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• Ubuntu 14.04 : Lost my sound randomly tried a few commands and I think I failed

  - by Marc-Antoine Théberge

  I lost my sound the other day and I tried to delete pulseaudio then reinstall, then I tried to delete it and install alsa, It did not work and I had to reinstall everything; overall bad idea... now I can't have any sound. Should I do a fresh install? I don't know how to boot an usb drive with GRUB... Here's my sysinfo System information report, generated by Sysinfo: 2014-05-28 05:45:58 http://sourceforge.net/projects/gsysinfo SYSTEM INFORMATION Running Ubuntu Linux, the Ubuntu 14.04 (trusty) release. GNOME: 3.8.4 (Ubuntu 2014-03-17) Kernel version: 3.13.0-27-generic (#50-Ubuntu SMP Thu May 15 18:08:16 UTC 2014) GCC: 4.8 (i686-linux-gnu) Xorg: 1.15.1 (16 April 2014 01:40:08PM) (16 April 2014 01:40:08PM) Hostname: mark-laptop Uptime: 0 days 11 h 43 min CPU INFORMATION GenuineIntel, Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU N270 @ 1.60GHz Number of CPUs: 2 CPU clock currently at 1333.000 MHz with 512 KB cache Numbering: family(6) model(28) stepping(2) Bogomips: 3192.13 Flags: fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe nx constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts aperfmperf pni dtes64 monitor ds_cpl est tm2 ssse3 xtpr pdcm movbe lahf_lm dtherm MEMORY INFORMATION Total memory: 2007 MB Total swap: 1953 MB STORAGE INFORMATION SCSI device - scsi0 Vendor: ATA Model: ST9160310AS HARDWARE INFORMATION MOTHERBOARD Host bridge Intel Corporation Mobile 945GSE Express Memory Controller Hub (rev 03) Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Device 8340 PCI bridge(s) Intel Corporation NM10/ICH7 Family PCI Express Port 1 (rev 02) (prog-if 00 [Normal decode]) Intel Corporation NM10/ICH7 Family PCI Express Port 2 (rev 02) (prog-if 00 [Normal decode]) Intel Corporation NM10/ICH7 Family PCI Express Port 4 (rev 02) (prog-if 00 [Normal decode]) Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev e2) (prog-if 01 [Subtractive decode]) Intel Corporation NM10/ICH7 Family PCI Express Port 1 (rev 02) (prog-if 00 [Normal decode]) Intel Corporation NM10/ICH7 Family PCI Express Port 2 (rev 02) (prog-if 00 [Normal decode]) Intel Corporation NM10/ICH7 Family PCI Express Port 4 (rev 02) (prog-if 00 [Normal decode]) Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev e2) (prog-if 01 [Subtractive decode]) ISA bridge Intel Corporation 82801GBM (ICH7-M) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 02) Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Device 830f IDE interface Intel Corporation 82801GBM/GHM (ICH7-M Family) SATA Controller [IDE mode] (rev 02) (prog-if 80 [Master]) Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Device 830f GRAPHIC CARD VGA controller Intel Corporation Mobile 945GSE Express Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller]) Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Device 8340 SOUND CARD Multimedia controller Intel Corporation NM10/ICH7 Family High Definition Audio Controller (rev 02) Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Device 831a NETWORK Ethernet controller Qualcomm Atheros AR8121/AR8113/AR8114 Gigabit or Fast Ethernet (rev b0) Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Device 8324

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• What are some good realistic programming related movies (docu-dramas, documentaries, accurate fiction, etc)?

  - by EpsilonVector

  A while ago I asked this question and the result was this. Following the response I got in the meta question I'm re-asking the question with new guidelines to focus it on the direction I wanted it to have originally. ================================================================== The guidelines are as follows: by "programming related" I mean movies from which we can learn about stuff like the development process, or history of software/computers, or programming culture. In other words, they must be grounded in the industry. No tangential stuff. Good entries answer as many of the following criteria as possible: Teach you about the history of the industry, or the development process, or teach you about important industry related topics (software patents for example) Are based on real life events, companies, people, practices, and they are the main focus of the movie After watching them, you feel like you understand or know something about the programmers' world that you didn't before (or you can see how someone could have such a response). You can point to it and say "this faithfully represents the industry/programmer culture at some point in time". This might be something you would show laymen to explain to them what "your people" are like and what is it that you do. Examples for good entries include: Pirates of Silicon Valley- the story of how Microsoft and Apple started the industry. Revolution OS- The story of Linux's rise to fame, and a pretty good cover of the Free Software/Open Source world. Aardvark'd: 12 Weeks with Geeks- development process. Examples for bad entries: Movies who's sole relevance is that they can be appreciated by programmers. The point of this question is not to be "what are some good movies" with "for a programmer" appended to it. Just because the writers got a few computer jokes right in itself doesn't make it about the industry. Movies where there's a computer related element, but are not about the industry. For example, 24 (the TV series). It's a product of the information age but it isn't actually about it. Another example is movies where there's a really cool programmer character, but are overall about something completely different. Likewise, The Big Bang Theory is not about physics, even though they have a cool physicist as a character. Science fiction, even if it draws ideas from computers. For example, the Matrix trilogy. Movies that you can't point to them and say: this is a faithful representation of our world (at some point in time). If you can't do that then it doesn't mirror the industry. Keep it one entry per answer so that the voting could sort the entries out.

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• Atheros AR928X wireless connection makes neighbourhood machine drop off line

  - by funicorn

  I have an Acer laptop with Atheros AR928X wireless card installed, supported by ath9k driver in the linux kernel. There are other 5 computers sharing wireless connection via a TPLink 150Mbit/s wireless router. At first I found the network is a little bit slower than it's in Windows7, which I accepted as it should be. However a very strange thing is, each time I connected to the router and downloaded stuff for a while, one of the computers running Windows7 in my local network dropped off from the router. And if I run my laptop under Windows7, everything is fine. What's even stranger is although the network becomes slower, only the certain computer drops and totally freezes in connection with the router. I'm not willing to conclude it's due to the unhealthy connection from my laptop to the router, however we have confirmed this for more than one times and there is no problem with the network when I'm running WIndows7. I'm extremely confused about what's going on. As a Linux user running Ubuntu over 5 years, I am awared that wireless driver in Linux is badly notorious of lack of stability and slow speed. But is it so bad that the unhealthy wireless connection can do damage to another computer in the same local network? I do see a lot of "Tx excessive retries" in iwconfig output. But how exactly does this happen ? Thanks for your help. I guess I have to use this answer box to show the outputs $ sudo iwconfig wlan0 IEEE 802.11bgn ESSID:"TP-LINK111" Mode:Managed Frequency:2.427 GHz Access Point: E0:05:C5:E8:A9:92 Bit Rate=121.5 Mb/s Tx-Power=16 dBm Retry long limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off Encryption key:off Power Management:off Link Quality=47/70 Signal level=-63 dBm Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0 Tx excessive retries:2 Invalid misc:23 Missed beacon:0 To show what's wrong with the wireless connection, I ran iwconfig again within 3 minutes, during which time I hardly did anything and the network was not much busy than being nearly idle $ sudo iwconfig wlan0 IEEE 802.11bgn ESSID:"TP-LINK111" Mode:Managed Frequency:2.427 GHz Access Point: E0:05:C5:E8:A9:92 Bit Rate=121.5 Mb/s Tx-Power=16 dBm Retry long limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off Encryption key:off Power Management:off Link Quality=48/70 Signal level=-62 dBm Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0 Tx excessive retries:9 Invalid misc:28 Missed beacon:0 You can see Tx excessive retires and Invalid misc increase very quickly. $ sudo iwlist wlan0 modu wlan0 unknown modulation information. $ sudo iwlist wlan0 channel wlan0 13 channels in total; available frequencies : Channel 01 : 2.412 GHz Channel 02 : 2.417 GHz Channel 03 : 2.422 GHz Channel 04 : 2.427 GHz Channel 05 : 2.432 GHz Channel 06 : 2.437 GHz Channel 07 : 2.442 GHz Channel 08 : 2.447 GHz Channel 09 : 2.452 GHz Channel 10 : 2.457 GHz Channel 11 : 2.462 GHz Channel 12 : 2.467 GHz Channel 13 : 2.472 GHz Current Frequency:2.427 GHz (Channel 4)

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• ArchBeat Link-o-Rama for 2012-09-05

  - by Bob Rhubart

  OTN Architect Day - Boston - Sept 12: What to Expect If you've never attended an OTN Architect Day, here's a little preview. You start with a continental breakfast. Then you have keynotes by an Oracle expert, and a member of the Oracle ACE community. After that come the break-out sessions, so you have your choice of two sessions in each time slot. So you'll get in two breakouts before lunch. Then you eat. After that there's a panel Q&A during which the audience tosses questions at the assembled session speakers. Then it's on to another set of break-out sessions, followed by a short break. Then the audience breaks into small groups for round table discussions. After that there's a drawing for some cool prizes, followed by the cocktail reception. All that costs you absolutely zero. Register now. Starting and Stopping Fusion Applications the Right Way | Ronaldo Viscuso While the fastartstop tool that ships with Oracle Fusion Applications does most of the work to start/stop/bounce the Fusion Apps environment, it does not do it all. Oracle Fusion Applications A-Team blogger Ronaldo Viscuso's post "aims to explain all tasks involved in starting and stopping a Fusion Apps environment completely." Dodeca Customer Feedback - The Rosewood Company | Tim Tow Oracle ACE Director Tim Tow shares anecdotal comments from one of his clients, a company that is deploying Dodeca to replace an aging VBA/Essbase application. Configuring UCM cache to check for external Content Server changes | Martin Deh Oracle WebCenter and ADF A-Team blogger Martin Deh shares the background information and the solution to a recently encountered customer scenario. Proxy As Upgrade to 11g Does Not Like NQSession.User | Art of Business Intelligence "In Oracle BI 10g the application was a lot more tolerant of bad design and cavalier usage of variables," observes Oracle ACE Christian Screen. "We noticed an issue recently during an upgrade where the Proxy As configuration in Oracle BI 10g used the NQSession.User variable to identify the user logged into Presentation Servers acting as Proxy." Oracle WebLogic Server 11g: Interactive Quick Reference | Dirk Nachbar Oracle ACE Dirk Nachbar shares a quick post with information on a new interactive reference guide to Oracle WebLogic Server. "The Quick Reference shows you an architecural overview of the Oracle WebLogic Server processes, tools, configuration files, log files and so on including a short description of each section and the corresponding link to the Oracle WebLogic Server Documentation," says Nachbar. Thought for the Day "In fast moving markets, adaptation is significantly more important than optimization." — Larry Constantine Source: Quotes for Software Engineers

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• Should UTF-16 be considered harmful?

  - by Artyom

  I'm going to ask what is probably quite a controversial question: "Should one of the most popular encodings, UTF-16, be considered harmful?" Why do I ask this question? How many programmers are aware of the fact that UTF-16 is actually a variable length encoding? By this I mean that there are code points that, represented as surrogate pairs, take more than one element. I know; lots of applications, frameworks and APIs use UTF-16, such as Java's String, C#'s String, Win32 APIs, Qt GUI libraries, the ICU Unicode library, etc. However, with all of that, there are lots of basic bugs in the processing of characters out of BMP (characters that should be encoded using two UTF-16 elements). For example, try to edit one of these characters: 𝄞 (U+1D11E) MUSICAL SYMBOL G CLEF 𝕥 (U+1D565) MATHEMATICAL DOUBLE-STRUCK SMALL T 𝟶 (U+1D7F6) MATHEMATICAL MONOSPACE DIGIT ZERO 𠂊 (U+2008A) Han Character You may miss some, depending on what fonts you have installed. These characters are all outside of the BMP (Basic Multilingual Plane). If you cannot see these characters, you can also try looking at them in the Unicode Character reference. For example, try to create file names in Windows that include these characters; try to delete these characters with a "backspace" to see how they behave in different applications that use UTF-16. I did some tests and the results are quite bad: Opera has problem with editing them (delete required 2 presses on backspace) Notepad can't deal with them correctly (delete required 2 presses on backspace) File names editing in Window dialogs in broken (delete required 2 presses on backspace) All QT3 applications can't deal with them - show two empty squares instead of one symbol. Python encodes such characters incorrectly when used directly u'X'!=unicode('X','utf-16') on some platforms when X in character outside of BMP. Python 2.5 unicodedata fails to get properties on such characters when python compiled with UTF-16 Unicode strings. StackOverflow seems to remove these characters from the text if edited directly in as Unicode characters (these characters are shown using HTML Unicode escapes). WinForms TextBox may generate invalid string when limited with MaxLength. It seems that such bugs are extremely easy to find in many applications that use UTF-16. So... Do you think that UTF-16 should be considered harmful?

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• "Package dependencies cannot be resolved" error when installing software

  - by Savitha

  Iam getting a problem while install media player packages. Package dependencies cannot be resolved This error could be caused by required additional software packages which are missing or not installable. Furthermore there could be a conflict between software packages which are not allowed to be installed at the same time. Depends: libc6 (>= 2.7) but 2.13-0ubuntu13 is to be installed Depends: libglib2.0-0 (>= 2.24.0) but 2.28.6-0ubuntu1 is to be installed Depends: libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-0 (>= 0.10.22) but 0.10.32-1ubuntu5 is to be installed Depends: libgstreamer0.10-0 (>= 0.10.26) but 0.10.32-3ubuntu3 is to be installed Depends: liborc-0.4-0 (>= 1:0.4.10) but 1:0.4.11-2 is to be installed Depends: libpostproc-extra-51 (>= 4:0.6-1~) but 4:0.6.4-1ubuntu1+medibuntu1 is to be installed Depends: libswscale-extra-0 (>= 4:0.6-1~) but 4:0.6.4-1ubuntu1+medibuntu1 is to be installed gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad: Depends: libc6 (>= 2.7) but 2.13-0ubuntu13 is to be installed Depends: libcairo2 (>= 1.2.4) but 1.10.2-2ubuntu2 is to be installed Depends: libcdaudio1 (>= 0.99.12p2) but 0.99.12p2-9 is to be installed Depends: libdc1394-22 but it is not going to be installed Depends: libdirectfb-1.2-9 but it is not going to be installed Depends: libflite1 but it is not going to be installed Depends: libgcc1 (>= 1:4.1.1) but 1:4.5.2-8ubuntu4 is to be installed Depends: libglib2.0-0 (>= 2.26.0) but 2.28.6-0ubuntu1 is to be installed Depends: libgsm1 (>= 1.0.13) but it is not going to be installed Depends: libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-0 (>= 0.10.32) but 0.10.32-1ubuntu5 is to be installed Depends: libgstreamer0.10-0 (>= 0.10.32) but 0.10.32-3ubuntu3 is to be installed Depends: libjasper1 (>= 1.900.1) but 1.900.1-7ubuntu2 is to be installed Depends: libmodplug1 but it is not going to be installed Depends: libmpcdec6 (>= 1:0.1~r435) but it is not going to be installed Depends: libmusicbrainz4c2a (>= 2.1.5) but it is not going to be installed Depends: libofa0 (>= 0.9.3) but it is not going to be installed Depends: liborc-0.4-0 (>= 1:0.4.10) but 1:0.4.11-2 is to be installed Depends: libpng12-0 (>= 1.2.13-4) but 1.2.44-1ubuntu3 is to be installed Depends: librsvg2-2 (>= 2.26.0) but 2.32.1-0ubuntu3 is to be installed Depends: librtmp0 (>= 2.3) but 2.3-2 is to be installed Depends: libschroedinger-1.0-0 (>= 1.0.9) but it is not going to be installed Depends: libsndfile1 (>= 1.0.20) but 1.0.23-1build1 is to be installed Depends: libstdc++6 (>= 4.1.1) but 4.5.2-8ubuntu4 is to be installed Depends: libvpx0 (>= 0.9.0) but it is not going to be installed gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly: Depends: libc6 (>= 2.7) but 2.13-0ubuntu13 is to be installed Depends: libgcc1 (>= 1:4.1.1) but 1:4.5.2-8ubuntu4 is to be installed Depends: libglib2.0-0 (>= 2.24.0) but 2.28.6-0ubuntu1 is to be installed Depends: libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-0 (>= 0.10.26) but 0.10.32-1ubuntu5 is to be installed Depends: libgstreamer0.10-0 (>= 0.10.26) but 0.10.32-3ubuntu3 is to be installed Depends: libid3tag0 (>= 0.15.1b) but it is not going to be installed Depends: libmad0 (>= 0.15.1b-3) but it is not going to be installed Depends: liborc-0.4-0 (>= 1:0.4.10) but 1:0.4.11-2 is to be installed Depends: libstdc++6 (>= 4.1.1) but 4.5.2-8ubuntu4 is to be installed

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• How can I dynamically load the correct sprite from a sprite sheet?

  - by Leonard Challis

  I am making a simple card game in unity. The game is based on a standard 52-card pack, with identical backs for unique faces. In my particular game different cards are worth different values and have various special abilities. The game will have 52 cards on the table (on the draw position or in the face-down deck or in someone's hand) at all times, so this number won't change. I thought that making a Card prefab and instantiating 52 of these manually would be a bad idea. Even doing it in code, I thought, would be a bit OTT, and that I should just instantiate visual cards when they are face-up to the player. I have a sprite sheet of the 52 cards and the back, which is imported as a Sprite in multiple mode, sliced in to a grid containing all the cards needed to play the game. The problem I now face is that, through my GameController script I want to generate a shuffled pack of cards, deal some to each player and then show those cards to a player. However, I am not sure of the best way, or even if it's possible, to do this dynamically with the sprite sheets as they are. For instance if I have the following: private CardRank rank; private CardSuite suite; private void Start() { this.rank = CardRank.Ace; this.suite = CardSuite.Spades; } This class would be instantiated by the game manager. I would have 52 of these in code. Whenever I have to visually show a card in the scene, I would use a card prefab, which is essentially a game object with a SpriteRenderer on it. I would need to dynamically load the correct sprite for this object from the spritesheet. The sliced sprites from the sprite sheet actually have names in the format AS (Ace of Spades), 7H (Seven of Hearts), etc - though this was a manual thing I did myself of course. I have also tried various alternative solutions, including creating animations, having separate sprites not in a spritesheet and having an array of available sprites in an array with a specific index for each card, but none seem as elegant as trying to load the correct sprite at runtime, as I'm trying to. So, how do I load a specific sprite from a spritesheet at runtime? I'm open to suggestions, even those that make me think differently about how to approach the problem.

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• How Microsoft Market DotNet?

  - by Fendy

  I just read an Joel's article about Microsoft's breaking change (non-backwards compatibility) with dot net's introduction. It is interesting and explicitly reflected the condition during that time. But now almost 10 years has passed. The breaking change It is mainly on how bad is Microsoft introducing non-backwards compatibility development tools, such as dot net, instead of improving the already-widely used asp classic or VB6. As much have known, dot net is not natively embedded in windows XP (yes in vista or 7), so in order to use the .net apps, you need to install the .net framework of over 300mb (it's big that day). However, as we see that nowadays many business use .net as their main development tools, with asp.net or mvc as their web-based applications. C# nowadays be one of tops programming languages (the most questions in stackoverflow). The more interesing part is, win32api still alive even there is newer technology out there (and still widely used). Imagine if microsoft does not introduce the breaking change, there will many corporates still uses asp classic or vb-based applications (there still is, but not that much). There are many corporates use additional services such as azure or sharepoint (beside how expensive is it). Please note that I also know there are many flagships applications (maybe adobe's and blizzard's) still use C-based or older language and not porting to newer high-level language. The question How can Microsoft persuade the users to migrate their old applications into dot net? As we have known it is very hard and give no immediate value when rewrite the applications (netscape story), and it is very risky. I am more interested in Microsoft's way and not opinion such as "because dot net is OOP, or dot net is dll-embedable, etc". This question may be constructive, as the technology is vastly changes over times lately. As we can see, Microsoft changes Asp.Net webform to MVC, winform is legacy now, it is starting to change to use windows store rather than basic-installment, touchscreen and later on we will have see-through applications such as google class. And that will be breaking changes. We will need to account portability as an issue nowadays. We will need other than just mere technology choice, but also migration plans. Even maybe as critical as we might need multiplatform language compiler, as approached by Joel's Wasabi. (hey, I read his articles too much!)

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• Default values - are they good or evil?

  - by Andrew

  The question about default values in general - default return function values, default parameter values, default logic for when something is missing, default logic for handling exceptions, default logic for handling the edge conditions etc. For a long time I considered default values to be a "pure evil" thing, something that "cloaks the catastrophe" and results in a very hard do find bugs. But recently I started to think about default values as some sort of a technical debt ... which is not a straight bad thing but something that could provide some "short term financing" get us to survive the project (how many of us could afford to buy a house without taking out the mortgage?). When I say a "short term" - I don't mean - "do something quickly first and do refactor it out later before it hits the production". No - I am talking about relying on a hardcoded default values in a production software. Granted - it could cause some issues, but what if it only going to cause a single trouble in a whole year. Again - I am talking about the "average" mainstream software here (not a software for a nuclear power station) - the average web site or a UI application for the accounting software, meaning that people lives are not at stake, nor millions of dollars. Again, from my experience, business users would rather live with the software which "works somehow", rather then wait for a perfect one. And the use of default values helps a lot if you develop a software in a RAD style. But again - the longest debug sessions I have spent were because of the bugs introduced by a default value which either stopped being "a default" along the way or because a small subsystem has recently been upgraded and as a result of this upgrade it does not handle the default correctly (e.g. empty list vs null, or null string vs empty string). So my question is - are the default values good or evil. And if they are a technical debt - how do measure up how much you can borrow so you can afford the repayments? Would really appreciate any input. Cheers. EDIT: If I am using the default values as a way to cut the corners during the development - and if the corners cutting results in a bugs and issues - what is the methodology to recover from these issues?

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• Euler angles to Cartesian Coordinates for use with gluLookAt

  - by notrodash

  I have searched all of the internet but just couldn't find the answer. I am using LibGDX and this is part of my code that loops over and over: public void render() { GL11 gl = Gdx.gl11; float centerX = (float)Math.cos(yaw) * (float)Math.cos(pitch); float centerY = (float)Math.sin(yaw) * (float)Math.cos(pitch); float centerZ = (float)Math.sin(pitch); System.out.println(centerX+" "+centerY+" "+centerZ+" ~ "+GDXRacing.camera.position.x+" "+GDXRacing.camera.position.y+" "+GDXRacing.camera.position.z); Gdx.glu.gluLookAt(gl, GDXRacing.camera.position.x, GDXRacing.camera.position.y, GDXRacing.camera.position.z, centerX, centerY, centerZ, 0, 1, 0); if(Gdx.input.isKeyPressed(Keys.A)) { yaw--; } if(Gdx.input.isKeyPressed(Keys.D)) { yaw++; } } I might just be bad at the math, but I dont get it. Does someone have a good explanation and an idea about how to deal with this? I am trying to make a first person camera. By the way, the camera is translated by +10 on the Z axis. Currently when I run the application, this is what I get: Watch video in browser | Download video (for those who cant download the video, everything shakes in a clockwise/anticlockwise action, depending on if I increase or decrease the Yaw value) -Thank you. [edit] and with this code: public void render() { GL11 gl = Gdx.gl11; float centerX = (float)(MathUtils.cosDeg(yaw)*4); float centerY = 0; float centerZ = (float)(MathUtils.sinDeg(yaw)*4); System.out.println(centerX+" "+centerY+" "+centerZ+" ~ "+GDXRacing.camera.position.x+" "+GDXRacing.camera.position.y+" "+GDXRacing.camera.position.z); Gdx.glu.gluLookAt(gl, GDXRacing.camera.position.x, GDXRacing.camera.position.y, GDXRacing.camera.position.z, centerX, centerY, centerZ, 0, 1, 0); if(Gdx.input.isKeyPressed(Keys.A)) { yaw--; } if(Gdx.input.isKeyPressed(Keys.D)) { yaw++; } } it slowly swings from the left to the right. This approach worked for turning left and right for 2d games though. What am I doing wrong?

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• In an Entity-Component-System Engine, How do I deal with groups of dependent entities?

  - by John Daniels

  After going over a few game design patterns, I have settle with Entity-Component-System (ES System) for my game engine. I've reading articles (mainly T=Machine) and review some source code and I think I got enough to get started. There is just one basic idea I am struggling with. How do I deal with groups of entities that are dependent on each other? Let me use an example: Assume I am making a standard overhead shooter (think Jamestown) and I want to construct a "boss entity" with multiple distinct but connected parts. The break down might look like something like this: Ship body: Movement, Rendering Cannon: Position (locked relative to the Ship body), Tracking\Fire at hero, Taking Damage until disabled Core: Position (locked relative to the Ship body), Tracking\Fire at hero, Taking Damage until disabled, Disabling (er...destroying) all other entities in the ship group My goal would be something that would be identified (and manipulated) as a distinct game element without having to rewrite subsystem form the ground up every time I want to build a new aggregate Element. How do I implement this kind of design in ES System? Do I implement some kind of parent-child entity relationship (entities can have children)? This seems to contradict the methodology that Entities are just empty container and makes it feel more OOP. Do I implement them as separate entities, with some kind of connecting Component (BossComponent) and related system (BossSubSystem)? I can't help but think that this will be hard to implement since how components communicate seem to be a big bear trap. Do I implement them as one Entity, with a collection of components (ShipComponent, CannonComponents, CoreComponent)? This one seems to veer way of the ES System intent (components here seem too much like heavy weight entities), but I'm know to this so I figured I would put that out there. Do I implement them as something else I have mentioned? I know that this can be implemented very easily in OOP, but my choosing ES over OOP is one that I will stick with. If I need to break with pure ES theory to implement this design I will (not like I haven't had to compromise pure design before), but I would prefer to do that for performance reason rather than start with bad design. For extra credit, think of the same design but, each of the "boss entities" were actually connected to a larger "BigBoss entity" made of a main body, main core and 3 "Boss Entities". This would let me see a solution for at least 3 dimensions (grandparent-parent-child)...which should be more than enough for me. Links to articles or example code would be appreciated. Thanks for your time.

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• Guiding Management to the Correct Decision

  - by Blumer

  My supervisor (also a developer) and I have a running joke about writing a book called "Managing From Beneath: Subversively Guiding Management to the Right Decision" and including a number of "techniques" we've developed for helping those who make the decisions to make the right ones. So far, we've got (cynicism warning!): BIC It! BIC stands for "Bury In Committee." When a bad idea comes up that someone wants to champion, we try to get it deferred to a committee for input. Typically it will either get killed outright (especially if other members of the committee are competing for you as a resource), or it will be hung up long enough that the proponent forgets about it. Smart, Stupid, or Expensive? When someone gets a visionary idea, offer them three ways to do it: a smart way, a stupid way, and an expensive way. The hope is that you've at least got a 2/3 shot of not having to do it the way that makes a piece of your soul die. All-Pro. It's a preemptive pro/con list in which you get into the mind of the (pr)opponent and think what would be cons against doing it your way. Twist them into pros and present them in your pro list before they have a chance to present them as cons. Dependicitis. Link pending decisions together, ideally with the proponent's pet project as the final link in the chain. Use this leverage to force action on those that have been put off. Preemptive Acceptance. Sometimes it's clear that management is going to go a particular direction regardless of advice to the contrary, and it's time to make the best of it. Take the opportunity to get something else you need, though. Approach the sponsor out of the blue and take the first step: "You know, I've been thinking about it, and while it's not the route I would advise, as long as we can get the schedule and budget for Project Awesome loosened up, I can work some magic to make your project fly." So ... what techniques have you come up with to try to head off the problem projects or make the best of what may come?

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• Vostro 3560 Wireless on Ubuntu 12.10

  - by ngille

  I have been using Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS on a Dell Vostro 3560 for some time now. At first I had issues with the wireless but I was pointed to a driver from Ubuntu 11.xx for a Broadcom BCM43142 and that did work! however with the upgrade to 12.10 I find myself at a lost because the driver will not work anymore. When trying to reinstall it I get "Driver of bad quality" I still install it but it just wont work. I cant seem to find anything on this issue for 12.10 and didn't know if anyone had any advice or if someone could point me in the right direction on resources to write my own driver for it. As I know C/C++ but have never written a driver for a Linux machine before. Thanks for any help! To be more clear I installed Ubuntu 12.10 Desktop on my Dell Vostro 3560 laptop. When I log in, my wireless card isn't visible in the Network Manager popup menu, although the wired network shows up there. I installed the driver mentioned below and that did help me on 12.04 but is now broken due to "Poor quality" a sudo lspci -nn command brings up: 00:00.0 Host bridge [0600]: Intel Corporation 3rd Gen Core processor DRAM Controller [8086:0154] (rev 09) 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation 3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller [8086:0166] (rev 09) 00:14.0 USB controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family USB xHCI Host Controller [8086:1e31] (rev 04) 00:16.0 Communication controller [0780]: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family MEI Controller #1 [8086:1e3a] (rev 04) 00:1a.0 USB controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family USB Enhanced Host Controller #2 [8086:1e2d] (rev 04) 00:1b.0 Audio device [0403]: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family High Definition Audio Controller [8086:1e20] (rev 04) 00:1c.0 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 1 [8086:1e10] (rev c4) 00:1c.1 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 2 [8086:1e12] (rev c4) 00:1c.2 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 3 [8086:1e14] (rev c4) 00:1d.0 USB controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family USB Enhanced Host Controller #1 [8086:1e26] (rev 04) 00:1f.0 ISA bridge [0601]: Intel Corporation HM77 Express Chipset LPC Controller [8086:1e57] (rev 04) 00:1f.2 SATA controller [0106]: Intel Corporation 7 Series Chipset Family 6-port SATA Controller [AHCI mode] [8086:1e03] (rev 04) 00:1f.3 SMBus [0c05]: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family SMBus Controller [8086:1e22] (rev 04) 01:00.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller [10ec:8168] (rev 07) **02:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation BCM43142 802.11b/g/n [14e4:4365] (rev 01)**

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• What are some reasonable stylistic limits on type inference?

  - by Jon Purdy

  C++0x adds pretty darn comprehensive type inference support. I'm sorely tempted to use it everywhere possible to avoid undue repetition, but I'm wondering if removing explicit type information all over the place is such a good idea. Consider this rather contrived example: Foo.h: #include <set> class Foo { private: static std::set<Foo*> instances; public: Foo(); ~Foo(); // What does it return? Who cares! Just forward it! static decltype(instances.begin()) begin() { return instances.begin(); } static decltype(instances.end()) end() { return instances.end(); } }; Foo.cpp: #include <Foo.h> #include <Bar.h> // The type need only be specified in one location! // But I do have to open the header to find out what it actually is. decltype(Foo::instances) Foo::instances; Foo() { // What is the type of x? auto x = Bar::get_something(); // What does do_something() return? auto y = x.do_something(*this); // Well, it's convertible to bool somehow... if (!y) throw "a constant, old school"; instances.insert(this); } ~Foo() { instances.erase(this); } Would you say this is reasonable, or is it completely ridiculous? After all, especially if you're used to developing in a dynamic language, you don't really need to care all that much about the types of things, and can trust that the compiler will catch any egregious abuses of the type system. But for those of you that rely on editor support for method signatures, you're out of luck, so using this style in a library interface is probably really bad practice. I find that writing things with all possible types implicit actually makes my code a lot easier for me to follow, because it removes nearly all of the usual clutter of C++. Your mileage may, of course, vary, and that's what I'm interested in hearing about. What are the specific advantages and disadvantages to radical use of type inference?

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• Two interfaces with identical signatures

  - by corsiKa

  I am attempting to model a card game where cards have two important sets of features: The first is an effect. These are the changes to the game state that happen when you play the card. The interface for effect is as follows: boolean isPlayable(Player p, GameState gs); void play(Player p, GameState gs); And you could consider the card to be playable if and only if you can meet its cost and all its effects are playable. Like so: // in Card class boolean isPlayable(Player p, GameState gs) { if(p.resource < this.cost) return false; for(Effect e : this.effects) { if(!e.isPlayable(p,gs)) return false; } return true; } Okay, so far, pretty simple. The other set of features on the card are abilities. These abilities are changes to the game state that you can activate at-will. When coming up with the interface for these, I realized they needed a method for determining whether they can be activated or not, and a method for implementing the activation. It ends up being boolean isActivatable(Player p, GameState gs); void activate(Player p, GameState gs); And I realize that with the exception of calling it "activate" instead of "play", Ability and Effect have the exact same signature. Is it a bad thing to have multiple interfaces with an identical signature? Should I simply use one, and have two sets of the same interface? As so: Set<Effect> effects; Set<Effect> abilities; If so, what refactoring steps should I take down the road if they become non-identical (as more features are released), particularly if they're divergent (i.e. they both gain something the other shouldn't, as opposed to only one gaining and the other being a complete subset)? I'm particularly concerned that combining them will be non-sustainable as soon as something changes. The fine print: I recognize this question is spawned by game development, but I feel it's the sort of problem that could just as easily creep up in non-game development, particularly when trying to accommodate the business models of multiple clients in one application as happens with just about every project I've ever done with more than one business influence... Also, the snippets used are Java snippets, but this could just as easily apply to a multitude of object oriented languages.

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• Shrink NTFS Windows 7 Partition with GParted

  - by user15961

  I am running a dual-boot system with Windows 7 and Ubuntu 10.10. Initially I allocated about 20GB for my Ubuntu partition; however, I quickly ran out of that space and am now looking to expand my partition. Currently my NTFS partition (450GB) has about 130GB of free space. I tried using GParted to shrink the partition but encountered the following error. I booted into windows so I could run chkdsk but the countdown freezes at 1 upon reboot. I tried multiple methods to resolve that issue but nothing seems to work. Finally I gave up, and now I just want to know what is the best way for me to force GParted to shrink the partition regardless of the errors. I don't really have anything important and I don't mind risking the data. I just don't want to wipe the entire NTFS partition because I don't have a Windows install CD and might require Windows later on for some programs. I tried using sudo ntfsresize but that spews out the same error as GParted... Any ideas? Check and repair file system (ntfs) on /dev/sda2 00:00:09 ( ERROR ) calibrate /dev/sda2 00:00:00 ( SUCCESS ) path: /dev/sda2 start: 36944325 end: 976771119 size: 939826795 (448.14 GiB) check file system on /dev/sda2 for errors and (if possible) fix them 00:00:09 ( ERROR ) ntfsresize -P -i -f -v /dev/sda2 ntfsresize v2.0.0 (libntfs 10:0:0) Device name : /dev/sda2 NTFS volume version: 3.1 Cluster size : 4096 bytes Current volume size: 481191318016 bytes (481192 MB) Current device size: 481191319040 bytes (481192 MB) Checking for bad sectors ... Checking filesystem consistency ... Cluster 63468 is referenced multiple times! Cluster 63469 is referenced multiple times! Cluster 63465 is referenced multiple times! Cluster 63466 is referenced multiple times! Cluster 63467 is referenced multiple times! Cluster 165621 is referenced multiple times! Cluster 165622 is referenced multiple times! Cluster 165623 is referenced multiple times! Cluster 165624 is referenced multiple times! ERROR: Filesystem check failed! ERROR: 9 clusters are referenced multiply times. NTFS is inconsistent. Run chkdsk /f on Windows then reboot it TWICE! The usage of the /f parameter is very IMPORTANT! No modification was and will be made to NTFS by this software until it gets repaired.

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• How to handle interruptions in developer work without losing concentration? [closed]

  - by tomaszs

  I work as a developer for some years now. Mainly the issue why it's antisocial work is because you need to spend much time programming. I've been always the kind of developer who likes to cut off from any sources of distraction and spend several hours on project because in this way i (as i hope) do it faster. There are also other kinds of developers, more social that can chat, read, watch movies while development and they are ok with this and don't hesitate to be interrupted in their work in any time and come back to the project without any problem. For me any distraction is source of frustration because i need to spend substantial time to load my mind with all info about the project and to concentrate back on the tasks. I always thought it's better to do this that way because project is completed faster. But it makes some things difficult: it's hard to chat with someone who needs to have some important info: because you are a bit frustrated when you know you loose your Zen. And sometimes its more important to chat with someone than to loose Zen. Well.. mostly in any other kind of work the ability to be "multitask" is very important. But as a developer and as a person it's also very important to stay social. And i see now that the problem of concentration makes it difficult to make the right chose: the cost of maintaining concentration is just sometimes so damn high! So is it only me that i have so little concentration skills so any interruption is for me a big deal? Maybe it's just i have so bad memory so that i dont remember all issues of a project so long? Or maybe i develop the project in a fashion that requires me to store so much info on my mind only to be able to start working with code? Or should i just accept that being more social will make me finish project slower and in the fashion that i personally consider non 100% productive? And it's just normal thing and i should just accept it and start to live like any other person who has many works and don't assume that programming is in any case other than any other work and i just do fuzz about the whole concentration thing? This is question for mid-pro developers. I think you was having the same dillema in your life. I would be glad if you could help me take the right road here because it's just driving me and i suppose people i work with crazy for years.

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• Dealing with coworkers when developing, need advice [closed]

  - by Yippie-Kai-Yay

  I developed our current project architecture and started developing it on my own (reaching something like, revision 40). We're developing a simple subway routing framework and my design seemed to be done extremely well - several main models, corresponding views, main logic and data structures were modeled "as they should be" and fully separated from rendering, algorithmic part was also implemented apart from the main models and had a minor number of intersection points. I would call that design scalable, customizable, easy-to-implement, interacting mostly based on the "black box interaction" and, well, very nice. Now, what was done: I started some implementations of the corresponding interfaces, ported some convenient libraries and wrote implementation stubs for some application parts. I had the document describing coding style and examples of that coding style usage (my own written code). I forced the usage of more or less modern C++ development techniques, including no-delete code (wrapped via smart pointers) and etc. I documented the purpose of concrete interface implementations and how they should be used. Unit tests (mostly, integration tests, because there wasn't a lot of "actual" code) and a set of mocks for all the core abstractions. I was absent for 12 days. What do we have now (the project was developed by 4 other members of the team): 3 different coding styles all over the project (I guess, two of them agreed to use the same style :), same applies to the naming of our abstractions (e.g CommonPathData.h, SubwaySchemeStructures.h), which are basically headers declaring some data structures. Absolute lack of documentation for the recently implemented parts. What I could recently call a single-purpose-abstraction now handles at least 2 different types of events, has tight coupling with other parts and so on. Half of the used interfaces now contain member variables (sic!). Raw pointer usage almost everywhere. Unit tests disabled, because "(Rev.57) They are unnecessary for this project". ... (that's probably not everything). Commit history shows that my design was interpreted as an overkill and people started combining it with personal bicycles and reimplemented wheels and then had problems integrating code chunks. Now - the project still does only a small amount of what it has to do, we have severe integration problems, I assume some memory leaks. Is there anything possible to do in this case? I do realize that all my efforts didn't have any benefit, but the deadline is pretty soon and we have to do something. Did someone have a similar situation? Basically I thought that a good (well, I did everything that I could) start for the project would probably lead to something nice, however, I understand that I'm wrong. Any advice would be appreciated, sorry for my bad english.

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• How to discriminate from two nodes with identical frequencies in a Huffman's tree?

  - by Omega

  Still on my quest to compress/decompress files with a Java implementation of Huffman's coding (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huffman_coding) for a school assignment. From the Wikipedia page, I quote: Create a leaf node for each symbol and add it to the priority queue. While there is more than one node in the queue: Remove the two nodes of highest priority (lowest probability) from the queue Create a new internal node with these two nodes as children and with probability equal to the sum of the two nodes' probabilities. Add the new node to the queue. The remaining node is the root node and the tree is complete. Now, emphasis: Remove the two nodes of highest priority (lowest probability) from the queue Create a new internal node with these two nodes as children and with probability equal to the sum of the two nodes' probabilities. So I have to take two nodes with the lowest frequency. What if there are multiple nodes with the same low frequency? How do I discriminate which one to use? The reason I ask this is because Wikipedia has this image: And I wanted to see if my Huffman's tree was the same. I created a file with the following content: aaaaeeee nnttmmiihhssfffouxprl And this was the result: Doesn't look so bad. But there clearly are some differences when multiple nodes have the same frequency. My questions are the following: What is Wikipedia's image doing to discriminate the nodes with the same frequency? Is my tree wrong? (Is Wikipedia's image method the one and only answer?) I guess there is one specific and strict way to do this, because for our school assignment, files that have been compressed by my program should be able to be decompressed by other classmate's programs - so there must be a "standard" or "unique" way to do it. But I'm a bit lost with that. My code is rather straightforward. It literally just follows Wikipedia's listed steps. The way my code extracts the two nodes with the lowest frequency from the queue is to iterate all nodes and if the current node has a lower frequency than any of the two "smallest" known nodes so far, then it replaces the highest one. Just like that.

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• Why would you dual-run an app on Azure and AWS?

  - by Elton Stoneman

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/EltonStoneman/archive/2013/11/10/why-would-you-dual-run-an-app-on-azure-and-aws.aspxI had this question from a viewer of my Pluralsight course, Implementing the Reactive Manifesto with Azure and AWS, and thought I’d publish the response. So why would you dual-run your cloud app by hosting it on Azure and AWS? Sounds like a lot of extra development and management overhead. Well the most compelling reasons are reliability and portability. In 2012 I was working for a client who was making a big investment in the cloud, and at the end of the year we published their first external API for business partners. It was hosted in Azure and used some really nice features to route back into existing on-premise services. We were able to publish a clean, simple API to partners, and hide away the underlying complexity of the internal services while still leveraging them to do all the work. Two days after we went live, we were hit by the Azure SSL certificate expiry outage, and our API was unavailable for the best part of 3 days. Fortunately we had planned a gradual roll-out to partners, so the impact was minimal, but we’d been intending to ramp up quickly, and if the outage had happened a week or two later we would have been in a very bad place. Not least because our app could only run on Azure, we couldn’t package it up for another service without going back and reworking the code. More recently AWS had an issue with a networking device in one of their data centres which caused an outage that took the best part of a day to resolve. In both scenarios the SLAs are worthless, as you’ll get back a small percentage of your cloud expenditure, which is going to be negligible compared to your costs in dealing with the outage. And if your app is built specifically for AWS or Azure then if there’s an extended outage you can’t just deploy it onto a new set of kit from a different supplier. And the chances are pretty good there will be another extended outage, both for Microsoft and for Amazon. But the chances are small that it will happen to both at the same time. So my basic guidance has been: ignore the SLAs, go for better uptime by using two clouds. As soon as you need to scale beyond a single instance, start by scaling out to another cloud. Then scale out to different data centres in both clouds. Then you’ve got dual-cloud, quadruple-datacentre redundancy, so any more scaling you need can be left to the clouds to auto-scale themselves. By running in both clouds, you’ve made your app portable, so in the highly unlikely event that both AWS and Azure go down in multiple regions, you’ll have a deployment package which will let you spin up a new stack on yet another cloud, without having to rework your solution.

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• SQL: empty string vs NULL value

  - by Jacek Prucia

  I know this subject is a bit controversial and there are a lot of various articles/opinions floating around the internet. Unfortunatelly, most of them assume the person doesn't know what the difference between NULL and empty string is. So they tell stories about surprising results with joins/aggregates and generally do a bit more advanced SQL lessons. By doing this, they absolutely miss the whole point and are therefore useless for me. So hopefully this question and all answers will move subject a bit forward. Let's suppose I have a table with personal information (name, birth, etc) where one of the columns is an email address with varchar type. We assume that for some reason some people might not want to provide an email address. When inserting such data (without email) into the table, there are two available choices: set cell to NULL or set it to empty string (''). Let's assume that I'm aware of all the technical implications of choosing one solution over another and I can create correct SQL queries for either scenario. The problem is even when both values differ on the technical level, they are exactly the same on logical level. After looking at NULL and '' I came to a single conclusion: I don't know email address of the guy. Also no matter how hard i tried, I was not able to sent an e-mail using either NULL or empty string, so apparently most SMTP servers out there agree with my logic. So i tend to use NULL where i don't know the value and consider empty string a bad thing. After some intense discussions with colleagues i came with two questions: am I right in assuming that using empty string for an unknown value is causing a database to "lie" about the facts? To be more precise: using SQL's idea of what is value and what is not, I might come to conclusion: we have e-mail address, just by finding out it is not null. But then later on, when trying to send e-mail I'll come to contradictory conclusion: no, we don't have e-mail address, that @!#$ Database must have been lying! Is there any logical scenario in which an empty string '' could be such a good carrier of important information (besides value and no value), which would be troublesome/inefficient to store by any other way (like additional column). I've seen many posts claiming that sometimes it's good to use empty string along with real values and NULLs, but so far haven't seen a scenario that would be logical (in terms of SQL/DB design). P.S. Some people will be tempted to answer, that it is just a matter of personal taste. I don't agree. To me it is a design decision with important consequences. So i'd like to see answers where opion about this is backed by some logical and/or technical reasons.

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• Finding a new programming language for web development?

  - by Xeoncross

  I'm wondering if there are any un-biased resources that give good, specific overviews of programming languages and their intended goals. I would like to learn a new language, but visiting the sites of each language isn't working. Each one talks about how great it is without much mention of it's weaknesses or specific goals. Ruby is a dynamic, open source programming language with a focus on simplicity and productivity. Python is a programming language that lets you work more quickly and integrate your systems more effectively. Having been a PHP developer for years, Vic Cherubini sums up my plight well: I knew PHP well, had my own framework, and could work quickly to get something up and running. I programmed like this throughout the MVC revolution. I got better and better jobs (read: better paying, better title) as a PHP developer, but all along the way realizing that the code I wrote on my own time was great, and the code I worked with at work was horrible. Like, worse than horrible. Atrocious. OS Commerce level bad. Having side projects kept me sane, because the code I worked with at work made me miserable. This is why I'm retiring from PHP for my side projects and new programming ventures. I'm spent with PHP. Exhausted, if you will. I've reached a level where I think I'm at the top with it as a language and if I don't move on to a new language soon, I'll be done completely with programming and I do not want that. Languages I've looked at include JavaScript (for node.js), Ruby, Python, & Erlang. I've even thought about Scala or C++. The problem is figuring out which ones are built to handle my needs the best. So where can I go to skip the hype and get real information about the maturity of a platform, the size of the community, and the strengths & weaknesses of that language. If I know these then picking a language to continue my web development should be easy.

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• Randomly generate directed graph on a grid

  - by Talon876

  I am trying to randomly generate a directed graph for the purpose of making a puzzle game similar to the ice sliding puzzles from Pokemon. This is essentially what I want to be able to randomly generate: http://bulbanews.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Crunching_the_numbers:_Graph_theory. I need to be able to limit the size of the graph in an x and y dimension. In the example given in the link, it would be restricted to an 8x4 grid. The problem I am running into is not randomly generating the graph, but randomly generating a graph, which I can properly map out in a 2d space, since I need something (like a rock) on the opposite side of a node, to make it visually make sense when you stop sliding. The problem with this is that sometimes the rock ends up in the path between two other nodes or possibly on another node itself, which causes the entire graph to become broken. After discussing the problem with a few people I know, we came to a couple of conclusions that may lead to a solution. Including the obstacles in the grid as part of the graph when constructing it. Start out with a fully filled grid and just draw a random path and delete out blocks that will make that path work. The problem then becomes figuring out which ones to delete to avoid introducing an additional, shorter path. We were also thinking a dynamic programming algorithm may be beneficial, though none of us are too skilled with creating dynamic programming algorithms from nothing. Any ideas or references about what this problem is officially called (if it's an official graph problem) would be most helpful. Here are some examples of what I have accomplished so far by just randomly placing blocks and generating the navigation graph from the chosen start/finish. The idea (as described in the previous link) is you start at the green S and want to get to the green F. You do this by moving up/down/left/right and you continue moving in the direction chosen until you hit a wall. In these pictures, grey is a wall, white is the floor, and the purple line is the minimum length from start to finish, and the black lines and grey dots represented possible paths. Here are some bad examples of randomly generated graphs: http://i.stack.imgur.com/9uaM6.png Here are some good examples of randomly generated (or hand tweaked) graphs: i.stack.imgur.com/uUGeL.png (can't post another link, sorry) I've also seemed to notice the more challenging ones when actually playing this as a puzzle are ones which have lots of high degree nodes along the minimum path.

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• Real-Time Multi-User Gaming Platform

  - by Victor Engel

  I asked this question at Stack Overflow but was told it's more appropriate here, so I'm posting it again here. I'm considering developing a real-time multi-user game, and I want to gather some information about possibilities before I do some real development. I've thought about how best to ask the question, and for simplicity, the best way that occurred to me was to make an analogy to the field (or playground) game darebase. In the field game of darebase, there are two or more bases. To start, there is one team on each base. The game is a fancy game of tag. When two people meet out in the field, the person who left his base most recently timewise captures the other person. They then return to that person's base. Play continues until everyone is part of the same team. So, analogizing this to an online computer game, let's suppose there are an indefinite number of bases. When a person starts up the game, he has a team that is located at, for example, his current GPS coordinates. It could be a virtual world, but for sake of argument, let's suppose the virtual world corresponds to the player's actual GPS coordinates. The game software then consults the database to see where the closest other base is that is online, and the two teams play their game of virtual tag. Note that the user of the other base could have a different base than the one run by the current user as the closest base to him, in which case, he would be in two simultaneous battles, one with each base. When they go offline, the state of their players is saved on a server somewhere. Game logic calls for the players to have some automaton-logic of some sort, so they can fend for themselves in a limited way using basic rules, until their user goes online again. The user doesn't control the players' movements directly, but issues general directives that influence the players' movement logic. I think this analogy is good enough to frame my question. What sort of platforms are available to develop this sort of game? I've been looking at smartfoxserver, but I'm not convinced yet that it is the best option or even that it will work at all. One possibility, of course, would be to roll out my own web server, but I'd rather not do that if there is an existing service out there already that I could tap into. I will be developing for iOS devices at first. So any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I think I need to establish the architecture first before proceeding with this project. Note that darbase is not the game I intend to implement, but, upon reflection, that might not be a bad idea either.

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• Has test driven development (TDD) actually benefited a real world project?

  - by James

  I am not new to coding. I have been coding (seriously) for over 15 years now. I have always had some testing for my code. However, over the last few months I have been learning test driven design/development (TDD) using Ruby on Rails. So far, I'm not seeing the benefit. I see some benefit to writing tests for some things, but very few. And while I like the idea of writing the test first, I find I spend substantially more time trying to debug my tests to get them to say what I really mean than I do debugging actual code. This is probably because the test code is often substantially more complicated than the code it tests. I hope this is just inexperience with the available tools (RSpec in this case). I must say though, at this point, the level of frustration mixed with the disappointing lack of performance is beyond unacceptable. So far, the only value I'm seeing from TDD is a growing library of RSpec files that serve as templates for other projects/files. Which is not much more useful, maybe less useful, than the actual project code files. In reading the available literature, I notice that TDD seems to be a massive time sink up front, but pays off in the end. I'm just wondering, are there any real world examples? Does this massive frustration ever pay off in the real world? I really hope I did not miss this question somewhere else on here. I searched, but all the questions/answers are several years old at this point. It was a rare occasion when I found a developer who would say anything bad about TDD, which is why I have spent as much time on this as I have. However, I noticed that nobody seems to point to specific real-world examples. I did read one answer that said the guy debugging the code in 2011 would thank you for have a complete unit testing suite (I think that comment was made in 2008). So, I'm just wondering, after all these years, do we finally have any examples showing the payoff is real? Has anybody actually inherited or gone back to code that was designed/developed with TDD and has a complete set of unit tests and actually felt a payoff? Or did you find that you were spending so much time trying to figure out what the test was testing (and why it was important) that you just tossed out the whole mess and dug into the code?

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