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• Architecture- Tracking lead origin when data is submitted by a server

  - by Kevin

  I'm looking for some assistance in determining the least complex strategy for tracking leads on an affiliate's website. The idea is to make the affiliate's integration with my application as easy as possible. I've run into theoretical barriers, so i'm here to explore other options. Application Overview: This is a lead aggregation / distribution platform. We will be focusing on the affiliate portion of this website. Essentially affiliates sign up, enter in marketing campaigns and sell us their conversions. Problem to be solved: We want to track a lead's origin and other events on the affiliate site. We want to know what pages, ads, and forms they viewed before they converted. This can easily be solved with pixel tracking. Very straightforward. Theoretical Issues: I thought I would ask affiliates to place the pixel where I could log impressions and set a third party cookie when the pixel is first called. Then I could associate future impressions with this cookie. The problem is that when the visitor converts on the affiliate's site and I receive their information via HTTP POST from the Affiliate's server I wouldn't be able to access the cookie and associate it with the lead record unless the lead lands on my processor via a redirect and is then redirected back to the affiliate's landing page. I don't want to force the affiliates to submit their forms directly to my tracking site, so allowing them to make an HTTP POST from their server side form processor would be ideal. I've considered writing JavaScript to set a First Party cookie but this seems to make things more complicated for the affiliate. I also considered having the affiliate submit the lead's data via a conversion pixel. This seems to be the most ideal scenario so far as almost all pixels are as easy as copy/paste. The only complication comes from the conversion pixel- which would submit all of the lead information and the request would come from the visitor's machine so I could access my third party cookie.

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• How do I prevent my filesystems from being mounted read-only after suspending?

  - by Chas. Owens

  I have Ubuntu 12.04 installed on an SDHC card (only one ext2 partition, no swap). When I suspend using pm-suspend, my root filesystem is mounted read-only. I am currently "fixing" this with the following file: /etc/pm/sleep.d/99_make_disk_rw: #!/bin/sh mount -o remount,rw / But the disk is marked as needing an fsck on reboot. How can I prevent the filesystem from being mounted read-only or whatever is going wrong here. Update: It looks like it is getting mounted read-only because an error occurred. I have changed the mount options for / in /etc/fstab to noatime,nodiratime,errors=continue and it no longer mounts the SDHC card as read-only after it resumes. So the problem is happening when it suspends, not when it resumes as I had thought. I checked /sys/bus/usb/devices/1-4/power/persist and it is set to 1. So the SDHC card shouldn't appear disconnected to the OS (or more accurately it should recover from the disconnection without error). Here seems to be the relevant section of the syslog Sep 10 10:34:23 iubit kernel: [ 748.246226] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] Media Changed Sep 10 10:34:23 iubit kernel: [ 748.246234] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE Sep 10 10:34:23 iubit kernel: [ 748.246243] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] Sense Key : Unit Attention [current] Sep 10 10:34:23 iubit kernel: [ 748.246253] Info fld=0x0 Sep 10 10:34:23 iubit kernel: [ 748.246258] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] Add. Sense: Not ready to ready change, medium may have changed Sep 10 10:34:23 iubit kernel: [ 748.246271] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] CDB: Read(10): 28 00 00 5d 3e f0 00 00 08 00 Sep 10 10:34:23 iubit kernel: [ 748.246291] end_request: I/O error, dev sdb, sector 6110960 Sep 10 10:34:23 iubit kernel: [ 748.247027] EXT2-fs (sdb1): error: ext2_fsync: detected IO error when writing metadata buffers Sep 10 10:34:23 iubit anacron[6954]: Anacron 2.3 started on 2012-09-10 Sep 10 10:34:23 iubit anacron[6954]: Normal exit (0 jobs run) Sep 10 10:34:24 iubit laptop-mode: Laptop mode Sep 10 10:34:24 iubit laptop-mode: enabled, not active Sep 10 10:34:24 iubit kernel: [ 749.055376] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] No Caching mode page present Sep 10 10:34:24 iubit kernel: [ 749.055387] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through Sep 10 10:34:25 iubit anacron[7555]: Anacron 2.3 started on 2012-09-10 Sep 10 10:34:25 iubit anacron[7555]: Normal exit (0 jobs run) Sep 10 10:34:31 iubit kernel: [ 756.090861] EXT2-fs (sdb1): previous I/O error to superblock detected

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• sp_help

  - by David-Betteridge

  One of the nice things about SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) is that you can highlight a table name in a script and press Alt + F1 to perform sp_help on it. Unfortunately I've never been able to use that feature as the majority of the tables in our product belong to a schema other than dbo.    On a long train journey back to York I wondered if I could solve this problem by writing my own replacement for sp_help (which I’ve called sp_help_table_schemas).  My version works by first checking the system tables to find out which schemas the table belongs to SELECT s.Name   --Find the schema FROM sys.schemas s  JOIN sys.tables t on t.schema_id = s.schema_id  WHERE t.name = 'Orders'It then dynamically calls the standard sp_help method but this time supplying the table owner as well.SET @cmd = 'EXEC sp_help ''' + QUOTENAME(@SchemaName) + '.' + QUOTENAME(@ObjectName) + ''' ;' ;           EXEC ( @cmd )Once I had proved the basics worked I wrapped it up into a stored procedure and deployed it to the master database on my laptop.  It was then just a question of going into Tools à Options within SSMS and defining the keyboard short cutA couple of notes You can’t amend the existing Alt+F1 entry to I went with Ctrl+F1.  You need to open new query window for the change to be picked upSo I can now highlight a table name and press Ctrl+F1 The completed script is attached.   Thanks go to Martin Bell who reviewed my stored procedure and give some valuable advice.

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• Design pattern for an automated mechanical test bench

  - by JJS

  Background I have a test fixture with a number of communication/data acquisition devices on it that is used as an end of line test for a product. Because of all the various sensors used in the bench and the need to run the test procedure in near real-time, I'm having a hard time structuring the program to be more friendly to modify later on. For example, a National Instruments USB data acquisition device is used to control an analog output (load) and monitor an analog input (current), a digital scale with a serial data interface measures position, an air pressure gauge with a different serial data interface, and the product is interfaced through a proprietary DLL that handles its own serial communication. The hard part The "real-time" aspect of the program is my biggest tripping point. For example, I need to time how long the product needs to go from position 0 to position 10,000 to the tenth of a second. While it's traveling, I need to ramp up an output of the NI DAQ when it reaches position 6,000 and ramp it down when it reaches position 8,000. This sort of control looks easy from browsing NI's LabVIEW docs but I'm stuck with C# for now. All external communication is done by polling which makes for lots of annoying loops. I've slapped together a loose Producer Consumer model where the Producer thread loops through reading the sensors and sets the outputs. The Consumer thread executes functions containing timed loops that poll the Producer for current data and execute movement commands as required. The UI thread polls both threads for updating some gauges indicating current test progress. Unsure where to start Is there a more appropriate pattern for this type of application? Are there any good resources for writing control loops in software (non-LabVIEW) that interface with external sensors and whatnot?

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• ASP.NET MVC Cookbook &ndash; public review

  - by Andrew Siemer - www.andrewsiemer.com

  I have recently started writing another book.  The topic of this book is ASP.NET MVC.  This book differs from my previous book in that rather than working towards building one project from end to end – this book will demonstrate specific topics from end to end.  It is a recipe book (hence the cookbook name) and will be part of the Packt Publishing cookbook series.  An example recipe in this book might be how to consume JSON, creating a master /details page, jquery modal popups, custom ActionResults, etc.  Basically anything recipe oriented around the topic of ASP.NET MVC might be acceptable.  If you are interested in helping out with the review process you can join the “ASP.NET MVC 2 Cookbook-review” group on Google here: http://groups.google.com/group/aspnet-mvc-2-cookbook-review Currently the suggested TOC for the project is listed.  Also, chapters 1, 2, and most of 8 are posted.  Chapter 5 should be available tonight or tomorrow. In addition to reporting any errors that you might find (much appreciated), I am very interested in hearing about recipes that you want included, expanded, or removed (as being redundant or overly simple).  Any input is appreciated!  Hearing user feedback after the book is complete is a little late in my opinion (unless it is positive feedback of course). Thank you!

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• /etc/resolv.conf nameserver fd00::1

  - by user88631

  My /etc/resolv.conf constantly get a mysterious entry, i run a home network with ipv6 provided by ravd, the interface is auto-configured by Network manager (all name server lookups are lost when this line is first in my /etc/resolv.conf) . Dynamic resolv.conf(5) file for glibc resolver(3) generated by resolvconf(8) **# DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE BY HAND -- YOUR CHANGES WILL BE OVERWRITTEN** nameserver fd00::1 nameserver 192.168.1.1 search home.int When ping is working cat /etc/resolv.conf # Dynamic resolv.conf(5) file for glibc resolver(3) generated by resolvconf(8) # DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE BY HAND -- YOUR CHANGES WILL BE OVERWRITTEN nameserver 192.168.1.1 search home.int So something is putting fd00::1 at start of file, not if I ping6 fd00::1 I get Destination unreachable: Administratively prohibited To diagnose this I ran the router with single cable to connected to ubuntu machine. Ran tcpdump + restarted network on ubuntu. "tcpdump ip6 -e -i eth0 | grep fd00" finds nothing, it's not being advertised via the network.. The only hit I got was when an upstream router refused a connection attempt from the ubuntu machine to fd00::1. I have also switched on debug for network manager & it appears to set the mystery line.. 15:22:14 storage-pc NetworkManager[349]: <info> Activation (eth0) Stage 5 of 5 (IPv4 Commit) complete. 15:22:14 storage-pc NetworkManager[349]: <warn> dnsmasq exited with error: Other problem (5) 15:22:14 storage-pc NetworkManager[349]: <debug> [1346822534.281528] [nm-dns-manager.c:598] update_dns(): updating resolv.conf 15:22:14 storage-pc NetworkManager[349]: <debug> [1346822534.281875] [nm-dns-manager.c:719] update_dns(): DNS: plugin dnsmasq ignored (caching disabled) 15:22:14 storage-pc NetworkManager[349]: <info> ((null)): writing resolv.conf to /sbin/resolvconf 15:22:14 storage-pc dbus[2184]: [system] Successfully activated service 'org.freedesktop.nm_dispatcher' 15:22:14 storage-pc dnsmasq[2875]: reading /etc/resolv.conf 15:22:14 storage-pc dnsmasq[2875]: using nameserver 192.168.1.1#53 15:22:14 storage-pc dnsmasq[2875]: using nameserver fd00::1#53 Any suggestions on how to find out where this comes from?

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• Unity throws SynchronizationLockException while debugging

  - by pjohnson

  I've found Unity to be a great resource for writing unit-testable code, and tests targeting it. Sadly, not all those unit tests work perfectly the first time (TDD notwithstanding), and sometimes it's not even immediately apparent why they're failing. So I use Visual Studio's debugger. I then see SynchronizationLockExceptions thrown by Unity calls, when I never did while running the code without debugging. I hit F5 to continue past these distractions, the line that had the exception appears to have completed normally, and I continue on to what I was trying to debug in the first place.In settings where Unity isn't used extensively, this is just one amongst a handful of annoyances in a tool (Visual Studio) that overall makes my work life much, much easier and more enjoyable. But in larger projects, it can be maddening. Finally it bugged me enough where it was worth researching it.Amongst the first and most helpful Google results was, of course, at Stack Overflow. The first couple answers were extensive but seemed a bit more involved than I could pull off at this stage in the product's lifecycle. A bit more digging showed that the Microsoft team knows about this bug but hasn't prioritized it into any released build yet. SO users jaster and alex-g proposed workarounds that relieved my pain--just go to Debug|Exceptions..., find the SynchronizationLockException, and uncheck it. As others warned, this will skip over SynchronizationLockExceptions in your code that you want to catch, but that wasn't a concern for me in this case. Thanks, guys; I've used that dialog before, but it's been so long I'd forgotten about it.Now if I could just do the same for Microsoft.CSharp.RuntimeBinder.RuntimeBinderException... Until then, F5 it is.

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• How should I host our scalable worker processes?

  - by Pieter Breed

  We are designing a new architecture for an enterprise business. The principles we've followed so far is not to develop what you can (possible buy and) deploy, ie, don't reinvent any wheels. In this way we've decided on CQRS, RabbitMQ, Riak and a bunch of other things. We still need to write /some/ business code though and these will be in the form of worker processes, which will consume commands from a message queue and after any side-effects, produce events onto another message queue. The idea behind this is that via the competing-consumers design we will have a scalable design right out of the box. One option is of writing a management infrastructure that will know how to: deploy code instantiate processes kill processes update configuration etc IE provide fault tolerance and scalability. Also, this is exactly what something like GAE and Heroku does for you, but in a public setting and in our organization, public is bad. My question is, is there an out-of-the-box solution that we can use to host our consumers in? Like a private cloud or private platform-as-a-service. Private Heroku or GAE. Is there some kind of software or software product with which we can do all of these things and thereby get scalability and fault tolerance over our consumers?

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• Raspberry Pi and Java SE: A Platform for the Masses

  - by Jim Connors

  One of the more exciting developments in the embedded systems world has been the announcement and availability of the Raspberry Pi, a very capable computer that is no bigger than a credit card.  At $35 US, initial demand for the device was so significant, that very long back orders quickly ensued. After months of patiently waiting, mine finally arrived.  Those initial growing pains appear to have been fixed, so availability now should be much more reasonable. At a very high level, here are some of the important specs: Broadcom BCM2835 System on a chip (SoC) ARM1176JZFS, with floating point, running at 700MHz Videocore 4 GPU capable of BluRay quality playback 256Mb RAM 2 USB ports and Ethernet Boots from SD card Linux distributions (e.g. Debian) available So what's taking place taking place with respect to the Java platform and Raspberry Pi? A Java SE Embedded binary suitable for the Raspberry Pi is available for download (Arm v6/7) here.  Note, this is based on the armel architecture, a variety of Arm designed to support floating point through a compatibility library that operates on more platforms, but can hamper performance.  In order to use this Java SE binary, select the available Debian distribution for your Raspberry Pi. The more recent Raspbian distribution is based on the armhf (hard float) architecture, which provides for more efficient hardware-based floating point operations.  However armhf is not binary compatible with armel.  As of the writing of this blog, Java SE Embedded binaries are not yet publicly available for the armhf-based Raspbian distro, but as mentioned in Henrik Stahl's blog, an armhf release is in the works. As demonstrated at the just-completed JavaOne 2012 San Francisco event, the graphics processing unit inside the Raspberry Pi is very capable indeed, and makes for an excellent candidate for JavaFX.  As such, plans also call for a Pi-optimized version of JavaFX in a future release too. A thriving community around the Raspberry Pi has developed at light speed, and as evidenced by the packed attendance at Pi-specific sessions at Java One 2012, the interest in Java for this platform is following suit. So stay tuned for more developments...

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• Be careful when installing the Blend Windows Phone 7 Add-In

  - by Laurent Bugnion

  There was a small issue today with the release of the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP (April 2010 Refresh) refresh. The issue is that the Expression Blend Add-in Preview for Windows Phone (April Refresh) is not compatible with Blend 4.0.20408.0, which was the public RC (release candidate). A few days ago, the Blend team released a fix for an issue that was sometimes causing a crash when Blend was starting up. This new release (V4.0.20421.0) was not very well announced however, and many people (including me) did not install it. After all, Blend did not crash at startup of either of my machines, so I didn’t deem necessary to install yet a new RC. However, it is now clear that the Windows Phone 7 Add-In needs this latest-and-greatest version to work. If you have Blend 4.0.20408.0, you won’t be able to work with Windows Phone 7 in Blend. To add to the confusion, the page where you can download V4.0.20421.0 from has an error, and the wrong version number is wrong (at least at the time of writing). Do not let this confuse you. You must download this version and install it. Hopefully this helps clarify some of the confusion… Happy WinPhone7 coding :) Laurent

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• Efficient coding in Visual Studio (or another IDE), with touch typing

  - by cheeesus

  Moving the cursor to another position in code is one of the most frequent actions when coding. I don't write my programs from the beginning to the end, like a letter. However, moving the cursor requires me to move my right hand to the key arrows or to the mouse, which feels like an interruption to my writing rhythm, since I'm using touch typing. I want my hands to rest on the keyboard. It's difficult to explain what I mean, but I think every coder using touch typing knows what I mean. I tried many things, like defining some shortcuts as surrogate arrow keys (Shift+Alt+J, K, L, I), or buying a keyboard with a Trackpoint, Trackpad, or Trackball on it, but I have not yet found a satisfying solution to the problem. What is the best solution you know of, regardless of which IDE you use? Edit: Thank you for your answers. I am using a lot of shortkeys, but I think using a Vim plugin in Visual Studio would interfere too much with the shortkeys I am used to. Also, I have a keyboard with a built-in mouse, but I'm still looking for a better solution.

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• Split a 2D scene in layers or have a z coordinate

  - by Bane

  I am in the process of writing a 2D game engine, and a dilemma emerged. Let me explain the situation... I have a Scene class, to which various objects can be added (Drawable, ParticleEmitter, Light2D, etc), and as this is a 2D scene, things will obviously be drawn over each other. My first thought was that I could have basic add and remove methods, but I soon realized that then there would be no way for the programmer to control the order in which things were drawn. So I can up with two options, each with its pros and cons. A) Would be to split the scene in layers. By that I mean instead of having the scene be a container of objects, have it be a container of layers, which are in turn the containers of objects. B) Would require to have some kind of z-coordinate, and then have the scene sorted so objects with lower z get drawn first. Option A is pretty solid, but the problem is with the lights. In what layer do I add it? Does it work cross-layer? On all bottom layers? And I still need the Z coordinate to calculate the shadow! Option B would require me to change all my code from having Vector2D positions, to some kind of class that inherits from Vector2D and adds a z coordinate to it (I don't want it to be a Vector3D because I still need all the same methods the 2D kind has, just with .z clamped on). Am I missing something? Is there an alternative to these methods? I'm working in Javascript, if that makes a difference.

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• Designing Content-Based ETL Process with .NET and SFDC

  - by Patrick

  As my firm makes the transition to using SFDC as our main operational system, we've spun together a couple of SFDC portals where we can post customer-specific documents to be viewed at will. As such, we've had the need for pseudo-ETL applications to be implemented that are able to extract metadata from the documents our analysts generate internally (most are industry-standard PDFs, XML, or MS Office formats) and place in networked "queue" folders. From there, our applications scoop of the queued documents and upload them to the appropriate SFDC CRM Content Library along with some select pieces of metadata. I've mostly used DbAmp to broker communication with SFDC (DbAmp is a Linked Server provider that allows you to use SQL conventions to interact with your SFDC Org data). I've been able to create [console] applications in C# that work pretty well, and they're usually structured something like this: static void Main() { // Load parameters from app.config. // Get documents from queue. var files = someInterface.GetFiles(someFilterOrRegexPattern); foreach (var file in files) { // Extract metadata from the file. // Validate some attributes of the file; add any validation errors to an in-memory // structure (e.g. List<ValidationErrors>). if (isValid) { // Upload using some wrapper for an ORM an someInterface.Upload(meta.Param1, meta.Param2, ...); } else { // Bounce the file } } // Report any validation errors (via message bus or SMTP or some such). } And that's pretty much it. Most of the time I wrap all these operations in a "Worker" class that takes the needed interfaces as constructor parameters. This approach has worked reasonably well, but I just get this feeling in my gut that there's something awful about it and would love some feedback. Is writing an ETL process as a C# Console app a bad idea? I'm also wondering if there are some design patterns that would be useful in this scenario that I'm clearly overlooking. Thanks in advance!

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• Session serialization in JavaEE environment

  - by Ionut

  Please consider the following scenario: We are working on a JavaEE project for which the scalability starts to become an issue. Up until now, we were able to scale up but this is no longer an option. Therefore we need to consider scaling out and preparing the App for a clustered environment. Our main concern right now is serializing the user sessions. Sadly, we did not consider from the beginning the issue and we are encountering the following excetion: java.io.WriteAbortedException: writing aborted; java.io.NotSerializableException: org.apache.catalina.session.StandardSessionFacade I did some research and this exception is thrown because there are objects stored on the session which does not implement the Serializable interface. Considering that all over the app there are quite a few custom objects which are stored on the session without implementing this interface, it would require a lot of tedious work and dedication to fix all these classes declaration. We will fix all this declarations but the main concern is that, in the future, there may be a developer which will add a non Serializable object on the session and break the session serialization & replication over multiple nodes. As a quick overview of the project, we are developing using a home grown framework based on Struts 1 with the Servlet 3.0 API. This means that at this point, we are using the standard session.getAttribute() and session.setAttribute() to work with the session and the session handling is scattered all over the code base. Besides updating the classes of the objects stored on session and making sure that they implement the Serializable interface, what other measures of precaution should we take in order to ensure a reliable Session replication capability on the Application layer? I know it is a little bit late to consider this but what would be the best practice in this case? Furthermore, are there any other issues we should consider regarding this transition? Thank you in advance!

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• An alternative to a video codec for storing motion changes [on hold]

  - by Andrew Simpson

  I have a 3 dimensional byte array. The 3-d array represents a jpeg image. Each channel/array represents part of the RGB spectrum. I am not interested in retaining black pixels. A black pixel is represented by this atypical arrangement: myarray[0,0,0] =0; myarray[0,0,1] =0; myarray[0,0,2] =0; So, I have flattened this 3d array out to a 1d array by doing this byte[] AFlatArray = new byte[width x height x 3] and then assigning values respective to the coordinate. But like I said I do not want black pixels. So this array has to only contain color pixels with the x,y coordinate. The result I want is to re-represent the image from the i dimension byte array that only contains non-black pixels. How do I do that? It looks like I have to store black pixels as well because of the xy coordinate system. I have tried writing to a binary file but the size of that file is greater than the jpeg file as the jpeg file is compressed. I am using c#.

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• Help in (re)designing my Swing application

  - by Harihar Das

  I have developed a Swing application that controls execution of several script like jobs. I need to display the interim output of the jobs concurrently. I have followed MVC while writing the application. The application is working as expected. But off late I have the following requirements in hand: A few of the script jobs need special user privileges to execute so as to access specialized resources. There seems to be now way in Java to impersonate as a different user while running an application.[examined in this question]. Also trying to run the Swing application as a scheduled task in windows is not helping. Once started the jobs should be running even if the user logs off after starting the jobs. I am thinking of separating the execution logic from the UI and run that as a service; and introduce JMS in between the two layers so as to store/retrieve the interim the output. Note: I need to run this application on windows Any ideas on meeting my requirements will be highly appreciated.

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• Paranoid Encryption

  - by Lord Jaguar

  Call me paranoid, but I really like to keep my stuff secret, but readily available on the cloud. So, asking this question. How safe and reliable is encryption software (e.g., truecrypt)? The reason I ask is that, what is I encrypt my data today with this software and after a couple of years, the software is gone ! What happens to my encrypted data? Is it equally safe to AES encrypt using 7-zip? Will it provide the same level or equivalent level of encryption as truecrypt or other encryption software? (I agree truecrypt will be better because of the container encryption it gives.) And what happens if 7-zip shuts down after 5 years? I am sorry if I am sounding paranoid, but I am coming back to my original question... Is there any application/software independent encryption? Meaning, can I encrypt with one software and decrypt with another so that I will not be dependent on just one vendor? I want my encryption to depend ONLY on the password and NOT on the encryption program/software? The next question, can I write my own program that does AES/stronger encryption when I give it a passphrase, so that I don't need to depend on third party software for encryption? If yes, which language supports the same? Can someone give me a heads up as to where to look for in case of writing my own encryption program?

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• Permanent death in a MUD (think command line MMORPG)

  - by Luke Laupheimer

  I have considered writing a MUD for years, and I have a lot of ideas my friends think are really cool (and that's how I'd hope to get anywhere -- word of mouth). Thing is, there's one thing I have always wanted, that my friends and strangers hated: permanent death. Now, the emotional response I get to this is visceral revulsion, every time. I'm pretty sure I am the only person that wants this, or if I'm not, I'm a tiny minority. Now, the reason I want it is because I want the actions of the players to matter. Unlike a lot of other MUDs, which have a set of static city-states and social institutions etc, I want the things my players do, should I get any, to actually change the situation. And that includes killing people. If you kill someone, you didn't send them to time out, you killed them. What happens when you kill people? They go away. They don't come back in half an hour to smack talk you some more. They're gone. Forever. By making death non-permanent, you make death not matter. It would be similar if a climax to a character's arc is getting a speeding ticket. It cheapens it. Non-permanent death cheapens death. How can I: 1) Convince my players (and random people!) that this is actually a good idea?, or 2) Find some other way to make death and violence matter as much as it does in real life (except within the game, of course) sans character deletion? What alternatives are there out there?

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• Tracking contributions from contributors not using git

  - by alex.jordan

  I have a central git repo located on a server. I have many contributors that are not tech savvy, do not have server access, and do not know anything about git. But they are able to contribute via the project's web side. Each of them logs on via a web browser and contributes to the project. I have set things up so that when they log on, each user's contributions are made into a cloned repo on the server that is specifically for that user. Periodically, I log on to the server, visit each of their repos, and do a git diff to make sure they haven't done anything bad. If all is well, I commit their changes and push them to the central repo. Of course I need to manually look at their changes so that I can add an appropriate commit message. But I would also like to track who made the changes. I am making the commit, and I (and the web server) are the only users that are actually writing anything to the server. I could track this in the commit messages. While this strikes me as wrong, if this is my only option, is there a way to make userx's cloned repo always include "userx: " before each commit message that I add, so that I do not have to remind myself which user's repo I am in? Or even better, is there an easy way for me to make the commit, but in such a way as I credit the user whose cloned repo I am in?

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• Tried teaching myself to program before college, accidently overwhelmed myself, tips?

  - by Gunnar Keith

  I'm sixteen, I'm overly interested in programming, and I'm currently taking IT classes during my mornings in high school. Last year, I tried teaching myself to code. It was quite exciting, but all I did was watch TheNewBoston's videos on YouTube for Python. After his tutorials, I just did research, made some CMD programs, and that's it. After that, I got cocky and got my feet wet in many other languages. Java, C++, C#, Perl, Ruby... and it overwhelmed me. Which made it less fun to code. I want to go to college for a 2 year programming course. And I want to make writing code my profession. But how do you recommend I attack re-learning it all again? Start with Python? Don't even try? Also, I'm not 100% in math, but I'm good friends with a lot of programmers, who say they suck at math, but manage to code just fine. I'm not looking for negative feedback. I just want the proper head-start on things before college.

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• Would it be a good idea to work on letting people add arrays of numbers in javascript?

  - by OneThreeSeven

  I am a very mathematically oriented programmer, and I happen to be doing a lot of java script these days. I am really disappointed in the math aspects of javascript: the Math object is almost a joke because it has so few methods you can't use ^ for exponentiation the + operator is very limited, you cant add array's of numbers or do scalar multiplication on arrays Now I have written some pretty basic extensions to the Math object and have considered writing a library of advanced Math features, amazingly there doesn't seem to be any sort of standard library already out even for calculus, although there is one for vectors and matricies I was able find. The notation for working with vectors and matricies is really bad when you can't use the + operator on arrays, and you cant do scalar multiplication. For example, here is a hideous expression for subtracting two vectors, A - B: Math.vectorAddition(A,Math.scalarMultiplication(-1,B)); I have been looking for some kind of open-source project to contribute to for awhile, and even though my C++ is a bit rusty I would very much like to get into the code for V8 engine and extend the + operator to work on arrays, to get scalar multiplication to work, and possibly to get the ^ operator to work for exponentiation. These things would greatly enhance the utility of any mathematical javascript framework. I really don't know how to get involved in something like the V8 engine other than download the code and start working on it. Of course I'm afraid that since V8 is chrome specific, that without browser cross-compatibility a fundamental change of this type is likely to be rejected for V8. I was hoping someone could either tell me why this is a bad idea, or else give me some pointers about how to proceed at this point to get some kind of approval to add these features. Thanks!

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• Linqpad and StreamInsight

  Slightly before the announcement of StreamInsight being available for Linqpad I downloaded it from here.  I had seen Roman Schindlauer demonstrate it at Teched and it looked a really good tool to do some StreamInsight dev.   You will need .Net 4.0 and StreamInsight installed. Here’s what you need to do after downloading and installing Linqpad. Add a new connection   The next thing we need to do is install and enable the StreamInsight driver.  Choose to view more drivers.   Choose StreamInsight     Select the driver after install     I have chosen the Default Context.     And after all that I can finally get to writing my query.  This is a very simple query where I turn a collection (IEnumerable) into a PointStream.  After doing that I create 30 minute windows over the stream before outputting the count of events in each of those windows to the result window.     I have played with Linqpad only a little but I think it is going to be a really good tool to get ideas developed and quickly.  I have also enabled Autcompletion (paid £25) and I recommend it.

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• Documenting mathematical logic in code

  - by Kiril Raychev

  Sometimes, although not often, I have to include math logic in my code. The concepts used are mostly very simple, but the resulting code is not - a lot of variables with unclear purpose, and some operations with not so obvious intent. I don't mean that the code is unreadable or unmaintainable, just that it's waaaay harder to understand than the actual math problem. I try to comment the parts which are hardest to understand, but there is the same problem as in just coding them - text does not have the expressive power of math. I am looking for a more efficient and easy to understand way of explaining the logic behind some of the complex code, preferably in the code itself. I have considered TeX - writing the documentation and generating it separately from the code. But then I'd have to learn TeX, and the documentation will not be in the code itself. Another thing I thought of is taking a picture of the mathematical notations, equations and diagrams written on paper/whiteboard, and including it in javadoc. Is there a simpler and clearer way? P.S. Giving descriptive names(timeOfFirstEvent instead of t1) to the variables actually makes the code more verbose and even harder too read.

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• Is there a language more general than Lisp?

  - by Jon Purdy

  I've been programming for a long time, and writing in Lisp (well, mostly Scheme) for a little less. My experience in these languages (and other functional languages) has informed my ability to write clean code even with less powerful tools. Lisp-family languages have lovely facilities for implementing every abstraction in common use: S-expressions generalise structure. Macros generalise syntax. Continuations generalise flow control. But I'm dissatisfied. Somehow, I want more. Is there a language that's more general? More powerful? As great as Lisp is, I find it hard to believe no one has come up with anything (dare I say) better. I'm well aware that ordinarily a question like this ought to be closed for its argumentative nature. But there seems to be a broad consensus that Lisp represents the theoretical pinnacle of programming language design. I simply refuse to accept that without some kind of proof. Which I guess amounts to questioning whether the lambda calculus is in fact the ideal abstraction of computation.

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• Managing the Domino Effect (with Tutor Publisher Reports)

  - by [email protected]

  When an organization upgrades their business application or improves a process, it triggers changes that will reverberate throughout an organization, like a falling row of dominoes standing on end. A tangible and repeatable way to communicate change is with updated process documentation. But how do organizations get their arms around all the documents that are impacted by an application upgrade or process improvement? A small change in one place will trigger subsequent changes in other areas. A simple domino chain of questions can go like this. What screens have changed? Do the new screens change the process in place? In what procedural documents are the screens referenced? Who uses the screens and must be notified of the changes? What other documents are affected? Will the change affect current company policy? Tutor Publisher compiles focused, easy to read impact analysis reports of your process documentation library that answer these tough questions. Tutor reports make it easy to quickly target the information and documents that require updating. In turn, the updated documents are used to communicate the change. The Tutor writing methodology and Publisher reports provide organizations the means to confidently keep documentation in sync with the way the business runs. Start managing the domino effect in your organization. Get a grip on it here!

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