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• Quick, Linux-compatible unit-aware calculator

  - by endolith

  I want to be able to press a keyboard combination, start typing a mathematical expression that includes units and slightly advanced math (not just a four-function calculator), and get a result immediately, in units that I specify, that I can copy and paste. Currently I open Firefox and press Ctrl+K, type in the search box, and it usually gives me a result in the drop-down from Google Calculator. It doesn't always, though, so I press "=" at the end, wait for a result, remove the equals, wait for a result, realize it doesn't understand the way I typed a unit, open the result in a new tab, etc. it sucks. Wolfram Alpha is smarter, but very much slower, and the output is all images, not text, and I don't have a quick widget for it, if such a thing could even exist. GNU units has a ton of units, which is great, and I can define my own units, which is great, but they have to be written in specific, unintuitive ways, it doesn't handle much advanced math, and I'd need to open a terminal, start units, etc. I hate the command line. I wasted a lot of time trying to make front-ends for units in Deskbar and Launchy, but I'm not a real coder and I don't use either of those anymore. Any other solutions or enhancements of these?

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• Is it possible to install ffmpeg and x264 on a Synology Diskstation 209?

  - by Kieran Benton

  Hi, Complete linux novice here! :) I'm trying to get my brilliant DS209 NAS box to do some transcoding for me of a few AVI videos to a format suitable for my Apply iTouch - yes I could do it with another machine and Handbrake but it would be really useful to offload some of this to the NAS to do overnight. I've managed to install ipkg onto my DS209 NAS box and have played around with installing some packages (binutils, mono, bash etc). I've even managed to install ffmpeg from ipkg and put together the correct command line profile to do the encoding as a .sh file: time ffmpeg -y -i $1 -f mp4 -title $2 -vcodec libx264 -level 21 -s 426×320 -b 512k -bt 512k -bufsize 4M -maxrate 4M -g 250 -coder 0 -threads 0 -acodec libfaac -ac 2 -ab 64k $3 However running this I get a missing dependency on libx264. I've tried building this from the latest source in git, but I get errors during the make process that I just don't understand (way out of my depth). encoder/set.c: In function 'x264_sei_version_write': encoder/set.c:491: error: 'X264_VERSION' undeclared (first use in this function) encoder/set.c:491: error: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once encoder/set.c:491: error: for each function it appears in.) make: *** [encoder/set.o] Error 1 Can anyone else try building it or give me a pointer as to what I can do to get this going? Its been a good learning experience so far! Thanks.

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• Excel concatenate strings from cells listed in third cell

  - by Puddingfox

  I have an excel 2007 workbook that has five columns: A. A list of machines B. A list of service numbers for each machine C. A list of service names for each machine ...(nothing here) I. A list of Service Numbers J. A list of Service Names Each machine listed in column A has one or more services running on it from the list in column J. I would like to be able to add services to a machine (i.e. updating the cell in Column C) by simply adding another comma-separated number to Column B. For Example, The first row would look like this assuming Machine1 has the first three services: | A | B | C | Machine1 | 1,2,3 | HTTP,HTTPS,DNS Right now I have to manually update the formula in column c for each change I make. The current formula is: =CONCATENATE(J1,",",J2,",",J3) I would like to use something like this (please forgive my syntax; I'm a coder and I'm treating cell B1 as if it is an indexed array): =CONCATENATE(CELL("J"+B1[0] , "," , "J"+B1[1] , "," "J"+B1[2]) Although having variable numbers of services makes this even more difficult. Is there any way of doing this. For reference, this is columns I and J: | I | J | 1 |HTTP | 2 |HTTPS | 3 |DNS ..... | 16 |Service16 I don't know very much about Excel so any help is greatly appreciated.

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• How can I systematically shut down Windows services in order?

  - by cbmeeks

  We have this open source application that has three (3) services. For the purpose of this question, let's call them A, B, and C. Now, they have to be shut down in a specific order. That order would be A then B then C. If B shuts down before A then we run into all kinds of problems. Same is true if C shuts down before B or A. Plus, each service can take a different amount of time to shut down due to how many users were using it. Oh, this need to be wrapped up in a DOS batch file or something a non-techy user could just double-click to initiate. (PowerShell is not out of the question but I've never used it). Also, I'm a C# coder so that could be used too. Anyway, when the restart is initiated the following needs to happen: 1) Initiate shutdown of service A 2) When service A is down, it should trigger the shutdown of service B 3) When service B is down, it should trigger the shutdown of service C 4) When service C is down, it should trigger the START UP of service A 5) When service A is UP, it should trigger the START UP of service B 6) When service B is UP, it should trigger the START UP of service C So as you can see, each stop/start needs to wait on the previous to be completely finished before moving on. And since each service can take a few seconds to a few minutes, we can't use any kind of timing tricks. Suggestions greatly appreciated. Thanks!

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• Remote Socket Read In Multi-Threaded Application Returns Zero Bytes or EINTR (104)

  - by user39891

  Hi. Am a c-coder for a while now - neither a newbie nor an expert. Now, I have a certain daemoned application in C on a PPC Linux. I use PHP's socket_connect as a client to connect to this service locally. The server uses epoll for multiplexing connections via a Unix socket. A user submitted string is parsed for certain characters/words using strstr() and if found, spawns 4 joinable threads to different websites simultaneously. I use socket, connect, write and read, to interact with the said webservers via TCP on their port 80 in each thread. All connections and writes seems successful. Reads to the webserver sockets fail however, with either (A) all 3 threads seem to hang, and only one thread returns -1 and errno is set to 104. The responding thread takes like 10 minutes - an eternity long:-(. *I read somewhere that the 104 (is EINTR?), which in the network context suggests that ...'the connection was reset by peer'; or (B) 0 bytes from 3 threads, and only 1 of the 4 threads actually returns some data. Isn't the socket read/write thread-safe? I use thread-safe (and reentrant) libc functions such as strtok_r, gethostbyname_r, etc. *I doubt that the said webhosts are actually resetting the connection, because when I run a single-threaded standalone (everything else equal) all things works perfectly right, but of course in series not parallel. There's a second problem too (oops), I can't write back to the client who connect to my epoll-ed Unix socket. My daemon application will hang and hog CPU 100% for ever. Yet nothing is written to the clients end. Am sure the client (a very typical PHP socket application) hasn't closed the connection whenever this is happening - no error(s) detected either. Any ideas? I cannot figure-out whatever is wrong even with Valgrind, GDB or much logging. Kindly help where you can.

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• Setting the default permissions for files uploaded via FTP to a directory

  - by Kerri

  Disclaimer: I'm just a web designer/coder, and server admin stuff is my weakest point of them all. So be easy on me (and very specific). I'm using a simple CMS (Unify) on a site, where part of the functionality is that the client can upload files to a specified directory (using FTP). The permissions for the upload directory are set to 755. But when files are uploaded through the interface, they are uploaded with permissions set to 640 (instead of 644), so site visitors cannot acces the files. When I emailed the CMS's support about this, they told me that it was a server setting, and I need to make sure that files uploaded through FTP are set to 644. Makes perfect sense, but I have no idea how to do this. Any help would be greatly appreciated. This site is a shared site hosted by Network Solutions (Unix), so my access options are limited. I can edit .htaccess files, and php.ini, but that's about all I have access to. It appears I can't even log on via shell. ETA: 11/11/2010 Thanks all. I was able to work around this problem by setting up the CMS's settings in a different way. I'd be interested in following up on Nick O'Niel's suggestions, because I think he's on the right track, but unfortunately I can't access the necessary files on this particular server. So, anyway, I'm leaving this open, since the original questions isn't exactly resolved. Unfortunately, I probably can't put a correct answer to the test, since the shared server in question has nearly all of its config files tightly locked down.

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• Hello World - My Name is Christian Finn and I'm a WebCenter Evangelist

  - by Michael Snow

  12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Cambria","serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;}  Good Morning World! I'd like to introduce a new member of the Oracle WebCenter Team, Christian Finn. We decided to let him do his own intros today. Look for his guest posts next week and he'll be a frequent contributor to WebCenter blog and voice of the community. Hello (Oracle) World! Hi everyone, my name is Christian Finn. It’s a coder’s tradition to have “hello world” be the first output from a new program or in a new language. While I have left my coding days far behind, it still seems fitting to start my new role here at Oracle by saying hello to all of you—our customers, partners and my colleagues. So by way of introduction, a little background about me. I am the new senior director for evangelism on the WebCenter product management team. Not only am I new to Oracle, but the evangelism team is also brand new. Our mission is to raise the profile of Oracle in all of the markets/conversations in which WebCenter competes—social business, collaboration, portals, Internet sites, and customer/audience engagement. This is all pretty familiar turf for me because, as some of you may know, until recently I was the director of product management at Microsoft for Microsoft SharePoint Server and several other SharePoint products. And prior to that, I held management roles at Microsoft in marketing, channels, learning, and enterprise sales. Before Microsoft, I got my start in the industry as a software trainer and Lotus Notes consultant. I am incredibly excited to be joining Oracle at this time because of the tremendous opportunity that lies ahead to improve how people and businesses work. Of all the vendors offering a vision for social business, Oracle is unique in having best of breed strength in market (or coming soon) in all three critical areas: customer experience management; the middleware and back-end applications that run your business; and in the social, collaboration, and content technologies that are the connective tissue between them. Everyone else can offer one or two of the above, but not all three unified together. So it is a great time to come board and there’s a fantastic team of people hard at work on building great products for you. In the coming weeks and months you’ll be hearing much more from us. For now, we’ll kick things off with some blog posts here on the WebCenter blog. Enjoy the reads and please share your thoughts with me over Twitter on @cfinn.

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• Optimization and Saving/Loading

  - by MrPlosion1243

  I'm developing a 2D tile based game and I have a few questions regarding it. First I would like to know if this is the correct way to structure my Tile class: namespace TileGame.Engine { public enum TileType { Air, Stone } class Tile { TileType type; bool collidable; static Tile air = new Tile(TileType.Air); static Tile stone = new Tile(TileType.Stone); public Tile(TileType type) { this.type = type; collidable = true; } } } With this method I just say world[y, x] = Tile.Stone and this seems right to me but I'm not a very experienced coder and would like assistance. Now the reason I doubt this so much is because I like everything to be as optimized as possible and there is a major flaw in this that I need help overcoming. It has to do with saving and loading... well more on loading actually. The way it's done relies on the principle of casting an enumeration into a byte which gives you the corresponding number where its declared in the enumeration. Each TileType is cast as a byte and written out to a file. So TileType.Air would appear as 0 and TileType.Stone would appear as 1 in the file (well in byte form obviously). Loading in the file is alot different though because I can't just loop through all the bytes in the file cast them as a TileType and assign it: for(int x = 0; x < size.X; x++) { for(int y = 0; y < size.Y; y+) { world[y, x].Type = (TileType)byteReader.ReadByte(); } } This just wont work presumably because I have to actually say world[y, x] = Tile.Stone as apposed to world[y, x].Type = TileType.Stone. In order to be able to say that I need a gigantic switch case statement (I only have 2 tiles but you could imagine what it would look like with hundreds): Tile tile; for(int x = 0; x < size.X; x++) { for(int y = 0; y < size.Y; y+) { switch(byteReader.ReadByte()){ case 0: tile = Tile.Air; break; case 1: tile = Tile.Stone; break; } world[y, x] = tile; } } Now you can see how unoptimized this is and I don't know what to do. I would really just like to cast the byte as a TileType and use that but as said before I have to say world[y, x] = Tile.whatever and TileType can't be used this way. So what should I do? I would imagine I need to restructure my Tile class to fit the requirements but I don't know how I would do that. Please help! Thanks.

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• Programmatically disclosing a node in af:tree and af:treeTable

  - by Frank Nimphius

  A common developer requirement when working with af:tree or af:treeTable components is to programmatically disclose (expand) a specific node in the tree. If the node to disclose is not a top level node, like a location in a LocationsView -> DepartmentsView -> EmployeesView hierarchy, you need to also disclose the node's parent node hierarchy for application users to see the fully expanded tree node structure. Working on ADF Code Corner sample #101, I wrote the following code lines that show a generic option for disclosing a tree node starting from a handle to the node to disclose. The use case in ADF Coder Corner sample #101 is a drag and drop operation from a table component to a tree to relocate employees to a new department. The tree node that receives the drop is a department node contained in a location. In theory the location could be part of a country and so on to indicate the depth the tree may have. Based on this structure, the code below provides a generic solution to parse the current node parent nodes and its child nodes. The drop event provided a rowKey for the tree node that received the drop. Like in af:table, the tree row key is not of type oracle.jbo.domain.Key but an implementation of java.util.List that contains the row keys. The JUCtrlHierBinding class in the ADF Binding layer that represents the ADF tree binding at runtime provides a method named findNodeByKeyPath that allows you to get a handle to the JUCtrlHierNodeBinding instance that represents a tree node in the binding layer. CollectionModel model = (CollectionModel) your_af_tree_reference.getValue(); JUCtrlHierBinding treeBinding = (JUCtrlHierBinding ) model.getWrappedData(); JUCtrlHierNodeBinding treeDropNode = treeBinding.findNodeByKeyPath(dropRowKey); To disclose the tree node, you need to create a RowKeySet, which you do using the RowKeySetImpl class. Because the RowKeySet replaces any existing row key set in the tree, all other nodes are automatically closed. RowKeySetImpl rksImpl = new RowKeySetImpl(); //the first key to add is the node that received the drop //operation (departments).            rksImpl.add(dropRowKey);    Similar, from the tree binding, the root node can be obtained. The root node is the end of all parent node iteration and therefore important. JUCtrlHierNodeBinding rootNode = treeBinding.getRootNodeBinding(); The following code obtains a reference to the hierarchy of parent nodes until the root node is found. JUCtrlHierNodeBinding dropNodeParent = treeDropNode.getParent(); //walk up the tree to expand all parent nodes while(dropNodeParent != null && dropNodeParent != rootNode){    //add the node's keyPath (remember its a List) to the row key set    rksImpl.add(dropNodeParent.getKeyPath());      dropNodeParent = dropNodeParent.getParent(); } Next, you disclose the drop node immediate child nodes as otherwise all you see is the department node. Its not quite exactly "dinner for one", but the procedure is very similar to the one handling the parent node keys ArrayList<JUCtrlHierNodeBinding> childList = (ArrayList<JUCtrlHierNodeBinding>) treeDropNode.getChildren();                     for(JUCtrlHierNodeBinding nb : childList){   rksImpl.add(nb.getKeyPath()); } Next, the row key set is defined as the disclosed row keys on the tree so when you refresh (PPR) the tree, the new disclosed state shows tree.setDisclosedRowKeys(rksImpl); AdfFacesContext.getCurrentInstance().addPartialTarget(tree.getParent()); The refresh in my use case is on the tree parent component (a layout container), which usually shows the best effect for refreshing the tree component. 

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• How to get faster graphics in KVM? VNC is painfully slow with Haiku OS guest, Spice won't install and SDL doesn't work

  - by Don Quixote

  I've been coming up to speed on the Haiku operating system, an Open Source clone of BeOS 5 Pro. I'm using an Apple MacBook Pro as my development machine. Apple's BootCamp BIOS does not support more than four partitions on the internal hard drive. While I can set up extended and logical partitions, doing so will prevent any of the installed operating systems from booting. To run Haiku directly on the iron, I boot it off a USB stick. Using external storage is also helpful because I am perpetually out of filesystem space. While VirtualBox is documented to allow access to physical drives, I could not actually get it to work. Also VirtualBox can only use one of the host CPU's cores. While VB guests can be configured for more than one CPU, they are only emulated. A full build of the Haiku OS takes 4.5 under VB. I had the hope of reducing build times by using KVM instead, but it's not working nearly as well as VirtualBox did. The Linux Kernel Virtual Machine is broken in all manner of fundamental ways as seen from Haiku. But I'm a coder; maybe I could contribute to fixing some of those problems. The first problem I've got is that Haiku's video in virt-manager is quite painfully slow. When I drag Haiku windows around the desktop, they lag quite far behind where my mouse is. It's quite difficult to move a window to a precise position on the screen. Just imagine that the mouse was connected to the window title bar with a really stretchy spring. Also Haiku's mouse lags quite far behind where I have moved it. I found lots of Personal Package Archives that enable Spice from QEMU / KVM at the Ubuntu Personal Package Arhives. I tried a few of the PPAs but none of them worked; with one of them, the command "add-apt-repository" crashed with a traceback. There is a Wiki page about Spice, but it says that it only works on 64-bit. My Early 2006 MacBook Pro is 32-bit. Its Apple Model Identifier is MacBookPro1,1; these use Core Duos NOT Core 2 Duos. I don't mind building a source deb for 32-bit if I can expect it to work. Is there some reason that Spice should be 64-bit only? Does it need features of the x86_64 Instruction Set Architecture that x86 does not have? When I try using SDL from virt-manager, the configuration for Local SDL Window says "Xauth: /home/mike/.Xauthority". When I try to start my guest, virt-manager emits an error. When I Googled the error message, the usual solution was to make ~/.Xauthority readible. However, .Xauthorty does not exist in my home directory. Instead I have a $XAUTHORITY environment variable. There is no way to configure SDL in virt-manager to use $XAUTHORITY instead of ~/.Xauthority. Neither does it work to copy the value of $XAUTHORITY into the file. I am ready to scream, because I've been five fscking days trying to make KVM work for Haiku development. There is a whole lot more that is broken than the slow video. All I really want to do for now is speed up my full builds of Haiku by using "jam -j2" to use both cores in my CPU. I may try Xen next, but the last time I monkeyed with Xen it was far, far more broken than I am finding KVM to be. Just for now, I would be satisfied if there were some way to use my USB stick as a drive in VirtualBox. VB does allow me to configure /dev/sdb as a drive, but it always causes a fatal error when I try to launch the guest. Thank You For Any Advice You Can Give Me. -

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• Entity System with C++ templates

  - by tommaisey

  I've been getting interested in the Entity/Component style of game programming, and I've come up with a design in C++ which I'd like a critique of. I decided to go with a fairly pure Entity system, where entities are simply an ID number. Components are stored in a series of vectors - one for each Component type. However, I didn't want to have to add boilerplate code for every new Component type I added to the game. Nor did I want to use macros to do this, which frankly scare me. So I've come up with a system based on templates and type hinting. But there are some potential issues I'd like to check before I spend ages writing this (I'm a slow coder!) All Components derive from a Component base class. This base class has a protected constructor, that takes a string parameter. When you write a new derived Component class, you must initialise the base with the name of your new class in a string. When you first instantiate a new DerivedComponent, it adds the string to a static hashmap inside Component mapped to a unique integer id. When you subsequently instantiate more Components of the same type, no action is taken. The result (I think) should be a static hashmap with the name of each class derived from Component that you instantiate at least once, mapped to a unique id, which can by obtained with the static method Component::getTypeId ("DerivedComponent"). Phew. The next important part is TypedComponentList<typename PropertyType>. This is basically just a wrapper to an std::vector<typename PropertyType> with some useful methods. It also contains a hashmap of entity ID numbers to slots in the array so we can find Components by their entity owner. Crucially TypedComponentList<> is derived from the non-template class ComponentList. This allows me to maintain a list of pointers to ComponentList in my main ComponentManager, which actually point to TypedComponentLists with different template parameters (sneaky). The Component manager has template functions such as: template <typename ComponentType> void addProperty (ComponentType& component, int componentTypeId, int entityId) and: template <typename ComponentType> TypedComponentList<ComponentType>* getComponentList (int componentTypeId) which deal with casting from ComponentList to the correct TypedComponentList for you. So to get a list of a particular type of Component you call: TypedComponentList<MyComponent>* list = componentManager.getComponentList<MyComponent> (Component::getTypeId("MyComponent")); Which I'll admit looks pretty ugly. Bad points of the design: If a user of the code writes a new Component class but supplies the wrong string to the base constructor, the whole system will fail. Each time a new Component is instantiated, we must check a hashed string to see if that component type has bee instantiated before. Will probably generate a lot of assembly because of the extensive use of templates. I don't know how well the compiler will be able to minimise this. You could consider the whole system a bit complex - perhaps premature optimisation? But I want to use this code again and again, so I want it to be performant. Good points of the design: Components are stored in typed vectors but they can also be found by using their entity owner id as a hash. This means we can iterate them fast, and minimise cache misses, but also skip straight to the component we need if necessary. We can freely add Components of different types to the system without having to add and manage new Component vectors by hand. What do you think? Do the good points outweigh the bad?

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• Python progression path - From apprentice to guru

  - by Morlock

  Hi all, I've been learning, working, and playing with Python for a year and a half now. As a biologist slowly making the turn to bio-informatics, this language has been a the very core of all the major contributions I have made in the lab. (bash and R scripts have helped some too. My C++ capabilities are very not functional yet). I more or less fell in love with the way Python permits me to express beautiful solutions and also with the semantics of the language that allows such a natural flow from thoughts to workable code. What I would like to know from you is your answer to a kind of question I have seldom seen in this or other forums. Let me sum up what I do NOT want to ask first ;) I don't want to know how to QUICKLY learn Python Nor do I want to find out the best way to get acquainted with the language Finally, I don't want to know a 'one trick that does it all' approach. What I do want to know your opinion about, is: What are the steps YOU would recommend to a Python journeyman, from apprenticeship to guru status (feel free to stop wherever your expertise dictates it), in order that one IMPROVES CONSTANTLY, becoming a better and better Python coder, one step at a time. The kind of answers I would enjoy (but feel free to surprise the readership :P ), is formatted more or less like this: Read this (eg: python tutorial), pay attention to that kind of details Code for so manytime/problems/lines of code Then, read this (eg: this or that book), but this time, pay attention to this Tackle a few real-life problems Then, proceed to reading Y. Be sure to grasp these concepts Code for X time Come back to such and such basics or move further to... (you get the point :) This process depicts an iterative Learn/Code cycle, and I really care about knowing your opinion on what exactly one should pay attention to, at various stages, in order to progress CONSTANTLY (with due efforts, of course). If you come from a specific field of expertise, discuss the path you see as appropriate in this field. Thanks a lot for sharing your opinions and good Python coding!

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• A couple of questions on exceptions/flow control and the application of custom exceptions

  - by dotnetdev

  1) Custom exceptions can help make your intentions clear. How can this be? The intention is to handle or log the exception, regardless of whether the type is built-in or custom. The main reason I use custom exceptions is to not use one exception type to cover the same problem in different contexts (eg parameter is null in system code which may be effect by an external factor and an empty shopping basket). However, the partition between system and business-domain code and using different exception types seems very obvious and not making the most of custom exceptions. Related to this, if custom exceptions cover the business exceptions, I could also get all the places which are sources for exceptions at the business domain level using "Find all references". Is it worth adding exceptions if you check the arguments in a method for being null, use them a few times, and then add the catch? Is it a realistic risk that an external factor or some other freak cause could cause the argument to be null after being checked anyway? 2) What does it mean when exceptions should not be used to control the flow of programs and why not? I assume this is like: if (exceptionVariable != null) { } Is it generally good practise to fill every variable in an exception object? As a developer, do you expect every possible variable to be filled by another coder?

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• Is there a perfect algorithm for chess?

  - by Overflown

  Dear Stack Overflow community, I was recently in a discussion with a non-coder person on the possibilities of chess computers. I'm not well versed in theory, but think I know enough. I argued that there could not exist a deterministic Turing machine that always won or stalemated at chess. I think that, even if you search the entire space of all combinations of player1/2 moves, the single move that the computer decides upon at each step is based on a heuristic. Being based on a heuristic, it does not necessarily beat ALL of the moves that the opponent could do. My friend thought, to the contrary, that a computer would always win or tie if it never made a "mistake" move (however do you define that?). However, being a programmer who has taken CS, I know that even your good choices - given a wise opponent - can force you to make "mistake" moves in the end. Even if you know everything, your next move is greedy in matching a heuristic. Most chess computers try to match a possible end game to the game in progress, which is essentially a dynamic programming traceback. Again, the endgame in question is avoidable though. -- thanks, Allan Edit: Hmm... looks like I ruffled some feathers here. That's good. Thinking about it again, it seems like there is no theoretical problem with solving a finite game like chess. I would argue that chess is a bit more complicated than checkers in that a win is not necessarily by numerical exhaustion of pieces, but by a mate. My original assertion is probably wrong, but then again I think I've pointed out something that is not yet satisfactorily proven (formally). I guess my thought experiment was that whenever a branch in the tree is taken, then the algorithm (or memorized paths) must find a path to a mate (without getting mated) for any possible branch on the opponent moves. After the discussion, I will buy that given more memory than we can possibly dream of, all these paths could be found.

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• geocoder.getFromLocationName returns only null

  - by test

  Hello, I am going out of my mind for the last 2 days with an IllegalArgumentException error i receive in android code when trying to get a coordinates out of an address, or even reverse, get address out of longitude and latitude. this is the code, but i cannot see an error. is a standard code snippet that is easily found on a google search. public GeoPoint determineLatLngFromAddress(Context appContext, String strAddress) { Geocoder geocoder = new Geocoder(appContext, Locale.getDefault()); GeoPoint g = null; try { System.out.println("str addres: " + strAddress); List<Address> addresses = geocoder.getFromLocationName(strAddress, 5); if (addresses.size() > 0) { g = new GeoPoint((int) (addresses.get(0).getLatitude() * 1E6), (int) (addresses.get(0).getLongitude() * 1E6)); } } catch (Exception e) { throw new IllegalArgumentException("locationName == null"); } return g; } These are the permissions from manifest.xml file: <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.INTERNET" /> <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION" /> <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.ACCESS_COARSE_LOCATION" /> <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.ACCESS_MOCK_LOCATION" /> I do have the Google Api key declared too: <uses-library android:name="com.google.android.maps" /> From the code snippet above, geo coder is not null, neither is the address or appContext, and i stumble here: geocoder.getFromLocationName(strAddress, 5); I did a lot of google searching and found nothing that worked, and the most important info i found is this: ""The Geocoder class requires a backend service that is not included in the core android framework." Sooo, i am confuzed now. What do I have to call, import, add, use in code.... to make this work? I am using Google Api2.2, Api level 8. If somebody has found a solution for this, or a pointer for documentation, something that i didn't discover, please let us know. Thank you for your time.

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• How do I get the Silverlight Add-On for Visual Studio 2010 and some example code?

  - by xarzu

  How do I get the Silverlight Add-On for Visual Studio 2010? And where can I find lots of example code? When the interent and html was new, one could find examples of how to build a website on a few trusted web sites. The same web sites might not be the best choice for looking for examples for Silverlight, I guess. What are the best web sites where you can look at examples -- and most importantly -- look at the source code of some examples of Silverlight? Back when MFC existed as a option that programmers might use to develop windows applications, a coder could look at a huge list of sample code and step through that code to find something that somewhat did what he was looking for and use that example code to build his own app. Is there anything like that for Silverlight? I have found the http://gallery.expression.microsoft.com/ Expression Blend Gallery and I have found the http://www.silverlight.net/community/samples/silverlight-samples/ Silverlight dot net community samples. I guess that will keep me busy for a while. Are there other sites? There are video instructions on MSDN's Channel9: http://channel9.msdn.com/tags/curso-silverlight-4/ Are there any videos in English? The video instructions look very good. Where is the links to the English versions? I was suggested this site for learning silverlight: http://channel9.msdn.com/learn/courses/Silverlight4/ This online documentation mentions "The Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010" which "is an add-on for Visual Studio 2010 that provides tooling for Microsoft Silverlight 4 and WCF RIA Services. It can be installed on top of either Visual Studio 2010 or Visual Web Developer 2010 Express" where can I find this? Is it shipped with Visual Studio 2010?

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• Making that move from junior > mid level

  - by dotnetdev

  Hi, Before I start, I know there is another thread about this very issue (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2352874/moving-from-junior-developer-to-mid-level). I am in this very same situation, but of course every person and the company/employment-history is not the same. In my current company, I have not done one piece of coding from start to finish with the oversight of my manager and a Project Manager to manage the work/deadlines etc. I am basically an odd-jobs type of guy. The coding I do is on the side to whatever boring spreadsheet/word document I have to write. Very illogical that you're a coder and you're doing it in secret. In another job I had for 3 months (Was made redundant), it required 1 years experience, perhaps because of the fact I was the sole developer. It wasn't too hard, but then I was solely responsible and I learnt a lot from that. I had 2 other 3 months jobs (contracts), so I have been working for 1 year 9 months. I know found a job which I'm in the last stage for, which needs 3 years .NET experience and 2 years Sharepoint. How can I know if I am ready for this job? My current job has been going on for 1 year, but it doesn't mean squat apart from explaining how I have spent my time. It does not tell me what level I am at (apart from the huge skills gap I have opened up against my peers because I practise at home). So 1 year of doing nothing at work, but 1 year of doing loads at home. In fact, I take 1 week off and do more at home then in the company since I started. How can I know if I am ready for such a job? I am generally very confident given all I've achieved in coding, but I have no idea what a job with this sort of experience entails (what day-to-day-problems I would be facing). Is there any advice on how to handle this transition? Thanks

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• Calculating odds distribution with 6-sided dice

  - by Stephen

  I'm trying to calculate the odds distribution of a changing number of 6-sided die rolls. For example, 3d6 ranges from 3 to 18 as follows: 3:1, 4:3, 5:6, 6:10, 7:15, 8:21, 9:25, 10:27, 11:27, 12:25, 13:21, 14:15, 15:10, 16:6, 17:3, 18:1 I wrote this php program to calculate it: function distributionCalc($numberDice,$sides=6) { for ( $i=0; $i<pow($sides,$numberDice); $i++) { $sum=0; for ($j=0; $j<$numberDice; $j++) { $sum+=(1+(floor($i/pow($sides,$j))) % $sides); } $distribution[$sum]++; } return $distribution; } The inner $j for-loop uses the magic of the floor and modulus functions to create a base-6 counting sequence with the number of digits being the number of dice, so 3d6 would count as: 111,112,113,114,115,116,121,122,123,124,125,126,131,etc. The function takes the sum of each, so it would read as: 3,4,5,6,7,8,4,5,6,7,8,9,5,etc. It plows through all 3^6 possible results and adds 1 to the corresponding slot in the $distribution array between 3 and 18. Pretty straightforward. However, it only works until about 8d6, afterward i get server time-outs because it's now doing billions of calculations. But I don't think it's necessary because die probability follows a sweet bell-curve distribution. I'm wondering if there's a way to skip the number crunching and go straight to the curve itself. Is there a way to do this, so, for example, with 80d6 (80-480)? Can the distribution be projected without doing 6^80 calculations? I'm not a professional coder and probability is still new to me, so thanks for all the help! Stephen

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• AContext.data can be nil?

  - by waza123

  In this code, as you see on Connect, AContext.Data is filled with something TmyTThreadList = class(TThreadList) id: integer; end; var unique_id:integer; procedure TfrmTestIdTCPServer.IdTCPServerConnect(AContext: TIdContext); begin CS.Enter; try inc(unique_id); finally CS.Leave; end; AContext.Data := myTThreadList.Create; list := myTThreadList(AContext.Data).LockList; try myTThreadList(AContext.Data).id := my_unique_id; list.Add(myTThreadList(AContext.Data)); finally myTThreadList(AContext.Data).UnlockList; end; end; then on disconnect, coder is checking here for Acontext.Data < nil procedure TfrmTestIdTCPServer.IdTCPServerDisconnect(AContext: TIdContext); var begin if AContext.Data <> nil then begin The question is, why he is checking for nil ? Thanks. EDIT: I'm asking this, because when I do the same, onExecute I access AContext.Data , and sometimes (when in same time is connecting many clients) AContext.Data is empty, access violation appears.

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• OpenGL - drawing 2D polygons shapes with texture

  - by plonkplonk

  I am trying to make a few effects in a C+GL game. So far I draw all my sprites as a quad, and it works. However, I am trying to make a large ring appear at times, with a texture following that ring, as it takes less memory than a quad with the ring texture inside. The type of ring I want to make is not a round-shaped GL mesh ring (the "tube" type) but a "paper" 2D ring. That way I can modify the "width" of the ring, getting more of the effect than a simple quad+ring texture. So far all my attempts have been...kind of ridiculous, as I don't understand GL's coordinates too well (and I can't really understand the available documentation...I am just a designer with no coder help or background. A n00b, basically). glBegin(GL_POLYGON); for(i = 0;i < 360; i += 10){ glTexCoord2f(0, 0); glVertex2f(Cos(i)*(H-10),Sin(i)H); glTexCoord2f(0, HP); glVertex2f(Sin(i)(H-10),Cos(i)*(H-10)); glTexCoord2f(WP, HP); glVertex2f(Cos(i)H,Sin(i)(H-10)); glTexCoord2f(WP, 0); glVertex2f(Sin(i)*H,Cos(i)*H); } glEnd(); This is my last attempt, and it seems to generate a "sunburst" from the right edge of the circle instead of a ring. It's an amusing effect but definitely not what I want. Other results included the circle looking exactly the same as the quad textured (aka drawing a sprite literally) or something that looked like a pop-art filter, by working on this train of thought. Seems like my logic here is entirely flawed, so, what would be the easiest way to obtain such a ring? No need to reply in code, just some guidance for a non-math-skilled user...

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• Advice on coding Perl to work like PHP

  - by user272273

  I am first and foremost a perl coder, but like many, also code in PHP for client work, especially web apps. I am finding that I am duplicating a lot of my projects in the two languages, but using different paradigms (e.g. for handling cgi input and session data) or functions. What I would like to do is start to code my Perl in a way which is structured more like PHP, so that I a) am keeping one paradigm in my head b) can more quickly port over scripts from one to the other Specifically, I am asking if people could advise how you might do the following in perl? 1) Reproduce the functionality of $_SESSION, $_GET etc. e.g. by wrapping up the param() method of CGI.pm, a session library? 2) Templating library that is similar to PHP I am used to mixing my code and HTML in the PHP convention. e.g. i <h1>HTML Code here</h1> <? print "Hello World\b"; ?> Can anybody advise on which perl templating engine (and possibly configuration) will allow me to code similarly? 3) PHP function library Anybody know of a library for perl which reproduces a lot of the php inbuilt functions?

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• About my changes on php class... is there any bug in my changes ? I need help, thanks.

  - by question_about_the_problem

  I'm junior coder and I have no good experience. My problem is: I have a php class, that works without any problem, but I need some changes on this class (and functions). And i don't have fax machine right now to try. is there any bug in my changes ? Here is my changes text: 1.) Open the file xxx.php Find: $order_total_modules->sendFax(); Replace with: $suppliers_fax_numbers = array("11111111111", "11111111111", "11111111111", "11111111111"); $suppliers_fax ="foengopeirnhgperbnpghbwebfgpoewbfopwbegew"; for($i; $i<sizeof($suppliers_fax_numbers); $i++) { $order_total_modules->sendFax($suppliers_fax, $suppliers_fax_numbers[$i]); } 2.) Open the file xxx.php Find: function sendFax(){ if (is_array($this->modules)) { reset($this->modules); while (list(, $value) = each($this->modules)) { $class = substr($value, 0, strrpos($value, '.')); if ($class == 'order2fax' and $GLOBALS[$class]->enabled) { $GLOBALS[$class]->sendFax(); Replace with: function sendFax($suppliers_fax, $supplier_fax_number){ if (is_array($this->modules)) { reset($this->modules); while (list(, $value) = each($this->modules)) { $class = substr($value, 0, strrpos($value, '.')); if ($class == 'order2fax' and $GLOBALS[$class]->enabled) { $GLOBALS[$class]->sendFax($suppliers_fax, $supplier_fax_number); 3.) Open the file xxx.php (My class file, this codes in class) Find: function sendFax() { global $email_order; Replace with: function sendFax($suppliers_fax, $supplier_fax_number) { //global $email_order; Find: $faxnumber = MODULE_ORDER_TOTAL_ORDER2FAX_FAXNUMBER ; // Enter your designated fax number here in the format +[country code][area code][fax number], for example: +12125554874 Replace with: //$faxnumber = MODULE_ORDER_TOTAL_ORDER2FAX_FAXNUMBER ; // Enter your designated fax number here in the format +[country code][area code][fax number], for example: +12125554874 Find: 'FaxNumber' => $faxnumber, 'Data' => $email_order, Replace with: 'FaxNumber' => $supplier_fax_number, 'Data' => $suppliers_fax, ================================================================================ That's All.

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• What specific features of LabView are frustrating to you?

  - by Underflow

  Please bear with me: this isn't a language debate or a flame. It's a real request for opinions. Occasionally, I have to help educate a traditional text coder in how to think in LabVIEW (LV). Often during this process, I get to hear about how LV sucks. Rarely is this insight accompanied by rational observations other than "Language X is just so much better!". While this statement is satisfying to them, it doesn't help me understand what is frustrating them. So, for those of you with LabVIEW and text language experience, what specific things about LV drive you nuts? ------ Summaries ------- Thanks for all the answers! Some of the issues are answered in the comments below, some exist on other sites, and some are just genuine problems with LV. In the spirit of the original question, I'm not going to try to answer all of these here: check LAVA or NI's website, and you'll be pleasantly surprised at how many of these things can be overcome. Unintentional concurrency No access to tradition text manipulation tools Binary-only source code control Difficult to branch and merge Too many open windows Text has cleaner/clearer/more expressive syntax Clean coding requires a lot of time and manipulation Large, difficult to access API/palette system Mouse required File namespacing: no duplicate files with the same name in memory LV objects are natively by-value only Requires dev environment to view code Lack of zoom Slow startup Memory pig "Giant" code is difficult to work with UI lockup is easy to do Trackpads and LV don't mix well String manipulation is graphically bloated Limited UI customization "Hidden" primitives (yes, these exist) Lack of official metaprogramming capability (not for much longer, though) Lack of unicode support [1]: http://www.lavag.org LAVA

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• Socket Read In Multi-Threaded Application Returns Zero Bytes or EINTR (104)

  - by user309670

  Hi. Am a c-coder for a while now - neither a newbie nor an expert. Now, I have a certain daemoned application in C on a PPC Linux. I use PHP's socket_connect as a client to connect to this service locally. The server uses epoll for multiplexing connections via a Unix socket. A user submitted string is parsed for certain characters/words using strstr() and if found, spawns 4 joinable threads to different websites simultaneously. I use socket, connect, write and read, to interact with the said webservers via TCP on their port 80 in each thread. All connections and writes seems successful. Reads to the webserver sockets fail however, with either (A) all 3 threads seem to hang, and only one thread returns -1 and errno is set to 104. The responding thread takes like 10 minutes - an eternity long:-(. *I read somewhere that the 104 (is EINTR?), which in the network context suggests that ...'the connection was reset by peer'; or (B) 0 bytes from 3 threads, and only 1 of the 4 threads actually returns some data. Isn't the socket read/write thread-safe? I use thread-safe (and reentrant) libc functions such as strtok_r, gethostbyname_r, etc. *I doubt that the said webhosts are actually resetting the connection, because when I run a single-threaded standalone (everything else equal) all things works perfectly right, but of course in series not parallel. There's a second problem too (oops), I can't write back to the client who connect to my epoll-ed Unix socket. My daemon application will hang and hog CPU 100% for ever. Yet nothing is written to the clients end. Am sure the client (a very typical PHP socket application) hasn't closed the connection whenever this is happening - no error(s) detected either. Any ideas? I cannot figure-out whatever is wrong even with Valgrind, GDB or much logging. Kindly help where you can.

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• c# web extracting programming, which libraries, examples samples please

  - by user287745

  I have just started programming and have made a few small applications in C and C#. My understanding is that programming for web and thing related to web is nowadays a very easy task. Please note this is for personnel learning, not for rent a coder or any money making. An application which can run on any Windows platform even Windows 98. The application should start automatically at a scheduled time and do the following. Connect to a site which displays stock prices summary (high low current open). Capture the data (excluding the other things in the site.) And save it to disk (an SQL database) Please note:- Internet connection is assumed to be there always. Do not want to know how to make database schema or database. The stock exchange has no law prohibiting the use of the data provided on its site, but I do not want to mention the name in case I am wrong, but it's for personal private use only. The data of summary of pricing is arranged in a table such that when copied pasted to MS Excel it automatically forms a table. need steps guidance please, examples, lbraries

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