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• Has anyone used Rational Team Concert (RTC)?

  - by FryGuy

  The company I work for is currently evaluating replacements for SourceSafe, and for various reasons, I think RTC will be chosen. I'm a little scared that we're going to end up with a solution that isn't the best for us in our situation. I've tried researching a little bit about what it is, but all I have been able to find are marketing things, but nothing about how it actually works (any of the paradigms it uses, etc). Our team is around 8 developers and 2 QA people on a single project (and 4-5 more people that would be using it for their independent project). It seems like RTC is targetted for larger teams, but our team is relatively small. Does anyone has experience using RTC in a smaller team? The project that would be using it is a .NET/WPF application, so we would be using primarily Visual Studio. Is the Visual Studio integration any good, or are we stuck having to have Eclipse open on top of Visual Studio? Personally, I have been using Bazaar as my personal source control (and checking out/into sourcesafe from a branch), as well as on personal projects. Does RTC incorporate features of "third generation" version control systems, such as first class branching/merging and changesets rather than file changes, and good visualization of where changes come from? Also, what are the general pros and cons for it?

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• Disadvantage of OOP?

  - by Bragaadeesh

  Typically i dont want to know the specifics of the cons of OOPs, but it felt kind of weird when I had an argument at an interview I attended recently. The question that was posted to me was to tell me one disadvantage of OOP (Object Oriented Programming). At that time, I felt OOP to be the most matured level of programming after the procedural/functional models. So I replied to him that I dont see any negatives at all. But the interviewer said there are few and I asked him to list one if he does not mind. He gave an example that I cant digest well, he said that OOP pattern does not strictly implement inheritance rules and cited the satellite/rocket example where the body parts will disintegrate periodically to remove weight during rocket launch and said that inheritance does not support this. His example kind of felt very weird to me the reason being the application of inheritance to this example. Then I left the example aside and I had this doubt - Can we unplug class hierarchies in such a manner (I am kind of confident in Java its not possible) in an ideal Object Oriented Design?

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• The woes of (sometimes) storing "date only" in datetimes

  - by Heinzi

  We have two fields from and to (of type datetime), where the user can store the begin time and the end time of a business trip, e.g.: From: 2010-04-14 09:00 To: 2010-04-16 16:30 So, the duration of the trip is 2 days and 7.5 hours. Often, the exact times are not known in advance, so the user enters the dates without a time: From: 2010-04-14 To: 2010-04-16 Internally, this is stored as 2010-04-14 00:00 and 2010-04-16 00:00, since that's what most modern class libraries (e.g. .net) and databases (e.g. SQL Server) do when you store a "date only" in a datetime structure. Usually, this makes perfect sense. However, when entering 2010-04-16 as the to date, the user clearly did not mean 2010-04-16 00:00. Instead, the user meant 2010-04-16 24:00, i.e., calculating the duration of the trip should output 3 days, not 2 days. I can think of a few (more or less ugly) workarounds for this problem (add "23:59" in the UI layer of the to field if the user did not enter a time component; add a special "dates are full days" Boolean field; store "2010-04-17 00:00" in the DB but display "2010-04-16 24:00" to the user if the time component is "00:00"; ...), all having advantages and disadvantages. Since I assume that this is a fairly common problem, I was wondering: Is there a "standard" best-practice way of solving it? If there isn't, have you experienced a similar requirement, how did you solve it and what were the pros/cons of that solution?

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• DrScheme versus mzscheme: treatment of definitions

  - by speciousfool

  One long term project I have is working through all the exercises of SICP. I noticed something a bit odd with the most recent exercise. I am testing a Huffman encoding tree. When I execute the following code in DrScheme I get the expected result: (a d a b b c a) However, if I execute this same code in mzscheme by calling (load "2.67.scm") or by running mzscheme -f 2.67.scm, it reports: symbols: expected symbols as arguments, given: (leaf D 1) My question is: why? Is it because mzscheme and drscheme use different rules for loading program definitions? The program code is below. ;; Define an encoding tree and a sample message ;; Use the decode procedure to decode the message, and give the result. (define (make-leaf symbol weight) (list 'leaf symbol weight)) (define (leaf? object) (eq? (car object) 'leaf)) (define (symbol-leaf x) (cadr x)) (define (weight-leaf x) (caddr x)) (define (make-code-tree left right) (list left right (append (symbols left) (symbols right)) (+ (weight left) (weight right)))) (define (left-branch tree) (car tree)) (define (right-branch tree) (cadr tree)) (define (symbols tree) (if (leaf? tree) (list (symbol-leaf tree)) (caddr tree))) (define (weight tree) (if (leaf? tree) (weight-leaf tree) (cadddr tree))) (define (decode bits tree) (define (decode-1 bits current-branch) (if (null? bits) '() (let ((next-branch (choose-branch (car bits) current-branch))) (if (leaf? next-branch) (cons (symbol-leaf next-branch) (decode-1 (cdr bits) tree)) (decode-1 (cdr bits) next-branch))))) (decode-1 bits tree)) (define (choose-branch bit branch) (cond ((= bit 0) (left-branch branch)) ((= bit 1) (right-branch branch)) (else (error "bad bit -- CHOOSE-BRANCH" bit)))) (define (test s-exp) (display s-exp) (newline)) (define sample-tree (make-code-tree (make-leaf 'A 4) (make-code-tree (make-leaf 'B 2) (make-code-tree (make-leaf 'D 1) (make-leaf 'C 1))))) (define sample-message '(0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 0 1 1 1 0)) (test (decode sample-message sample-tree))

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• How to Create Deterministic Guids

  - by desigeek

  In our application we are creating Xml files with an attribute that has a Guid value. This value needed to be consistent between file upgrades. So even if everything else in the file changes, the guid value for the attribute should remain the same. One obvious solution was to create a static dictionary with the filename and the Guids to be used for them. Then whenever we generate the file, we look up the dictionary for the filename and use the corresponding guid. But this is not feasible coz we might scale to 100's of files and didnt want to maintain big list of guids. So another approach was to make the Guid the same based on the path of the file. Since our file paths and application directory structure are unique, the Guid should be unique for that path. So each time we run an upgrade, the file gets the same guid based on its path. I found one cool way to generate such 'Deterministic Guids' (Thanks Elton Stoneman). It basically does this: private Guid GetDeterministicGuid(string input) { //use MD5 hash to get a 16-byte hash of the string: MD5CryptoServiceProvider provider = new MD5CryptoServiceProvider(); byte[] inputBytes = Encoding.Default.GetBytes(input); byte[] hashBytes = provider.ComputeHash(inputBytes); //generate a guid from the hash: Guid hashGuid = new Guid(hashBytes); return hashGuid; } So given a string, the Guid will always be the same. Are there any other approaches or recommended ways to doing this? What are the pros or cons of that method?

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• SQL Server CLR stored procedures in data processing tasks - good or evil?

  - by Gart

  In short - is it a good design solution to implement most of the business logic in CLR stored procedures? I have read much about them recently but I can't figure out when they should be used, what are the best practices, are they good enough or not. For example, my business application needs to parse a large fixed-length text file, extract some numbers from each line in the file, according to these numbers apply some complex business rules (involving regex matching, pattern matching against data from many tables in the database and such), and as a result of this calculation update records in the database. There is also a GUI for the user to select the file, view the results, etc. This application seems to be a good candidate to implement the classic 3-tier architecture: the Data Layer, the Logic Layer, and the GUI layer. The Data Layer would access the database The Logic Layer would run as a WCF service and implement the business rules, interacting with the Data Layer The GUI Layer would be a means of communication between the Logic Layer and the User. Now, thinking of this design, I can see that most of the business rules may be implemented in a SQL CLR and stored in SQL Server. I might store all my raw data in the database, run the processing there, and get the results. I see some advantages and disadvantages of this solution: Pros: The business logic runs close to the data, meaning less network traffic. Process all data at once, possibly utilizing parallelizm and optimal execution plan. Cons: Scattering of the business logic: some part is here, some part is there. Questionable design solution, may encounter unknown problems. Difficult to implement a progress indicator for the processing task. I would like to hear all your opinions about SQL CLR. Does anybody use it in production? Are there any problems with such design? Is it a good thing?

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• Long running stateful service in .NET

  - by Asaf R

  Hi, I need to create a service in .NET that maintains (inner) state in-memory, spawns multiple threads and is generally long-running. There are a lot options - Good-old Windows Service Windows Communication Services Windows Workflow Foundation I really don't know which to choose. Most of the functionality is in a library used by this service, so the service itself is rather simple. On one hand, it's important the service host is as close to "simply working" as possible, which excludes Windows Service. On the other hand, it's important that the service is not taken down by the host just because there's no external activity, which makes WCF kind o' "scary". As for WF, it's strongest selling point is the ability to create processes as, um..., workflows, which is something I don't need nor want. To sum it up, the plethora of Microsoft technologies got me a bit confused. I'd appreciate help regarding the pros and cons of each solution (or other's I've failed to mention) for the problem of a stateful, long running service in .NET Thanks, Asaf P.S., I'm using .NET 4. EDIT: What I mean by the host "simply working" is, for example, that the service I create be reactivated if it crashes. I guess the reason for this question is that I've created Windows Services in the past (I think it was in plain C++ with Win32 API), and I don't want to miss out on something simpler if there's is such as thing. Thanks for all the replies thus far! Asaf.

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• Correctly use dependency injection

  - by Rune

  Me and two other colleagues are trying to understand how to best design a program. For example, I have an interface ISoda and multiple classes that implement that interface like Coke, Pepsi, DrPepper, etc.... My colleague is saying that it's best to put these items into a database like a key/value pair. For example: Key | Name -------------------------------------- Coke | my.namespace.Coke, MyAssembly Pepsi | my.namespace.Pepsi, MyAssembly DrPepper | my.namespace.DrPepper, MyAssembly ... then have XML configuration files that map the input to the correct key, query the database for the key, then create the object. I don't have any specific reasons, but I just feel that this is a bad design, but I don't know what to say or how to correctly argue against it. My second colleague is suggesting that we micro-manage each of these classes. So basically the input would go through a switch statement, something similiar to this: ISoda soda; switch (input) { case "Coke": soda = new Coke(); break; case "Pepsi": soda = new Pepsi(); break; case "DrPepper": soda = new DrPepper(); break; } This seems a little better to me, but I still think there is a better way to do it. I've been reading up on IoC containers the last few days and it seems like a good solution. However, I'm still very new to dependency injection and IoC containers, so I don't know how to correctly argue for it. Or maybe I'm the wrong one and there's a better way to do it? If so, can someone suggest a better method? What kind of arguments can I bring to the table to convince my colleagues to try another method? What are the pros/cons? Why should we do it one way? Unfortunately, my colleagues are very resistant to change so I'm trying to figure out how I can convince them.

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• Do ruby on rails programmers refactor?

  - by JoaoHornburg

  I'm a Java programmer who started programming Ruby on Rails one year ago. I like the language, rails itself and the principles behind them. But something that bothers me is that Ruby programmers don't seem to refactor. I noticed that there is a big lack of tools for refactoring in Ruby / Rails. Some IDE's, like Aptana and RubyMine seem to offer some very basic refactoring, but nothing really big compared to Eclipse's Java refactorings. Then there is another fact: most railers (even the pros) prefer some lightweight editors, like VIM or TextMate, instead of IDEs. Well, with these tools you just get zero refactoring (only regex with find/replace). This leaves me this impression that rails programmers don't refactor. It might be just a false impression, of course, but I would like to hear the opinion of people who work professionally with ruby on rails. Do you refactor? If you do, how do you do it,with which tools? If not, why not?

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• When and how should independent hierarchies be used in clojure?

  - by Rob Lachlan

  Clojure's system for creating an ad hoc hierarchy of keywords is familiar to most people who have spent a bit of time with the language. For example, most demos and presentations of the language include examples such as (derive ::child ::parent) and they go on to show how this can be used for multi-method dispatch. In all of the slides and presentations that I've seen, they use the global hierarchy. But it is possible to put keyword relationships in independent hierarchies, by using (derive h ::child ::parent), where h is created by (make-hierarchy). Some questions, therefore: Are there any guidelines on when this is useful or necessary? Are there any functions for manipulating hierarchies? Merging is particularly useful, so I do this: (defn merge-h [& hierarchies] (apply merge-with (cons #(merge-with clojure.set/union %1 %2) hierarchies)) But I was wondering if such functions already exist somewhere. EDIT: Changed "custom" hierarchy to "independent" hierarchy, since that term better describes this animal. Also, I've done some research and included my own answer below. Further comments are welcome.

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• Lightweight spinlocks built from GCC atomic operations?

  - by Thomas

  I'd like to minimize synchronization and write lock-free code when possible in a project of mine. When absolutely necessary I'd love to substitute light-weight spinlocks built from atomic operations for pthread and win32 mutex locks. My understanding is that these are system calls underneath and could cause a context switch (which may be unnecessary for very quick critical sections where simply spinning a few times would be preferable). The atomic operations I'm referring to are well documented here: http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-4.4.1/gcc/Atomic-Builtins.html Here is an example to illustrate what I'm talking about. Imagine a RB-tree with multiple readers and writers possible. RBTree::exists() is read-only and thread safe, RBTree::insert() would require exclusive access by a single writer (and no readers) to be safe. Some code: class IntSetTest { private: unsigned short lock; RBTree<int>* myset; public: // ... void add_number(int n) { // Aquire once locked==false (atomic) while (__sync_bool_compare_and_swap(&lock, 0, 0xffff) == false); // Perform a thread-unsafe operation on the set myset->insert(n); // Unlock (atomic) __sync_bool_compare_and_swap(&lock, 0xffff, 0); } bool check_number(int n) { // Increment once the lock is below 0xffff u16 savedlock = lock; while (savedlock == 0xffff || __sync_bool_compare_and_swap(&lock, savedlock, savedlock+1) == false) savedlock = lock; // Perform read-only operation bool exists = tree->exists(n); // Decrement savedlock = lock; while (__sync_bool_compare_and_swap(&lock, savedlock, savedlock-1) == false) savedlock = lock; return exists; } }; (lets assume it need not be exception-safe) Is this code indeed thread-safe? Are there any pros/cons to this idea? Any advice? Is the use of spinlocks like this a bad idea if the threads are not truly concurrent? Thanks in advance. ;)

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• open source business intelligence solutions

  - by opensas

  which open source business intelligence solution would you recommend? All I need is to build some cubes and let the end user play with dimensions, filter data, sort, etc, and once it's done being able to export it to excel... I'd like the solution to be as simple and easy on resources as possible, and also I'd like it to be as much open source as possible, by the way. I've heard that many solutions available do have many restrictions when it comes to there community version. I'd like to ear your advices and the pros/cons of each alternative, to help me choose the right tool, and if you could point me to some basic demo and tutorial to get started. thanks a lot ps: I'm using sql server databases, they aren't huge databases (in general less than a million records) and I doesn't necessarily have to work on "live" data... ps: some useful links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_intelligence_tools#Open_source_free_products http://www.manageability.org/blog/stuff/open-source-java-business-intelligence http://www.jaspersoft.com/jasperanalysis http://community.pentaho.com/projects/bi_platform/ http://community.pentaho.com/faq/platform_licensing.php http://www.eclipse.org/birt/phoenix/ http://www.spagoworld.org/xwiki/bin/view/SpagoWorld/ http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:vhsqMQXwCUkJ:www.ow2.org/xwiki/bin/download/Activities/EuropeLocalChapterWebinars/ELCWebinarOSBI.pdf+open+source+business+intelligence&hl=en&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESgpJJ2MqaKprJQOF2jX2UXCZQjg_asv8d7EVYtq0Vma-e-tR1tFxS-I0SOW0IhJC5acYc94rkDOrgP1WckCp_vk4qhKqR9y2Klp_u9cL8hlXoKoUpMkpAd5wabu61A4W0y15E5P&sig=AHIEtbRJ5FAI-3YK-qtayPjKkF_CwOgZag

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• NAMESPACE_SEPARATOR constant

  - by ts

  Hello, Having namespaces in PHP is great. Having '\' as namespace separator is a little bit ... awkward (but if there is someone who thinks that is cool & sexy, I am adding tag "rant" to this post. ;) . So, here goes the question: Are you using in your code NAMESPACE_SEPARATOR constant? As in code below: <?php if (!\defined('NAMESPACE_SEPARATOR') { \define('NAMESPACE_SEPARATOR', '\\'); } // if Pros: consistent with DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR (which all of us are using ;) no mess with escaping (think of '\Foo\Bar' but '\\' . Foo' . '\\' . 'Bar') more readable (IMHO) which gives us in effect an opportunity to write good, namespace-aware autoloaders can resist another change if something scary happens (as with ol'good '::' from PHP 6 alpha) can hide uniquess of '\' as namespace operator in programming language land from strangers ;) Cons: "The reason for DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR is that the value is platform dependent, the namespace separator isn't." (as stated in http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=43046) 19 characters instead of 1 ( \ ) or 4 ('\\') There are places where you can't use this (full qualified class names as default class variables) ie: class A { protected $sDefaultReporterClass = '\My\Namespace\DefaultReporter'; } So, what are you thinking ?

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• What vertex shader code should be used for a pixel shader used for simple 2D SpriteBatch drawing in XNA?

  - by Michael

  Preface First of all, why is a vertex shader required for a SilverlightEffect (.slfx file) in Silverlight 5? I'm trying to port a simple 2D XNA game to Silverlight 5 RC, and I would like to use a basic pixel shader. This shader works great in XNA for Windows and Xbox, but I can't get it to compile with Silverlight as a SilverlightEffect. The MS blog for the Silverlight Toolkit says that "there is no difference between .slfx and .fx", but apparently this isn't quite true -- or at least SpriteBatch is working some magic for us in "regular XNA", and it isn't in "Silverlight XNA". If I try to directly copy my pixel shader file into a Silverlight project (and change it to the supported "Effect - Silverlight" importer/processor), when I try to compile I see the following error message: Invalid effect file. Unable to find vertex shader in pass "P0" Indeed, there isn't a vertex shader in my pixel shader file. I haven't needed one with my other 2D XNA apps since I'm just doing basic SpriteBatch drawing. I tried adding a vertex shader to my shader file, using Remi Gillig's comment on this Shawn Hargreaves blog post for guidance, but it doesn't quite work. The shader file successfully compiles, and I see some semblance of my game on screen, but it's tiny, twisted, repeated, and all jumbled up. So clearly something's not quite right. The Real Question So that brings me to my real question: Since a vertex shader is required, is there a basic vertex shader function that works for simple 2D SpriteBatch drawing? And if the vertex shader requires world/view/project matricies as parameters, what values am I supposed to use for a 2D game? Can any shader pros help? Thanks!

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• [Haskell] Problem when mixing type classes and type families

  - by Giuseppe Maggiore

  Hi! This code compiles fine: {-# LANGUAGE MultiParamTypeClasses, FunctionalDependencies, FlexibleInstances, UndecidableInstances, FlexibleContexts, EmptyDataDecls, ScopedTypeVariables, TypeOperators, TypeSynonymInstances, TypeFamilies #-} class Sel a s b where type Res a s b :: * instance Sel a s b where type Res a s b = (s -> (b,s)) instance Sel a s (b->(c,a)) where type Res a s (b->(c,a)) = (b -> s -> (c,s)) but as soon as I add the R predicate ghc fails: {-# LANGUAGE MultiParamTypeClasses, FunctionalDependencies, FlexibleInstances, UndecidableInstances, FlexibleContexts, EmptyDataDecls, ScopedTypeVariables, TypeOperators, TypeSynonymInstances, TypeFamilies #-} class Sel a s b where type Res a s b :: * instance Sel a s b where type Res a s b = (s -> (b,s)) class R a where type Rec a :: * cons :: a -> Rec a elim :: Rec a -> a instance Sel a s (b->(c,Rec a)) where type Res a s (b->(c,Rec a)) = (b -> s -> (c,s)) complaining that: Illegal type synonym family application in instance: b -> (c, Rec a) In the instance declaration for `Sel a s (b -> (c, Rec a))' what does it mean and (most importantly) how do I fix it? Thanks

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• IUsable: controlling resources in a better way than IDisposable

  - by Ilya Ryzhenkov

  I wish we have "Usable" pattern in C#, when code block of using construct would be passed to a function as delegate: class Usable : IUsable { public void Use(Action action) // implements IUsable { // acquire resources action(); // release resources } } and in user code: using (new Usable()) { // this code block is converted to delegate and passed to Use method above } Pros: Controlled execution, exceptions The fact of using "Usable" is visible in call stack Cons: Cost of delegate Do you think it is feasible and useful, and if it doesn't have any problems from the language point of view? Are there any pitfalls you can see? EDIT: David Schmitt proposed the following using(new Usable(delegate() { // actions here }) {} It can work in the sample scenario like that, but usually you have resource already allocated and want it to look like this: using (Repository.GlobalResource) { // actions here } Where GlobalResource (yes, I know global resources are bad) implements IUsable. You can rewrite is as short as Repository.GlobalResource.Use(() => { // actions here }); But it looks a little bit weird (and more weird if you implement interface explicitly), and this is so often case in various flavours, that I thought it deserve to be new syntactic sugar in a language.

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• "do it all" page structure and things to watch out for?

  - by Andrew Heath

  I'm still getting my feet wet in PHP (my 1st language) and I've reached the competency level where I can code one page that handles all sorts of different related requests. They generally have a structure like this: (psuedo code) <?php include 'include/functions.php'; IF authorized IF submit (add data) ELSE IF update (update data) ELSE IF list (show special data) ELSE IF tab switch (show new area) ELSE display vanilla (show default) ELSE "must be registered/logged-in" ?> <HTML> // snip <?php echo $output; ?> // snip </HTML> and it all works nicely, and quite quickly which is cool. But I'm still sorta feeling my way in the dark... and would like some input from the pros regarding this type of page design... is it a good long-term structure? (it seems easily expanded...) are there security risks particular to this design? are there corners I should avoid painting myself into? Just curious about what lies ahead, really...

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• Is using SharePoint as a intranet/extranet portal a good idea?

  - by Rob

  I work for a fortune 500 company in IT and we have developed many systems/applications to do a variety of things. We are in need of some commonality of these applications and a better portal/dashboard/landing page for these applications. So, our customers and employees would log into this portal and see all the "things" that they can do which then link to their own application. This could maybe just iframe in each application inside of this portal to keep brand and navigation consistency. We are trying to decide whether to use SharePoint 2007 or 2010 for this or develop a portal/dashboard of sorts in house. We would like this portal to look and feel very branded to our needs and really not even feel like its using SharePoint (if needed). An example is to provide our own Menu control that drives the navigation if needed. Does anyone have any pros/cons for using SharePoint in such a way? Any advice on implementation (e.g. use 2010, much easier to customize design than 2007, etc)?

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• Wanted to know in detail about how shared libraries work vis-a-vis static library.

  - by goldenmean

  Hello, I am working on creating and linking shared library (.so). While working with them, many questions popped up which i could not find satisying answers when i searched for them, hence putting them here. The questions about shared libraries i have are: 1.) How is shared library different than static library? What are the Key differences in way they are created, they execute? 2.) In case of a shared library at what point are the addresses where a particular function in shared library will be loaded and run from, given? Who gives those functions is load/run addresses? 3.) Will an application linked against shared library be slower in execution as compared to that which is linked with a static library? 4.) Will application executable size differ in these two cases? 5.) Can one do source level debugging of by stepping into functions defined inside a shared library? Is any thing extra needed to make these functions visible to the application? 6.) What are pros and cons in using either kind of library? Thanks. -AD

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• Advantages/disadvantages of Python and Ruby

  - by Seburdis

  I know this is going to seem a little like all the other python vs ruby question out there, but I'm not looking specifically to pick one over the other all the time. My question is, essentially, why would you use one language over the other when you are starting a new project? What features does ruby have that python doesn't that would make you decide on it for a given project? What about python over ruby? I was just recently thinking about the differentiation between the two languages because of Jamis Buck's "There is no magic, only awesome" series of articles (4 parts, available here) when I realized I really don't know enough about the two languages to know when to choose one over the other. I'm hoping to get objective answers from people who have experience with both languages, rather than just "python is better, ruby sucks" kind of responses. If you know of a feature in one language that doesn't exist in the other and is great in a certain situation, feel free to chime in and say why you think it's awesome. If you have another language comparable to these that you'd like to suggest pros/cons for, like groovy for example, that would be appreciated too. Some thing I know each language has going for it: Ruby: Awesome metaprogramming Great community Wide selection of Gems Rails Great code readability, usually MacRuby is great for native development on Mac without objc Amazing testing tools (cucumber, rspec, shoulda, autotest, etc.) Python: Whitespace indentation List comprehensions Better functional programming support? Lots of support on linux Easy_install isn't far from gems Great variety of libraries available

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• how to 'scale' these three tables?

  - by iddqd

  I have the following Tables: Players id playerName Weapons id type otherData Weapons2Player id playersID_reference weaponsID_reference That was nice and simple. Now I need to SELECT items from the Weapons table, according to some of their characteristics that i previously just packed into the otherData column (since it was only needed on the client side). The problem is, that the types have varying characteristics - but also a lot of similar data. So I'm trying to decide on the following possibilities, all of which have their pros and cons. Solution A Kill the Weapons table, and create a new table for each Weapon-Type: Weapons_Swords id bladeType damage otherData Weapons_Guns id accuracy damage ammoType otherData But how will i Link these to the Players ? create Weapons_Swords2Players, Weapons_Guns2Players for each weapon-type? (Will result in a lot more JOINS when loading the player with all his weapons...and it's also more complicated to insert a new player) or add another column to Weapons2Players called WeaponsTypeTable, then do sub-selects to the correct Weapons sub-table (seems easier, but not really right, slightly easier insert i guess) Solution B Keep the Weapons table, and add all the fields i need to it. The Problem is that then there will be NULL fields, since not all Weapon-Types use all fields (can't be right) Weapons id type accuracy damage ammoType bladeType otherData This seems to be pretty basic stuff, but i just can't decide what's best. Or is there a correct Solution C? many thanks.

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• Techniques for sharing a value among classes in a program

  - by Kenneth Cochran

  I'm using Environment.GetFolderPath(Environment.SpecialFolder.CommonApplicationData) + "\MyProgram" As the path to store several files used by my program. I'd like to avoid pasting the same snippet of code all over the my applcation. I need to ensure that: The path cannot be accidentally changed once its been set The classes that need it have access to it. I've considered: Making it a singleton Using constructor dependency injection Using property dependency injection Using AOP to create the path where its needed. Each has pros and cons. The singleton is everyone's favorite whipping boy. I'm not opposed to using one but there are valid reasons to avoid it if possible. I'm already heavily using constructor injection through Castle Windsor. But this is a path string and Windsor doesn't handle system type dependencies very gracefully. I could always wrap it in a class but that seems like overkill for something as simple as a passing around a string value. In any case this route would add yet another constructor argument to each class where it is used. The problem I see with property injection in this case is that there is a large amount of indirection from the where the value is set to where it is needed. I would need a very long line of middlemen to reach all the places where its used. AOP looks promising and I'm planning on using AOP for logging anyway so this at least sounds like a simple solution. Is there any other options I haven't considered? Am I off base with my evaluation of the options I have considered?

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• Teach Markup or use a WYSIWYG editor?

  - by Atomiton

  When it comes to WYSIWYG editors WYSI rarely WYG. The problem I always have is when people paste in formatted text from word. Ideally, what I'm looking for is a way for people to input text into the document while at the same time teaching them structure... I just don't know if that's a realistic goal ( compared to cut n' paste ) I'm curious if people have found using something other than WYSIWYG editors ( take SO, for example ) has worked for REAL WORLD USERS. I'm not talking about programmers, developers and experience internet users... I'm talking about your average user. I'd be interested in best practices when it comes to getting users to enter content... and I'd love it if someone could point me to some good editors/examples. there are lots of choices when it comes to WYSIWYG ( ckEditor, FreeTextBox, TinyMCE ) but I don't hear a lot about SO-like techniques. Does adding that small barrier scares users away? Is it too difficult to teach people to mark up their text? Is it easier to teach them html? Is a BBCode implementation a good idea? What are some Pros/Cons to wysiwyg/markup. What approach have others used?

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• Hadoop Map/Reduce - simple use example to do the following...

  - by alexeypro

  I have MySQL database, where I store the following BLOB (which contains JSON object) and ID (for this JSON object). JSON object contains a lot of different information. Say, "city:Los Angeles" and "state:California". There are about 500k of such records for now, but they are growing. And each JSON object is quite big. My goal is to do searches (real-time) in MySQL database. Say, I want to search for all JSON objects which have "state" to "California" and "city" to "San Francisco". I want to utilize Hadoop for the task. My idea is that there will be "job", which takes chunks of, say, 100 records (rows) from MySQL, verifies them according to the given search criteria, returns those (ID's) which qualify. Pros/cons? I understand that one might think that I should utilize simple SQL power for that, but the thing is that JSON object structure is pretty "heavy", if I put it as SQL schemas, there will be at least 3-5 tables joins, which (I tried, really) creates quite a headache, and building all the right indexes eats RAM faster than I one can think. ;-) And even then, every SQL query has to be analyzed to be utilizing the indexes, otherwise with full scan it literally is a pain. And with such structure we have the only way "up" is just with vertical scaling. But I am not sure it's the best option for me, as I see how JSON objects will grow (the data structure), and I see that the number of them will grow too. :-) Help? Can somebody point me to simple examples of how this can be done? Does it make sense at all? Am I missing something important? Thank you.

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• Access ADP - For/Against?

  - by webworm

  I have been tasked with taking an Access 97 application and moving the back-end data to SQL Server while moving the front end to Access 2003 (using Access Data Projects). In the process of this migration the back-end data structures will be changed significantly to support new functionality. If I had my wish we would not be using Access as the front end. I think our application would be much better served by WinForms, WPF, or a web application. We have the time needed to properly plan a business logic layer and implement an excellent solution but powers above me want to stay with Access because that is what they are familiar with. What I could use help with is pros/cons of continuing down this path of Access development. What are some legitimate arguments for and against using Access 2003? Here is what I have come up with so far. Pro Access: Already own Access 2003 licenses Easy GUI development Reports look nice Against Access Having to use VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) ADO vs DAO. Didn't Microsoft change things from Access 2002 to Access 2003? Not tied to Access runtime Choice in front end (WPF, WinForms, even ASP.NET) Maintainability True separation of logic from UI not possible Does Microsoft still support Access ADP? Perhaps there are other issues I am not aware off both for and against Access for application development. I am trying to keep an open mind while at the same time trying to maintain my sanity. I have been using C# since .NET was released and the thought of going back to VBA for six months makes my head hurt. Especially when I feel I could offer so much more if allowed to develop with modern languages and tools?

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