Search Results

Search found 23792 results on 952 pages for 'void pointers'.

Page 332/952 | < Previous Page | 328 329 330 331 332 333 334 335 336 337 338 339  | Next Page >

• Creating the concept of Time

  - by Jamie Dixon

  So I've reached the point in my exploration of gaming where I'd like to impliment the concept of time into my little demo I've been building. What are some common methodologies for creating the concept of time passing within a game? My thoughts so far: My game loop tendes to spend a fair bit of time sitting around waiting or user input so any time system will likely need to be run in a seperate thread. What I've currently done is create a BackgroundWorker passing in a method that contains a loop triggering every second. This is working fine and I can output information to the console from here etc. Inside this loop I have a DateTime object that is incrimented by 1 minute for every realtime second. (the game begins in the year 01/01/01) Is this a standard way of acheiving this result or are there more tried and tested methods? I'm also curious about how to go about performing time based actions (reducing player energy, moving entities around the game board, life/death etc). Thanks for any pointers or advice. I've searched around however I'm not familiar enough with the terms and so my searches are yeilding little result on this one.

  Read the article

• Choosing a web development framework?

  - by Bob

  So, I've sort of reached a point where I want to start developing a website. Originally, I planned to build said website using PHP and CodeIgniter, I'm familiar with both, but, truth be told, I'm not too fond of either. I find they just get rather messy, CodeIgniter helps somewhat, but no matter what, it seems that most PHP comes out more obfuscated than it has to be. Anyways, I've come to the point where I want to either use Python or Ruby. I'm familiar in both, though more so towards Python, but I've never done any web development in them. I'll take the necessary time to learn the frameworks (and further my knowledge in the language of my choosing), but I need to choose one. I don't like either language more than the other, they both have their benefits... However, since I've never done any web development with either language, I was hoping that you guys could give me some pointers. What are the available frameworks for each language? What do you recommend and why? Note: I've primarily looked into Rails and Django - but I'm still open to others. I'm looking for one that will work for just one (or maybe two) developers. It has to be fairly easy to learn (but I will take the time to learn it). Also, I'd like it to easily support clean code and agile development.

  Read the article

• Is there a measure of code rot?

  - by DarenW

  I'm dealing, again, with a messy C++ application, tons of classes with confusing names, objects have pointers into each other and all over, longwinded Boost and STL data types, etc. (Pause and consider your favorite terror of messy legacy code. We probably have it.) The phrase "code rot" oft comes to mind when I work on this project. Is there a quantitative way to measure code rot? I wouldn't expect anything highly meaningful or scientific, since no other measure of code productivity or quality is so fine. I'm not looking for a mere opposite of measures of code quality, but specifically a measure of how many bad things happened after a series of maintenance software "engineers" have had turns hacking at the code. A general measure applying to any language, or many languages, would be great. If there's no such thing, at least for C++, which is a better than average language for creating messes. Maybe something involving a measure of topology of how objects connect during runtime, a count of chunks of commented out code, how mane files a typical variable's usage is scattered over, I don't know... but surely now, a decade into the 21st Century, someone has attempted to define some sort of rot measure. It would be especially interesting to automate a series of svn checkouts, measure the "rottenosity" of each, and plot the decay over time.

  Read the article

• UI message passing programming paradigm

  - by Ronald Wildenberg

  I recently (about two months ago) read an article that explained some user interface paradigm that I can't remember the name of and I also can't find the article anymore. The paradigm allows for decoupling the user interface and backend through message passing (via some queueing implementation). So each user action results in a message being pased to the backend. The user interface is then updated to inform the user that his request is being processed. The assumption is that a user interface is stale by definition. When you read data from some store into memory, it is stale because another transaction may be updating the same data already. If you assume this, it makes no sense to try to represent the 'current' database state in the user interface (so the delay introduced by passing messages to a backend doesn't matter). If I remember correctly, the article also mentioned a read-optimized data store for rendering the user interface. The article assumed a high-traffic web application. A primary reason for using a message queue communicating with the backend is performance: returning control to the user as soon as possible. Updating backend stores is handled by another process and eventually these changes also become visible to the user. I hope I have explained accurately enough what I'm looking for. If someone can provide some pointers to what I'm looking for, thanks very much in advance.

  Read the article

• How should I configure TRIM Support for LVM logical volumes?

  - by Zack Perry

  I am setting up a notebook for software demo purpose. The machine has a Intel Core i7 CPU, 8GB RAM, a 128GB SSD, and runs Ubuntu 12.04 LTS 64bit desktop. As it is, the SSD is configured to have a single volume group, with /boot, /swap, and / all in their respective logical volumes. They collectively consume 30GB space. I plan to use the remaining for logical volumes for KVM guests, all run Ubuntu 12.04 Server I would like to ensure that the SSD is utilized optimally. Although on this site, there are some great info about setting up TRIM support for file system setups that do not involve LVM, I have not found explicit guide regarding my planned setup. I did found this page which talks about adding issue_discards in /etc/lvm/lvm.conf. But in said file on my machine, I didn't find the cited content. I double-checked man lvm.conf(5), didn't see any mentioning of this option either. Thus, I'm not sure what to do. Furthermore, even say adding the option is the right thing to do, should I in my machine's /etc/fstab still add mount options such as noatime etc? Any tips, pointers, and/or further guidance are greatly appreciated.

  Read the article

• Mirror using apt-mirror and exclud certain sections/categories

  - by Onitlikesonic

  I'm currently using apt-mirror to create a local mirror of the debian repositories. As the mirrored repositories will be used only by machines destined to be headless servers and as an effort to reduce the current mirroring size (around 75GB), categories like games and possibly others will never be needed. How can I go about specifying (on the mirror.list perhaps?) what sections/categories I want to be excluded from the mirroring? Maybe a bit subjective, but apart from games what other sections/categories could be "safely" ignored from the mirroring for my environment purposes? My mirror.list looks as below since all the machines are using precise. # MAIN deb-amd64 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise main restricted universe multiverse deb-i386 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise main restricted universe multiverse # SECURITY deb-amd64 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise-security main restricted universe multiverse deb-i386 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise-security main restricted universe multiverse Also, what others would you recommend adding to the list to be mirrored for a relatively stable environment? Again I understand this is subjective, just looking for some pointers. Much appreciated in advance

  Read the article

• How would you refactor nested IF Statements?

  - by saunderl

  I was cruising around the programming blogosphere when I happened upon this post about GOTO's: http://giuliozambon.blogspot.com/2010/12/programmers-tabu.html Here the writer talks about how "one must come to the conclusion that there are situations where GOTOs make for more readable and more maintainable code" and then goes on to show an example similar to this: if (Check#1) { CodeBlock#1 if (Check#2) { CodeBlock#2 if (Check#3) { CodeBlock#3 if (Check#4) { CodeBlock#4 if (Check#5) { CodeBlock#5 if (Check#6) { CodeBlock#6 if (Check#7) { CodeBlock#7 } else { rest - of - the - program } } } } } } } The writer then proposes that using GOTO's would make this code much easier to read and maintain. I personally can think of at least 3 different ways to flatten it out and make this code more readable without resorting to flow-breaking GOTO's. Here are my two favorites. 1 - Nested Small Functions. Take each if and its code block and turn it into a function. If the boolean check fails, just return. If it passes, then call the next function in the chain. (Boy, that sounds a lot like recursion, could you do it in a single loop with function pointers?) 2 - Sentinal Variable. To me this is the easyest. Just use a blnContinueProcessing variable and check to see if it is still true in your if check. Then if the check fails, set the variable to false. How many different ways can this type of coding problem be refactored to reduce nesting and increase maintainability?

  Read the article

• Disk space suddenly 100% used?

  - by dannymcc

  I'm trying to identify why, suddenly, 100% of our disk space is in use. I have already rebooted but the issue persists. Here are the outputs of some commands that are showing some strange (for me) results: danny@hydrogen:~$ df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/cciss/c0d0p1 130G 122G 949M 100% / none 1.9G 196K 1.9G 1% /dev none 2.0G 0 2.0G 0% /dev/shm none 2.0G 40K 2.0G 1% /var/run none 2.0G 0 2.0G 0% /var/lock none 2.0G 0 2.0G 0% /lib/init/rw danny@hydrogen:/$ sudo du -chs / du: cannot access `/proc/1662/task/1662/fd/4': No such file or directory du: cannot access `/proc/1662/task/1662/fdinfo/4': No such file or directory du: cannot access `/proc/1662/fd/4': No such file or directory du: cannot access `/proc/1662/fdinfo/4': No such file or directory danny@hydrogen:/$ df Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/cciss/c0d0p1 135342296 128144108 323104 100% / none 1991336 196 1991140 1% /dev none 1995788 0 1995788 0% /dev/shm none 1995788 40 1995748 1% /var/run none 1995788 0 1995788 0% /var/lock none 1995788 0 1995788 0% /lib/init/rw danny@hydrogen:/$ mount /dev/cciss/c0d0p1 on / type ext4 (rw,errors=remount-ro) proc on /proc type proc (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev) none on /sys type sysfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev) none on /sys/fs/fuse/connections type fusectl (rw) none on /sys/kernel/debug type debugfs (rw) none on /sys/kernel/security type securityfs (rw) none on /dev type devtmpfs (rw,mode=0755) none on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,noexec,nosuid,gid=5,mode=0620) none on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev) none on /var/run type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,mode=0755) none on /var/lock type tmpfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev) none on /lib/init/rw type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,mode=0755) danny@hydrogen:/$ sudo du -h --max-depth=1 634M ./premvet_sync 5.6M ./etc 4.0K ./opt 16K ./lost+found 7.4M ./bin 623M ./lib 196K ./dev 0 ./sys 4.0K ./srv 4.0K ./cdrom 8.0K ./media 52K ./tmp ... it hangs for ages here..... The server is running Ubuntu 10.04.4 LTS. System load: 2.85 Temperature: 8 C Usage of /: 94.7% of 129.07GB Processes: 132 Memory usage: 39% Users logged in: 0 Swap usage: 0% IP address for eth0: 192.168.1.124 => / is using 94.7% of 129.07GB I'm struggling to comprehend why this is happening! Any pointers would be appreciated.

  Read the article

• Good resources for learning Rails?

  - by Bobby Tables

  I just finished working through Peter Cooper's "Beginning Ruby". So now I've got a reasonable grounding in the Ruby language and would like to move onto learning Rails. This question's answers give some good pointers, but I'd like to hear some specific reviews of books and online materials. I generally learn best by working through books with good practical/technical examples AND some passive reading content that breaks up the study between practical and reading sessions (this is what made "Beginning Ruby" great for me), but I'm worried that RoR is evolving fast and that any printed book I order might be obsolete by the time I get it and work through it. Is this a fair worry? Or can anyone recommend a good Rails 3 book that should be up to date at least for the next year or so? Also, I had a brief look at some of the online resources from the other questions, and Rails for Zombies seems to get a lot of praise. Has anyone here actually used it as their introductory guide to Rails? Basically I'd like to hear first-hand accounts of people who went through this "Ruby-to-Rails" learning phase recently and which materials were useful to you.

  Read the article

• Procedural... house with rooms generator

  - by pek

  I've been looking at some algorithms and articles about procedurally generating a dungeon. The problem is, I'm trying to generate a house with rooms, and they don't seem to fit my requirements. For one, dungeons have corridors, where houses have halls. And while initially they might seem the same, a hall is nothing more than the area that isn't a room, whereas a corridor is specifically designed to connect one area to another. Another important difference with a house is that you have a specific width and height, and you have to fill the entire thing with rooms and halls, whereas with a dungeon, there is empty space. I think halls in a house is something in between a dungeon corridor (gets you to other rooms) and an empty space in the dungeon (it's not explicitly defined in code). More specifically, the requirements are: There is a set of predefined rooms I cannot create walls and doors on the fly. Rooms can be rotated but not resized Again, because I have a predefined set of rooms, I can only rotate them, not resize them. The house dimensions are set and has to be entirely filled with rooms (or halls) I.e. I want to fill a 14x20 house with the available rooms making sure there is no empty space. Here are some images to make this a little more clear: As you can see, in the house, the "empty space" is still walkable and it gets you from one room to another. So, having said all this, maybe a house is just a really really tightly packed dungeon with corridors. Or it's something easier than a dungeon. Maybe there is something out there and I haven't found it because I don't really know what to search for. This is where I'd like your help: could you give me pointers on how to design this algorithm? Any thoughts on what steps it will take? If you have created a dungeon generator, how would you modify it to fit my requirements? You can be as specific or as generic as you like. I'm looking to pick your brains, really.

  Read the article

• High-Level Application Architecture Question

  - by Jesse Bunch

  So I'm really wanting to improve how I architect the software I code. I want to focus on maintainability and clean code. As you might guess, I've been reading a lot of resources on this topic and all it's doing is making it harder for me to settle on an architecture because I can never tell if my design is the one that the more experienced programmer would've chosen. So I have these requirements: I should connect to one vendor and download form submissions from their API. We'll call them the CompanyA. I should then map those submissions to a schema fit for submitting to another vendor for integration with the email service provider. We'll call them the CompanyB. I should then submit those responses to the ESP (CompanyB) and then instruct the ESP to send that submitter an email. So basically, I'm copying data from one web service to another and then performing an action at the latter web service. I've identified a couple high-level services: The service that downloads data from CompanyA. I called this the CompanyAIntegrator. The service that submits the data to CompanyB. I called this CompanyBIntegrator. So my questions are these: Is this a good design? I've tried to separate the concerns and am planning to use the facade pattern to make the integrators interchangeable if the vendors change in the future. Are my naming conventions accurate and meaningful to you (who knows nothing specific of the project)? Now that I have these services, where should I do the work of taking output from the CompanyAIntegrator and getting it in the format for input to the CompanyBIntegrator? Is this OK to be done in main()? Do you have any general pointers on how you'd code something like this? I imagine this scenario is common to us engineers---especially those working in agencies. Thanks for any help you can give. Learning how to architect well is really mind-cluttering.

  Read the article

• Keeping multiple root directories in a single partition

  - by intuited

  I'm working out a partition scheme for a new install. I'd like to keep the root filesystem fairly small and static, so that I can use LVM snapshots to do backups without having to allocate a ton of space for the snapshot. However, I'd also like to keep the number of total partitions small. Even with LVM, there's inevitably some wasted space and it's still annoying and vaguely dangerous to allocate more. So there seem to be a couple of different options: Have the partition that will contain bulky, variable files, like /srv, /var, and /home, be the root partition, and arrange for the core system state — /etc, /usr, /lib, etc. — to live in a second partition. These files can (I think) be backed up using a different backup scheme, and I don't think LVM snapshots will be necessary for them. The opposite: putting the big variable directories on the second partition, and having the essential system directories live on the root FS. Either of these options require that certain directories be pointers of some variety to subdirectories of a second partition. I'm aware of two different ways to do this: symlinks and bind-mounts. Is one better than the other for this purpose? Is there another option? Do any of the various Ubuntu installation media/strategies support this style of partition layout?

  Read the article

• Libgdx Box2d createfixture crashes vm intermittently

  - by user45021

  I have a hard to debug problem. I have a Box2D game which creates a wheeled vehicle. I want the vehicle body to reflect when it goes from moving left to moving right. to do this i set a flag in a changelistener on a button and then in update method i destroy and recreate the body facing the other way. it works fine most of the time but if i flip the vehicle several times quickly JVM crashes. no errors nothing in log. i added system.out.prints and the errors occur in the routine that instantiates the new body and before anything gets deleted/removed so i don't think the UI is trying to access null pointers. and if it was it should throw an error. M the crash seems to be at createFixture statements. but the work most of the first time. I tried debugging but the error doesn't happen much when the flips are slow. in any case createFixture drops fairly quickly into jni. Is this a Box2D bug? Is GC the issue? From Mission Control I see the GC is collecting on a period of ooh maybe 5s and flipping slower than that mostly works. how do i debug this? i am win7 64bit with 64bit at and jdk7 64bit. libgdx-0.9.9 and sometimes libgdx-nightly-20140215.

  Read the article

• Implementing MVC pattern in SWT application

  - by Pradeep Simha

  I am developing an SWT application (it's basically an Eclipse plugin, so I need to use SWT). Currently my design is as follows: Model: In model, I have POJOs which represents the actual fields in views. View: It is a dumb layer, it contains just UI and contains no logic (not even event handlers) Controller: It acts as a mediator b/w those two layers. Also it is responsible for creating view layer, handling events etc. Basically I have created all of the controls in view as a static like this public static Button btnLogin and in controller I have a code like this: public void createLoginView(Composite comp) { LoginFormView.createView(comp); //This createView method is in view layer ie LoginFormView LoginFormView.btnLogin.addSelectionListener(new SelectionListener() { //Code goes here }); } Similalrly I have done for other views and controls. So that in main class and other classes I am calling just createLoginView of controller. I am doing similar thing for other views. So my question, is what I am doing is correct? Is this design good? Or I should have followed any other approach. Since I am new to SWT and Eclipse plugin development (basically I am Java EE developer having 4+ years of exp). Any tips/pointers would be appreciated.

  Read the article

• Learning to be a good developer: what parts can you skip over?

  - by Andrew M

  I have set myself the goal of becoming a decent developer by this time next year. By this I mean full experience of the development 'lifecycle,' a few good apps/sites/webapps under my belt, and most importantly being able to work at a steady pace without getting sidelined for hours by some should-know-this-already technique. I'm not starting from scratch. I've written a lot of html/css, SQL, javascript, python and VB.net, and studied other languages like C and Java. I know about things like OOP, design patterns, TDD, complexity, computational linguistics, pointers/references, functional programming, and other academic/theoretical matters. It's just I can't say I've really done these things yet. So I want to get up to speed, and I want to know what things I can leave till a later date. For instance, studying algorithms and the maths behind them is interesting and all, but so far I've hardly needed to write anything but the most basic nested loops. Investigating Assembly to have a clearer picture of low-level operations would be cool... but I imagine rarely infringes on daily work. On the other hand, looking at a functional programming language might help me write programs that are more comprehensible and less prone to hidden failures (at the moment I'm finding the biggest difficulty is when the complexity of the app exceeds my capacity to understand it - for instance passing data around was fine... until I had to start doing it with AJAX, which was a painful step up). I could spend time working through case studies of design patterns, but I'm not sure how many of them get used in 'real life.' I'm a programmer with basic abilities - what skills should I focus on developing? (also my Unix skills are very weak, and also knowledge of Windows configuration... not sure how much time I should spend on that)

  Read the article

• State of the art Culling and Batching techniques in rendering

  - by Kristian Skarseth

  I'm currently working with upgrading and restructuring an OpenGL render engine. The engine is used for visualising large scenes of architectural data (buildings with interior), and the amount of objects can become rather large. As is the case with any building, there is a lot of occluded objects within walls, and you naturally only see the objects that are in the same room as you, or the exterior if you are on the outside. This leaves a large number of objects that should be occluded through occlusion culling and frustum culling. At the same time there is a lot of repetative geometry that can be batched in renderbatches, and also a lot of objects that can be rendered with instanced rendering. The way I see it, it can be difficult to combine renderbatching and culling in an optimal fashion. If you batch too many objects in the same VBO it's difficult to cull the objects on the CPU in order to skip rendering that batch. At the same time if you skip the culling on the cpu, a lot of objects will be processed by the GPU while they are not visible. If you skip batching copletely in order to more easily cull on the CPU, there will be an unwanted high amount of render calls. I have done some research into existing techniques and theories as to how these problems are solved in modern graphics, but I have not been able to find any concrete solution. An idea a colleague and me came up with was restricting batches to objects relatively close to eachother e.g all chairs in a room or within a radius of n meeters. This could be simplified and optimized through use of oct-trees. Does anyone have any pointers to techniques used for scene managment, culling, batching etc in state of the art modern graphics engines?

  Read the article

• Learning to code first game, few questions on basic game development and 3D

  - by ProgrammerByDay

  I've been programming for a while, and I'm concurrently learning how to make a basic game and slimdx, and wanted to talk to someone to hopefully get a few pointers. I've read that Tetris is the "Hello, world" of game programming, which made sense to me, so I decided to give it a shot. I've been able to code up a basic version in a few hours, which I'm quite happy with, but I had a few questions about 3D programming. Right now I'm using Direct3D to do display the blocks without any textures (just colored squares). I have a data structure (2d array of bytes, where each byte denotes the presence of a block and its color) which is the "game board," and on every render() call I create a new vertex buffer of the existing squares in the game board, and draw those primitives. This feels very inefficient, and I wondering what would be the idiomatic way of doing this in a 3D world, with matrix/rotations/translation operations. I know 3D is overkill for such a project, but I want to learn any 3d concepts that I can while I'm doing it. I understand that what you'd usually want to do is keep the same vertices/vertex buffers but manipulate them with matrices to achieve rotations/translations, etc. To do so, I assume what would happen is I'd have one vertex buffer for the "active" piece, since that'll be constantly rotated and moved, and have one vertex buffer for the frozen pieces on the bottom of the board, which is pretty much stationary, but will need to be changed/recreated when the active piece becomes frozen. Right now I'm just clearing and redrawing on every render call, which seems like the easiest way to do things, although I wonder if there's a more efficient way to deal with changes. Obviously there are a lot of questions I'm asking here, but if you can even just point me a step or two ahead in terms of how I should be thinking, it'd be great. Thanks

  Read the article

• How do I express subtle relationships in my data?

  - by Chuck H

  "A" is related to "B" and "C". How do I show that "B" and "C" might, by this context, be related as well? Example: Here are a few headlines about a recent Broadway play: 1 - David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross, Starring Al Pacino, Opens on Broadway 2 - Al Pacino in 'Glengarry Glen Ross': What did the critics think? 3 - Al Pacino earns lackluster reviews for Broadway turn 4 - Theater Review: Glengarry Glen Ross Is Selling Its Stars Hard 5 - Glengarry Glen Ross; Hey, Who Killed the Klieg Lights? Problem: Running a fuzzy-string match over these records will establish some relationships, but not others, even though a human reader could pick them out from context in much larger datasets. How do I find the relationship that suggests #3 is related to #4? Both of them can be easily connected to #1, but not to each other. Is there a (Googlable) name for this kind of data or structure? What kind of algorithm am I looking for? Goal: Given 1,000 headlines, a system that automatically suggests that these 5 items are all probably about the same thing. To be honest, it's been so long since I've programmed I'm at a loss how to properly articulate this problem. (I don't know what I don't know, if that makes sense). This is a personal project and I'm writing it in Python. Thanks in advance for any help, advice, and pointers!

  Read the article

• Is this an apt-get issue or network issue?

  - by zharvey

  I just installed my first Ubuntu server (12.04) instance and immediately am noticing a few things: Running apt-get install or update fails (see below) Running ifconfig produces peculiar IP addresses starting with 10.x.x.x and my router does not see the server at all in its "Attached Devices" page (its a consumer grade Netgear) When I run apt-get I get 50+ of the following errors: Failed to fetch <some-http-url. Temporary failure resolving <blah.ubuntu.com I read up on this error for 12.04, and found some similar posts on this forum and on serverfault that recommended going into /etc/resolv.conf and adding an entry: nameserver 8.8.8.8 To my surprise, I found that /etc/resolve.conf was a symlink pointing to somewhere else and I had to delete it first, then create a new one with the entry indicated above. I restarted the server and tried running apt-get again: same results. How do I start diagnosing the problem (I'm a relatively new Linux/Ubuntu user)? Additional details that may help: This is actually a virtual machine running as a VirtualBox guest OS The physical host that is running this VM is my laptop which has a wireless connection; I'm wondering if (somehow) the laptop is getting the network wirelessly, but perhaps either the VBox VM and/or the Ubuntu server OS isn't configured for wireless and so nothing is "getting through"? Thanks in advance for any pointers! Edit: Here is a snapshot of my VM's Network settings (only Adapter 1 has any information populating its fields, so I assume my VM has only 1 adapter): Here is the output when I run ifconfig from the terminal: And here is the output when I run route from the terminal: Running ping google.com:

  Read the article

• I don't know C. And why should I learn it?

  - by Stephen

  My first programming language was PHP (gasp). After that I started working with JavaScript. I've recently done work in C#. I've never once looked at low or mid level languages like C. The general consensus in the programming-community-at-large is that "a programmer who hasn't learned something like C, frankly, just can't handle programming concepts like pointers, data types, passing values by reference, etc." I do not agree. I argue that: Because high level languages are easily accessible, more "non-programmers" dive in and make a mess, and In order to really get anything done in a high level language, one needs to understand the same similar concepts that most proponents of "learn-low-level-first" evangelize about. Some people need to know C. Those people have jobs that require them to write low to mid-level code. I'm sure C is awesome. I'm sure there are a few bad programmers who know C. My question is, why the bias? As a good, honest, hungry programmer, if I had to learn C (for some unforeseen reason), I would learn C. Considering the multitude of languages out there, shouldn't good programmers focus on learning what advances us? Shouldn't we learn what interests us? Should we not utilize our finite time moving forward? Why do some programmers disagree with this? I believe that striving for excellence in what you do is the fundamental deterministic trait between good programmers and bad ones. Does anyone have any real world examples of how something written in a high level language--say Java, Pascal, PHP, or Javascript--truely benefitted from a prior knowledge of C? Examples would be most appreciated. (revised to better coincide with the six guidelines.)

  Read the article

• Is NAN suitable for communicating that an invalid parameter was involved in a calculation?

  - by Arman

  I am currently working on a numerical processing system that will be deployed in a performance-critical environment. It takes inputs in the form of numerical arrays (these use the eigen library, but for the purpose of this question that's perhaps immaterial), and performs some range of numerical computations (matrix products, concatenations, etc.) to produce outputs. All arrays are allocated statically and their sizes are known at compile time. However, some of the inputs may be invalid. In these exceptional cases, we still want the code to be computed and we still want outputs not "polluted" by invalid values to be used. To give an example, let's take the following trivial example (this is pseudo-code): Matrix a = {1, 2, NAN, 4}; // this is the "input" matrix Scalar b = 2; Matrix output = b * a; // this results in {2, 4, NAN, 8} The idea here is that 2, 4 and 8 are usable values, but the NAN should signal to the receipient of the data that that entry was involved in an operation that involved an invalid value, and should be discarded (this will be detected via a std::isfinite(value) check before the value is used). Is this a sound way of communicating and propagating unusable values, given that performance is critical and heap allocation is not an option (and neither are other resource-consuming constructs such as boost::optional or pointers)? Are there better ways of doing this? At this point I'm quite happy with the current setup but I was hoping to get some fresh ideas or productive criticism of the current implementation.

  Read the article

• Crawling a Content Folio

  - by Kyle Hatlestad

  Content Folios in WebCenter Content allow you to assemble, track, and access a logical group of documents and/or links.  It allows you to manage them as just a list of items (simple folio) or organized as a hierarchy (advanced folio).  The built-in UI in content server allows you to work with these folios, but publishing them or consuming them externally can be a bit of a challenge.   The folios themselves are actually XML files that contain the structure, attributes, and pointers to the content items.  So to publish this somewhere, such as a Site Studio page, you could perhaps use an XML parser to traverse the structure and create your output.  But XML parsers are not always the easiest or most efficient to use.  In order to more easily crawl and consume a Content Folio, Ed Bryant - Principal Sales Consultant, wrote a component to do just that.  His component adds a service which does all the work for you and returns the folio structure as a simple resultset.  So consuming and publishing that folio on a Site Studio page or in your portal using RIDC is a breeze!  For example, let's take an advanced Content Folio example like this: If we look at the native file, the XML looks like this: But if we access the folio using the new service - http://server/cs/idcplg?IdcService=FOLIO_CRAWL&dDocName=ecm008003&IsPageDebug=1 - this is what the result set looks like (using the IsPageDebug parameter). Given this as the result set, it makes it very easy to consume and repurpose that folio. You can download a copy of the sample component here. Special thanks to Ed for letting me share this component!

  Read the article

• Interesting sessions/tips from RMOUG

  - by jean-pierre.dijcks

  One of the sessions I was at at last week's RMOUG was a session on Temp Tablespace Groups. I had a look because I had no experience with this and it seemed to help with parallel processing and the allocation/usage of temp. You can read the excellent write-up at Kellyn Pedersen's blog - who did the session and all the work - here. So for all of those who may be seeing lot's of waits like enq: TS - Contention when you are doing hash joins and sorts, do have a look at the above blog post. I also had the chance to listen in at Stewart Bryson's session on Restartability (he had 3 R-s) where he gave very useful tips about how to deal with your data warehouse loads. Questions like archive log mode - should I or should I not were well covered. Flashback archives, also nice to hear about. Very nice talk, very interesting. Unfortunately he hasn't blogged about it yes, so no pointers to that one. Got to see a couple of other interesting sessions, and as conferences go got to meet some interesting Oracle folks from the region. As usual RMOUG was useful and fun. Off to the drawing boards to design next year's session!

  Read the article

• Combining Code Review with Trust Metrics

  - by DragonFax

  I don't get the chance to partake of it at work. But I love the idea of code review. Especially of online open source code review like Gerrit Code Review. I love what Trust Metrics have done for forums and collective intelligences sites on the internet like stackexchange, reddit, and wikipedia. Would it be possible to combine the two and come up with an open source project management system. Something that ends up being mostly community driven. Perhaps a kind of wikipedia of code for a project. Where submitters become popular/trusted by having lots of patches reviewed favoriably by others, and accepted into the trunk. And popular/trusted submitters get their patchs accepted faster/easier. I'm looking for some opinions on the idea, or perhaps pointers to where its been done before, if thats the case. This might leave the lead maintiner little more to do than: wrangle the direction of the project by fast-tracking or vetoing specific patches. settling disputes when the CI tests break, or fixing it himself. Is design by community worse than design by committee?

  Read the article

• Marshalling the value of a char* ANSI string DLL API parameter into a C# string

  - by Brian Biales

  For those who do not mix .NET C# code with legacy DLL's that use char* pointers on a regular basis, the process to convert the strings one way or the other is non-obvious. This is not a comprehensive article on the topic at all, but rather an example of something that took me some time to go find, maybe it will save someone else the time. I am utilizing a third party too that uses a call back function to inform my application of its progress.  This callback includes a pointer that under some circumstances is a pointer to an ANSI character string.  I just need to marshal it into a C# string variable.  Seems pretty simple, yes?  Well, it is, (as are most things, once you know how to do them). The parameter of my callback function is of type IntPtr, which implies it is an integer representation of a pointer.  If I know the pointer is pointing to a simple ANSI string, here is a simple static method to copy it to a C# string: private static string GetStringFromCharStar(IntPtr ptr) {     return System.Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal.PtrToStringAnsi(ptr); } The System.Runtime.InteropServices is where to look any time you are mixing legacy unmanaged code with your .NET application.

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 328 329 330 331 332 333 334 335 336 337 338 339  | Next Page >