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• Building a Redundant / Distributed Application

  - by MattW

  This is more of a "point me in the right direction" question. My team of three and I have built a hosted web app that queues and routes customer chat requests to available customer service agents (It does other things as well, but this is enough background to illustrate the issue). The basic dev architecture today is: a single page ajax web UI (ASP.NET MVC) with floating chat windows (think Gmail) a backend Windows service to queue and route the chat requests this service also logs the chats, calculates service levels, etc a Comet server product that routes data between the web frontend and the backend Windows service this also helps us detect which Agents are still connected (online) And our hardware architecture today is: 2 servers to host the web UI portion of the application a load balancer to route requests to the 2 different web app servers a third server to host the SQL Server DB and the backend Windows service responsible for queuing / delivering chats So as it stands today, one of the web app servers could go down and we would be ok. However, if something would happen to the SQL Server / Windows Service server we would be boned. My question - how can I make this backend Windows service logic be able to be spread across multiple machines (distributed)? The Windows service is written to accept requests from the Comet server, check for available Agents, and route the chat to those agents. How can I make this more distributed? How can I make it so that I can distribute the work of the backend Windows service can be spread across multiple machines for redundancy and uptime purposes? Will I need to re-write it with distributed computing in mind? I should also note that I am hosting all of this on Rackspace Cloud instances - so maybe it is something I should be less concerned about? Thanks in advance for any help!

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• Brain picking during job interview

  - by mark

  Recently, I had a job interview at a big Silicon Valley company for a senior software developer/R&D position. I had several technical phone screens, an all day on-site interview and more technical phone screens for another position later. The interviews went really well, I have a PhD and working experience in the area I was applying for yet no offer was made. So far, so good. It was an interesting experience, I am employed, absolutely no hard feelings about this. Some of the interviewers asked really detailed questions to the point of being suspicious about new technologies I have been working on. These technologies are still in development and have not come to market yet. I know some major hardware/software companies are working on this too. I have had many interviews before and based on my former interviewing experience and the impression some of the interviewers left behind, I know now all this company wanted from me is to extract some ideas about what I did in this field. Remember, I am referring to a R&D position, not the standard software developer stuff. Has anybody encountered this situation so far? And how did you deal with it? I am not so much concerned about "stealing" ideas but more about being tricked into showing up for an interview when there is no intension to hire anyway. I am considering refusing technical interviews in the future and instead proposing a trial period in which the company can easily reconsider its hiring decision.

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• Office arangement - comfort vs. teamwork?

  - by finrod

  Our team works in an open-space office. Luckily the cubicles are quite big (L shaped tables for everyone!), there is quite a lot of space so we are not sandwiched. Without going into further detail, there are comfortable spots (window), normal spots and stupid spots (near the corridor). Until recently, the development team of twelve engineers was seated so that all types of spots were occupied and we were all close together. In the old arrangement, verbal communication was very easy - half of the team was withing talking distance. The other half was like ten steps away. Often times I could ask, discuss, solve problems without leaving the cube. Most of the communication is work related, no bullshit or mental masturbation that would unnecessarily distract others. Now we have moved to another part of the building and have larger space to occupy. At this point, everyone could pick their spot. Naturally all stupid spots are left empty (for the poor newcomers to occupy bwehaha). In the new arrangement, the development team is stretched across the floor and some of the key engineers are seated 'far' from each other - definitely not within talking distance. I have yet to experience how this works out but am getting concerned that team work and communication may have been traded for personal comfort. Finally the questions... What do you think is better office arrangement? Such that allows for free verbal communication but trading for some developer's comfort, or such that potentially hinders verbal communication but makes developer's more comfortable in their spot? Or maybe it does not matter at all and we will evolve to be efficient in any arrangement? What is your personal experience? Note - yes I read books and posts how workplace is important in our job. However in this case - we are all still in open space and the difference between the different spots are not really groundbreaking. So I'm thinking the little comfort that few developers gain is not worth the loss of easy communication.

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• Publishing a game -- any way to target both WP7 and Win8 Store?

  - by Rei Miyasaka

  I'm at a dilemma which seems should soon become an important issue for a lot of developers. If I build a game in XNA, I won't be able to publish it on the Windows 8 Store, as it would be a classic application -- and classic applications can't be sold on the store. If I build a game in Metro DirectX, I would be able to sell it on the Store, but porting it to Windows Phone would involve porting it to Reach XNA, which in fact would likely involve more effort even than porting to OS X or Android -- both of which support C++. Of all the WinRT API that is supported on C++/JS/.NET, DirectX can only be programmed from C++. It's also unlikely that Microsoft will update Windows 7 or Vista to support the new DirectX features, although that would make the Metro DirectX the first new version of DirectX to stop supporting the immediate predecessor OS. If I build a game in Pre-Win8 DirectX 9/10/11, I won't be able to sell it on the Windows Store or Windows Phone, but I could sell it on something like Steam. It would also involve the most amount of manual plumbing. In fact, DirectWrite, despite being part of DirectX 11, doesn't talk to Direct3D. I'm getting really tired of all these restrictions -- artificial and otherwise -- and I'm coming to a point where I'm considering switching to a platform with a less fragmented API, like Android or Mac/iOS. As far as bringing a game into market goes, excluding the actual market share of any platforms that I might consider, what other factors would help me in making a decision? Just a few years ago this question was a lot easier to answer: if you were primarily concerned with Windows platforms, all you had to answer was whether you wanted DirectX, XNA, or something like SlimDX. If you made the wrong decision, no biggie -- all you really would have lost is XBox and the fairly small Windows Phone market.

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• good literature for teaching object oriented thinking in C [closed]

  - by Dipan Mehta

  Quite often C is the primary platform for the development. And when things are large scale, I have seen partitioning of the system as different objects is quite a natural thing. Some or many of the object orientated analysis and design principles are used here very well. This is not a debate question about whether or not C is a good candidate for object oriented programming or not. This is also NOT a question how to do OO in C. You can refer to this question and there are probably many such citations. As far as I am concerned, I have learned some of this things while working with many open source and commercial projects. (libjpeg, ffmpeg, Gstreamer which is based on GObject). I can probably extend a few references that explains some of these concepts such as - 1. Event Helix article, 2. Linux Mag article 3. one of my answers which links Schreiner's reference. Unfortunately, when we induct younger folks, it seems too hard to make them learn all of it the hard way. Usually, when we say it's C, a general reaction is to throw away all of the "Object thinking". Looking for help extending above references from those who have been in the similar areas of work. Are there any good formal literature that explains how Object thinking can be made to use while you are working in C? I have seen tons of book on general "object oriented paradigms" but they all focus on advanced languages mostly not in C. You see most C books - but most focus only on the syntax and the obfuscated corners of C and that's it. There are hardly ANY good reference, specially books or any systematic (I mean formal) literature on how to apply OO in C. This is very surprising given that so many large scale open source projects use C which are truly using this very well; but we hardly see any good formal literature on this subject.

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• Sorting objects before rendering

  - by dreta

  I'm trying to implement a scene graph and in all the articles i've come across there is talk about object sorting. So you'd sort your objects by "material" for example. Now untill i sat down and started implementing it, i kind of took this for granted, because it made sense. But now i'm wondering what does sorting actually change? In my engine, i have a manager for UBOs, i use those to store data that'll be shared between programs, at the moment that only involves time, camera and projection matrices and lights (i'm not worrying about managing which lights affect which objects ATM). Now for each model i have to change the model to world matrix uniform, no sorting is going to change that. So is the jump from changing this matrix to also setting a material for each object that bad? I vaguely remember reading somewhere that each time you change something in the pipeline, it has to get flushed and that can cause performance issues. But for each drawing call i'm setting up a model to world matrix anyway, so what sense does it make to ever be concerned about this? BTW is there any information about whether changing a uniform and calling glBufferSubData is more (or less) expensive.

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• Vector vs Scalar velocity?

  - by Serguei Fedorov

  I am revamping an engine I have been working on and off on for the last few weeks to use a directional vector to dictate direction; this way I can dictate the displacement based on a direction. However, the issue I am trying to overcome is the following problem; the speed towards X and speed towards Y are unrelated to one another. If gravity pulls the object down by an increasing velocity my velocity towards the X should not change. This is very easy to implement if my speed is broken into a Vector datatype, Vector.X dictates one direction Vector.Y dictates the other (assuming we are not concerned about the Z axis). However, this defeats the purpose of the directional vector because: SpeedX = 10 SpeedY = 15 [1, 1] normalized = ~[0.7, 0.7] [0.7, 0.7] * [10, 15] = [7, 10.5] As you can see my direction is now "scaled" to my speed which is no longer the direction that I want to be moving in. I am very new to vector math and this is a learning project for me. I looked around a little bit on the internet but I still want to figure out things on my own (not just look at an example and copy off it). Is there way around this? Using a directional vector is extremely useful but I am a little bit stumped at this problem. I am sorry if my mathematical understanding maybe completely wrong.

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• Confusion with floats converted into ints during collision detection

  - by TheBroodian

  So in designing a 2D platformer, I decided that I should be using a Vector2 to track the world location of my world objects to retain some sub-pixel precision for slow-moving objects and other such subtle nuances, yet representing their bodies with Rectangles, because as far as collision detection and resolution is concerned, I don't need sub-pixel precision. I thought that the following line of thought would work smoothly... Vector2 wrldLocation; Point WorldLocation; Rectangle collisionRectangle; public void Update(GameTime gameTime) { Vector2 moveAmount = velocity * (float)gameTime.ElapsedGameTime.TotalSeconds wrldLocation += moveAmount; WorldLocation = new Point((int)wrldLocation.X, (int)wrldLocation.Y); collisionRectangle = new Rectangle(WorldLocation.X, WorldLocation.Y, genericWidth, genericHeight); } and I guess in theory it sort of works, until I try to use it in conjunction with my collision detection, which works by using Rectangle.Offset() to project where collisionRectangle would supposedly end up after applying moveAmount to it, and if a collision is found, finding the intersection and subtracting the difference between the two intersecting sides to the given moveAmount, which would theoretically give a corrected moveAmount to apply to the object's world location that would prevent it from passing through walls and such. The issue here is that Rectangle.Offset() only accepts ints, and so I'm not really receiving an accurate adjustment to moveAmount for a Vector2. If I leave out wrldLocation from my previous example, and just use WorldLocation to keep track of my object's location, everything works smoothly, but then obviously if my object is being given velocities less than 1 pixel per update, then the velocity value may as well be 0, which I feel further down the line I may regret. Does anybody have any suggestions about how I might go about resolving this?

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• How to access a fake raid?

  - by maaartinus

  I have a fake raid, which I wanted to access using mdadm /dev/md0 -A -c 128 -l stripe --verbose /dev/sda /dev/sdc which should be right, as far as I understand the man page. But I get the message mdadm: option -l not valid in assemble mode leaving the offending option out leads to mdadm: failed to create /dev/md0 and (despite verbose) no more information. I'm assuming that -A requires some mdadm-specific header which is obviously missing. I probably need to use "build" instead of assemble, but from the description I'm really unsure whether this is a non-destructive operation. Is it? What should I exactly do? UPDATE I see I haven't made clear, that the array already exists as a fake-raid (I can't give the details about my mainboard now). It looks like doing nothing except for interleaving blocks, so I hoped it could be easily done using mdadm, too. Maybe I'm completely wrong, but all the info I've found was concerned with booting from fake-raid, what I don't really need. I'd be happy with a read access for now.

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• What went wrong with my curl install?

  - by Danjah

  I'm fresher than the prince to Linux, I've been following the instructions here: http://chrisfulstow.com/running-node-js-on-windows-with-virtualbox-and-ubuntu (the link tells what I am generally trying to do). I'm all up and running in VBox, and am at the curl install part, I may have done the curl part a week ago I forget. So I ran this command anyway: danjah@danjah-VirtualBox:~$ sudo apt-get install curl Result: [sudo] password for danjah: Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done curl is already the newest version. 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. Then: $ curl http://npmjs.org/install.sh | sudo npm_install=rc sh Result: fetching: { gzip: stdin: unexpected end of file /bin/tar: Child returned status 1 /bin/tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now It failed Should I be concerned? How can I test curl? How can I avoid these situations? Perhaps there's a generic way of checking to see if I've already installed packages/etc? Case specific answers and general advice most appreciated. cheers, d

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• Thinkpad W510 with default graphics drivers shows weird brightness issues

  - by Chantz

  Hey guys, I am currently running 10.10 - 32 bit on a new Thinkpad W510 with nVidia Quadro FX 880M graphics card. I am running with the default graphics drivers that installed with ubuntu install. My problem is that when I am logging in the screen acts normally as far as birghtness is concerned. I can increase/decrease brightness with Fn keys. But few seconds after I log in screen goes pitch dark. Hitting Fn+Home flickers the screen to all the way bright, then all the way dark. This behavior continues until I reach maximum brightness, in which case the screen stays all the way bright, for a few more seconds and then again goes dark if there is no activity & the cycle continues. Have you guys faced any of these issues? If so any pointers on how to resolve it. I am not alone, on ubuntu forum I saw another person having the same issue - link but no solution. Please help! UPDATE I followed the instructions that htorque mentions in his answer and it worked.

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• Am I programming too slow?

  - by Jonn

  I've only been a year in the industry and I've had some problems making estimates for specific tasks. Before you close this, yes, I've already read this: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/648/how-to-respond-when-you-are-asked-for-an-estimate and that's about the same problem I'm having. But I'm looking for a more specific gauge of experiences, something quantifiable or probably other programmer's average performances which I should aim for and base my estimates. The answers range from weeks, and I was looking more for an answer on the level of a task assigned for a day or so. (Note that this doesn't include submitting for QA or documentations, just the actual development time from writing tests if I used TDD, to making the page, before having it submitted to testing) My current rate right now is as follows (on ASP.NET webforms): Right now, I'm able to develop a simple data entry page with a grid listing (no complex logic, just Creating and Reading) on an already built architecture, given one full day's (8 hours) time. Adding complex functionality, and Update and Delete pages add another full day to the task. If I have to start the page from scratch (no solution, no existing website) it takes me another full day. (Not always) but if I encounter something new or haven't done yet it takes me another full day. Whenever I make an estimate that's longer than the expected I feel that others think that I'm lagging a lot behind everyone else. I'm just concerned as there have been expectations that when it's just one page it should take me no more than a full day. Yes, there definitely is more room for improvement. There always is. I have a lot to learn. But I would like to know if my current rate is way too slow, just average, or average for someone no longer than a year in the industry.

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• How can I disable recent documents in Unity?

  - by detly

  How do I disable the tracking and display of recently opened files (and whatever else is remembered) in a default installation of Ubuntu 11.10? (Note that this is not a duplicate of How can I keep recent files from appearing in Unity?, since that question and its answers are concerned with temporary and specific filtering. I want to disable it completely for a single user account.) Okay, to deflect the inevitable and expand on my motivation... While trawling the usual forums and Google results for a solution, it (unsurprisingly) seems that the near-universal use cases for this request are either browsing porn or Warhammer research. And the obvious solution to this is to create another user account to contain all evidence. However, this is not why I'm asking, and I don't say that to get all high and mighty about it, it's because this answer won't help. (Even though I really don't have any interest in Warhammer, and I have no idea how that paint pot and brush ended up in my drawer, no that's not glue on my thumb, etc.) My actual use case is that I use my personal laptop for presentations in different circles of my life. I have a user account set up with all the settings I like for presentations (shortcuts, small launcher, default associations, etc). But I don't want an accidental keystroke (or the find dialog) to display other recent presentations I've given, or the files I used in composing the presentation, or whatever. I also don't want to have to recreate this profile for every single presentation I might give. I just want a nice little isolated, memoryless, clean corner of my notebook for public display.

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• Questions before I revamp my rendering engine to use shaders (GLSL)

  - by stephelton

  I've written a fairly robust rendering engine using OpenGL ES 1.1 (fixed-function.) I've been looking into revamping the engine to use OpenGL ES 2.0, which necessitates that I use shaders. I've been absorbing information all day long and still have some questions. Firstly, lighting. The fixed-function pipeline is guaranteed to have at least 8 lights available. My current engine finds lights that are "close" to the primitives being drawn and enables them; I don't know how many lights are going to be enabled until I draw a given model. Nothing is dynamically allocated in GLSL, so I have to define in a shader some number of lights to be used, right? So if I want to stick with 8, should I write my general purpose shader to have 8 lights and then use uniforms to tell it how many / which lights to use? Which brings me to another question: should I be concerned with the amount of data I'm allocating in a shader? Recent video cards have hundreds of "stream processors." If I've got a fragment shader being used on some number of fragments in a given triangle, I assume they must each have their own stack to work on. Are read-only variables copied here, or read when needed? My initial goal is to rework my code so that it is virtually identical to the current implementation. What I have in mind is to create my own matrix stack so that I can implement something along the lines of push/popMatrix and apply all my translations, rotations, and scales to this matrix, then provide the matrix to the vertex shader so that it can make very quick vertex translations. Is this approach sound? Edit: My original intention was to ask if there was a tutorial that would explain the bare minimum necessary to jump from fixed-function to using shaders. Thanks!

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• How is determined an impact of a requirement change on the existing code?

  - by MainMa

  Hi, How companies working on large projects evaluate an impact of a single modification on an existing code? Since my question is probably not very clear, here's an example: Let's take a sample business application which deals with tasks. In the database, each task has a state, 0 being "Pending", ... 5 - "Finished". A new requirement adds a new state, between 2nd and 3rd one. It means that: A constraint on the values 1 - 5 in the database must be changed, Business layer and code contracts must be changed to add a new state, Data access layer must be changed to take in account that, for example the state StateReady is now 6 instead of 5, etc. The application must implement a new state visually, add new controls for it, new localized strings for tool-tips, etc. When an application is written recently by one developer, it's more or less easy to predict every change to do. On the other hand, when an application was written for years by many people, no single person can anticipate every change immediately, without any investigation. So since this situation (such changes in requirements) is very frequent, I imagine there are already some clever techniques and ways to predict the impact. Is there any? Do you know any books which deal about this subject? Note: my question is not related to How do you deal with changing requirements? question. In fact, I'm not interested in evaluating the cost of a change, but rather the way to predict the parts of an application which will be concerned by the change. What will be those changes and how difficult they are really doesn't matter in my question.

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• SEO with duplicate content

  - by user16831

  I have a nature photography site with multiple types of photo galleries. Each photo and associated caption on my site appears in several galleries. For instance, a photo of a goldfinch that was taken on a trip to New Mexico in 2008 will appear in the "goldfinch.php" gallery, in the "finches.php" gallery, and in the "New_Mexico_2008.php" gallery. This duplication is useful for my site visitors - User A may want to see goldfinch photos, whereas User B wants to see photos from New Mexico - but I am concerned about the SEO implications. The typical suggestions to deal with duplicate content, such as 301 redirects and canonical tags, probably won't work in this case, because the page content is substantially different (ranging from ~1% to ~90% duplication, depending on the specific example chosen). The obvious solution to me would be to edit robots.txt to only allow search engines to crawl one type of gallery - for instance, if they crawled only the galleries organized by species(e.g. goldfinch.php), all the photos on my site would be found exactly once. However, the Google content guidelines recommend against blocking crawler access to duplicate information. Should I go ahead and use robots.txt anyway? Or is there a better solution?

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• Any mobile-friendly Credit Card billing solutions for mobile sites similar to Bango?

  - by Programmer

  Are there any mobile-friendly Credit Card billing solutions for mobile sites similar to Bango? The advantages of Bango I have seen compared to regular Credit Card solutions that make it considerably "mobile-friendly" are: 1) It does not require the user to enter their full name and billing address to make a payment. The user is only required to enter their Credit Card number, expiration date, and CVC code (if they are in the U.S., they will also have to enter their Zip Code). That is significantly less input than is normally required for Credit Card payments, which is a big plus on small mobile key pads. After a user makes an initial Credit Card payment, their details are stored by Bango, and the next time the user needs to make a payment with the same Credit Card, they just have to click a single link and it processes the payment on their stored Credit Card. Needless to say, this is very convenient for mobile users as it is analogous to Direct Carrier Billing as far as the user is concerned since they won't need to input any details. The downside with Bango is that their fees are higher than others, all payments must be processed via their site and branding, there is a high minimum ($1.99) and a low maximum ($30) on how much you can charge users, and you need to pay a monthly fee on top of the high transaction costs. It is due to the downsides mentioned above that I am looking for an alternative solution that also does the advantages 1) and 2) above. Is there anything like that? I looked at JunglePay and they do neither 1) nor 2).

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• Will new Twitter API 1.1 allow hashtag/tweet/trend queries without any authentication, i.e. for a client that does not use an user's account at all?

  - by P5music

  I see that, even not being logged in Twitter with an account, if I google hashtags or twitter accounts, twitter show them. I think it should be also possible to get those tweets programmatically but I do not know it for sure, so I ask for confirmation here, especially for the future with the new Twitter API resctrictions. I mean, will it be possible to get tweets from hashtags or accounts without logging in an user account, and so not wanting to access the user settings, subscriptions, etc (because I do not need it), thus not having to respect any token limit? I found these API 1.1 faqs, have I to be concerned? Will an application have to request user authorization just to make public API calls? When API v1.1 is released, user authorization (and access tokens) are required for all API 1.1 requests. In the weeks following release, some methods will require only application-based authentication for certain "userless" contexts. Will an application have to request user authorization just to make public API calls? When API v1.1 is released, user authorization (and access tokens) are required for all API 1.1 requests. In the weeks following release, some methods will require only application-based authentication for certain "userless" contexts. Will the Search API require authentication? The Search API is now part of the official REST API in version 1.1. In addition to serving results in a format consistent with other Tweet resources, usage will also require authentication.

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• What kinds of issues can one expect when changing a domain names registar? (3 questions)

  - by anonymous-one

  Assuming that there are no 'unusual' items that come up, what kind of disruptions can one expect when moving a domain between registrars? I understand some of the below may vary over registrars. But assuming both ends are large proficient registrars: a) Will the NS settings be mirrored? We use a dedicated dns service provider so we are not using the originating registrars name servers. All that we are concerned about is that the existing NS values are mirrored at the target registrar. b) Are incoming domain transfers automated on the target registrar end? Eg: If we begin the transfer process during business hours at the source registrar, will someone have to manually approve the inbound transfer (most likely during their business hours) at the target registrar? c) Is the domain ever 'in limbo'? At any time in the process is there ever a time when the NS values for the domain are not populated (as they were prior to initiating the transfer) OR one does not have access to populate them (at the target registrar)? Thank you kindly for the help.

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• FOSS Development: Who develops the OS-specific packages?

  - by achristi

  I have a couple of FOSS projects. They can be a bit of a pain to get running unless you've got dependencies in place already, which I figure is par for the course for FOSS projects. We know that each free operating system out there has its own package management systems. A few of them, such as homebrew on Mac OS or AUR on Arch linux are very friendly to community contributions. What I am wondering is, who exactly is expected to contribute packages? Primarily I am concerned with the case of small or developing projects, since it's pretty standard for the big projects to be put in there by the OS maintainers. From my perspective, it is something of a chicken-egg problem, because your software will not make its way into a package system if it does not have users, and it is less likely to gain users if it is not easy to install and use. For the sake of discussion, let's assume that the software in question is actually legitimately useful. I can see where people could create crapware or spam and that should obviously be kept out of any package system. So, in summary, whose job is this? Is it spammy for a FOSS software dev to put his own work into various OS package repositories?

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• How to Structure a Trinary state in DB and Application

  - by ABMagil

  How should I structure, in the DB especially, but also in the application, a trinary state? For instance, I have user feedback records which need to be reviewed before they are presented to the general public. This means a feedback reviewer must see the unreviewed feedback, then approve or reject them. I can think of a couple ways to represent this: Two boolean flags: Seen/Unseen and Approved/Rejected. This is the simplest and probably the smallest database solution (presumably boolean fields are simple bits). The downside is that there are really only three states I care about (unseen/approved/rejected) and this creates four states, including one I don't care about (a record which is seen but not approved or rejected is essentially unseen). String column in the DB with constants/enum in application. Using Rating::APPROVED_STATE within the application and letting it equal whatever it wants in the DB. This is a larger column in the db and I'm concerned about doing string comparisons whenever I need these records. Perhaps mitigatable with an index? Single boolean column, but allow nulls. A true is approved, a false is rejected. A null is unseen. Not sure the pros/cons of this solution. What are the rules I should use to guide my choice? I'm already thinking in terms of DB size and the cost of finding records based on state, as well as the readability of code the ends up using this structure.

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• Games without a(n explicit) game loop

  - by Davy8

  Most game development happens with a main game loop. Are there any good articles/blog posts/discussions about games without a game loop? I imagine they'd mostly be web games, but I'd be interested in hearing otherwise. (As a side note, I think it's really interesting that the concept is almost exclusively used in gaming as far as I'm aware, perhaps that may be another question.) Edit: I realize there's probably a redraw loop somewhere. I guess what I really mean is a loop that is hidden to you. Frames are something you as the developer are not concerned with as you're working on a higher level of abstraction. E.g. someLootItem.moveTo(inventory, someAnimatationType) and that will move from the loot box to your inventory using the specified animation type without the game developer having to worry about the implementation details of that animation. Maybe that's how "real" games end up working, but from reading most tutorials they seem to imply a much more granular level of control is used, but that might just be an artifact of being a tutorial.

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• What is the best book for the preparation of MCPD Exam 70-564 (Designing and Developing ASP.NET 3.5 Applications)?

  - by Steve Johnson

  Hi all, I have seen a couple of questions like this one and scanned through the answers but somehow the replies were not satisfactory or practical. So i wondered maybe people who have gone through it and may suggest a better approach for the preparation of this exam. Goal: My goal is actually NOT merely to pass that exam. I intend to actually master the skill. I have been into asp.net web development for approximately 1.5 years and I want to study something that really improves "Design and Development Skills" in Web Development in general and asp.net to be specific which i can put to use and build upon that. Please suggest a book that teaches professional Asp.Net design and development skills and approaches to quality development by taking through practice design scenarios and their solutions and through various case studies that involve design problems and their implemented solutions. Edit: I have found the Micorosoft training kits to be fairly interesting and helpful as these tend to increase knowledge. I have utilized a lot of things after getting a good explanation of things from the training kits. However, as far as Microsoft Training Kit for 70-564 is concerned, there are not a lot of good reviews about it. What i have read and searched on the net , the reviews on amazon and various forums, stack-exchange and experts-exchange, were more inclined to the conclusion that "Microsoft Training Kit for Exam 70-564 is not good. Its is not good as compared to other kits from Microsoft, like as compared to the training kit of Exam 70-562 or others." So i was looking for a proper book containing examples from practical world scenarios and case studies from which i can not only learn but also master the skills before wasting money of Microsoft Training Kit for Exam 70-564. Waiting for experts to provide a suitable advice.

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• When can I publish a software tool written at work?

  - by AlexMA

  I'm working on a software problem at work that is fairly generic, but I can't find a library I like to solve it, so I'm considering writing one myself (at least a bare-bones version). I'll be writing some if not all of the 1.0 version at work, since I need it for the project. If turns out well I might want to bring the work home and polish it up just for fun, and maybe release it as an open-source project. However, I'm concerned that if I wrote the 1.0 version at work I may not be allowed to do this from a legal sense. Obviously I could ask my boss (who probably won't care), but I'm curious how other programmers have dealt with this issue and where the law stands here. My one sentence question is, When is it okay (legally/ethically) to open-source a software tool originally written by you for work at work? What if you have expanded the original source significantly during off-hours? Follow-up: Suppose I write the whole thing at home on my time then simply use it at work, does that change things drastically? Follow-up 2: Note that I'm not trying to rip off my employer (I understand that they're paying me to build products that they own)--I'm just wondering if there's a fair way of doing this for all involved... It would be nice if some nonprofit down the road could use my code and save them some time. Also, there's another issue at stake. If I write the library for a very simple, generic thing (like HTML tables in Javascript), does that mean I can never again do so on my own time without putting myself at legal risk (even if it was a whole new fresh rewrite or a segment of a larger project). Am I surrendering my right to write code for this sort of project for the rest of my life (without this company's permission), since the code at work might still be somewhere in my brain influencing me? This seems related to software patents, as a side-note.

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• I am not the most logically-organized person. Do I have any chance at being a good 'low-level' programmer?

  - by user217902

  Background: I am entering college next year. I really enjoy making stuff and solving logical problems, so I'm thinking of majoring in compsci and working in software development. I hope to have the kind of job where I can work with implementing / improving algorithms and data structures on a regular basis.. as opposed to, say, a job that's purely concerned with mashing different libraries together, or 'finding the right APIs for the job'. (Hence the word 'low-level' in the title. No, I don't wish to write assembly all day.) Thing is, I've never been the most logically-sharp person. Thus far I have only worked on hobby projects, but I find that I make the silliest of errors ever so often, and it can take me ages to find it. Like anywhere between three hours to a day to locate a simple segfault, off-by-one error, or other logical mistake. (Of course, I do other things in the meantime, like browsing SO, reddit, and the like..) It's not like I'm 'new' to programming either; I first tried C++ maybe five years ago. My question is: is this normal? Should a programmer with any talent solve it in less time? Having read Spolsky's Smart and gets things done, where he talks about the large variance in programming speed, am I near the bottom of the curve, and therefore destined to work in companies that cannot afford to hire quality programmers? I'd like to think that conceptually I'm okay -- I can grasp algorithms and concepts pretty well, I do fine in math and science, although I probably drop signs in my equations more often than the next guy. Still, grokking concepts makes me happy, and is the reason why I want to work with algorithms. I'm hoping to hear from those of you with real-world programming experience. TL;DR: I make many careless mistakes, should I not consider programming as a career?

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