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  • How or why would this mechanic (not) work to bring game balance to a singleplayer RPG? [closed]

    - by 0xFFF1
    Mechanic details The player, the monsters, and the merchants act as three separate parties. The player needs to beat up monsters for exp points and resources to sell and to buy potions from merchants to continue to fight. The monsters need healing and reviving to survive (also bought from merchants) and the merchants need potion ingredients from the player and the monsters to make potions to sell. These potions are only able to be processed in such bulk by merchants thus their potions would be cheaper than making them yourself. Only the monsters can farm ingredients in bulk. Only the player is or has to be overly aggressive (in bulk). Monsters can farm and produce "Level up candies" that do the work of exp. they are eaten right away after they are made and are never stockpiled or held for fear of the player and merchants who want to sell to the player. The monsters will defend themselves. Reviving is very expensive. The merchants can be found either with a concerned expression or a grinning expression based on how much profit they are making compared to their morale standing. The economies of each monster town and merchant city are distinct but interconnected. Magic Swords are worth a lot. So what I need to know is what concerns would there be to design a game around this mechanic and/or design this mechanic around a developing game. which would fare better? Is game balance an issue here? (how strong the monsters get or how quickly they die off based on the player's input into the system), Or is game balance solely in the hands of the player? (he decides if he overkills monsters or get underleveled.) What do I need to think about to make sure it isn't too easy or too hard to swing the amount/strength of monsters compared to the player and the amount of profit the merchants get vs the player. Would indicating how out of whack things are getting in game help with this?

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  • Is "as long as it works" the norm?

    - by q303
    Hi, My last shop did not have a process. Agile essentially meant they did not have a plan at all about how to develop or manage their projects. It meant "hey, here's a ton of work. Go do it in two weeks. We're fast paced and agile." They released stuff that they knew had problems. They didn't care how things were written. There were no code reviews--despite there being several developers. They released software they knew to be buggy. At my previous job, people had the attitude as long as it works, it's fine. When I asked for a rewrite of some code I had written while we were essentially exploring the spec, they denied it. I wanted to rewrite the code because code was repeated in multiple places, there was no encapsulation and it took people a long time to make changes to it. So essentially, my impression is this: programming boils down to the following: Reading some book about the latest tool/technology Throwing code together based on this, avoiding writing any individual code because the company doesn't want to "maintain custom code" Showing it and moving on to the next thing, "as long as it works." I've always told myself that next job I'm going to get a better shop. It never happens. If this is it, then I feel stuck. The technologies always change; if the only professional development here is reading the latest MS Press technology book, then what have you built in 10 years but a superficial knowledge of various technologies? I'm concerned about: Best way to have professional standards How to develop meaningful knowledge and experience in this situation

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  • In a 2D platform game, how to ensure the player moves smoothly over sloping ground?

    - by Kovsa
    See image: http://i41.tinypic.com/huis13.jpg I'm developing a physics engine for a 2D platform game. I'm using the separating axis theorem for collision detection. The ground surface is constructed from oriented bounding boxes, with the player as an axis aligned bounding box. (Specifically, I'm using the algorithm from the book "Realtime Collision Detection" which performs swept collision detection for OBBs using SAT). I'm using a fairly small (close to zero) restitution coefficient in the collision response, to ensure that the dynamic objects don't penetrate the environment. The engine mostly works fine, it's just that I'm concerned about some edge cases that could possibly occur. For example, in the diagram, A, B and C are the ground surface. The player is heading left along B towards A. It seems to me that due to inaccuracy, the player box could be slightly below the box B as it continues up and left. When it reaches A, therefore, the bottom left corner of the player might then collide with the right side of A, which would be undesirable (as the intention is for the player to move smoothly over the top of A). It seems like a similar problem could happen when the player is on top of box C, moving left towards B - the most extreme point of B could collide with the left side of the player, instead of the player's bottom left corner sliding up and left above B. Box2D seems to handle this problem by storing connectivity information for its edge shapes, but I'm not really sure how it uses this information to solve the problem, and after looking at the code I don't really grasp what it's doing. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

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  • Anonymous exposes sensitive bank emails

    - by martin.abrahams
    As expected for quite a while, emails purporting to reveal alleged naughtiness at a major bank have been released today. A bank spokesman says "We are confident that his extravagant assertions are untrue". The BBC report concludes…  “Firms are increasingly concerned about the prospect of disgruntled staff taking caches of sensitive e-mails with them when they leave, said Rami Habal, of security firm Proofpoint. "You can't do anything about people copying the content," he said. But firms can put measures in place, such as revoking encryption keys, which means stolen e-mails become unreadable, he added.” Actually, there is something you can do to guard against copying. While traditional encryption lets authorised recipients make unprotected copies long before you revoke the keys, Oracle IRM provides encryption AND guards against unprotected copies being made. Recipients can be authorised to save protected copies, and cut-and-paste within the scope of a protected workflow or email thread – but can be prevented from saving unprotected copies or pasting to unprotected files and emails.  The IRM audit trail would also help track down attempts to open the protected emails and documents by unauthorised individuals within or beyond your perimeter.

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  • Which .NET REST approach/technology/tool should I use?

    - by SonOfPirate
    I am implementing a RESTful web service and several client applications that are mostly in Silverlight. I am finding a litany of options for developing both the server-side and client-side of the API but am not sure which is the best approach. I'm concerned about stability as well as a platform that will continue to exist a few months from now. We started using the REST Starter Kit with .NET 3.5 but moved to the new WCF Web API when updating to .NET 4.0. All of their documentation indicates that WCF Web API is the replacement for the RSK. However, Web API is only in Preview 4 and does not include support for Silverlight or Windows Phone 7 clients (yet). WCF Web API looks like a wrapper on top of the WCF WebHttp Services stuff provided in the System.ServiceModel.Web library which makes me think that maybe it would be simpler to just go with the built-in stuff but Web API does offer some nice features. I am specifically tied-up trying to determine the best course for the client-side. My main requirement is that I need to support deserializing into my client-side objects quickly and easily. The Web API offers a nice client library but doesn't have a Silverlight version. I'd like to use the latest approach and the toolset that is being actively developed and supported. Is the REST Starter Kit really obsolete? Has anyone had any success implementing the WCF Web API toolkit? Is there merit to using either of these over the built-in WCF WebHttp Services features found in System.ServiceModel.Web? Is there a single solution that works for any client (web, Silverlight, etc.)? What suggestions do you have?

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  • How to connect Ethernet on Ubuntu (with auto-detection)

    - by user12285
    It's been well over six months but I have the same router SmartAX MT880d with Ethernet, and the exact same problem : no internet, even though I can successfully reach the modem settings page by entering 192.168.1.1 in Firefox. I'm a total beginner with Ubuntu. My internet works great in Windows but does not work in Ubuntu. Sorry if I don't use the right (technical) terminology to explain my issue. English is not my mother tongue. For 2 weeks, I've been doing reading on the web and forums and the ubuntuguide.org to name a few, but to no avail. Now I see no other solution but to ask for help. My problem is that I can't find a way to put the right digits in the right place because I don't know what numbers I need to put in what files. E.g.: do I need to use DHCP? or a static IP address? No clue whatsoever. I'm concerned that I might put figures in the wrong spaces. For example, is the modem/router's IP exactly 192.168.1.1 for Huawei Smart AXMT880d modem? Is the subnet 255.255.255.0? Gateway 192.168.1.1? I'm confused as I can also see a different IP starting with 155131*** (is it an account number?) on my contract with Huawei (a Chinese ISP). Apart from calling 911, what other numbers do I need to put in and where? How do I check that all the numbers have been entered correctly in every appropriate space before trying to connect the Internet?

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  • Why is a small fixed vocabulary seen as an advantage to RESTful services?

    - by Matt Esch
    So, a RESTful service has a fixed set of verbs in its vocabulary. A RESTful web service takes these from the HTTP methods. There are some supposed advantages to defining a fixed vocabulary, but I don't really grasp the point. Maybe someone can explain it. Why is a fixed vocabulary as outlined by REST better than dynamically defining a vocabulary for each state? For example, object oriented programming is a popular paradigm. RPC is described to define fixed interfaces, but I don't know why people assume that RPC is limited by these contraints. We could dynamically specify the interface just as a RESTful service dynamically describes its content structure. REST is supposed to be advantageous in that it can grow without extending the vocabulary. RESTful services grow dynamically by adding more resources. What's so wrong about extending a service by dynamically specifying a per-object vocabulary? Why don't we just use the methods that are defined on our objects as the vocabulary and have our services describe to the client what these methods are and whether or not they have side effects? Essentially I get the feeling that the description of a server side resource structure is equivalent to the definition of a vocabulary, but we are then forced to use the limited vocabulary in which to interact with these resources. Does a fixed vocabulary really decouple the concerns of the client from the concerns of the server? I surely have to be concerned with some configuration of the server, this is normally resource location in RESTful services. To complain at the use of a dynamic vocabulary seems unfair because we have to dynamically reason how to understand this configuration in some way anyway. A RESTful service describes the transitions you are able to make by identifying object structure through hypermedia. I just don't understand what makes a fixed vocabulary any better than any self-describing dynamic vocabulary, which could easily work very well in an RPC-like service. Is this just a poor reasoning for the limiting vocabulary of the HTTP protocol?

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  • PHP file_put_contents File Locking

    - by hozza
    The Senario: You have a file with a string (average sentence worth) on each line. For arguments sake lets say this file is 1Mb in size (thousands of lines). You have a script that reads the file, changes some of the strings within the document (not just appending but also removing and modifying some lines) and then overwrites all the data with the new data. The Questions: Does 'the server' PHP, OS or httpd etc. already have systems in place to stop issues like this (reading/writing half way through a write)? i. If it does, please explain how it works and give examples or links to relevant documentation. ii. If not, are there things I can enable or set-up, such as locking a file until a write is completed and making all other reads and/or writes fail until the previous script has finished writing? My Assumptions and Other Information: The server in question is running PHP and Apache or Lighttpd. If the script is called by one user and is halfway through writing to the file and another user reads the file at that exact moment. The user who reads it will not get the full document, as it hasn't been written yet. (If this assumption is wrong please correct me) I'm only concerned with PHP writing and reading to a text file, and in particular, the functions "fopen"/"fwrite" and mainly "file_put_contents". I have looked at the "file_put_contents" documentation but have not found the level of detail or a good explanation of what the "LOCK_EX" flag is or does. The senario is an EXAMPLE of a worst case senario where I would assume these issues are more likely to occur, due to the large size of the file and the way the data is edited. I want to learn more about these issues and don't want or need answers or comments such as "use mysql" or "why are you doing that" because I'm not doing that, I just want to learn about file read/writing with PHP and don't seem to be looking in the right places/documentation and yes I understand PHP is not the perfect language for working with files in this way...

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  • Preventing possible burnout in a junior dev, or perhaps I'm not doing enough?

    - by m.edmondson
    I'm a software developer with 5 years experience over 3 companies. Within the last year a junior (brand new to the industry) has started at my current employer. I believe he is an excellent developer, who always delivers and is skilled as solving complex problems. However I'm slightly concerned that he is possibly applying himself too much for the following reasons: He begins work approximately 2 hours before most (and is expected) In his free time he has developed an application that was clearly months worth of work that is specific to our employer I and the team are completely greatful for all he is doing, and is clearly an asset to our team. However I'm worried that this is not sustainable. I can almost see that he has the same enthusiasm that I had when I began coding for work, however over the years I've realised that extra curricular work not only doesn't progress your career, but eats into your all important free time. The question I'm asking is: Should I advise him to take things a bit more slowly? Or perhaps I need to learn from him and do more for my employer out of hours?

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  • Class Design for special business rules

    - by Samuel Front
    I'm developing an application that allows people to place custom manufacturing orders. However, while most require similar paperwork, some of them have custom paperwork that only they require. My current class design has a Manufacturer class, of which of one of the member variables is an array of RequiredSubmission objects. However, there are two issues that I am somewhat concerned about. First, some manufacturers are willing to accept either a standard form or their own custom form. I'm thinking of storing this in the RequiredSubmission object, with an array of alternate forms that are a valid substitute. I'm not sure that this is ideal, however. The major issue, however, is that some manufacturers have deadline cycles. For example, forms A, B and C have to be delivered by January 1, while payment must be rendered by January 10. If you miss those, you'll have to wait until the next cycle. I'm not exactly sure how I can get this to work with my existing classes—how can I say "this set of dates all belong to the same cycle, with date A for form A, date B for form B, etc." I would greatly appreciate any insights on how to best design these classes.

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  • Do we have enough time to build an electric car future?

    - by julien.groues
    A recent article from Greenbang has posed the question 'Do we have enough time to build an electric car future?'. The writer discusses that, although the future of transport might lie with electric cars, there is concern regarding whether we'll be able to build the market and infrastructure required to support them, before carbon and oil constraints create difficulties in powering the vehicles. Of course, the increasing use of Electric vehicles (EVs) is going to put excessive pressure on energy grids, as large volumes of electricity will need to be directed to charging points, which in turn must handle fluctuating demand at peak times. EVs are increasing in popularity as a sustainable method of transport to reduce carbon consumption, and electric utilities will have the opportunity, and the challenge, to quickly determine the best methods to fuel these vehicles and accommodate the associated increases in demand for energy. Critically, efficient software is required to provide diagnostic and predictive capabilities related to EV refuelling - for example, anticipated electricity flow will need to be addressed as the number of EVs on the road increases, and electricity will need to be directed to specific areas on-demand as vehicles attempt to recharge en-mass. But a smart grid infrastructure can meet these demands, intelligently. The implementation of a smart grid is not in the distant future, it is an achievable reality for utilities via simple installation of new software and technologies, which can be done incrementally for those facing existing legacy systems or concerned with upfront costs. The smart grid is integral to the monitoring and control of energy use as well as the future-proofing of the energy grid. A smart grid will be critical to meeting the electricity requirements of new EVs and will ensure their successful deployment by providing a reliable foundation for the data handling required to record and manage electricity distribution - from recording and assessing energy usage, to analysing data and sharing information with consumers via green billing. http://www.greenbang.com/do-we-have-enough-time-to-build-an-electric-car-future_14248.html

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  • What You Said: Where Do You Find Your Next Game?

    - by Jason Fitzpatrick
    Earlier this week we asked you to share your favorite places and tricks for finding new video games to play. It turns out the least of your problems was finding new games! From the comments it became apparent How-To Geek readers had absolutely no problem finding new games to add to their gaming stable. Buzz writes: I have quite an elaborate procedure in finding my next game:For free games i simply follow the feeds on a few websites like Freegamer, LinuxGames, HappyPenguin and Penguspy. Every now and them i browse Wikipedia articles on free/FOSS games. For commercial games the procedure depends on what i enjoyed the most in that game:- If i enjoyed the story or the general feel: i usually start with a game i like and look for sequels, prequels, mods or spinoffs. I even go out on a limb and give other platforms (than a PC) a try, even if it usually means emulation. If you really enjoy a game series/saga it’s usually worth the effort.- If i enjoy the producer/gaming company then i seek out more of their games.- If i enjoy the technical achievements that went into making the game or if i am concerned for the system requirements of my gear i try to play games that are built on the same engine(s) as one of the games i ran smooth and enjoyed.- If i feel like playing a particular genre i usually start with a title i enjoyed and look for alternatives or similar games- You can always try searching for Game of The Year winners for a particular time period or other similar accomplishments. They usually yield great results. How to Make Your Laptop Choose a Wired Connection Instead of Wireless HTG Explains: What Is Two-Factor Authentication and Should I Be Using It? HTG Explains: What Is Windows RT and What Does It Mean To Me?

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  • Strategy for backwards compatibility of persistent storage

    - by Baqueta
    In my experience, trying to ensure that new versions of an application retain compatibility with data storage from previous versions can often be a painful process. What I currently do is to save a version number for each 'unit' of data (be it a file, database row/table, or whatever) and ensure that the version number gets updated each time the data changes in some way. I also create methods to convert from v1 to v2, v2 to v3, and so on. That way, if I'm at v7 and I encounter a v3 file, I can do v3-v4-v5-v6-v7. So far this approach seems to be working out well, but I haven't had to make use of it extensively yet so there may be unforseen problems. I'm also concerned that if the objects I'm loading change significantly, I'll either have to keep around old versions of the classes or face updating all my conversion methods to handle the new class definition. Is my approach sound? Are there other/better approaches I could be using? Are there any design patterns applicable to this problem?

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  • No Worms Here: Early Bird Registration Begins for Oracle OpenWorld

    - by Oracle OpenWorld Blog Team
    Save US$500 with your Early Bird registration By Karen Shamban Early Birds for Oracle OpenWorld won’t catch any worms, but they will catch great savings: $US500! If you register now, those savings can be yours. If you're thinking about attending and wondering what’s happening as the preparation for OpenWorld continues, here’s a quick rundown: •    Review teams are selecting the presenters and topics that will provide attendees with superior technical session content •    Knowledgeable partners and sponsors are being engaged•    In-depth demos and labs are being developed•    Extraordinary experiences are being created•    Fantastic networking events are in the works Think you’d like to attend OpenWorld but concerned about time and budget being tight? If that’s the case, check out the Discover pass. It gives you access to keynotes, designated sessions, exhibition halls, the Oracle DEMOgrounds, and more. All for hundreds of dollars less than a full registration package. Want to be there? Learn more about registration options for Oracle OpenWorld. And remember, if you're going to register or have already, book your hotel room now. The best rooms go quickly and are gone before you know it. Have an Oracle OpenWorld topic you’d like to see covered in this blog? Comments welcome!   

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  • Advice: How to convince my newly annointed team lead against writing the code base from scratch

    - by shan23
    I work in a pretty reknowned MNC, and the module that I work in has been assigned to a new "lead". The code base is pretty huge (~130K or more, with inter dependencies on other modules) , but stable - some parts have grown ugly over the years, but its provably in working state. (Our products are running for years on them, even new ones). The problem is, our lead wants to rewrite the code from scratch, to encompass "finer granularity and a proactive design". I know in my guts thats not a very good idea, but how do I convince him/the rest of the team(who are pretty much more senior than me in terms of years of exp), without sounding too pedantic myself (Thou shalt not rewrite , as Joel et al have clear articles prohibiting it)? I have a good working relation with the person concerned, and don't want to ruin it, but neither do I want to be party to a decision which would surely plague us for years to come !! Any suggestions for a milder,yet effective approach ? Even accounts of how you have tackled such a situation to your liking would help me a lot! EDIT: The code base I'm talking about is not a product/GUI, but at kernel level with all the critical functionalities for our product. I hope now you know why i sound so apprehensive !!

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  • Dual Boot, Dual Hard Drives!

    - by Mars
    I'm posting this question after reading most of similar ones. My situation is different here in the fact that I'm installing on SSD and not partitioning my HDD, and that I can actually boot! I'm just looking to improve the convenience of having easier way to choose. 1- I have a Dell Inspiron 15R SE. It has HDD (1TB) and SSD (32GB). I managed to do whatever things I did in distant past to set the SSD free (I don't really care how fast my system boots). Now I wanted to install Linux on the SSD and leave the HDD untouched. It's way too precious for me to mess with it. So, I repartitioned the SSD to: 30GB for /root, 1GB for /swap, and 100MB for /boot. I installed Linux on the root and the GRUB on boot (of the SSD). Now GRUB immediately boots into linux and doesn't allow me to boot to Windows. BUT! If I enable UEFI Boot manager and choose "Windows Boot Manager" after hitting F12, I can boot into Windows 8 normally. I'd say that's pretty ok, except, I'd prefer to have the option to boot into which one or at the very least, default to boot to Windows. 2- I'm concerned that if I now delete the SSD partition, that the boot will break and I won't be able to boot anything! Does this seem like a valid concern? I made that choice of having linux on SSD because I'm going to be training on it, so I expect multiple resets from time to time.

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  • Can non-IT people handle a wiki?

    - by Andrew Heath
    (I'm hoping that some of you will have encountered this issue before and can offer some insights...) My company is looking to improve their market research data management. Current data management style: "Hey Jimbo, where's that picture of our WhatZit 2.0? "yeah I remember that email about that company from that guy, gimme a few minutes to search my Outlook" "who has the newest copy of the Important Competitor's product catalogue? Mine is from '09." ... "Colleen does, and she's on maternity leave. You'll have to call her to get her workstation password..." Desired data management style: data organized neatly by topic (legal, economic, industrial, competitor) for each topic, multiple media types stored together (company product images, press releases, contact info) but still neatly sorted by type data editing histories communal access (no data silos) I was thinking about setting up a department wiki for all users to access. It seems to satisfy the four criteria above, but I'm a little concerned about how user-friendly (read: decipherable to non-technical people) it is for the more advanced features like image galleries, article formatting, and the like. Has anyone here setup a wiki for non-IT people and had it not catch on fire//become a ghost town//look like Geocities? Bonus question: can you see any obvious drawbacks to my choice of MediaWiki (or any other wiki) for solving this problem? Thank you.

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  • I'm hoping to start an online supermarket and needs advice on open source shopping cart software and applications..

    - by Betterman Simidi
    I have been researching on both open source software and off-the-shelf software for an online supermarket project in Africa. I have now narrowed by search to X-cart and the PHP based PrestaShop shopping carts. My plan is to acquire an open source shopping cart either by purchasing or as a free open source cart and hire a local developer to customize it to our local needs. I have been doing the demo for x-cart for three weeks now and had thought it might work best for us but after going through the 600 page manual and I'm concerned with how far it can be localized. Yesterday i was looking at the possible Prestashop free open source cart and i seem to like the back-end. Didn't like the back-end for Magento much but from reviews conducted by third-parties they seem to recommend it. I'm now wondering whether i should have a developer start the whole project from scratch, or use an open source software such us PrestaShop or get x-cart which can then be customized. Note that my store will have thousands of products and services including groceries and so i want something that can handle upto 500,000 products and over. Kindly advice. 93276

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  • Simple monitoring of a Raspberry Pi powered screen - Part 2

    - by Chris Houston
    If you have read my previous blog post Raspberry Pi entrance signed backed by Umbraco - Part 1 which describes how we used a Raspberry Pi to drive an Entrance sign for QV Offices you will have seen I mentioned a follow up post about monitoring the sign.As the sign is mounted in the entrance of the building on the ground floor and the reception is on the 1st floor, this meant that if there was a fault of any kind showing on the screen, the first person to see this was inevitably one of QV Offices' clients as they walked into the building.Although the QV Offices' team were able to check the Umbraco website address that the sign uses, this did not always mean that everything was working as expected. We noticed a couple of times that the sign had Wifi issues (it is now hard wired) and this caused the Chromium browser to render a 404 error when it tried to refresh the screen.The simple monitoring solutionWe added the following line to our refresh script, so that after the sign had been refreshed a screen shot of the Raspberry Pi would be taken:import -display :0 -window root ~/screenshot.jpgFinally we wrote a small Crontab task that ran on a QV Offices Mac that grabs this screen shot and saved it on the desktop, admittedly we have used a package that it not mega secure, but in reality this is an internal system that only runs an office sign, so we are not to concerned about it being hacked.*/5 * * * * /usr/local/bin/sshpass -p 'password' /usr/bin/scp [email protected]:screenshot.jpg Desktop/QVScreenShot.jpgAs the file icon updates, if the image changes, this gives a quick visual indication of the status of the sign, if for some reason the icon does not look correct the QV Offices administrator can just click on the file to see the exact image currently displayed on the sign.Sometimes a quick and easy solution is better than a more complex and expensive one.

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  • Ray Tracing concers: Efficient Data Structure and Photon Mapping

    - by Grieverheart
    I'm trying to build a simple ray tracer for specific target scenes. An example of such scene can be seen below. I'm concerned as to what accelerating data structure would be most efficient in this case since all objects are touching but on the other hand, the scene is uniform. The objects in my ray tracer are stored as a collection of triangles, thus I also have access to individual triangles. Also, when trying to find the bounding box of the scene, how should infinite planes be handled? Should one instead use the viewing frustum to calculate the bounding box? A few other questions I have are about photon mapping. I've read the original paper by Jensen and many more material. In the compact data structure for the photon they introduce, they store photon power as 4 chars, which from my understanding is 3 chars for color and 1 for flux. But I don't understand how 1 char is enough to store a flux of the order of 1/n, where n is the number of photons (I'm also a bit confused about flux vs power). The other question about photon mapping is, if it would be more efficient in my case to store photons per object (or even per Object's triangle) instead of using a balanced kd-tree. Also, same question about bounding box of the scene but for photon mapping. How should one find a bounding box from the pov of the light when infinite planes are involved?

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  • How to justify technology choice to customer?

    - by suslik
    When freelancing / contracting a customer will typically specify functional requirements, acceptance criteria, etc, and the implementation details are in the developer's hands. As a developer your technology choice is a balancing act between what you are most familiar with, technologically what the right tool appears to be, ease of finding coders with this skill and their expense, and a few other factors. I'm in a situation where I have evaluated my options and selected a somewhat obscure open source technology that I believe will get me there faster, easier, and be more maintanable in the long term. It's different, but I think that that is what the requirements call for. The customer has inquired about what I'm going to use to build the solution, and now they are concerned because they've never heard of it before. The reasons for my choice are mostly technical, whereas the customer isn't (but they know some buzzwords!). Explaining these technical reasons will not be easy, and I am not sure if that is the right way to approach this situation anyway. And that's my question: what is the right way to approach this situation so as to cause the least amount of headache for everyone involved?

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  • Ranking drop after using reverse proxy for blog subdirectory and robots.txt for old blog subdomain

    - by user40387
    We have a 3Dcart store and a WordPress blog hosted on a separate server. Originally, we had a CNAME set up to point the blog to http://blog.example.com/. However, in our attempt to boost link-based and traffic-based authority on the main site, we've opted to do a reverse proxy to http://www.example.com/blog/. It’s been about two months since we finished the reverse proxy migration. It appears that everything is technically working as intended, including some robots and sitemap changes; the new URLs are even generating some traffic, as indicated on Google Analytics. While Google has been indexing the new URL locations, they’re ranking very poorly, even for non-competitive, long-tail keywords. Meanwhile, the old subdomain URLs are still ranking mostly as well as they used to (even though they aren’t showing meta titles and descriptions due to being blocked by robots.txt). Our working theory is that Google has an old index of the subdomain URLs, and is considering the new URLs to be duplicate content, since it’s being told not to crawl the subdomain and therefore can’t see the rel canonicals we have in place. To resolve this, we’ve updated the subdomain’s robot.txt to no longer block crawling and indexing. Theoretically, seeing the canonical tag on the subdomain pages will resolve any perceived duplicate content issues. In the meantime, we were wondering if anyone would have any other ideas. We are very concerned that we’ll be losing valuable traffic, as we’re entering our on season at the moment.

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  • Complexity of defense AI

    - by Fredrik Johansson
    I have a non-released game, and currently it's only possible to play with another human being. As the game rules are made up by me, I think it would be great if new players could learn basic game play by playing against an AI opponent. I mean it's not like Tennis, where the majority knows at least the fundamental rules. On the other hand, I'm a bit concerned that this AI implementation can be quite complex. I hope you can help me with an complexity estimation. I've tried to summarize the gameplay below. Is this defense AI very hard to do? Basic Defense Game Play Player Defender can move within his land, i.e. inside a random, non-convex, polygon. This land will also contain obstacles modeled as polygons, that Defender has to move around. Player Attacker has also a land, modeled as another such polygon. Assume that Defender shall defend against Attacker. Attacker will then throw a thingy towards Defender's land. To be rewarded, Attacker wants to hit Defender's land, and Defender will want to strike away the thingy from his land before it stops to prevent Attacker from scoring. To feint Defender, Attacker might run around within his land before the throw, and based on these attacker movements Defender shall then continuously move to the best defense position within his land.

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  • Confusion about git; how to undo?

    - by dan
    I wanted to install some source code that was on git. Don't really know what that means, I've never used git before, but I figured it was time to learn so, I first installed git. Next I tried to clone the git directory of the software I want to install. I got a message saying "the authenticity of can't be established". I went ahead and ended up with another message saying warning such and such will be added to known hosts. I went ahead and it said something about hanging up on the connection. After searching the internet for a while I realized I didn't need git to install the software but now I have it installed and have added some host to some file or another. I'm concerned I've created some security issues I need to fix. Can anyone help me undo what I've done, or better understand what I've done. Did adding a git project open up my system? Beyond that can anyone tell me how git works. Everything I've found assumes I know stuff that I don't yet. Thanks

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  • At what point would you drop some of your principles of software development for the sake of more money?

    - by MeshMan
    I'd like to throw this question out there to interestingly see where the medium is. I'm going to admit that in my last 12 months, I picked up TDD and a lot of the Agile values in software development. I was so overwhelmed with how much better my development of software became that I would never drop them out of principle. Until...I was offered a contracting role that doubled my take home pay for the year. The company I joined didn't follow any specific methodology, the team hadn't heard of anything like code smells, SOLID, etc., and I certainly wasn't going to get away with spending time doing TDD if the team had never even seen unit testing in practice. Am I a sell out? No, not completely... Code will always been written "cleanly" (as per Uncle Bob's teachings) and the principles of SOLID will always be applied to the code that I write as they are needed. Testing was dropped for me though, the company couldn't afford to have such a unknown handed to the team who quite frankly, even I did create test frameworks, they would never use/maintain the test framework correctly. Using that as an example, what point would you say a developer should never drop his craftsmanship principles for the sake of money/other benefits to them personally? I understand that this can be a very personal opinion on how concerned one is to their own needs, business needs, and the sake of craftsmanship etc. But one can consider that for example testing can be dropped if the company decided they would rather have a test team, than rather understand unit testing in programming, would that be something you could forgive yourself for like I did? So given that there is something you would drop, there usually should be an equal cost in the business that makes up for what you drop - hopefully, unless of course you are pretty much out for lining your own pockets and not community/social collaborating ;). Double your money, go back to RAD? Or walk on, and look for someone doing Agile, and never look back...

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