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• As a developer, how do I learn sales? [closed]

  - by Dan Abramov

  I quit the company I was working for to pursuit an opportunity as a startup, and I believe in our product. I'm sure it's going to be great if we attract some customers first to keep going. (I don't want funding.) Our product is targeted at private schools and courses, and helps organize the mess other LMSs introduce. The problem is, our team is basically just me and I have very little idea about sales and marketing. I can do reasonably good copywriting but I'm sure I can do better—and being nervous or too techy in a real world conversation with the client doesn't help. I want to get better, in fact, a lot better at negotiating with clients and pitching my product. I did look for some “sales articles” on the web, and a lot of what I found is plain bullshit on SEO-engineered websites promoting books or $5000 courses. What I need instead is a developer's perspective on how to sale a product you think is great. What are typical programmer's mistakes and misconceptions about sales, and how to avoid them? How do you evolve into a reasonably great salesman? I can't believe it's in the mindset and unlearnable. Your own experience, combined with great articles available on the web is most welcome. To Future Readers The question got closed because it is not a good fit for this site. I found some helpful tips in a similar question asked on a sister StackExchange site about startups: I'm a terrible salesperson. What can I do about it?

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• SQL Source Control with Vault Support Officially Released

  - by Ajarn Mark Caldwell

  HOORAY!  It is officially here!  Today, Red-Gate officially released SQL Source Control version 2.1 with support for Vault. While we have been happily and successfully running the beta version (a.k.a. the Early Access release) of Red-Gate SQL Source Control with support for Vault for quite a while, it is good to have the official RTM (or GOLD, or PROD, or whatever you call your “no-longer-in-beta”) release of the product. As a courtesy to those who have not already read the series, allow me to provide you with these links to my previous posts about this fantastic tool. Using SQL Source Control with Fortress or Vault – Part 1 – Introduction and initial thoughts about the tool and source controlling SQL code in general. Using SQL Source Control with Fortress or Vault – Part 2 – Additional details about included features and a few warnings. Source Control and SQL Development – Part 3 – How we did it in the good ol’ days before this product came along. Using SQL Source Control and Vault Professional Part 4 – A few closing thoughts.

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• "Opportunity" to take over maintenance of a small internal website. What should I do?

  - by Dan

  I have been offered an "opportunity" to take over maintenance of a small internal website run by my group that provides information about schedules and photos of events the groups done. My manager sent me the link to the site and checked it out. The site looked clean and neat but loaded in ~5 seconds. I thought this was a little long considering the site really didn't contain a lot of content. This prompted me to take a look under the hood at the pages source code. To my horror it'd been totally hacked together using nested tables! I'm new so I really can't say no to this "opportunity" so what should I do with it? Every fiber of my being feels that the only correct thing to do is over hall the site using CSS, Div's, Span's and any other appropriate tags that a sane/good web developer would used to begin with instead of depending on the render incentive magic of tables. But I'd like to ask programmers with more experienced then me, who have been in this situation. What should I do? Is my only realistic option to leave the horror as is and only adjusting the content as requested? I'm really torn between good development and the corporate reality I'm part of. Is there some kind of middle ground where things can be made better even if they're not perfect? Thanks ahead of time.

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• C++ Iterator lifetime and detecting invalidation

  - by DK.

  Based on what's considered idiomatic in C++11: should an iterator into a custom container survive the container itself being destroyed? should it be possible to detect when an iterator becomes invalidated? are the above conditional on "debug builds" in practice? Details: I've recently been brushing up on my C++ and learning my way around C++11. As part of that, I've been writing an idiomatic wrapper around the uriparser library. Part of this is wrapping the linked list representation of parsed path components. I'm looking for advice on what's idiomatic for containers. One thing that worries me, coming most recently from garbage-collected languages, is ensuring that random objects don't just go disappearing on users if they make a mistake regarding lifetimes. To account for this, both the PathList container and its iterators keep a shared_ptr to the actual internal state object. This ensures that as long as anything pointing into that data exists, so does the data. However, looking at the STL (and lots of searching), it doesn't look like C++ containers guarantee this. I have this horrible suspicion that the expectation is to just let containers be destroyed, invalidating any iterators along with it. std::vector certainly seems to let iterators get invalidated and still (incorrectly) function. What I want to know is: what is expected from "good"/idiomatic C++11 code? Given the shiny new smart pointers, it seems kind of strange that STL allows you to easily blow your legs off by accidentally leaking an iterator. Is using shared_ptr to the backing data an unnecessary inefficiency, a good idea for debugging or something expected that STL just doesn't do? (I'm hoping that grounding this to "idiomatic C++11" avoids charges of subjectivity...)

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• Rule of thumb for cost vs. savings for code re-use

  - by Styler

  Is it a good rule of thumb to always write code for the intent of re-using it somewhere down the road? Or, depending on the size of the component you are writing, is it better practice to design it for re-use when it makes sense with regards to time spent on it. What is a good rule of thumb for spending extra time on analysis and design on project components that have "some probability" of being needed later down the road for other things that may or may need this part. For example, if I have the need for project X to do things A, and B. A definitely needs to be written for re-use because it just makes sense to do so. B is very project specific at the moment, and I can hack it all together in a couple days to finish the project on time and give everyone kudos for being a great team, etc. Or if we say, lets spend a whole friggin' 2 weeks figuring out what project Y/Z might need this thing for and spend a load of extra time on on part B because someday we might need to use it on project Y/Z (where the savings will be realized). I'd imagine a perfect world situation would be a nicely crafted combination of project specific vs. re-use architected components given the project. However some code shops might feel it would be a great idea to write everything for the intention of using it at some point down the road.

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• ADF Essentials - Available for free and certified on GlassFish!

  - by delabassee

  If you are an Oracle customer, you are probably familiar with Oracle ADF (Application Development Framework). If you are not, ADF is, in a nutshell, a Java EE based framework that simplifies the development of enterprise applications. It is the development framework that was used, among other things, to build Oracle Fusion Applications. Oracle has just released ADF Essentials, a free to develop and deploy version of Oracle ADF's core technologies. As a good news never come alone, GlassFish 3.1.2 is now a certified container for ADF Essentials! ADF Essentials leverage core ADF features and includes: Oracle ADF Faces - a set of more than 150 JSF 2.0 rich components that simplify the creation of rich Web user interfaces (charting, data vizualization, advanced tables, drag and drop, touch gesture support, extensive windowing capabilities, etc.) Oracle ADF Controller - an extension of the JSF controller that helps build reusable process flows and provides the ability to create dynamic regions within Web pages. Oracle ADF Binding - an XML-based, meta-data abstraction layer to connect user interfaces to business services. Oracle ADF Business Components – a declaratively-configured layer that simplifies developing business services against relational databases by providing reusable components that implement common design patterns. ADF is a highly declarative framework, it has always had a very good tooling support. Visual development for Oracle ADF Essentials is provided in Oracle JDeveloper 11.1.2.3. Eclispe support is planned for a later OEPE (Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse) release. Here are some relevant links to quickly learn on how to use ADF Essentials on GlassFish: Video : Oracle ADF Essentials Overview and Demo Deploying Oracle ADF Essentials Applications to Glassfish OTN : Oracle ADF Essentials Ressources

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• Logistics of code reuse (OOP)

  - by Ominus

  One of the driving points behind OOP is code reuse. I am curious about the actual logistics of this and how others both in team or solo handle it. For example lets say you have 5 projects you have worked on and between them you have a ton of classes that you think would be useful in other projects. How do you store them? Are they just in the normal project repository or do you break out the relevant classes and have them (as now copies) in another unique source repository that only houses code pieces that are intended to be reused? How do you go about finding or even knowing that there is a good piece of code out there that you should reuse? It's easier if your solo because you remember that you have coded something similar but even then it becomes kind of a stretch. If there is some way that you are storing these pieces of code do you then also have them indexed and searchable by tag or something. I fear that it just boils down to some tribal knowledge that you just know that for situation A i need solution B and we have a good piece of code that already can help here. A bit verbose but I hope you get what I am aiming at. If you think of a better way to make the question clearer please have at it :) TIA!

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• Installing Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  As has become customary when the product team releases a new patch, SP or version I like to document the install. This post seams almost redundant as I had no problems, but I think that is as valuable to other thinking of installing the Service Pack as all the problems that we sometimes get. As per Brian's post I am Installing Visual Studio Team Foundation Server Service Pack 1 first and indeed as this is a single server local deployment I need to install both. If I only install one it will leave the other product broken. Figure: Hopefully this will be more uneventful It takes a little while for your system to be checked to see what components need updating. On my main computer this was pretty quick, but on the laptop it took some time. Figure: There are a lot of components to update With this update also comes an update to .NET as well as many other components. Figure: I downloaded the full 1.5GB’s, but you could do a web install It depends on how good you internet connection is to how long it would take to download, but as I am now in the US I decided not to trust the internet connection speeds. It took around 30-40 minutes to download the full thing which is a little slow. Figure: I did not need to download, but that would increase the install time So on my main computer again this was fast, but again on my netbook this took a little while. Figure: The actual install took around 30-40 minutes (2 hours on netbook) I was pretty impressed with the speed of the install, and as Team Explore is now out of the box with Visual Studio 2010 I don’t get the problem of the SP being installed before Team Explorer and having a disjointed experience Figure: As I suspected, no problems with the install Figure: Checking in Visual Studio shows that all the servicing points were successful This was an easy experience even if the SP was over 1.5GB’s to download Hopefully I will be discovering things that work better for a good while to come, as well as not seeing holes in the product that I had no encountered yet. What were your experiences of installing Visual Studio 2010 Service pack 1?

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• Partner Training for Oracle Business Intelligence Applications 4-Day Bootcamp

  - by Mike.Hallett(at)Oracle-BI&EPM

  Partners 4-Day training from 15th - 18th October 2012, at Oracle Reading (UK) The Oracle Business Intelligence Applications provide pre-built Operational BI solutions for eBusiness Suite, Peoplesoft, Siebel, JDE and SAP; offering out-of-the-box integration. This FREE for Partners 4-Day training will provide attendees with an in-depth working understanding of the architecture, the technical and the functional content of the Oracle Business Intelligence Applications, whilst also providing an understanding of their installation, configuration and extension. The course will cover the following topics: Overview of Oracle Business Intelligence Applications Oracle BI Applications Fundamentals and Features Configuring BI Applications for Oracle E-Business Suite Understanding BI Applications Architecture Fundamentals of BI Applications Security   REGISTER HERE NOW    (acceptance is subject to availability and your place will be confirmed within two weeks: for help see the Partner Registration Guide) Location: Bray Room, at Oracle Corporation UK Ltd Oracle Parkway Thames Valley Park Reading, Berkshire RG6 1RA 15th - 18th October 2012, 4-Days :  9:30 am – 5:00 pm BST Audience The seminar is aimed at BI Consultants and Implementation Consultants within Oracle's Gold and Platinum Partners. Good understanding of basic data warehousing concepts Hands on experience in Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition Hands on experience in Informatica Some understanding of  Oracle BI Applications is required (See Sales & Technical Tutorials for OBI, BI-Apps and Hyperion EPM)  Good understanding of any of the following Oracle EBS modules: General Ledger, Accounts Receivables, Accounts Payables Please note that attendees are required to bring a laptop: 4GB RAM Windows 64 bits 80GB free space in Hard drive or External Device CPU Core 2 Duo or Higher Windows 7, Windows XP, Windows 2003 NOT ALLOWED with Windows Vista An Administrator User For more information please contact [email protected].

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• Nifty GUI Layout

  - by Jason Crosby

  I am new to JME3 game engine but I know Android XML GUI layouts pretty good. I have a simple layout here and I cant figure out what is wrong. Here is my XML code: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <nifty xmlns="http://nifty-gui.sourceforge.net/nifty-1.3.xsd" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://nifty-gui.sourceforge.net/nifty-1.3.xsd http://nifty-gui.sourceforge.net/nifty-1.3.xsd"> <useControls filename="nifty-default-controls.xml" /> <useStyles filename="nifty-default-styles.xml" /> <screen id="start" controller="com.jasoncrosby.game.farkle.gui.MenuScreenGui"> <layer id="layer" backgroundColor="#66CD00" childLayout="center"> <panel id="panel" align="center" valign="center" childLayout="center" visibleToMouse="true"> <image filename="Textures/wood_floor.png" height="95%" width="95%"/> <panel id="panel" align="center" valign="center" childLayout="center" visibleToMouse="true"> <text text="test" font="Interface/Fonts/Eraser.fnt"></text> </panel> </panel> </layer> </screen> Everything works good until I get to displaying the text. I have tried different alignments and tried moving the text into different panels but no matter what I do the text is never in the center of the screen. Its always in the upper left corner so far I can only see the lower right part of the text. I'm sure it has to be something simple but since I'm new to this I'm not noticing anything. Thanks for the help in advance.

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• How to really master ASP.NET MVC?

  - by user1620696

  Some years ago I've worked with web development just using PHP without focus on object orientation and so on. When I knew a little bit about it, and the benefits it brings, I've started moving to ASP.NET MVC. First, I've studied C# in the book Visual C# Step by Step. I've found it a good book for a beginner, and I could learn a lot of this new language with it. Now, when I've came to study ASP.NET MVC, I hadn't so much luck. I've studied on some books that explained MVC well and so on, but then started just saying: "do that, and now that, and then that", and I feel I couldn't really master ASP.NET MVC. I feel this, because when I was reading, I knew how to do the things the book taught, like implementing DI with Ninject and so on, but some time later, without looking at it for some time, I couldn't do it by myself. What I'm trying to say, is that usually I don't know where to start, how to do things in this framework and so on. How can I really master ASP.NET MVC? There is some book, some tutorial series, anything, that can really help with that? I'm pretty happy with the .NET framework, my problem isn't it, my only problem is working with the MVC framework, and applying the techniques from object orientation there. I don't know if this question is on-topic here, but I'm really just looking for some good references, to become better with this framework.

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• Back to Sony

  - by Bunch

  Well I switched back to Sony. After about a year of debating whether or not to keep my XBox 360 or get a PS3 I decided over the weekend to trade in the 360 for a PS3.  I had thought about keeping both but I really don’t need two gaming systems. So far I like it, the graphics are good and the game selection is pretty much the same. For me the game exclusives didn’t sway me one way or the other (i.e. I’ve never played Halo so you can’t miss what you never played). My main reasons for switching were: RROD – I’ve had three and I don’t play a huge amount per week. Free online gaming – I never did buy a Live Gold account even though it is affordable Blu-ray player – Figured this is as good of a time as any to finally get one Netflix streaming with no need for an upgrade to your online account like on XBox MUCH quieter system Finally at a $299 price point All in all the last point was the main one for me. Like a lot of other folks I was really put off by the PS3’s original pricing of $499 and $599. Technorati Tags: Gaming

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• Please help me decide if I should I change jobs [closed]

  - by KindaNewbie

  About me: I am very entrepreneurial and believe I would do well working solo as a consultant and possibly hiring help. I do want to do that at some point. I love to learn and a good challenge. Please help me make this decision! Current job (I am there for about 4 years): Pros: secure job good pay (I guess I am 80 percentile for my level/geographical area) large corporation - main business is not software excellent health insurance for low cost to me, pension, 401k matching, 6 weeks paid time off per year small dev team use of latest technologies (mostly WPF/silverlight) low supervision (I can do personal things all the time) I get to do a lot of moonlighting and my goal was to go solo full-time in a year or so. Cons: small team of non-professional devs 50% of my time I do things I don't enjoy projects are not meaningful to the organization If I left it wouldn't be too hard for them - business would resume as usual. Nobody besides my small team of 3 has any idea about software development whatsoever. Prospect job: Pros: small/agile software company same salary as current job same size dev team but all are very sharp (I would probably be the weakest of the team in the beginning) technology used is outside my comfort zone (latest cool web technolgies such as html5/jquery/...) - I am not a web dev and they know that. ton of learning opportunity Start-up - possibility of stock option/partial ownership of some sort Cons: Small office space - not able to do personal things as often (may be pro) No room for moonlighting less benefits (but salary can compensate for that)

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• Cleaning Up Online Games with Positive Enforcement

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  Anyone who has played online multiplayer games, especially those focused on combat, can attest to how caustic other players can be. League of Legends creators are fighting that, rather successfully, with a positive-reinforcement honor system. The Mary Sue reports: Here’s the background: Six months ago, Riot established Team Player Behavior — affectionately called Team PB&J — a group of experts in psychology, neuroscience, and statistics (already, I am impressed). At the helm is Jeffrey Lin, better known as Dr. Lyte, Riot’s lead designer of social systems. As quoted in a recent article at Polygon: We want to show other companies and other games that it is possible to tackle player behavior, and with certain systems and game design tools, we can shape players to be more positive. Which brings us to the Honor system. Honor is a way for players to reward each other for good behavior. This is divvied up into four categories: Friendly, Helpful, Teamwork, and Honorable Opponent. At the end of a match, players can hand out points to those they deem worthy. These points are reflected on players’ profiles, but do not result in any in-game bonuses or rewards (though this may change in the future). All Honor does is show that you played nicely. 6 Ways Windows 8 Is More Secure Than Windows 7 HTG Explains: Why It’s Good That Your Computer’s RAM Is Full 10 Awesome Improvements For Desktop Users in Windows 8

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• Tell me why I should bother using Linux if it's all about problems getting the OS to install or work properly? [closed]

  - by Vilhjalmur Magnussin

  Why should I spend day's trying to get Ubuntu to either install and/or work properly? I'm using an Acer Timeline X laptop and if I install 10.04 the wireless doesn't work, and if I try installing 11.04 it either won't install, or if it installs it's full of bugs causing my computer to freeze all the time. So please, I'm all open ears. Someone give me one or two good reasons to continue wasting time (in hope it eventually works) before I decide to focus my time on other things like productivity (using Windows like I've been doing successfully the last 10 years). This is the second time I give Ubuntu a try, the first time was in 2010 using Ubuntu Studio and Ubuntu Desktop, and it ended with me shifting back to Windows since I had spent more time getting everything to work than actually working while trying Ubuntu. I really don't understand why it needs to be like this. Why go on trying when all I see is forums full of discussions about problems which people are having difficulties fixing. Or maybe there is just one special type of computer which works well with Linux? Would very much like to know which computer that is. SO please, if it's not to much trouble I really want to here from someone who has something good to say about going through all this trouble just to get a working environment up and running since I already have a working environment up and running called Windows. Thanks, Villi.

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• CMS for coding blog

  - by OrgnlDave

  I've got a server with a LAMP stack and such. I'd like to host a blog-type site (or if there's a free place good for this, that would be cool!) that covers a variety of tutorials, interesting content, etc. There are tons of CMS's out there but if you search for tips on ones that do programming type things well, you get tons of hits about web development. I'd like to know if anyone here has recommendations from actually using a CMS for this type of thing or, short of that, can recommend one - not based on generalities like "Joomla! is great!" I'm looking for the least setup time possible. I'm proficient with CSS and I can design a color scheme, so that's not a big problem. As you can expect, attaching files, pictures, and syntax highlighting are musts (C/C++ ish is good). Ability to group posts, perhaps use tags, etc. would be cool too, but not necessary. As I'm writing this, it almost sounds like it'd be easier to custom-code a small PHP site myself.

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• Shooting Print Quality Pictures with a Camera Phone [Video]

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  Camera phones get a lot of grief for being underpowered but in this video tutorial the crew at SLR Lounge shows how basic technique and a good eye overcome all. Last year over at the photo blog FStoppers they put together a video showing off how you could use the iPhone as a fashion camera–essentially arguing that the camera wasn’t as important as the photographer. A lot of people said “Well yeah, but you had professional models and thousands of dollars in lighting equipment!” in reaction to the video. In turn the crew at SLR Lounge decided to make their own video showing that using only an iPhone camera and two reflectors (as well as an attractive but informal model). It of course helps to have some side kicks to help hold up your reflectors but the point still stands about modern camera phones being perfectly capable of good photos. The SLR Lounge iPhone Photo Shoot – A Follow Up Tribute to The FStoppers [YouTube] What is a Histogram, and How Can I Use it to Improve My Photos?How To Easily Access Your Home Network From Anywhere With DDNSHow To Recover After Your Email Password Is Compromised

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• Large enterprise application - clients wish to use duplicate e-mails addresses?

  - by Alex Key

  I'd like to know people's opinions, reactions to clients and technical work arounds (if applicable), to the issue of an enterprise application where a client wishes to use duplicate e-mail addresses? To clarify, when I say duplicate e-mail addresses I mean within the same client system, having multiple users that have the same e-mail address. So not just using generic e-mail addresses but using the e-mail address of another user. e.g. Bob Jenkins: [email protected] James Jeffery: [email protected] Context To give this some further context, in the e-learning sector it is common that although all staff in an organisation must complete e-learning - they may not have their own e-mail address so they choose to use their managers e-mail address. Albeit against good practice in public sites... it's a requirement we've over and over again where an organisation is split between office based staff and perhaps e.g. staff in a warehouse. Where problem lies Mr Steak, good point, the problem lies in password resets and perhaps in situations where semi-personal information could be sent (not confidential enough to worry about the insecurities of email). Perhaps reminders for specific system actions, which would be confusing for the unintended party to see (if perhaps misreading the e-mail's intended recipient) Possible solutions System knowing the difference between a "for the attention of" and direct to the person e-mails, including this in the body text. Using alternative communication such as SMS Simply not having e-mails sent to people who are not the intended recipient. Providing an e-mail service ourselfs (not really viable for a corporate IT dept) Thoughts?

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• PHP safe_mode is a pain, looking for advice (Ubuntu 12.04 server, public webserver)

  - by user73279

  Maybe askUbuntu isn't the right forum or I haven't provided the right search query but I haven't seen anything in my searching of askUbuntu on PHP safe_mode. I get lots of Windows Safe Mode and Ubuntu Safe Mode results but not PHP safe_mode. So I keep running into one issue after another regarding PHP safe_mode. (I write a lot of my own PHP code for various site maintenance tools and such.) I know safe_mode is going away in the next version of PHP but I still see a fair amount of advice recommending that you leave it enabled. I've recently consolidated from 3 servers down to 1 and at least one of those old servers had safe_mode disabled without any issues. (The lack of issues may have simply been a matter of good luck.) None of the previous 3 gave me this much trouble so I'm guessing so additional php.ini/PHP safe_mode setting was turned on for the new server. I primarily run WordPress for my websites with a few MediaWiki sites sprinkled in. And I am currently running into an issue using WordPress's auto update feature as it doesn't seem to be able to use fopen. WordPress is not relaying the actual error message to me but since I was just able to update the plugins I'm using this is a safe_mode problem. I've had a lot of safe_mode issues since consolidating to this new server. Long story short, the advice I'd seen to use safe_mode was all at least 2 years old. Do I really need it? If I disable PHP safe_mode are there a good set of security measures I should implement - i.e. chmod 640 /var/www/..., add this to your .htaccess, etc - to protect my server/sites? Thanks

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• Procedural content (settlement) generation

  - by instancedName

  I have, lets say, something like a homework or assignment to do. Roughly said I need to write an algorithm (pseudo code is not necessary, just in depth description) of procedure that would generate settlements, environment and a people to populate it with, as part of some larger world generation procedure. The genre of game is not specified, it could be any genre (rpg, strategy, colony simulation etc.) where interacting with large and extensive world is central to the game. Procedure should be called once per settlement. At the time of calling, world generation procedure makes geography, culture and history input available. Output should be map of the village and it's immediate area, and various potential additional information like myths, history, demographic facts etc. Bonus would be quest ant similar stuff, but that not really my focus at the moment. I will leave quality of the output for later when I actually dig little deeper into this topic. I am free to change parameters as long as I have strong explanation for doing so. Setting of the game is undetermined so I am free to use anything that I like the most. Ok, so my actual question is: Can anyone who has some experience in this field of game design recommend me some good literature, or point me in the direction where I should look/reed/study? I'm somewhat experienced game programmer, but I've never been into game design till now so any help will be great. I want to do this assignment as good as I can. As for deadline, it's not strictly set, but lets say I don't want it to take longer then few weeks, one month at worst case.

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• Collision and Graphics integration

  - by Shlomi Atia

  I'm a little confused about the integration between collision and graphics. They both need to share the same position in the world. The most obvious choice is the center of the entity, which is good for bounding volumes and fixed sized sprites. However, for characters with variable height size sprites like this: http://gamemedia.wcgame.ru/data/2011-07-17/game-sprite-sheet.jpg This is no longer good. The character won't align to the ground if I'll draw it from the center. I can just make the sprites the same height, but it will be a waste of memory (the largest sprite is 4 times larger then the smallest one). Even then, this is not an option at all with skeletal sprites like this one: http://user-generated-content.java-gaming.org/img-vault/212a171fc1ebb27ab77608fb9b2dd9bd9205361ce6300b21a7f8d06d025fbbd8.png It seems that the graphics need to be drawn from the ground for characters, but not for other images such as scenery and obstacles. The only solution I could think of was having another position called draw-position, which is the entity center for images, and is the the bottom of the collision volume for characters. Then when I draw relative to that position, it should work properly. I haven't found any references for something like that, so I'm kinda insecure about it. Does anyone knows of a better approach for this problem? Thanks

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• Earmarks of a Professional PHP Programmer

  - by Scotty C.

  I'm a 19 year old student who really REALLY enjoys programming, and I'm hoping to glean from your years of experience here. At present, I'm studying PHP every chance I get, and have been for about 3 years, although I've never taken any formal classes. I'd love to some day be a programmer full time, and make a good career of it. My question to you is this: What do you consider to be the earmarks or traits of a professional programmer? Mainly in the field of PHP, but other, more generalized qualifications are also more than welcome, as I think PHP is more of a hobbyist language and may not be the language of choice in the eyes of potential employers. Please correct me if I'm wrong. Above all, I don't want to wast time on something that isn't worth while. I'm currently feeling pretty confident in my knowledge of PHP as a language, and I know that I could build just about anything I need and have it "work", but I feel sorely lacking in design concepts and code structure. I can even write object oriented code, but in my personal opinion, that isn't worth a hill of beans if it isn't organized well. For this reason, I bought Matt Zandstra's book "PHP Objects, Patterns, and Practice" and have been reading that a little every day. Anyway, I'm starting to digress a little here, so back to the original question. What advice would you give to an aspiring programmer who wants to make an impact in this field? Also, on a side note, I've been working on a project with a friend of mine that would give a fairly good idea of where I'm at coding wise. I'm gonna give a link, I don't want anyone to feel as though I'm pushing or spamming here, so don't click it if you don't want to. But if you are interested on giving some feedback there as well, you can see the code on github. I'm known as The Craw there. https://github.com/PureChat/PureChat--Beta-/tree/

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• How do you communicate improvements in tools and process to the development team?

  - by birryree

  Hi everyone, My team does a lot of internal tooling and infrastructure work - you can think of us as a small scale version of the teams Facebook, Etsy, Netflix, etc. who build all the infrastructure for scaling their services up to thousands/tens of thousands of servers and supporting millions of users. Lately, we've been running full steam ahead improving much of the tools we use internally, like tools for automatically creating new servers, setting up new application instances, etc. An end result of this has been decreased developer frustration, but increased 'ignorance' by most of the developer team about how to use our tools correctly and effectively. More often than not, my team will be asked by other teams to help them use the tools. Solutions we've thought up or things already in place: All our code is relatively simple and self-explanatory, with good comments where necessary, so developers could read the scripts. Counterargument: You can guess this isn't a particularly good idea, having people read our tools' code to figure out how to use it. All our code is committed to Subversion with very detailed commit messages about changes, developers could read the commit emails. Counterargument: Expect the developers to read all our commits? Ludicrous. Wiki - we have an internal company wiki, that we try to maintain with up to date information, but as we are moving so fast, the wiki has to keep pace as well. Counterargument: As mentioned, we move fast in my team, as more improvements on our tools are added daily. Again still relies on people to read something that might change constantly. Email the team? We could email the team when we have a glut of improvements to communicate. So as you can all see, we are trying to find new ideas, and explore options we haven't thought of yet. Anyone else ever been in a similar situation and have some guidance?

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• Mock the window.setTimeout in a Jasmine test to avoid waiting

  - by Aligned

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/Aligned/archive/2014/08/21/mock-the-window.settimeout-in-a-jasmine-test-to-avoid-waiting.aspxJasmine has a clock mocking feature, but I was unable to make it work in a function that I’m calling and want to test. The example only shows using clock for a setTimeout in the spec tests and I couldn’t find a good example. Here is my current and slightly limited approach.   If we have a method we want to test: var test = function(){ var self = this; self.timeoutWasCalled = false; self.testWithTimeout = function(){ window.setTimeout(function(){ self.timeoutWasCalled = true; }, 6000); }; }; Here’s my testing code: var realWindowSetTimeout = window.setTimeout; describe('test a method that uses setTimeout', function(){ var testObject; beforeEach(function () { // force setTimeout to be called right away, no matter what time they specify jasmine.getGlobal().setTimeout = function (funcToCall, millis) { funcToCall(); }; testObject = new test(); }); afterEach(function() { jasmine.getGlobal().setTimeout = realWindowSetTimeout; }); it('should call the method right away', function(){ testObject.testWithTimeout(); expect(testObject.timeoutWasCalled).toBeTruthy(); }); }); I got a good pointer from Andreas in this StackOverflow question. This would also work for window.setInterval. Other possible approaches: create a wrapper module of setTimeout and setInterval methods that can be mocked. This can be mocked with RequireJS or passed into the constructor. pass the window.setTimeout function into the method (this could get messy)

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• Using 12.04 installation as a persistent pen drive

  - by Cawas

  Disclaimer: I aim to build a self contained pen drive with my application inside, so no matter about updates. Maybe I'm looking at the wrong linux distribution to do this... Please let me know if you think so. I've tried knoppix and even lubuntu, but they don't come with enough "drivers" for Unity3D to work. Creating a custom live persistent pen drive is a real pain and I'm trying for 1 day without any success. Sure, being able to do it would probably be ideal and occupy the minimum space. Using the installation image on a pen drive, however, is good enough and is really easy to create. We can even do it from any OS, using UNetBootin, LiLi USB Creator or some other methods. Straight forward. Some recommend installing it on a pen drive. But that requires a lot of space and, I believe, it won't behave as good as something meant to be installed on a usb disk, because of memory management. So, there are only a few negative points on using the installation image that I can think of. Question here, is how to remove those drawbacks: Having to press "Try Ubuntu". That's the big one. Couldn't find how. Unable to load everything on memory and keep on running without the pen drive (like this) Unable to remove "Install Ubuntu 12.04 LTS" app. Setting the ISO to use maximum amount of space for the OS will leave pen drive with zero space left and any file saved within it from ubuntu is inaccessible from the outside (when plugin the pen drive and not booting from it). Am I missing something? Can those points be fixed?

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