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• Generate custom RSS/Atom feed with SyndicationFeedFormatter made from XML

  - by Sentax

  I have followed this article and implemented my service and I can open the web browser and see the test data being published. I would like to create a custom formatted response, as for my needs this will not be published to the internet and it's an isolated feed that other devices on the local network could read to get the data I'm publishing. I'd like to create an XML document and publish it instead of using the SyndicationItem that is being used in the article to display title, author, description, etc. Would like to create something simple to be published: <MyData> <ID>33883</ID> <Title>The Name</Title> <Artist>The Artist</Artist> </MyData> I know how to create that in an XMLWriter, but how to publish in a SyndicationFeedFormatter that is the return type for the function in the article? I have seen the XmlSyndicationContent class but haven't seen any practical examples that would accomplish what I want to do.

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• How to code a 'Next in Results' within search results in PHP

  - by thebluefox

  Right, bit of a head scratcher, although I've got a feeling there's an obvious answer and I'm just not seeing the wood for the trees. Baiscally, using Solr as a search engine for my site, bringing back 15 results per page. When you click on a result, you get a detail page, that has a "Next in Results" link on it, which obviously forwards you on to the next result. Whats the best way of doing this? I've come up with a few solutions but they're either too inpractical or just don't work. I could store all the ids in a session array, then grab the one after the current one and put that in the link. But with possibly hundreds/thousands of results, the memory that array would need, and the performance hit of dealing with it isn't practical. I could take the same approach and put it into the db, but I'll still have to deal with a potentially huge array when I grab them out of the db. Or; I could do the search again, only returning the id's, and grab the one after the one we're currently looking at. I think this could be the best option? Although it does seem kind of messy, namely because of when I have to select the id thats on a different 'page' (ie the 16th, 31st etc result). Unless I pass through where it was in the results, and select from there, but that still doesn't seem like the right way to do it. I'm really sorry if this is just complete nonsense, any help is massively appreciated as always, Cheers guys!

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• Why have or haven't you moved to ASP.NET MVC yet?

  - by Jason

  I find myself on the edge of trying out ASP.NET MVC but there is still "something" holding me back. Are you still waiting to try it, and if so, why? If you finally decided to use it, what helped you get over your hesitation? I'm not worried about it from a technical point of view; I know the pros and cons of web forms vs MVC. My concerns are more on the practical side. Will Microsoft continue to support ASP.NET MVC if they don't reach some critical threshold of developers/customers using it? Are customers willing to try ASP.NET MVC? Have you had to convince a customer to use it? How did that go? Are there major sites using ASP.NET MVC (besides SO)? Could you provide links if you have them? Did you try ASP.NET MVC and found yourself regretting it? If so, what do you regret? If you have any other concerns preventing you from using MVC.NET, what are they? If you had concerns but felt they were addressed and now use MVC.NET, could you list them as well? Thanks

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• How to optimize Conway's game of life for CUDA?

  - by nlight

  I've written this CUDA kernel for Conway's game of life: global void gameOfLife(float* returnBuffer, int width, int height) { unsigned int x = blockIdx.x*blockDim.x + threadIdx.x; unsigned int y = blockIdx.y*blockDim.y + threadIdx.y; float p = tex2D(inputTex, x, y); float neighbors = 0; neighbors += tex2D(inputTex, x+1, y); neighbors += tex2D(inputTex, x-1, y); neighbors += tex2D(inputTex, x, y+1); neighbors += tex2D(inputTex, x, y-1); neighbors += tex2D(inputTex, x+1, y+1); neighbors += tex2D(inputTex, x-1, y-1); neighbors += tex2D(inputTex, x-1, y+1); neighbors += tex2D(inputTex, x+1, y-1); __syncthreads(); float final = 0; if(neighbors < 2) final = 0; else if(neighbors 3) final = 0; else if(p != 0) final = 1; else if(neighbors == 3) final = 1; __syncthreads(); returnBuffer[x + y*width] = final; } I am looking for errors/optimizations. Parallel programming is quite new to me and I am not sure if I get how to do it right. The rest of the app is: Memcpy input array to a 2d texture inputTex stored in a CUDA array. Output is memcpy-ed from global memory to host and then dealt with. As you can see a thread deals with a single pixel. I am unsure if that is the fastest way as some sources suggest doing a row or more per thread. If I understand correctly NVidia themselves say that the more threads, the better. I would love advice on this on someone with practical experience.

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• Why are symbols not frozen strings?

  - by Alex Chaffee

  I understand the theoretical difference between Strings and Symbols. I understand that Symbols are meant to represent a concept or a name or an identifier or a label or a key, and Strings are a bag of characters. I understand that Strings are mutable and transient, where Symbols are immutable and permanent. I even like how Symbols look different from Strings in my text editor. What bothers me is that practically speaking, Symbols are so similar to Strings that the fact that they're not implemented as Strings causes a lot of headaches. They don't even support duck-typing or implicit coercion, unlike the other famous "the same but different" couple, Float and Fixnum. The mere existence of HashWithIndifferentAccess, and its rampant use in Rails and other frameworks, demonstrates that there's a problem here, an itch that needs to be scratched. Can anyone tell me a practical reason why Symbols should not be frozen Strings? Other than "because that's how it's always been done" (historical) or "because symbols are not strings" (begging the question). Consider the following astonishing behavior: :apple == "apple" #=> false, should be true :apple.hash == "apple".hash #=> false, should be true {apples: 10}["apples"] #=> nil, should be 10 {"apples" => 10}[:apples] #=> nil, should be 10 :apple.object_id == "apple".object_id #=> false, but that's actually fine All it would take to make the next generation of Rubyists less confused is this: class Symbol < String def initialize *args super self.freeze end (and a lot of other library-level hacking, but still, not too complicated) See also: http://onestepback.org/index.cgi/Tech/Ruby/SymbolsAreNotImmutableStrings.red http://www.randomhacks.net/articles/2007/01/20/13-ways-of-looking-at-a-ruby-symbol Why does my code break when using a hash symbol, instead of a hash string? Why use symbols as hash keys in Ruby? What are symbols and how do we use them? Ruby Symbols vs Strings in Hashes Can't get the hang of symbols in Ruby

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• Improve Log Exceptions

  - by Jaider

  I am planning to use log4net in a new web project. In my experience, I see how big the log table can get, also I notice that errors or exceptions are repeated. For instance, I just query a log table that have more than 132.000 records, and I using distinct and found that only 2.500 records are unique (~2%), the others (~98%) are just duplicates. so, I came up with this idea to improve logging. Having a couple of new columns: counter and updated_dt, that are updated every time try to insert same record. If want to track the user that cause the exception, need to create a user_log or log_user table, to map N-N relationship. Create this model may made the system slow and inefficient trying to compare all these long text... Here the trick, we should also has a hash column of binary of 16 or 32, that hash the message and the exception, and configure an index on it. We can use HASHBYTES to help us. I am not an expert in DB, but I think that will made the faster way to locate a similar record. And because hashing doesn't guarantee uniqueness, will help to locale those similar record much faster and later compare by message or exception directly to make sure that are unique. This is a theoretical/practical solution, but will it work or bring more complexity? what aspects I am leaving out or what other considerations need to have? the trigger will do the job of insert or update, but is the trigger the best way to do it?

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• Writing an audio player in C#

  - by Malki

  Hi, I have a pretty cool idea for a very special media player. I like to think about this project as a mini-startup, since I don't yet know if my idea is practical. Anyways, before implementing my idea, I first need to be able to implement a simple audio player. My preferred language for this project is C#, simply because it's so easy to use, but any other object oriented language would be fine too I guess. I started out with no knowledge whatsoever about audio. My main goals right now are: Being able to play audio files - as many formats as possible (sort of a VLC type player, but only audio for now). Being able to analyze audio files - as in, reading frequency, amplitude, volume, and other information about the audio. I think maybe a good idea here is to be able to analyze one file format (PCM?), and then temporarily converting any file I want to analyze to that format. This is in order to later implement a mechanism that compares songs and identifies similar songs to recommend to the user (this feature isn't part of my idea, but I figured since it exists in many players nowadays, I need to have it too if I want be able to compete with them). BTW - I currently don't have any knowledge about audio/wavelengths/frequencies and such, so I'd appreciate it if someone could point me in the right direction about this analyzation feature. Maybe in the future I'd expand to playing video files as well, but for now I'm concentrating on audio. After searching the Internet for a while, I've come across LAME. Problem is, it's not C#, and I'm not sure how to use it. I know there is something called "Interoperability", that is supposed to let me work with native DLL files through C#. Any information about that would be helpful as well. Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks, Malki :)

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• SQL-Server: Is there an equivalent of a trigger for general stored procedure execution

  - by Arj

  Hi All, Hope you can help. Is there a way to reliably detect when a stored proc is being run on SQL Server without altering the SP itself? Here's the requirement. We need to track users running reports from our enterprise data warehouse as the core product we use doesn't allow for this. Both core product reports and a slew of in-house ones we've added all return their data from individual stored procs. We don't have a practical way of altering the parts of the product webpages where reports are called from. We also can't change the stored procs for the core product reports. (It would be trivial to add a logging line to the start/end of each of our inhouse ones). What I'm trying to find therefore, is whether there's a way in SQL Server (2005 / 2008) to execute a logging stored proc whenever any other stored procedure runs, without altering those stored procedures themselves. We have general control over the SQL Server instance itself as it's local, we just don't want to change the product stored procs themselves. Any one have any ideas? Is there a kind of "stored proc executing trigger"? Is there an event model for SQL Server that we can hook custom .Net code into? (Just to discount it from the start, we want to try and make a change to SQL Server rather than get into capturing the report being run from the products webpages etc) Thoughts appreciated Thanks

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• How to write this snippet in Python?

  - by morpheous

  I am learning Python (I have a C/C++ background). I need to write something practical in Python though, whilst learning. I have the following pseudocode (my first attempt at writing a Python script, since reading about Python yesterday). Hopefully, the snippet details the logic of what I want to do. BTW I am using python 2.6 on Ubuntu Karmic. Assume the script is invoked as: script_name.py directory_path import csv, sys, os, glob # Can I declare that the function accepts a dictionary as first arg? def getItemValue(item, key, defval) return !item.haskey(key) ? defval : item[key] dirname = sys.argv[1] # declare some default values here weight, is_male, default_city_id = 100, true, 1 # fetch some data from a database table into a nested dictionary, indexed by a string curr_dict = load_dict_from_db('foo') #iterate through all the files matching *.csv in the specified folder for infile in glob.glob( os.path.join(dirname, '*.csv') ): #get the file name (without the '.csv' extension) code = infile[0:-4] # open file, and iterate through the rows of the current file (a CSV file) f = open(infile, 'rt') try: reader = csv.reader(f) for row in reader: #lookup the id for the code in the dictionary id = curr_dict[code]['id'] name = row['name'] address1 = row['address1'] address2 = row['address2'] city_id = getItemValue(row, 'city_id', default_city_id) # insert row to database table finally: f.close() I have the following questions: Is the code written in a Pythonic enough way (is there a better way of implementing it)? Given a table with a schema like shown below, how may I write a Python function that fetches data from the table and returns is in a dictionary indexed by string (name). How can I insert the row data into the table (actually I would like to use a transaction if possible, and commit just before the file is closed) Table schema: create table demo (id int, name varchar(32), weight float, city_id int); BTW, my backend database is postgreSQL

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• Wildcards vs. generic methods

  - by FredOverflow

  Is there any practical difference between the following approaches to print all elements in a range? public static void printA(Iterable<?> range) { for (Object o : range) { System.out.println(o); } } public static <T> void printB(Iterable<T> range) { for (T x : range) { System.out.println(x); } } Apparently, printB involves an additional checked cast to Object (see line 16), which seems rather stupid to me -- isn't everything an Object anyway? public static void printA(java.lang.Iterable); Code: 0: aload_0 1: invokeinterface #18, 1; //InterfaceMethod java/lang/Iterable.iterator:()Ljava/util/Iterator; 6: astore_2 7: goto 24 10: aload_2 11: invokeinterface #24, 1; //InterfaceMethod java/util/Iterator.next:()Ljava/lang/Object; 16: astore_1 17: getstatic #30; //Field java/lang/System.out:Ljava/io/PrintStream; 20: aload_1 21: invokevirtual #36; //Method java/io/PrintStream.println:(Ljava/lang/Object;)V 24: aload_2 25: invokeinterface #42, 1; //InterfaceMethod java/util/Iterator.hasNext:()Z 30: ifne 10 33: return public static void printB(java.lang.Iterable); Code: 0: aload_0 1: invokeinterface #18, 1; //InterfaceMethod java/lang/Iterable.iterator:()Ljava/util/Iterator; 6: astore_2 7: goto 27 10: aload_2 11: invokeinterface #24, 1; //InterfaceMethod java/util/Iterator.next:()Ljava/lang/Object; 16: checkcast #3; //class java/lang/Object 19: astore_1 20: getstatic #30; //Field java/lang/System.out:Ljava/io/PrintStream; 23: aload_1 24: invokevirtual #36; //Method java/io/PrintStream.println:(Ljava/lang/Object;)V 27: aload_2 28: invokeinterface #42, 1; //InterfaceMethod java/util/Iterator.hasNext:()Z 33: ifne 10 36: return

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• how to make a software and preserve database integrity and correctness and please help confused

  - by user287745

  i have made an application project in vs 08 c#, sql server from vs 08. the database has like 20 tables and many fields in each have made an interface for adding deleting editting and retrieving data according to predefined needs of the users. now i have to 1) make to project in to a software which i can deliver to professor. that is he can just double click the icon and the software simply starts. no vs 08 needed to start the debugging 2) the database will be on one powerful computer (dual core latest everything win xp) and the user will access it from another computer connected using LAN i am able to change the connection string to the shared database using vs 08/ debugger whenever the server changes but how am i supposed to do that when its a software? 3)there will by many clients am i supposed to give the same software to every one, so they all can connect to the database, how will the integrity and correctness of the database be maintained? i mean the db.mdf file will be in a folder which will be shared with read and write access. so its not necessary that only one user will write at a time. so is there any coding for this or? please help me out here i am stuck do not know what to do i have no practical experience, would appreciate all the help thank you

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• How to create a snowstorm on your Windows desktop?

  - by Vilx-

  Practical uses aside, how (if it is possible at all) could you create a "snowing" effect on your desktop PC running Windows? Preferably with nothing but raw C/C++ and WinAPI. The requirements for the snow are: Appears over everything else shown; Snowflakes are small, possibly simple dots or clusters of a few white pixels; Does not bother working with the computer (clicking a snowflake sends the click through to the underlying window); Plays nicely with users dragging windows; Multimonitor capable. Bonus points for any of the following features: Snow accumulates on the lower edge of the window or the taskbar (if it's at the bottom of the screen); Snow accumulates also on top-level windows. Or perhaps some snow accumulates, some continues down, accumulating on every window with a title bar; Snow accumulated on windows gets "shaken off" when windows are dragged; Snow accumulated on taskbar is aware of the extended "Start" button under Vista/7. Snowflakes have shadows/outlines, so they are visible on white backgrounds; Snowflakes have complex snowflike-alike shapes (they must still be tiny). Most of these effects are straightforward enough, except the part where snow is click-through and plays nicely with dragging of windows. In my early days I've made an implementation that draws on the HDC you get from GetDesktopWindow(), which was click-through, but had problems with users dragging windows (snowflakes rendered on them got "dragged along"). The solution may use Vista/7 Aero features, but, of course, a universal solution is preferred. Any ideas? :)

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• Is .NET 4.0 just a show?

  - by Will Marcouiller

  I went to a presentation about the .NET Framework and Visual Studio 2010, last night. The topis were: ASP.NET 4 - Some of the new features of ASP.NET 4 More control over ClientID's in WebForms; Output Caching; ... // Some other stuff I don't really remember being more in framework and WinForms world. Entity Framework 2.0 (.NET 4.0) T4 Templates; Domain driven development; Data driven development; Contexts (edmx files); Some of real-world limitations of EF4 (projects with over 70 to 75 tables); Better POCO support, despite there are still these hidden EntityObject and StructuralObject, but used differently in comparison to EF 1.0 so that it doesn't take off your inheritance; Allows to easily choose how to persist the hierarchy into the underlying database; Code only (start working with EF4 directly from your code!); Design by Contract (DbC). The most interesting feature is, and only, as far as I'm concerned, all related to parallelism made easier. Which really works! No additional assembly references to add. In conclusion, I'm far from impressed about .NET Framework 4.0, apart that it makes some things easier to do. But when you're used to make it a way, it doesn't really change much, in my opinion. Is it me who cannot foresee what .NET 4.0 has to offer? What would you guys base your decision on to migrate to .NET 4.0, in a practical way?

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• C++: calling non-member functions with the same syntax of member ones

  - by peoro

  One thing I'd like to do in C++ is to call non-member functions with the same syntax you call member functions: class A { }; void f( A & this ) { /* ... */ } // ... A a; a.f(); // this is the same as f(a); Of course this could only work as long as f is not virtual (since it cannot appear in A's virtual table. f doesn't need to access A's non-public members. f doesn't conflict with a function declared in A (A::f). I'd like such a syntax because in my opinion it would be quite comfortable and would push good habits: calling str.strip() on a std::string (where strip is a function defined by the user) would sound a lot better than calling strip( str );. most of the times (always?) classes provide some member functions which don't require to be member (ie: are not virtual and don't use non-public members). This breaks encapsulation, but is the most practical thing to do (due to point 1). My question here is: what do you think of such feature? Do you think it would be something nice, or something that would introduce more issues than the ones it aims to solve? Could it make sense to propose such a feature to the next standard (the one after C++0x)? Of course this is just a brief description of this idea; it is not complete; we'd probably need to explicitly mark a function with a special keyword to let it work like this and many other stuff.

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• Script/plugin to update web page (load next 25 comments) until page fully loaded

  - by Carl

  Brief summary: I need a script/plugin for Firefox that selects the "load next 25 comments" link at the bottom of a web page, until that link is no longer on the page. As you click that link - you get more comments - eventually all of them on the same page. See this web page for an example (there are 1,852 comments): http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/05/16/gulf.oil.spill/index.html#comment-50598247 I have a regular problem with CNN.com. I post comments there. People sometimes reply to them. I check my profile, and see the number of replies, but I can't read them there. I have to follow the link to the original article. The fist set of comments are at the bottom, with a 'load next 25' link at the bottom. There are often hundreds of comments, and sometimes a few thousand. There is no practical way for me to read the replies to my comments. If there's under around 300 hundred, I'll just click that link enough times to see what the replies to my comments are. I need a script/plugin to select that 'load next 25' link until that link is no longer present on the page. Then I could just search for my userid and read the responses.

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• MySql "comments" parameter as descriptor?

  - by Nick

  So, I'm trying to learn a lot at once, and this place is really helpful! I'm making a little running log website for myself and maybe a few other people, and I have it so that the user can add workouts for each day. With each workout, I have a variety of information the user can fill out for the workout, such as running distance, time, quality of run, course, etc... I store this in a MySql database as a table with fields titled "distance", "time", "runquality", etc... Now, these field titles don't match up with what I want displayed on the running log, so I was thinking of using the "Comments" attribute for a field to store its human-readable title--thus the field "runquality" would have "Quality of run" as its comment, and then I would pull the comment with a SQL query and display it instead of the field name. Is this a good theoretical/practical way of going about it? And what sort of SQL would I use to pull the comment for the field anyway? Secondly, suppose I want to add the ability for the user to create their own workout descriptors. So say a user wants to add a "temperature" descriptor for their workout. Should I create a script that adds fields to my workout table, or should I create a separate table listing only workout descriptors and somehow link the descriptor table with the "contents" table? I haven't learned any theory about database design or anything so any help is appreciated!

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• What Test Environment Setup do Committers Use in the Ruby Community?

  - by viatropos

  Today I am going to get as far as I can setting up my testing environment and workflow. I'm looking for practical advice on how to setup the test environment from you guys who are very passionate and versed in Ruby Testing. By the end of the day (6am PST?) I would like to be able to: Type one 1-command to run test suites for ANY project I find on Github. Run autotest for ANY Github project so I can fork and make TESTABLE contributions. Build gems from the ground up with Autotest and Shoulda. For one reason or another, I hardly ever run tests for projects I clone from Github. The major reason is because unless they're using RSpec and have a Rake task to run the tests, I don't see the common pattern behind it all. I have built 3 or 4 gems writing tests with RSpec, and while I find the DSL fun, it's less than ideal because it just adds another layer/language of methods I have to learn and remember. So I'm going with Shoulda. But this isn't a question about which testing framework to choose. So the questions are: What is your, the SO reader and Github project committer, test environment setup using autotest so that whenever you git clone a gem, you can run the tests and autotest-develop them if desired? What are the guys who are writing the Paperclip Tests and Authlogic Tests doing? What is their setup? Thanks for the insight. Looking for answers that will make me a more effective tester.

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• Is there a definitive reference document for Ruby syntax?

  - by JSW

  I'm searching for a definitive document on Ruby syntax. I know about the definitive documents for the core API and standard library, but what about the syntax itself? For instance, such a document should cover: reserved words, string literals syntax, naming rules for variables/classes/modules, all the conditional statements and their permutations, and so forth. I know there are many books and tutorials, yes, but every one of them is essentially a tutorial, each one having a range of different depth and focus. They will all, by necessity of brevity and narrative flow, omit certain details of the language that the author deems insignificant. For instance, did you know that you can use a case statement without an initial case value, and it will then execute the first true when clause? Any given Ruby book or tutorial may or may not cover that particular lesser-known functionality of the case syntax. It's not discussed in the section in "Programming Ruby" about case statements. But that is just one small example. So far the best documentation I've found is the rubyspec project, which appears to be an attempt to write a complete test suite for the language. That's not bad, but it's a bit hard to use from a practical standpoint as a developer working on my own projects. Am I just missing something or is there really no definitive readable document defining the whole of Ruby syntax?

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• Emulating Test::More::done_testing - what is the most idiomatic way?

  - by DVK

  I have to build unit tests for in environment with a very old version of Test::More (perl5.8 with $Test::More::VERSION being '0.80') which predates the addition of done_testing(). Upgrading to newer Test::More is out of the question for practical reasons. And I am trying to avoid using no_tests - it's generally a bad idea not catching when your unit test dies prematurely. What is the most idiomatic way of running a configurable amount of tests, assuming no no_tests or done_testing() is used? Details: My unit tests usually take the form of: use Test::More; my @test_set = ( [ "Test #1", $param1, $param2, ... ] ,[ "Test #1", $param1, $param2, ... ] # ,... ); foreach my $test (@test_set) { run_test($test); } sub run_test { # $expected_tests += count_tests($test); ok(test1($test)) || diag("Test1 failed"); # ... } The standard approach of use Test::More tests => 23; or BEGIN {plan tests => 23} does not work since both are obviously executed before @tests is known. My current approach involves making @tests global and defining it in the BEGIN {} block as follows: use Test::More; BEGIN { our @test_set = (); # Same set of tests as above my $expected_tests = 0; foreach my $test (@tests) { my $expected_tests += count_tests($test); } plan tests = $expected_tests; } our @test_set; # Must do!!! Since first "our" was in BEGIN's scope :( foreach my $test (@test_set) { run_test($test); } # Same sub run_test {} # Same I feel this can be done more idiomatically but not certain how to improve. Chief among the smells is the duplicate our @test_test declarations - in BEGIN{} and after it.

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• iPhone: How to Determine Average Light/Dark of an Area of an UIImage

  - by TechZen

  I need to place labels with a transparent background over a variable-content UIImage. Readability will vary significantly depending on the relationship between the color of the label's text and the color/luminosity of the area of the image displayed under the label. Since the image will be constantly changing, the color of the label's text needs to change in sync. I have found several techniques for determining the color, perceived luminosity etc of a single pixel. However, I need to rather quickly (while a view loads) determine the rough perceived color/luminosity of an area of the UIImage under the frame of the UILabel. I presume I will also need to measure the alpha because the same color/luminosity looks different at different alpha values. Is there a way to calculate such a value for an area? Will I be reduced to simply summing pixels? If it comes to that, is there an algorithm to accomplish this? I've thought of two possible approaches: Perform some "folding" operations i.e. combining pixels from one half of the area to the other half. Then repeat until I get a single value. Would this be practical? How would you logically combine pixels to average their perceived color/luminosity? Sample a statistically significant number of pixels in the area and then combine them (somehow) to get a rough measure. I think this problem comes up a lot these days with people being so found of customizing backgrounds. Seems like something that would be worth my time to bang out a category or class to handle this and then share it around.

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• Learn Prolog Now! DCG Practice Example

  - by Timothy

  I have been progressing through Learn Prolog Now! as self-study and am now learning about Definite Clause Grammars. I am having some difficulty with one of the Practical Session's tasks. The task reads: The formal language anb2mc2mdn consists of all strings of the following form: an unbroken block of as followed by an unbroken block of bs followed by an unbroken block of cs followed by an unbroken block of ds, such that the a and d blocks are exactly the same length, and the c and d blocks are also exactly the same length and furthermore consist of an even number of cs and ds respectively. For example, ε, abbccd, and aaabbbbccccddd all belong to anb2mc2mdn. Write a DCG that generates this language. I am able to write rules that generate andn, b2mc2m, and even anb2m and c2mndn... but I can't seem to join all these rules into anb2mc2mdn. The following are my rules that can generate andn and b2mc2m. s1 --> []. s1 --> a,s1,d. a --> [a]. d --> [d]. s2 --> []. s2 --> c,c,s2,d,d. c --> [c]. d --> [d]. Is anb2mc2mdn really a CFG, and is it possible to write a DCG using only what was taught in the lesson (no additional arguments or code, etc)? If so, can anyone offer me some guidance how I can join these so that I can solve the given task?

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• How difficult is it for an old-school programmer to pick up an FPGA kit and make something useful wi

  - by JUST MY correct OPINION

  I'm an old, old, old coder. (How old? I've used paper tape in anger.) I've programmed in a lot of languages and under a lot of paradigms (spaghetti, structured, object-oriented, functional and a smattering of logical). I'm getting bored. FPGAs look interesting to me. I have the crazy notion of resurrecting some of the ancient hardware I worked on in the days using FPGAs. I know this can be done because I've seen PDP-10 and PDP-11 implementations in FPGAs. I'd like to do the same for a few machines that are perhaps not as popular as those two, however. While I am an old, old coder, what I am not is an electronics or computer systems engineer. I'll be learning from scratch if I go down this path. My question, therefore, is two-fold: How difficult will it be for this old dinosaur to pick up and learn FPGAs to the point that interesting (not necessarily practical -- more from a hobbyist perspective) projects can be made? What should I start with learning-wise to go down this path? I know where to get FPGA kits, but I haven't found anything like "FPGAs for Complete Dinosaurs" yet anywhere out there.

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• Displaying a collection of objects in a .Net grid on a smartphone without data binding.

  - by Xav

  I know there's No DataGridView in the CF, but I've got a collection of in-memory objects that I want to display in a grid on a phone. Options I have thought of: Stick all the objects into a SQL-CE database and use a bound datagrid. This'll mean pulling my classes apart and separating the data from the functionality, which may or may not be a bad thing, but seems a little overkill. Write my own dataset and binding code so that I can bind my collection of objects to a bound datagrid. No idea how practical or possible this is, but seems like it's either do-able or impossible and I'm hoping someone here knows which! Find a third-party unbound grid control. The only one I've seen mentioned is OpenNetCF, which I'm downloading as I type. Are there others? Are any of them any good? Do something very nasty with dynamically loading labels and textboxes into a scrolling region on the form. REALLY don't want to go there. I'm not much experienced with data-bound controls other than occasionally making use of the very vanilla functionality in WinForms or ASP.Net, and that quite a long time ago, so if any of the above are silly, please be gentle. Thanks Xav

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• Preprocessor "macro function" vs. function pointer - best practice?

  - by Dustin

  I recently started a small personal project (RGB value to BGR value conversion program) in C, and I realised that a function that converts from RGB to BGR can not only perform the conversion but also the inversion. Obviously that means I don't really need two functions rgb2bgr and bgr2rgb. However, does it matter whether I use a function pointer instead of a macro? For example: int rgb2bgr (const int rgb); /* * Should I do this because it allows the compiler to issue * appropriate error messages using the proper function name, * not to mention possible debugging benefits? */ int (*bgr2rgb) (const int bgr) = rgb2bgr; /* * Or should I do this since it is merely a convenience * and they're really the same function anyway? */ #define bgr2rgb(bgr) (rgb2bgr (bgr)) I'm not necessarily looking for a change in execution efficiency as it's more of a subjective question out of curiosity. I am well aware of the fact that type safety is neither lost nor gained using either method. Would the function pointer merely be a convenience or are there more practical benefits to be gained of which I am unaware?

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• Using fonts that aren't on iPhone

  - by 4thSpace

  I'd like to use some fonts that aren't part of the iPhone OS. I've seen games that use non standard fonts. I can install the fonts, create images for each one in Photoshop and then use those images in the iPhone app. However, I don't think that is a practical way to go. If the color or tint needs to be adjusted (because of background) or size, I'll have to redesign every font I'm using. Is there a better way to do this? I read this http://stackoverflow.com/questions/360751/can-i-embed-a-custom-font-in-an-iphone-application and downloaded the open source font label app. However, it crashes most of the time when I try using particular fonts. In regards to the last comment about using UIFont with the fontWithName:size, that certainly doesn't work. Your font variable will be nil. Listing all available fonts reveals why - none of the custom fonts are in the list. I've also read http://stackoverflow.com/questions/566054/how-do-i-include-a-font-with-my-iphone-application, which definitely does not work. Same as last comment in above link.

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