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• Is there value in having new developers (graduates) start as testers / bug-fixers?

  - by Nico Huysamen

  Hi Programmers Community. What are your thoughts on the following: Is there value in having new developers (graduates) start as testers / bug-fixers? There are two schools of thought here that I have come across. Having new developers (graduates) start as testers / bug-fixers / doing SLA (Service Level Agreement) work, get's them familiar with the code base. It also allows them the opportunity to learn how to read [other people's] code. Further more, by fixing bugs, they will learn certain bad and good practices, which could hopefully help them in the future. The other way of thinking though, is that if you immediately start new developers on something like testing / bug-fixing / SLA work, their appetite for the development world might go away, and/or they might leave the company and you potentially loose out on a great future resource. Is there a balance that should be kept between these two? Currently where I work there is no clear-cut definition of what new starters do. Some go directly on to client work, while some fall in to the SLA world. Should companies have such a policy? Or should it be handled on a case-by-case or opportunity-based basis? Hope to hear from some of you that have experience in this field. Thanks!

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• how to give action to the CCArray which contain bubbles(sprites)

  - by prakash s

  I am making bubbles shooter game in cocos2d I have taken one array in that i have inserted number of different color bubbles and i showing on my game scene also , but if give some move action to that array ,it moving down but it displaying all the bubbles at one position and automatically destroying , what is the main reason behind this please help me here is my code: -(void)addTarget { CGSize winSize = [[CCDirector sharedDirector] winSize]; //CCSprite *target = [CCSprite spriteWithFile:@"3.png" rect:CGRectMake(0, 0, 256, 256)]; NSMutableArray * movableSprites = [[NSMutableArray alloc] init]; NSArray *images = [NSArray arrayWithObjects:@"1.png", @"2.png", @"3.png", @"4.png",@"5.png",@"1.png",@"5.png", @"3.png", nil]; for(int i = 0; i < images.count; ++i) { NSString *image = [images objectAtIndex:i]; // generate random number based on size of array (array size is larger than 10) CCSprite*target = [CCSprite spriteWithFile:image]; float offsetFraction = ((float)(i+1))/(images.count+1); //target.position = ccp(winSize.width*offsetFraction, winSize.height/2); target.position = ccp(350*offsetFraction, 460); // [[CCActionManager sharedManager ] pauseAllActionsForTarget:target ] ; [self addChild:target]; [movableSprites addObject:target]; //[target runAction:[CCMoveTo actionWithDuration:20.0 position:ccp(0,0)]]; id actionMove = [CCMoveTo actionWithDuration:10 position:ccp(winSize.width/2,winSize. height/2)]; id actionMoveDone = [CCCallFuncN actionWithTarget:self selector:@selector(spriteMoveFinished:)]; [target runAction:[CCSequence actions:actionMove, actionMoveDone, nil]]; } } after the move at certain position i want to display all the bubbles in centre of my window

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• Reinventing the Wheel, why should I?

  - by Mercfh

  So I have this problem, it may be my OCD (i have OCD it's not severe.....but It makes me very..lets say specific about certain things, programming being one of them) or it may be the fact that I graduated college and still feel "meh" at programming. Reading This made me think "OH thats me!" but thats not really my main problem. My big problem is....anytime im using a high level language/API/etc. I always think to myself that im not really "programming". I know I know...it sounds stupid. But Like I feel like....if i can't figure out how to do it at the lowest level then Im not really "understanding" it. I do this for just about every new technology I learn. I look at the lowest level and try to understand it. Sometimes I do.....most of the time I don't, I mean i've only really been programming for 4 years (at college, if you even call it programming.....our university's program was "meh"). For instance I do a little bit of embedded programming (with the Atmel AVR 8bits/Arduino stuff). And I can't bring myself to use the C compiler, even though it's 8 million times easier than using assembly......it's stupid I know... Anyone else feel like this, I think it's just my OCD that makes me feel this way....but has anyone else ever felt like they need to go down to the lowest level of the language to even be satisfied with using it? I apologize for the very very odd question, but I think it really hinders me in getting deep seeded into a programming language and making a real application of my own. (it's silly I know)

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• Ubuntu 12.04 LTS won't install - never finishes please help

  - by Richard Higgins

  Want to try Ubuntu after using Windows for 30 years. Tried to install it 5 times on a Lenovo X120e notebook and twice on a Lenovo M57 desktop. No luck, worse than what Microsoft puts you through. I burned 12.04 LTS to disc. It installs up to the "Who Are You?" screen, then stops. Accepted the recommended computer name and lower case user name. I chose "log me in automatically." After that there is no progress bar, no rotating or pulsing button, nothing to indicate the Ubuntu has not died or fallen asleep. Is that how it is written? Never heard of a program that would take a long time to install while a user looked at a locked, dead screen. I just bought the M57 desktop for my son. It came with Ubuntu 10 something. I wanted to upgrade to 12.04 but it crashed, twice, to a DOS screen saying the pc lacked a certain "init" file. Various help screen commands did not help. On the X120e, I thought a partial-failed Ubuntu install was causing the problem, so I removed the drive and deleted the Ubuntu partition and replaced it. But same result. After I fill in my name, accept computer and user name, the "continue" button does not appear to work. I can go "back" but not forward. I have waited torturous hours. It doesn't take more than two hours to install, does it?any It is my own fault because of the high expectations I had for a sensible, hassle-free installation, but I am immensely disappointed. Thank you for any response

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• Recommened design pattern to handle multiple compression algorithms for a class hierarchy

  - by sgorozco

  For all you OOD experts. What would be the recommended way to model the following scenario? I have a certain class hierarchy similar to the following one: class Base { ... } class Derived1 : Base { ... } class Derived2 : Base { ... } ... Next, I would like to implement different compression/decompression engines for this hierarchy. (I already have code for several strategies that best handle different cases, like file compression, network stream compression, legacy system compression, etc.) I would like the compression strategy to be pluggable and chosen at runtime, however I'm not sure how to handle the class hierarchy. Currently I have a tighly-coupled design that looks like this: interface ICompressor { byte[] Compress(Base instance); } class Strategy1Compressor : ICompressor { byte[] Compress(Base instance) { // Common compression guts for Base class ... // if( instance is Derived1 ) { // Compression guts for Derived1 class } if( instance is Derived2 ) { // Compression guts for Derived2 class } // Additional compression logic to handle other class derivations ... } } As it is, whenever I add a new derived class inheriting from Base, I would have to modify all compression strategies to take into account this new class. Is there a design pattern that allows me to decouple this, and allow me to easily introduce more classes to the Base hierarchy and/or additional compression strategies?

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• QA - Developer communication

  - by exiter2000

  I am a developer and have worked at this company 4~5 years by now. We have been practicing scrum for about 2 years. I think, I have been worked well with QAs. I believe QAs/developers/technical writers are all one team. We are also actively hiring new team members. As a legacy member of the team, I have faced to assist new member(including developers and testers) with my business knowledge. We work on 2 weeks base scrum. I usually deliver my user story completely by the first date of second week and do some qa build with partial functionality of my user story so that QA has a good idea about my implementation and flow. Recently, I have met some QAs. In first week, the QAs do not talk... In stand up meeting, they say they are developing test cases regardless I deliver the user story or not. In second week, I do not have a single defect till Thursday afternoon and suddenly I have a major defect with several minor UI defect, which I delivered one week ago. Or I have one or two minor defects on second week however major defects on Thursday afternoon or Friday morning. This eventually make the story rolls over to the next sprint. Major defect takes time to fix and more importantly it would trigger the regression test for the story... Even if I worked Thursday evening and fixed it, the testing will not finish. And this happens multiple times with certain QAs. As a same team member, I talked to the QAs if they could test major defect with higher priority... Rejected... Because I do not understand QA process.. So I asked roughly how many major test cases are covered so far in the stand up meeting on 2nd week Wednesday.. The response is I should not ask this to the QA in the stand up meeting... What do I do?

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• What would be a good filter to create 'magnetic deformers' from a depth map?

  - by sebf

  In my project, I am creating a system for deforming a highly detailed mesh (clothing) so that it 'fits' a convex mesh. To do this I use depth maps of the item and the 'hull' to determine at what point in world space the deviation occurs and the extent. Simply transforming all occluded vertices to the depths as defined by the 'hull' is fairly effective, and has good performance, but it suffers the problem of not preserving the features of the mesh and requires extensive culling to avoid false-positives. I would like instead to generate from the depth deviation map a set of simple 'deformers' which will 'push'* all vertices of the deformed mesh outwards (in world space). This way, all features of the mesh are preserved and there is no need to have complex heuristics to cull inappropriate vertices. I am not sure how to go about generating this deformer set however. I am imagining something like an algorithm that attempts to match a spherical surface to each patch of contiguous deviations within a certain range, but do not know where to start doing this. Can anyone suggest a suitable filter or algorithm for generating deformers? Or to put it another way 'compressing' a depth map? (*Push because its fitting to a convex 'bulgy' humanoid so transforms are likely to be 'spherical' from the POV of the surface.)

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• Does anybody know of any resources to achieve this particular "2.5D" isometric engine effect?

  - by Craig Whitley

  I understand this is a little vague, but I was hoping somebody might be able to describe a high-level workflow or link to a resource to be able to achieve a specific isometric "2.5D" tile engine effect. I fell in love with http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Q6ISVaM5Ww this engine. Especially with the lighting and the shaders! He has a brief description of how he achieved what he did, but I could really use a brief flow of where you would start, what you would read up on and learn and the logical order to implement these things. A few specific questions: 1) Is there a heightmap on the ground texture that lets the light reflect brighter on certain parts of it? 2) "..using a special material which calculates the world-space normal vectors of every pixel.." - is this some "magic" special material he has created himself, or can you hazard a guess at what he means? 3) with relation to the above quote - what does he mean by 'world-space normal vectors of every pixel'? 4) I'm guessing I'm being a little bit optimistic when I ask if there's any 'all-in-one' tutorial out there? :)

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• Developing configuration syntax - best practise/rules/methods?

  - by Isaac

  I am currently developing a small application, which checks if provided data meets certain requirements. The requirements are actually a long list, and might be changing, so I defined a syntax which allows me to state all of the requirements briefly and in a seperate file. Now the overall requirements for the application have changed, and I need to change my configuration syntax. Which leeds me to wonder if there is methodoloy or best practise for developing such syntaxes. Currently what I do is I think about the requirements and come up with an initial syntax, start configuring the first few items and see how it works. If I come upon something that does not work well or not at all with the current syntax, I change the syntax, if possible in a backward compatible way. This somehow works for me, but it feels a bit like fishing in troubled water. Also I feel it does not nessessarly lead to the most concise and easy to understand/use syntax. So I was wondering what other people do, especially if there is a better approach to this.

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• Does immutability entirely eliminate the need for locks in multi-processor programming?

  - by GlenPeterson

  Part 1 Clearly Immutability minimizes the need for locks in multi-processor programming, but does it eliminate that need, or are there instances where immutability alone is not enough? It seems to me that you can only defer processing and encapsulate state so long before most programs have to actually DO something. If a program performs actions on multiple processors, something needs to collect and aggregate the results. All this involves multi-process communication before, after, and possibly during some transformations. The start and end state of the machines are different. Can this always be done with no locks just by throwing out each object and creating a new one instead of changing the original (a crude view of immutability)? What cases still require locking? I'm interested in both the theoretical/academic answer and the practical/real-world answer. I know a lot of functional programmers like to talk about "no side effect" but in the "real world" everything has a side effect. Every processor click takes time and electricity and machine resources away from other processes. So I understand that there may be more than one perspective to answer this question from. If immutability is safe, given certain bounds or assumptions, I want to know what the borders of the "safety zone" are exactly. Some examples of possible boundaries: I/O Exceptions/errors Interfaces with programs written in other languages Interfaces with other machines (physical, virtual, or theoretical) Special thanks to @JimmaHoffa for his comment which started this question! Part 2 Multi-processor programming is often used as an optimization technique - to make some code run faster. When is it faster to use locks vs. immutable objects? Given the limits set out in Amdahl's Law, when can you achieve better over-all performance (with or without the garbage collector taken into account) with immutable objects vs. locking mutable ones? Summary I'm combining these two questions into one to try to get at where the bounding box is for Immutability as a solution to threading problems.

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• Recording slow web stream

  - by Budric

  I'm trying to record an mpeg2 video stream from a website that doesn't have the greatest bandwidth. The video often buffers. I want to download the stream and watch it offline. The extract stream format received is: Stream #0.0[0x44]: Audio: mp2, 48000 Hz, stereo, s16, 192 kb/s Stream #0.1[0x45]: Video: mpeg2video (Main), yuv420p, 704x576 [PAR 16:11 DAR 16:9], 15000 kb/s, 27.19 fps, 25 tbr, 90k tbn, 50 tbc I use the following tool to transocde the stream: ffmpeg -i "http://url" -y -vcodec libx264 -b 3000k -acodec copy /tmp/stream.mp4 Unfortunately after a few seconds ffmpeg stops recording with an error [mpegts @ 0x1f0b9c0] PES packet size mismatch [mp2 @ 0x1f14640] incomplete frame Error while decoding stream #0.0 [mpeg2video @ 0x1f16860] ac-tex damaged at 0 26 [mpeg2video @ 0x1f16860] Warning MVs not available I've tried encoding with vlc as well with similar issues. Although vlc doesn't stop encoding, the output video has regions where it hangs. vlc -I dummy "http://url" --network-caching="1000" --sout="#transcode{vcodec=h264,vb=3000,acodec=mp3,ab=192}:std{access=file,mux=mp4,dst=/tmp/stream.mp4}" [mpeg2video @ 0x7f2d4c001e20] ac-tex damaged at 9 33 [mpeg2video @ 0x7f2d4c001e20] Warning MVs not available [mpeg2video @ 0x7f2d4c001e20] concealing 132 DC, 132 AC, 132 MV errors [mpeg2video @ 0x7f2d4c001e20] ac-tex damaged at 16 17 [mpeg2video @ 0x7f2d4c001e20] Warning MVs not available [mpeg2video @ 0x7f2d4c001e20] concealing 836 DC, 836 AC, 836 MV errors libdvbpsi error (PSI decoder): TS discontinuity (received 4, expected 3) for PID 0 I also tried flv transcoding and it shows up with its own set of issues, like output flv file hangs in certain parts. Anyone know what's wrong or how to fix this?

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• How do you explain to an "agile" team that they still need to plan the software they write?

  - by user23157

  This week at work I got agiled yet again. Having gone through the standard agile, TDD, shared ownership, ad hoc development methodology of never planning anything beyond a few user stories on a piece of card, verbally chewing the cud over the technicallities of a 3rd party integration ad nauseam without ever doing any real thinking or due dilligence and architecturally coupling all production code to the first test that comes into anyone's head for the past few months we reach the end of a release cycle and lo and behold the main externally visible feature that we have been developing is too slow to use, buggy, becoming labyrinthinly complex and completely inflexible. During this process "spikes" were done but never documented and not a single architectural design was ever produced (there was no FS, so what the hell eh, if you don't know what you are developing, how can you plan or research it?) - the project passed from pair to pair, each of whom only ever focused on a single user story at a time and well the result was inevitable. To resolve this I went off the radar, went (the dreaded) waterfall, planned, coded and basically didn't swap off the pair and tried as much as I could to work alone - focusing on solid architecture and specifications rather than unit tests which will come later once everything is pinned down. The code is now much better and is actually totally usable, flexible and fast. Certain people seem to have really resented me doing this and have gone out of their way to sabotage my efforts (possibly unconsciously) because it goes against the holy process of agile. So how do you, as a developer, explain to the team that it is not "un-agile" to plan their work, and how do you fit planning into the agile process? (I'm not talking about the IPM; I'm talking about sitting down with a problem and sketching out an end-to-end design that says how a problem should be solved in sufficient detail that anyone who works on the problem knows what architecture and patterns they should be using and where the new code should integrate into existing code)

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• Java keyboard input [on hold]

  - by dØd

  I'm trying to implement a input system that can detect whether a certain key was held or was only pressed briefly. So far I have this: KEY_INTERACTION_TRESHOLD = 400ms //inside a constructor shouldMeasure = true; @Override public void keyPressed(KeyEvent e) { if (shouldMeasure) { startTime = System.currentTimeMillis(); shouldMeasure = false; return; } System.out.println("Button is held down"); e.consume(); } @Override public void keyReleased(KeyEvent e) { if (System.currentTimeMillis() - startTime < KEY_INTERACTION_TRESHOLD) { System.out.println("Button was only pressed briefly"); } startTime = 0; shouldMeasure = true; e.consume(); } Now this works, but the problem is that there is this delay between when I press a key to hold and when the message 'Button is held down' gets displayed. I understand why this delay occurs (for example when you press and hold a letter there will be a similar delay between the first and the second letter printed out), but I would like to somehow avoid it. I'm using only the Java API.

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• Strange and erratic transformations when using OpenGL VBOs to render scene

  - by janoside

  I have an existing iOS game with fairly simple scenes (all textured quads) and I'm using Apple's "Texture2D" class. I'm trying to convert this class to use VBOs since the vertices of my objects basically never change so I may as well not re-create them for every object every frame. I have the scene rendering using VBOs but the sizes and orientations of all rendered objects are strange and erratic - though locations seem generally correct. I've been toying with this code for a few days now, and I've found something odd: if I re-create all of my VBOs each frame, everything looks correct, even though I'm almost certain my vertices are not changing. Other notes I'm basing my work on this tutorial, and therefore am also using "IBOs" I create my buffers before rendering begins My buffers include vertex and texture data I'm using OpenGL ES 1.1 Fearing some strange effect of the current matrix GL state at the time of buffer creation I've also tried wrapping my buffer-setup code in a "pushMatrix-loadIdentity-popMatrix" block which (as expected) had no effect I'm aware that various articles have been published demonstrating that VBOs may not help performance, but I want to understand this problem and at least have the option to use them. I realize this is a shot in the dark, but has anyone else experienced this type of strange behavior? What might I be doing to result in this behavior? It's rather difficult for me to isolate the problem since I'm working in an existing, moderately complex project, so suggestions about how to approach the problem are also quite welcome.

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• De-index URL paremeters

  - by Doug Firr

  Upon reading over this question is lengthy so allow me to provide a one sentence summary: I need to get Google to de-index URLs that have certain parameters appended I have a website example.com with language translations. There used to be many translations but I deleted them all so that only English (Default) and French options remain. When one selects a language option a parameter is aded to the URL. For example, the home page: https://example.com (default) https://example.com/main?l=fr_FR (French) I added a robots.txt to stop Google from crawling any of the language translations: # robots.txt generated at http://www.mcanerin.com User-agent: * Disallow: Disallow: /cgi-bin/ Disallow: /*?l= So any pages containing "?l=" should not be crawled. I checked in GWT using the robots testing tool. It works. But under html improvements the previously crawled language translation URLs remain indexed. The internet says to add a 404 to the header of the removed URLs so the Googles knows to de-index it. I checked to see what my CMS would throw up if I visited one of the URLs that should no longer exist. This URL was listed in GWT under duplicate title tags (One of the reasons I want to scrub up my URLS) https://example.com/reports/view/884?l=vi_VN&l=hy_AM This URL should not exist - I removed the language translations. The page loads when it should not! I played around. I typed example.com?whatever123 It seems that parameters always load as long as everything before the question mark is a real URL. So if Google has indexed all these URLS with parameters how do I remove them? I cannot check if a 404 is being generated because the page always loads because it's a parameter that needs to be de-indexed.

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• cpu use goes to 100% when I lock the screen

  - by gianni

  Whenever I lock the screen, after a certain amount of time, the cpu and the cpu fan use go up near the limit, and it returns back to normal the moment I unlock the screen again (as shown by psensor). How can I find out what process is responsible for this? I've tried with "top -S", and the result is this... PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 2114 me 20 0 326m 104m 40m R 16 2.6 66:50.03 compiz 1234 root 20 0 396m 152m 98m R 6 3.8 20:23.88 Xorg 2204 me 20 0 160m 38m 30m S 4 1.0 0:33.35 yakuake 2446 me 20 0 206m 18m 12m S 4 0.5 6:32.18 psensor 2280 me 20 0 220m 18m 10m S 2 0.5 5:01.60 unity-panel 9138 me 20 0 154m 27m 15m S 2 0.7 0:03.63 plugin-cont 2282 me 20 0 65800 5272 3316 S 1 0.1 4:36.90 hud-service 2143 me 20 0 140m 11m 8352 S 1 0.3 2:50.16 indicator-m 9095 me 20 0 720m 253m 36m S 1 6.4 0:26.34 firefox 2076 me 20 0 7168 3484 828 S 1 0.1 1:46.53 dbus-daemon 2307 me 20 0 55000 5132 3632 S 1 0.1 2:01.55 indicator-a 2557 me 20 0 86328 6028 4576 S 0 0.1 1:44.71 conky 6290 me 20 0 2836 1296 964 R 0 0.0 0:29.64 top 6291 me 20 0 2836 1188 884 S 0 0.0 0:29.49 top 1 root 20 0 3644 1984 1284 S 0 0.0 60:57.76 init specs: ubuntu 12.04 fresh install intel core i5 4gB ram

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• 2D Side scroller collision detection

  - by Shanon Simmonds

  I am trying to do some collision detection between objects and tiles, but the tiles do not have there own x and y position, they are just rendered to the x and y position given, there is an array of integers which has the ids of the tiles to use(which are given from an image and all the different colors are assigned different tiles) int x0 = camera.x / 16; int y0 = camera.y / 16; int x1 = (camera.x + screen.width) / 16; int y1 = (camera.y + screen.height) / 16; for(int y = y0; y < y1; y++) { if(y < 0 || y >= height) continue; // height is the height of the level for(int x = x0; x < x1; x++) { if(x < 0 || x >= width) continue; // width is the width of the level getTile(x, y).render(screen, x * 16, y * 16); } } I tried using the levels getTile method to see if the tile that the object was going to advance to, to see if it was a certain tile, but, it seems to only work in some directions. Any ideas on what I'm doing wrong and fixes would be greatly appreciated. What's wrong is that it doesn't collide properly in every direction and also this is how I tested for a collision in the objects class if(!level.getTile((x + xa) / 16, (y + ya) / 16).isSolid()) { x += xa; y += ya; } EDIT: xa and ya represent the direction as well as the movement, if xa is negative it means the object is moving left, if its positive it is moving right, and same with ya except negative for up, positive for down.

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• Authorization design-pattern / practice?

  - by Lawtonfogle

  On one end, you have users. On the other end, you have activities. I was wondering if there is a best practice to relate the two. The simplest way I can think of is to have every activity have a role, and assign every user every role they need. The problem is that this gets really messy in practice as soon as you go beyond a trivial system. A way I recently designed was to have users who have roles, and roles have privileges, and activities require some combinations of privileges. For the trivial case, this is more complex, but I think it will scale better. But after I implemented it, I felt like it was overkill for the system I had. Another option would be to have users, who have roles, and activities require you to have a certain role to perform with many activities sharing roles. A more complex variant of this would given activities many possible roles, which you only needed one of. And an even more complex variant would be to allow logical statements of role ownership to use an activity (i.e. Must have A and (B exclusive or C) and must not have D). I could continue to list more, but I think this already gives a picture. And many of these have trade offs. But in software design, there are oftentimes solutions, while perhaps not perfect in every possible case, are clearly top of the pack to an extent it isn't even considered opinion based (i.e. how to store passwords, plain text is worse, hashing better, hashing and salt even better, despite the increased complexity of each level) (i.e. 2, Smart UI designs for applications are bad, even if it is subjective as to what the best design is). So, is there a best practice for authorization design that is not purely opinion based/subjective?

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• Impossible to select folders and files with mouse (Ubuntu 12.04)

  - by François

  First-time post for me here (after being a regular reader for two years though) so thank you all for the quality of replies and help provided. My problem is very simple apparently but a tricky one. I just installed the Ubuntu 12.04(1) along with the Gnome3-shell environment on my new pc desktop Acer Aspire X3995 (see config below). Everything work (more or less) so far (I still have problems of sound and disabled 2-fingers gestures with my screen -- which I will have to deal with xconfig settings I think -- though), but the main problem is that I cannot select files/folders with my USB mouse. When I try to double click on them, nothing happen (sometimes one folder or file is selected but then unselected again). Note that the navigation works perfectly from the USB keyboard and from the touch-screen (I am using a 23" wide touch-screen Acer Monitor T231Hbmid). Also, the mouse works perfectly with other menu navigation, with the only difference that the text of certain menus is selected as if I was holding the left click on them. So I assume the problem is only related to the mouse. Needless to say that the usual basic hardware checks have been performed (unplugging, powered-off, etc.). My level is simply "advanced user", meaning that if you provide me with intelligible input I should find my way, but please don't expect too much technical/specific knowledge... :) Please let me know if you need more information on this bug. Now, fingers crossed... and thanks in advance! Ciao, François Config of Acer Aspire X3995: Ubuntu 12.04 / Gnome3-shell environment / Intel Core i5 3450 / nVidia GeForce 605, 1Gb. Screen: Acer Monitor TFT 23" wide T231Hbmid

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• How is software used in critical life-or-death systems tested?

  - by waiwai933

  An airplane, as opposed to, for example, a website, is a system where any failure in certain systems is completely unacceptable, since errors in e.g. flight monitoring can cause the autopilot to malfunction and do a dive. Obviously, this doesn't happen since the brilliant engineers at Boeing and Airbus have checks in the autopilot to make sure it doesn't suddenly decide a dive is a perfectly acceptable and safe maneuver. Or perhaps the computer crashes, and the pilots in the newer fly-by-wire aircraft can no longer actually fly the plane. Of course, there are various safety procedures and redundancies built into these systems to prevent a crash (of both the software and the aircraft). However, on the other hand, it's quite obvious that software isn't perfect—both open source and closed source software do crash regularly, and only the simplest "Hello World" program doesn't fail. How can the engineers who design the software systems in the aeronautic, medical, and other life-or-death industries manage to test their software so that it doesn't fail (and if it does fail, at least fail gracefully)? I'm desperately hoping that you're not all going to go: "Oh, I work for Boeing/Airbus/(some other company) and it's not! Have fun on your next flight/hospital visit."

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• An experiment: unlimited free trial

  - by Alex.Davies

  The .NET Demon team have just implemented an experiment that is quite a break from Red Gate's normal business model. Instead of the tool expiring after the trial period, it now continues to work, but with a new message that appears after the tool has saved you a certain amount of time. The rationale is that a user that stops using .NET Demon because the trial expired isn't doing anyone any good. We'd much rather people continue using it forever, as long as everyone that finds it useful and can afford it still pays for it. Hopefully the message appearing is annoying enough to achieve that, but not for people to uninstall it. It's true that many companies have tried it before with mixed results, but we have a secret weapon. The perfect nag message? The neat thing for .NET Demon is that we can easily measure exactly how much time .NET Demon has saved you, in terms of unnecessary project builds that Visual Studio would have done. When you press F5, the message shows you the time saved, and then makes you wait a shorter time before starting your application. Confronted with the truth about how amazing .NET Demon is, who can do anything but buy it? The real secret though, is that while you wait, .NET Demon gives you entertainment, in the form of a picture of a cute kitten. I've only had time to embed one kitten so far, but the eventual aim is for a random different kitten to appear each time. The psychological health benefits of a dose of kittens in the daily life of the developer are obvious. My only concern is that people will complain after paying for .NET Demon that the kittens are gone.

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• When to use PHP or ASP.NET? [closed]

  - by loyalpenguin

  I have worked extensively in developing web applications using PHP and ASP.NET, but one of the questions that I'm constantly asked by customers is whether to move forward with a php website or an asp.net website. So naturally the first thing that comes to mind is to answer the question like this: PHP is open-source and ASP.NET is from Microsoft. Usually after something like that is said the customer has a blank look on there face. Apparently the fact that one is open source and the other isn't doesn't really faze them. And for good reason, because when I first heard it, it really doesn't tell me much. I know from working with both that each have their + and - when it comes to developing websites. NOTE: THIS QUESTION IS NOT TO QUESTION WHICH IS BETTER TO DEVELOP WITH. THIS QUESTION IS INTENDED TO BE OBJECTIVE. My question is what are differences between ASP.NET and PHP as far as Features Security Extendability Frameworks Average Development Time And when one is generally used over the other for certain types of projects. I am trying to compile a list of facts to be able to compare with the customer what developement platform is better for there particular project. I have done a simple search on google and a ton of articles come up, but the problem is the majority are usually biased towards PHP or ASP.NET. Also if you can maybe provide examples from experience when one technology was more preferable than the other that would be awesome.

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• Font corruption: lines through characters

  - by Aibara Iduas

  I have an odd problem where a one-pixel high white line is displayed through certain letters of text. Almost always only a single character type is affected at once, and only in one font size (though that size can change over time). Most of the time things are fine, but this happens several times a day. It's been happening ever since I upgraded to 10.10. I have noticed few patterns: It might be a problem with Firefox (I'm currently using the nightly ppa, but it occurred in 3.6 also) - but this could just be because I spend most of my time on my computer either at a browser or text editors. I seem to remember it happening with the buttons on various Gnome dialogs. It never occurs in text I've typed, be it an email, url bar, etc. In Firefox it happens across tabs, and the problem remains even if they are closed or reloaded; only restarting the program can fix it. Two examples (in the first, only the larger "r" is corrupted): Any help would be appreciated, thanks.

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• How can rotating release managers improve a project's velocity and stability?

  - by Yannis Rizos

  The Wikipedia article on Parrot VM includes this unreferenced claim: Core committers take turns producing releases in a revolving schedule, where no single committer is responsible for multiple releases in a row. This practice has improved the project's velocity and stability. Parrot's Release Manager role documentation doesn't offer any further insight into the process, and I couldn't find any reference for the claim. My first thoughts were that rotating release managers seems like a good idea, sharing the responsibility between as many people as possible, and having a certain degree of polyphony in releases. Is it, though? Rotating release managers has been proposed for Launchpad, and there were some interesting counterarguments: Release management is something that requires a good understanding of all parts of the code and the authority to make calls under pressure if issues come up during the release itself The less change we can have to the release process the better from an operational perspective Don't really want an engineer to have to learn all this stuff on the job as well as have other things to take care of (regular development responsibilities) Any change of timezones of the releases would need to be approved with the SAs and: I think this would be a great idea (mainly because of my lust for power), but I also think that there should be some way making sure that a release manager doesn't get overwhelmed if something disastrous happens during release week, maybe by have a deputy release manager at the same time (maybe just falling back to Francis or Kiko would be sufficient). The practice doesn't appear to be very common, and the counterarguments seem reasonalbe and convincing. I'm quite confused on how it would improve a project's velocity and stability, is there something I'm missing, or is this just a bad edit on the Wikipedia article? Worth noting that the top voted answer in the related "Is rotating the lead developer a good or bad idea?" question boldly notes: Don't rotate.

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• Old Lock Retrofitted for Wireless and Key-free Entry

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  What do you do if the old key your landlord gave you is poor fit for your apartment’s lock? If you’re the geeky sort, you build a wireless unlocking module to do the work for you. Instructables user Rybitski writes: The key to my apartment never worked quite right because it is a copy of a copy of a copy. I am fairly certain that the dead bolt is original to the building and the property manager seems to have lost the original key years ago. As a result unlocking the door was always a pain. Changing the lock wasn’t an option, but eliminating the need to use a key was. To that end, he built the device seen in the video above. An Arduino Uno drives a servo which in turn opens the deadbolt. The whole thing is controlled by a simple wireless key fob. Hit up the link below for the full build guide including code. Key Fob Deadbolt [via Hack A Day] How To Delete, Move, or Rename Locked Files in Windows HTG Explains: Why Screen Savers Are No Longer Necessary 6 Ways Windows 8 Is More Secure Than Windows 7

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