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• Pros and cons of PHP vs C,C++ as language in a programming interview ?

  - by DhruvPathak

  Hi All, Though this is a matter of personal choice and comfort. I would want your views on a situation like this. Programmer A has been working on PHP for some years, and has had prior experience in C.C++ during algorithm courses in university. The current fluency is good is PHP,but C,C++ can also be brushed up. So for interviews with major companies who put lot of emphasis on algorithms and data structures in programming interview e.g. binary trees, linked lists, arrays , strings . What should programmer A do ? Try to implement those things in PHP ( which is generally more suited for web development rather than programming contests/interviews ) or Or brush up the C,C++ skills and keep them as primary tool for tackling interview questions. What are advantages/ disadvantages of each language for an environment like programming contest or an interview ? Why would you recommend,not recommend Programmer A to participate in a contest like google code Jam/ ACM ICPC using PHP instead of C++ ? ( assuming PHP is allowed as a language there)

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• Is Akka a good solution for a concurrent pipeline/workflow problem?

  - by herpylderp

  Disclaimer: I am brand new to Akka and the concept of Actors/Event-Driven Architectures in general. I have to implement a fairly complex problem where users can configure a "concurrent pipeline": Pipeline: consists of 1+ Stages; all Stages execute sequentially Stage: consists of 1+ Tasks; all Tasks execute in parallel Task: essentially a Java Runnable As you can see above, a Task is a Runnable that does some unit of work. Tasks are organized into Stages, which execute their Tasks in parallel. Stages are organized into the Pipeline, which executes its Stages sequentially. Hence if a user specifies the following Pipeline: CrossTheRoadSafelyPipeline Stage 1: Look Left Task 1: Turn your head to the left and look for cars Task 2: Listen for cars Stage 2: Look right Task 1: Turn your head to the right and look for cars Task 2: Listen for cars Then, Stage 1 will execute, and then Stage 2 will execute. However, while each Stage is executing, it's individual Tasks are executing in parallel/at the same time. In reality Pipelines will become very complicated, and with hundreds of Stages, dozens of Tasks per Stage (again, executing at the same time). To implement this Pipeline I can only think of several solutions: ESB/Apache Camel Guava Event Bus Java 5 Concurrency Actors/Akka Camel doesn't seem right because its core competency is integration not synchrony and orchestration across worker threads. Guava is great, but this doesn't really feel like a subscriber/publisher-type of problem. And Java 5 Concurrency (ExecutorService, etc.) just feels too low-level and painful. So I ask: is Akka a strong candidate for this type of problem? If so, how? If not, then why, and what is a good candidate?

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• You may be tempted by IaaS, but you should PaaS on that or your database cloud journey will be a short one

  - by B R Clouse

  Before we examine Consolidation, the next step in the journey to cloud, let's take a short detour to address a critical choice you will face at the outset of your journey: whether to deploy your databases in virtual machines or not. A common misconception we've encountered is the belief that moving to cloud computing can be accomplished by simply hosting one's current operating environment as-is within virtual machines, and then stacking those VMs together in a consolidated environment.  This solution is often described as "Infrastructure as a Service" (IaaS) because the building block for deployments is a VM, which behaves like a full complement of infrastructure.  This approach is easy to understand and may feel like a good first step, but it won't take your databases very far in the journey to cloud computing.  In fact, if you follow the IaaS fork in the road, your journey will end quickly, without realizing the full benefits of cloud computing.  The better option to is to rationalize the deployment stack so that VMs are needed only for exceptional cases.  By settling on a standard operating system and patch level, you create an infrastructure that potentially all of your databases can share.  Now, the building block will be database instances or possibly schemas within databases.  These components are the platforms on which you will deploy workloads, hence this is known as "Platform as a Service" (PaaS). PaaS opens the door to higher degrees of consolidation than IaaS, because with PaaS you will not need to accommodate the footprint (operating system, hypervisor, processes, ...) that each VM brings with it.  You will also reduce your maintenance overheard if you move forward without the VMs and their O/Ses to patch and monitor.  So while IaaS simply shuffles complex and varied environments into VMs,  PaaS actually reduces complexity by rationalizing to the small possible set of components.  Now we're ready to look at the consolidation options that PaaS provides -- in our next blog posting.

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• Is it better to specialize in a single field I like, or expand into other fields to broaden my horizons?

  - by Oak

  This is a dilemma about which I have been thinking for quite a while. I'm a graduate student and my topics of interest are programming language design, code analysis, compilation, etc. So far, this field has been very interesting and rewarding for me, so I was thinking about finding a job in that field and continuing to specialize in it. I feel like it's a relatively solid field which won't "get out of style" anytime soon. I've always thought that in such complex fields it's better to be a real expert than just another guy who superficially understand what the experts are talking about. On the other hand, I feel that by specializing this way I really limit my future option. I have always been a strong believer in multidisciplinary approaches to problems. Maybe I should go search for a general programming job in which I could gain experience in other fields, as well as occasionally apply my favorite field for solving problems. Specializing in only one or two fields can prevent me from thinking outside the box and cause stagnation. I would really like to hear more opinions about this choice. The truth is I'm already leaning towards one of the choices, so basic psychology says nothing will change my mind, but I would still love to hear some feedback.

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• Server-side Architecture for Online Game

  - by Draiken

  basically I have a game client that has communicate with a server for almost every action it takes, the game is in Java (using LWJGL) and right now I will start making the server. The base of the game is normally one client communicating with the server alone, but I will require later on for several clients to work together for some functionalities. I've already read how authentication server should be sepparated and I intend on doing it. The problem is I am completely inexperienced in this kind of server-side programming, all I've ever programmed were JSF web applications. I imagine I'll do socket connections for pretty much every game communication since HTML is very slow, but I still don't really know where to start on my server. I would appreciate reading material or guidelines on where to start, what architecture should the game server have and maybe some suggestions on frameworks that could help me getting the client-server communication. I've looked into JNAG but I have no experience with this kind of thing, so I can't really tell if it is a solid and good messaging layer. Any help is appreciated... Thanks ! EDIT: Just a little more information about the game. It is intended to be a very complex game with several functionalities, making some functionalities a "program" inside the program. It is not an usual game, like FPS or RPG but I intend on having a lot of users using these many different "programs" inside the game. If I wasn't clear enough, I'd really appreciate people that have already developed games with java client/server architecture, how they communicated, any frameworks, apis, messaging systems, etc. It is not a question of lack of knowledge of language, more a question for advice, so I don't end up creating something that works, but in the later stages will have to be rewriten for any kind of limiting reason. PS: sorry if my english is not perfect...

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• Where should "display functions" live in an MVC web app?

  - by User

  I'm using the Yii Framework which is an MVC php framework that is pretty similar to your standard web-based MVC framework. I want to display the related data from a many-to-many table as a list of strings in my view. Assuming a table schema like: tag { id, name } post { id, title, content, date } post_tag { post_id, tag_id } A post will display like: Date: 9/27/2012 Title: Some Title Content: blah blah blah... Tags: Smart Funny Cool Informative I can achieve this by doing something like this in my Post view: <?php echo join(' ', array_map(function($tag) { return $tag->name; }, $model->tags)); ?> (where $model->tags is an array of Tag objects associated with my model) My questions are: Is this amount of code/logic okay in the view? (Personally I think I'd rather just reference a property or call a single function.) If not, where should this code live? In the model? the controller? a helper? Potentially I may want to use in in other views as well. Ultimately I think its purely a display issue which would make me think it should be in the view, but then I have to repeat the code in any view I want to use it in.

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• The balance between client and server functionality

  - by Eugen Martynov

  I want to bring the discussion that started in our teams and get your opinion about it. Assume we have an user account which could have different credentials for authentication and associated email to recover. An user has possibility to do signup with an email or use his social profile to complete signup process. As an Rest API from the backend to client looks like: Create account Authorise Update user data Link social account Register email Verify email In addition our BE is distributed and divided between several services/servers/clusters. So different calls are related to different end points. In case of the social sign up some of steps should be skipped or simplified. For example, with Facebook signup we could already skip email registration and verification step (we ask email permission form user), linking the social account and pre-fill user displayed name. So we proposed to have another end point which will hide/combine different calls on BE and return whole process result to the clients. The pros for this approach: No more duplication of functionality between clients Speed up the networking and user experience The cons for this approach: Additional work for backend Probably most complex scenarios in future updates I would like to get your opinion or experience with this situation. Especially if you already experienced point #2 from against reasons.

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• What will be the better way for data retrieval on application that needs to handle limited amount of data?

  - by Milanix

  Just moved this question from Stack Overflow. Since, adding my code snippets itself would make this question really long. Instead, I am pretty interested in knowing a better ways for data retrieval on application that needs to handle limited amount of data which isn't updated regularly. Let's take this example: I am writing an application which gets a schedule as an XML from server. I have written a logic in order to parse XML version and update database only if the version is newer than the local version. Although the update is checked automatically/manually on daily basis based on user preference, the actual version update happens only once per few months or so. Since, this is done by some other authority which doesn't provide API but, rather inform publicly on their changes. The actual XML contains a "(n number of groups)(days in a week) (n number of schedule)" . The group is usually 6 and the number of schedule is usually 2. So basically there would usually be only around 100 strings. Now although I have used SQLite at the moment. I want to know how to make update on database. Should I show progress dialog that the application is updating and exit the app when it's done? Since, my updates are infrequent i don't think this will really harm user experience but, is there any better ways to do it? Because I don't want update to be made when user is searching which is done using database. This will cause an database already open exception. At least I have faced this problem before. Is it better to rather parse XML every time when user wants to view certain things or to use SQLite? Since, I make lots of use of adapter in my app to create lists, will that degrade the performance?

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• Can Dungeons & Dragons Make You More Successful? [Video]

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  Dungeons & Dragons gets a bit of a bad rap in popular culture, but in this video treatise from Idea Channel, they propose that Dungeons & Dragons wires players for success. There are some deeply ingrained stereotypes about Dungeons & Dragons, and those stereotypes usually begin and end with people shouting “NERD!!!” But the reality of the D&D universe is a whole lot more complex. Rather than being an escape from reality, D&D is actually a way to enhance some important real life skillz! It’s a chance to learn problem solving, visualization, interaction, organization, people management… the list could go on and on. Plus, there are some very famous non-nerds who have declared an affinity for D&D, so best stop criticizing and join in if you want to be a successful at the game of life. While we’re trying not to let our love of all things gaming cloud our judgement, we’re finding it difficult to disagree with the premise that open-ended play fosters creative and adaptive thinking. Can Dungeons & Dragons Make You A Confident & Successful Person? [via Boing Boing] HTG Explains: What is the Windows Page File and Should You Disable It? How To Get a Better Wireless Signal and Reduce Wireless Network Interference How To Troubleshoot Internet Connection Problems

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• ASP.NET MVVM Handling multiple Data Transfer Objects on a single page

  - by meffect

  I have an asp.net mvc "edit" page which allows the user to make edits to the parent entity, and then also "create" child entities on the same page. Note: I'm making these data transfer objects up. public class CustomerViewModel { public int Id { get; set; } public Byte[] Timestamp { get; set; } public string CustomerName { get; set; } public etc.. public CustomerOrderCreateViewModel CustomerOrderCreateViewModel { get; set; } } In my view I have two html form's. One for Customer "edit" Http Posts, and the other for CustomerOrder "create" Http Posts. In the view page, I load the CustomerOrder "create" form in using: <div id="CustomerOrderCreate"> @Html.Partial("Vendor/_CustomerOrderCreatePartial", Model.CustomerOrderCreateViewModel) </div> The CustomerOrder html form action posts to a different controller HttpPost ActionResult than the Customer "edit" Action Result. My concern is this, on the CustomerOrder controller, in the HttpPost ActionResult [HttpPost] public ActionResult Create(CustomerOrderCreateViewModel vm) { if (!ModelState.IsValid) { return [What Do I Return Here] } ...[Persist to database code]... } I don't know what to return if the model state isn't valid. Right now it's not a problem, because jquery unobtrusive validation handles validation on the client. But what if I need more complex validation (ie: the server needs to handle the validation).

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• Why is a software development life-cycle so inefficient?

  - by user87166

  Currently the software development lifecycle followed in the IT company I work at is: The "Business" works with a solution manager to build a Business Requirement document The solution manager works with the Program manager to build a Functional Spec The PM works with the engineering lead to develop a release plan and with the engineering team to develop technical specifications If there are any clarifications required, developers contact the PM who contacts the solution manager who contacts the business and all the way back introducing a latency of nearly 24 hours and massive email chains for any clarifications By the time the tech spec is made, nearly 1 month has passed in back and forth Now, 2 weeks go to development while the test writes test cases Code is dropped formally to test, test starts raising bugs. Even if there is 1 root cause for 10 different issues, and its an easily fixed one, developers are not allowed to give fresh code to test for the next 1 week. After 2-3 such drops to test the code is given to the ops team as a "golden drop" ( 2 months passed from the beginning) Ops team will now deploy the code in a staging environment. If it runs stable for a week, it will be promoted to UAT and after 2 weeks of that it will be promoted to prod. If there are any bugs found here, well, applying for a visa requires less paperwork This entire process is followed even if a single SSRS report is to be released. How do other companies process such requirements? I'm wondering why, the business cannot just drop the requirements to developers, developers build and deploy to UAT themselves, expose it to the business who raise functional bugs and after fixing those promote to prod. (even for more complex stuff)

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• How can I learn more about ADF?

  - by jhpierce -Oracle

  Look to the Oracle Technology Network for a wealth of information, tutorials, best practices and coding examples. The place to start is the Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF) web page. The Oracle ADF page has basic information and downloads for ADF, but the real wealth is in the links to other pages. One of the pages is the Oracle ADF Code Corner,  which is a blog-style column that provides hints, tips and coding examples for ADF developers. The content on this page ranges from easy to complex and often contains advanced programming concepts. The content is inspired by questions asked on the Oracle JDeveloper customer forum on OTN. The ADF Code Corner has many articles that will inspire your imagination and possibly solve your coding problem.How about the Oracle ADF Architecture Square link? The Oracle ADF Architecture Square focuses on architectural issues and developer guidelines for writing ADF software solutions. The goal is to give ADF developers an understanding of the necessary decisions for building a successful ADF application, to offer potential architectural blueprints to choose from when putting the ADF application together, and to provide potential ADF best practices to take back to your development team. The Oracle ADF Mobile link gives information on developing mobile applications for iOS and Android based applications. There are links to ADF Mobile Overview, ADF Mobile demos and ADF Mobile courses.The Sample ADF Applications link lists sample applications and other resources where you can find code samples for ADF. These are complete ADF applications that can be downloaded into JDeveloper and give you insight into coding an application.There are many more links found under the "Learn More" tab that can equip the developer with the knowledge they need to develop their applications. There are links to overview papers, technical resources, related topics and available training. The information you need IS just a click away.

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• The advantages & disadvantages to be had from using a Web Framework?

  - by JHarley1

  Hello, This question is focused on extracting the advantages and disadvantages of using Web based Frameworks: such as Cake PHP, Zend, jQuery, ASP.NET). This question is completely language agnostic. Let me start with the notion of "Standing on the shoulders of Giants". Advantages: Empowers Developers - by taking features that would have previously have taken 100's of lines of code and compressing them into one simple function call empowers developers to integrate more complex features into their Web Sites. Allow for Quicker development of applications - this is very relevant for people that need websites created in a very small window (has anyone any examples of this?) Lower Costs - allows programmers to pass cost savings onto the customer, a whole new range of customers generated that wanted a website but previously could not afford the higher development costs. Disadvantages: Lost Understanding - by relying on the features of a framework a developer is in danger of loosing understanding on how things work (underneath the hood). The configuration cliff - once you go further than the configuration of your framework your productivity drops right off, it can be difficult to implement features outside of a frameworks configuration. Developer tramlines - you (the developer) has to do things the way that the developer want you to do things. Security issues - giving people these tools to develop professional looking websites fast is a potential risk, people can quickly create professional looking websites for fraudulent companies. I wonder what people make of my points, and whether any body disagrees with them? Also if people have additional points I would be grateful. Many Thanks, J

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• How to do a 3-tier using PHP [closed]

  - by Ric

  I have a requirement from a client for my PHP Web application to be 3-tier. For example, I would have a web server on Apache in the DMZ, but it should NOT contain any DB connections. It should connect to a Middle server that would host the business objects but be behind the firewall. Then those objects connect to my SQL cluster on another server. I have actually done this using .NET, but I am not sure how to setup my stack using PHP. I suppose I could have my UI front tier call the middle tier using REST based web services if I create my middle tier as a second web server, but this seems overly complex. The main reason for this is advanced security: we can not have any passwords on the DMZ first tier web server. The second reason is scalability - to have multiple server on different tiers that can handle the requests. The Last reason is for deployment - it is easier if I can take one set of servers offline for testing before putting them back in production. Is there a open source project that shows how to do this? The only example I can find is the web server hosting files from a shared drive on another machine (kind of how DotNetNuke pretends to be 3-tier), but that is NOT secure.

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• 2D Image Creator for a video game

  - by user1276078

  I need to make a few images for an arcade video game I'm making in Java. As of right now, I have drawings that animate, but there are two problems. The drawings are horrible, and as a result, the game won't get enough attention. It's a pain to have to change each coordinate for the drawing, as the drawings are fairly complex. I'd like to use images. I feel they could solve my problem. They would look better than the drawings, and it would only have an x and a y coordinate, rather than the many coordinates I need for each drawing. So, in a sense, I have two questions. Would images actually help? Would they solve my 2 problems? I just want to clarify. How would I make these images. I don't think I can copy them off of the internet because I plan on publishing this game. So, is there any software where you can make your own images? (It has to be in an image type that Java can support. I'm working with java). It also, as stated by the header, needs to be a 2D image; not 3D

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• Reformatting and version control

  - by l0b0

  Code formatting matters. Even indentation matters. And consistency is more important than minor improvements. But projects usually don't have a clear, complete, verifiable and enforced style guide from day 1, and major improvements may arrive any day. Maybe you find that SELECT id, name, address FROM persons JOIN addresses ON persons.id = addresses.person_id; could be better written as / is better written than SELECT persons.id, persons.name, addresses.address FROM persons JOIN addresses ON persons.id = addresses.person_id; while working on adding more columns to the query. Maybe this is the most complex of all four queries in your code, or a trivial query among thousands. No matter how difficult the transition, you decide it's worth it. But how do you track code changes across major formatting changes? You could just give up and say "this is the point where we start again", or you could reformat all queries in the entire repository history. If you're using a distributed version control system like Git you can revert to the first commit ever, and reformat your way from there to the current state. But it's a lot of work, and everyone else would have to pause work (or be prepared for the mother of all merges) while it's going on. Is there a better way to change history which gives the best of all results: Same style in all commits Minimal merge work ? To clarify, this is not about best practices when starting the project, but rather what should be done when a large refactoring has been deemed a Good Thing™ but you still want a traceable history? Never rewriting history is great if it's the only way to ensure that your versions always work the same, but what about the developer benefits of a clean rewrite? Especially if you have ways (tests, syntax definitions or an identical binary after compilation) to ensure that the rewritten version works exactly the same way as the original?

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• What do I need to Mod a Unreal Engine 3 game?

  - by RoadSideWarrior

  what I am looking for is some advise making a mod for a certain game and how I would go about making it. The game I am talking about is Blacklight: Retribution and what I wan't to know is; Is it possible? And if so, what programs will I need? It is an online only game so I was unsure how plausible a mod would be for it. Plus I have never made a video game before, but I do like the game and I wanted to do some things with it. Additionally, this will be my first time making anything video game related so I would appreciate any advise. To expand a bit, I plan to add something simple at first. A mod that would let you spectate another player in the first person. Then I plan do something a bit more complex where I want to make so the game optionally always records you playing (in short intervals most likely or you would run quickly out of memory). After all that is done I would add items, armor, weapons, and maybe make a map or not I am not sure but this in a shell what I hope to do. I don't know much about these things but I am reading anything I can get my hands on. So if this is overly ambitious or just plain out not a possibility any advise on what I should look to instead will be welcomed warmly. Thank you.

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• Is there a typical career path to learn game development "on the job"?

  - by mac

  The extended version of the question is: what is the typical career paths that a developer without specific experience in game development should take if he/she wishes to work in the game development industry? In other words, what are the positions such a programmer might aspire to get hired for, in the game industry? I am asking because it seems to me that - even without direct experience with 3D modelling, physics engines, shaders, etc... - for as much complex as these topics might be - they are still "just" top layers one can learn "on the job" if he/she has already good programming skills and experience in software design (for example during peer-programming sessions). I have no knowledge whatsoever of the game industry, so maybe I am being naïve here, but for all the other programming jobs I previously took, I learnt most of the specificities while working on concrete projects... so I wonder if there is a chance to do the same with game development. Thanks for your time and advice! :) PS: I don't know if this is important or not for answering the question, but scripting languages are the languages I am more proficient in. /mac

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• How do you track existing requirements over time?

  - by CaptainAwesomePants

  I'm a software engineer working on a complex, ongoing website. It has a lot of moving parts and a small team of UI designers and business folks adding new features and tweaking old ones. Over the last year or so, we've added hundreds of interesting little edge cases. Planning, implementing, and testing them is not a problem. The problem comes later, when we want to refactor or add another new feature. Nobody remembers half of the old features and edge cases from a year ago. When we want to add a new change, we notice that code does all sorts of things in there, and we're not entirely sure which things are intentional requirements and which are meaningless side effects. Did someone last year request that the login token was supposed to only be valid for 30 minutes, or did some programmers just pick a sensible default? Can we change it? Back when the product was first envisioned, we created some documentation describing how the site worked. Since then we created a few additional documents describing new features, but nobody ever goes back and updates those documents when new features are requested, so the only authoritative documentation is the code itself. But the code provides no justification, no reason for its actions: only the how, never the why. What do other long-running teams do to keep track of what the requirements were and why?

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• Microsoft Changes Developer Account Registration Requirements

  - by Tim Murphy

  Over the last couple of weeks I have noticed that Microsoft seems to have changed the requirements for Corporate accounts.  These requirements were not in effect when I originally setup the account for the company that I work for.  We also recently had our corporate account canceled without explanation and are in the process of working to get it reinstated.  This all seems to revolve around rules to increase confidence that in the producers of content.  They are now having Symantec validate a company based on legal documents. In the past there have been problems with getting credit cards accepted.  We have had to setup new Live IDs to satisfy whatever glitch the system had or unexplainable requirement.  I am hoping that in the time that has elapsed these problems have been resolved. In truth I can’t say that these new requirements weren’t always in place, but it is getting frustrating to help clients setup accounts.  I am encourage that they have taken steps to safeguard the consumer from Joe-fly-by-night, but they also need to make sure that the process doesn’t become so complex that it drives away companies from participating in the store.  We will have to keep an eye on this as things evolve. del.icio.us Tags: Windows Phone Development,Windows 8 Development,Windows Phone,Windows 8,Registration,Corporate Accounts

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• Beginners guide to developing optimization software

  - by Florenc

  I am novice in "serious" programming i.e. applications that deal with real-life applications and software projects that go beyond school assignments. My interests include optimization, operations research, algorithms and lately i discovered how much I do like software design/development/engineering. I have already developed some simple desktop applications for some "famous" problems like TSP using heuristc approaches, a VRP solver (in progress) and so on. While developing this kind of software I actually used basic concepts taught at school such as object-orientation analysis and design. But, I found these courses rather elementary and quite boring (for my expectations). So I decided to go a little further and start developing "real" software (and this is where I realized how important and interesting software engineering/design is.) Now, here's my issue: I can not find a "study guide" for developing software of this kind. Currently, there are numerous resources out there (books, websites, tutorials) in designing and developing complex IS, web applications, smartphone apps but I can't find a book for example entitled "optimization software development". Definetly, someone could claim that "design patterns apply to software in general" but that's not my point. My point is that I could simply use my imagination for "simple" implementations, but what happens, when my imagination can not go further? In other words I'm looking for a guide/path to bridge the gap between: Mathematics-Algorithm Design-Software Engineering-Optimization-Software development

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• What are some techniques I can use to refactor Object Oriented code into Functional code?

  - by tieTYT

  I've spent about 20-40 hours developing part of a game using JavaScript and HTML5 canvas. When I started I had no idea what I was doing. So it started as a proof of concept and is coming along nicely now, but it has no automated tests. The game is starting to become complex enough that it could benefit from some automated testing, but it seems tough to do because the code depends on mutating global state. I'd like to refactor the whole thing using Underscore.js, a functional programming library for JavaScript. Part of me thinks I should just start from scratch using a Functional Programming style and testing. But, I think refactoring the imperative code into declarative code might be a better learning experience and a safer way to get to my current state of functionality. Problem is, I know what I want my code to look like in the end, but I don't know how to turn my current code into it. I'm hoping some people here could give me some tips a la the Refactoring book and Working Effectively With Legacy Code. For example, as a first step I'm thinking about "banning" global state. Take every function that uses a global variable and pass it in as a parameter instead. Next step may be to "ban" mutation, and to always return a new object. Any advice would be appreciated. I've never taken OO code and refactored it into Functional code before.

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• How does a segment-based rendering engine (as in Descent) work?

  - by Calmarius

  As far as I know Descent was one of the first games that featured a fully 3D environment, and it used a segment based rendering engine. Its levels are built from cubic segments (these cubes may be deformed as long as it remains convex and sides remain roughly flat). These cubes are connected by their sides. The connected sides are traversable (maybe doors or grids can be placed on these sides), while the unconnected sides are not traversable walls. So the game is played inside of this complex. Descent was software rendered and it had to be very fast, to be playable on those 10-100MHz processors of that age. Some latter levels of the game are huge and contain thousands of segments, but these levels are still rendered reasonably fast. So I think they tried to minimize the amount of cubes rendered somehow. How to choose which cubes to render for a given location? As far as I know they used a kind of portal rendering, but I couldn't find what was the technique used in this particular kind of engine. I think the fact that the levels are built from convex quadrilateral hexahedrons can be exploited.

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• Employers and intellectual property 2

  - by Rick

  I have a question about intellectual property, I am currently a manager in a small manufacturing firm. The owners are driven by greed and don't appreciate the development process of complex machinery and are happy just to send things out half done. I on the other hand think that it should be done properly as breakdown in the field can be costly, embarrassing. They seem to have all of us running around doing most of the work out of hours using the attitude of "Be grateful to have a job" yet no one has a contract or any security or any agreement in place. For a couple of the projects i am using PLC's and doing the code in my own time and the testing during company time, and i am aware that they cannot support their own machines if i left, but as i created the code in my own time who owns it? The have asked my to put in a shutdown code for a maintenance request after a given length of time, could this be classed as criminal damage or anything illegal apart from immoral? (we sell the machines with 12 month warrantee, shut down after) But as time goes on I'm getting rather fed up of the companies attitude toward the client. I am considering keeping the clients as my own and get them to contact me directly In the shutdown code. By doing something like this is a trial version contact me for a full license? I wouldn't feel bad for my current employer as he is not afraid to S***t on people as he has been evolved in numerous law suits and has over 30 failed companies leaving people and customers high and dry, we have took the company this far on the reputation of the workers and and i can see things heading like all the other companies he has owned and taking our reputations with him. So i suppose now i have set the scene, if i code into it to contact me directly in the shutdown could there be any legal impact on me, as i rightly or wrongly think i own the code and designs? Cheers R

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• How did we get saddled with the (hierarchical) filesystem as the basic data structure?

  - by user1936

  I'm self-taught and I don't have a CS degree. The more I've been learning about data structure, the more I wonder, in this day and age, how are we still saddled with the filesystem, with directories and files, as the basic data storage structure on the OS? I understand the simplicity of it, but it seems nowadays that there could be more options available natively. As far as I'm aware, the only project to improve the basic functionality of the filesystem was ReiserFS, where you could tell what line of a file was changed by whom, and when. For instance, if I could have native tagging for files, where I could tag images, diagrams, word-processing documents, an entire code repository, all as belonging to a single project, that would really be helpful to me. Since I'm stuck in the filesystem paradigm, I know that I could put all those into a single folder/directory, but what if they already exist in disparate directories, and they need to stay there? I know there are programs out there that can do this, but why aren't they on the filesystem? Something that would be nice to have is some kind of relational feature in the filesystem, like you get with RDBMSes. I understand that that was supposed to be part of Vista/7, but that fell off the feature list too. Sure, any program can store a binary file and have any data structure it wants in it, by why couldn't the OS offer more complex ways of storing data, beyond the simple heirarchy of the filesystem?

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