow it to be good for everything, and even eliminate the need for all other languages. Someone from another thread said that if there's a flaw in a certain language, its successor might not have it. However, why don't we just update that language to remove the flaw, and/or add anything that's missing? Arrays are different in Java and C#, but why not have them both, just use different commands for them? And so on...

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