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• A better alternative to incompatible implementations for the same interface?

  - by glenatron

  I am working on a piece of code which performs a set task in several parallel environments where the behaviour of the different components in the task are similar but quite different. This means that my implementations are quite different but they are all based on the relationships between the same interfaces, something like this: IDataReader -> ContinuousDataReader -> ChunkedDataReader IDataProcessor -> ContinuousDataProcessor -> ChunkedDataProcessor IDataWriter -> ContinuousDataWriter -> ChunkedDataWriter So that in either environment we have an IDataReader, IDataProcessor and IDataWriter and then we can use Dependency Injection to ensure that we have the correct one of each for the current environment, so if we are working with data in chunks we use the ChunkedDataReader, ChunkedDataProcessor and ChunkedDataWriter and if we have continuous data we have the continuous versions. However the behaviour of these classes is quite different internally and one could certainly not go from a ContinuousDataReader to the ChunkedDataReader even though they are both IDataProcessors. This feels to me as though it is incorrect ( possibly an LSP violation? ) and certainly not a theoretically correct way of working. It is almost as though the "real" interface here is the combination of all three classes. Unfortunately in the project I am working on with the deadlines we are working to, we're pretty much stuck with this design, but if we had a little more elbow room, what would be a better design approach in this kind of scenario?

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• Is this a ridiculous way to structure a DB schema, or am I completely missing something?

  - by Jim

  I have done a fair bit of work with relational databases, and think I understand the basic concepts of good schema design pretty well. I recently was tasked with taking over a project where the DB was designed by a highly-paid consultant. Please let me know if my gut intinct - "WTF??!?" - is warranted, or is this guy such a genius that he's operating out of my realm? DB in question is an in-house app used to enter requests from employees. Just looking at a small section of it, you have information on the users, and information on the request being made. I would design this like so: User table: UserID (primary Key, indexed, no dupes) FirstName LastName Department Request table RequestID (primary Key, indexed, no dupes) <...> various data fields containing request details UserID -- foreign key associated with User table Simple, right? Consultant designed it like this (with sample data): UsersTable UserID FirstName LastName 234 John Doe 516 Jane Doe 123 Foo Bar DepartmentsTable DepartmentID Name 1 Sales 2 HR 3 IT UserDepartmentTable UserDepartmentID UserID Department 1 234 2 2 516 2 3 123 1 RequestTable RequestID UserID <...> 1 516 blah 2 516 blah 3 234 blah The entire database is constructed like this, with every piece of data encapsulated in its own table, with numeric IDs linking everything together. Apparently the consultant had read about OLAP and wanted the 'speed of integer lookups' He also has a large number of stored procedures to cross reference all of these tables. Is this valid design for a small to mid-sized SQL DB? Thanks for comments/answers...

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• Self-imposed lockout from program

  - by Alex

  I'm plagued with a lack of willpower. I recently started looking for solutions, and came across a program for macs called SelfControl which completely blocks one's access to a given set of websites for a given period of time (you can delete the program/restart your computer/do almost anything and it will still block those sites for the specified time period, and doesn't require a password to do it.) Unfortunately, there are no windows analogues. The one that comes the closest is Cold Turkey. It has the functionality whereby you set a time in the future, specify a list of websites (or programs - eg explorer, firefox, chrome) and you are blocked from accessing them for the whole duration. No password can undo it, no system reboot, etc. The problem is that the program is a buggy piece of garbage, and in order to ensure that you're not locked out from websites forever, you have to run an uninstaller which is just an exe file accessible at any time which completely defeats the purpose of a self-imposed program lockout. I want to make a better version of that program, or find a simple way to prevent access to a given set of programs over a given period of time with no way around it. I've only taken a few introductory courses in java (math major), but the internet is really having a negative effect on my studies, and the only way I can do work is to eliminate all distractions. What do I need to learn in order to make a program with the following properties: Given a set of .exe files, and a time in the future , this program will prevent access to the given .exe files until current time = given time restarting the computer doesn't interfere with the program, one can't uninstall the program until current time = given time, one can't create another instance of the program to block itself I don't care how much programming knowledge i need to acquire in order to make this program, so please give me a specific list of things that I need to study in order to make this happen, or if something like this exists, then please let me know.

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• International Pricing of Software [closed]

  - by arachnode.net

  I operate a small company that charges $99 for a piece of software. I'd like to know what would be a fair price for non-US customers. Today I sold a license to a party in South Africa. He told me he had been watching the project for two years while business justification could be made for the purchase as SA's currency is nine times weaker than the US dollar. I found this resource detailing how much a Big Mac costs in various countries: http://howmuchatyourplace.com/how_much_does/Big%20Mac_cost.php I realize that the cost of producing a Big Mac varies from locale to locale as does the demand for one. I am aware that many software companies charge prices in local currencies that equate to the price in US dollars. I am aware that my costs remain fixed, and I obviously I cannot discount the rate at which my time costs me. I'm OK with earning less per sale as I would rather get my software onto the desktops of those that need it rather than having them try to write it themselves. Support is light and I can usually point a user to an existing blog or forum post. Being a resident of Hawaii, I am aware that certain goods and services cost more here. Power is up to six times as much per KWH as it is in, say, Seattle, and wages are approximately 60% of what they are for my profession (programmer). I'd like to offer my software at a price that would be fair for everyone around the globe. If a currency is 2 foreign units to 1 US dollar, and goods and services cost 50% more and pay for an equivalent job is 50% of what it is here, should I charge, say, $50 instead of $99? Is there a resource which would allow me to input a price in US dollars and adjust for a list of international locations?

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• Explaining Asteroids Movement code

  - by Moaz ELdeen

  I'm writing an Asteroids Atari clone, and I want to figure out how the AI for the asteroids is done. I have came across that piece of code, but I can't get what it does 100% if ((float)rand()/(float)RAND_MAX < 0.5) { m_Pos.x = -app::getWindowWidth() / 2; if ((float)rand()/(float)RAND_MAX < 0.5) m_Pos.x = app::getWindowWidth() / 2; m_Pos.y = (int) ((float)rand()/(float)RAND_MAX * app::getWindowWidth()); } else { m_Pos.x = (int) ((float)rand()/(float)RAND_MAX * app::getWindowWidth()); m_Pos.y = -app::getWindowHeight() / 2; if (rand() < 0.5) m_Pos.y = app::getWindowHeight() / 2; } m_Vel.x = (float)rand()/(float)RAND_MAX * 2; if ((float)rand()/(float)RAND_MAX < 0.5) { m_Vel.x = -m_Vel.x; } m_Vel.y =(float)rand()/(float)RAND_MAX * 2; if ((float)rand()/(float)RAND_MAX < 0.5) m_Vel.y = -m_Vel.y;

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• Modular Architecture for Processing Pipeline

  - by anjruu

  I am trying to design the architecture of a system that I will be implementing in C++, and I was wondering if people could think of a good approach, or critique the approach that I have designed so far. First of all, the general problem is an image processing pipeline. It contains several stages, and the goal is to design a highly modular solution, so that any of the stages can be easily swapped out and replaced with a piece of custom code (so that the user can have a speed increase if s/he knows that a certain stage is constrained in a certain way in his or her problem). The current thinking is something like this: struct output; /*Contains the output values from the pipeline.*/ class input_routines{ public: virtual foo stage1(...){...} virtual bar stage2(...){...} virtual qux stage3(...){...} ... } output pipeline(input_routines stages); This would allow people to subclass input_routines and override whichever stage they wanted. That said, I've worked in systems like this before, and I find the subclassing and the default stuff tends to get messy, and can be difficult to use, so I'm not giddy about writing one myself. I was also thinking about a more STLish approach, where the different stages (there are 6 or 7) would be defaulted template parameters. Can anyone offer a critique of the pattern above, thoughts on the template approach, or any other architecture that comes to mind?

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• Caching by in-memory dictionaries. Are we doing it all wrong?

  - by user73983

  This approach is pretty much the accepted way to do anything in our company. A simple example : when a piece of data for a customer is requested from a service, we fetch all the data for that customer(relevant part to the service) and save it in a in-memory dictionary then serve it from there on following requests(we run singleton services). Any update goes to DB, then updates the in memory dictionary. It seems all simple and harmless but as we implement more complicated business rules the cache gets out of sync and we have to deal with hard to find bugs. Sometimes we defer writing to database, keeping new data in cache till then. There are cases when we store millions of rows in memory because the table has many relations to other tables and we need to show aggregate data quickly. All this cache handling is a big part of our codebase and I sense this is not the right way to do it. All of this juggling adds too much noise to the code and it makes it hard to understand the actual business logic. However I don't think we can serve data in a reasonable amount of time if we have to hit the database every time. I am unhappy about the current situation but I don't have a better alternative. My only solution would be to use NHibernate 2nd level cache but I have nearly no experience with it. I know many campanies use Redis or MemCached heavily to gain performance but I have no idea how I would integrate them into our system. I also don't know if they can perform better than in-memory data structures and queries. Are there any alternative approaches that I should look into?

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• How should I start refactoring my mostly-procedural C++ application?

  - by oob

  We have a program written in C++ that is mostly procedural, but we do use some C++ containers from the standard library (vector, map, list, etc). We are constantly making changes to this code, so I wouldn't call it a stagnant piece of legacy code that we can just wrap up. There are a lot of issues with this code making it harder and harder for us to make changes, but I see the three biggest issues being: Many of the functions do more (way more) than one thing We violate the DRY principle left and right We have global variables and global state up the wazoo. I was thinking we should attack areas 1 and 2 first. Along the way, we can "de-globalize" our smaller functions from the bottom up by passing in information that is currently global as parameters to the lower level functions from the higher level functions and then concentrate on figuring out how to removing the need for global variables as much as possible. I just finished reading Code Complete 2 and The Pragmatic Programmer, and I learned a lot, but I am feeling overwhelmed. I would like to implement unit testing, change from a procedural to OO approach, automate testing, use a better logging system, fully validate all input, implement better error handling and many other things, but I know if we start all this at once, we would screw ourselves. I am thinking the three I listed are the most important to start with. Any suggestions are welcome. We are a team of two programmers mostly with experience with in-house scripting. It is going to be hard to justify taking the time to refactor, especially if we can't bill the time to a client. Believe it or not, this project has been successful enough to keep us busy full time and also keep several consultants busy using it for client work.

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• Hosting files with support for file tagging / keywords

  - by Zev Chonoles

  I have a large (approx. 25GB) collection of files I would like to host online for people to view or download. I have a spare computer I can use as a dedicated server for these files. I'm looking for a method of, or piece of software for, hosting my files where I can assign tags or keywords to the files, and people viewing my files online can search the collection via the tags. By way of approximate solutions I've found so far, I see that there is software such as Collectorz.com or Readerware for creating databases of one's books / music / movies, and these databases can be searched by tags or keywords, and the databases can be made available and searchable online; this would suit my purposes except that my files are not necessarily books, music, or movies, and I want the files themselves accessible online, not a database describing my files. A commercially-available solution like the ones above would be acceptable, but I'd prefer to have the whole setup under my control (i.e. I'd like to either implement it by hand, or use commercial software that doesn't rely on using the company's servers, paying them a continued fee, etc.). The current extent of my internet experience is designing a few Google Sites, so I know there's a fair chance I won't understand the answers I receive, but I'm always happy to have a summer project :)

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• AppleTV - itunes store is temporarily unavailable - please check back later

  - by Ken

  When attempting to rent a movie on ATV, my wife received the error message above.  Alternately “server unavailable”.  When your wife is sick, the amount of IT support she needs goes up exponentially.  One piece of the puzzle was that she had changed her Apple ID password.  On her PC I ran iTunes and under account, there was only 1 device listed (not the ATV).  Even when signed out/back-in on the ATV under Settings>iTunes it still gave same error message.  What I suspect is it thinks she is trying to authorize the device to another Apple ID.  Some new 90 day rule limits when a device can be associated with another Apple ID.  Your iTunes store/account will show devices, and how long before they can be associated with a different Apple ID from the Account Information page in iTunes on your computer.  Apple must have no freaking idea why someone would want to know which ID is associated to the ATV (i.e. the vice versa), because it can’t be done. Solution: Try ATV settings>reset I swapped out ATV 1 for ATV 2 (used for music streaming downstairs).  I know it’s a cop-out solution, but remember I had a sick wife breathing down my neck.

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• JEditorPane on Steroids with Nashorn

  - by Geertjan

  Continuing from Embedded Nashorn in JEditorPane, here is the same JEditorPane on steroids with Nashorn, in the context of some kind of CMS backend system: Above, you see heavy reusage of NetBeans IDE editor infrastructure. Parts of it are with thanks to Steven Yi, who has done some great research in this area. Code completion, right-click popup menu, line numbering, editor toolbar, find/replace features, block selection, comment/uncomment features, etc, etc, etc, all the rich editor features from NetBeans IDE are there, within a plain old JEditorPane. And everything is externally extensible, e.g., new actions can be registered by external modules into the right-click popup menu or the editor toolbar or the sidebar, etc. For example, here's code completion (Ctrl-Space): It even has the cool new feature where if you select a closing brace and the opening brace isn't in the visible area, a rectangular popup appears at the top of the editor, to show how the current piece of code begins: The only thing I am missing is code folding! I wish that would work too, still figuring it out. What's also cool is that this is a Maven project. The sources: http://java.net/projects/nb-api-samples/sources/api-samples/show/versions/7.3/misc/CMSBackOffice2

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• More efficient in range checking

  - by Mob

  I am going to use a specific example in my question, but overall it is pretty general. I use java and libgdx. I have a ship that moves through space. In space there is debris that the ship can tractor beam in and and harvest. Debris is stored in a list, and the object contains it own x and y values. So currently there is no way to to find the debris's location without first looking at the debris object. Now at any given time there can be a huge (1000+) amount of debris in space, and I figure that calculating the distance between the ship and every single piece of debris and comparing it to maximum tractor beam length is rather inefficient. I have thought of dividing space into sectors, and have each sector contain a list of every object in it. This way I could only check nearby sectors. However this essentially doubles memory for the list. (I would reference the same object so it wouldn't double overall. I am not CS major, but I doubt this would be hugely significant.) This also means anytime an object moves it has to calculate which sector it is in, again not a huge problem. I also don't know if I can use some sort of 2D MAP that uses x and y values as keys. But since I am using float locations this sounds more trouble than its worth. I am kind of new to programming games, and I imagined there would be some eloquent solution to this issue.

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• Advanced TSQL training

  - by Dave Ballantyne

  Over the past few years, Ive had it on my to do list to write and deliver and full-scale SQLServer training course and not just an hour long bite size session at user groups and conferences.  To me, SQLServer development is not just knowing and remembering the syntax of commands.  Sometimes I semi-jest that i have “Written a merge statement without looking up the syntax”, but I know from my interactions on and off line that I am far from alone in this.  In any case we have an awesome tool in the internet which is great at looking things up. When developing SQL Server based solutions,  of more importance is knowing the internals of the engine.  SQL Server is a complex piece of software and we need to be able to understand to a fairly low level ( you can always dive deeper ) the choices that it makes and why it makes them in order to deliver performant, reliable, predictable and scalable systems to our customers and end-users. This is the view i shall be taking over two days in March (19th and 20th) in London and ,TBH, one I dont see taken often enough. Early bird discounts are available until 31Dec. Full details of the course and a high level view of the bullet points we shall be covering are available at the Technitrain site ( http://tinyurl.com/TSQLTraining )

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• Impact of Server Failure on Coherence Request Processing

  - by jpurdy

  Requests against a given cache server may be temporarily blocked for several seconds following the failure of other cluster members. This may cause issues for applications that can not tolerate multi-second response times even during failover processing (ignoring for the moment that in practice there are a variety of issues that make such absolute guarantees challenging even when there are no server failures). In general, Coherence is designed around the principle that failures in one member should not affect the rest of the cluster if at all possible. However, it's obvious that if that failed member was managing a piece of state that another member depends on, the second member will need to wait until a new member assumes responsibility for managing that state. This transfer of responsibility is (as of Coherence 3.7) performed by the primary service thread for each cache service. The finest possible granularity for transferring responsibility is a single partition. So the question becomes how to minimize the time spent processing each partition. Here are some optimizations that may reduce this period: Reduce the size of each partition (by increasing the partition count) Increase the number of JVMs across the cluster (increasing the total number of primary service threads) Increase the number of CPUs across the cluster (making sure that each JVM has a CPU core when needed) Re-evaluate the set of configured indexes (as these will need to be rebuilt when a partition moves) Make sure that the backing map is as fast as possible (in most cases this means running on-heap) Make sure that the cluster is running on hardware with fast CPU cores (since the partition processing is single-threaded) As always, proper testing is required to make sure that configuration changes have the desired effect (and also to quantify that effect).

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• Do you feel bad when you have to learn new things?

  - by tactoth

  New thing is not always cool. I see many people say they are very bored by doing the similar things day after day. For me it's the opposite - I'm always learning something new. During the last one and a harf year, nearly every two months I need to do lots of researches on a totally new topic: RTMP, MP4, SIP, VNC, Smooth streaming, ..., I have to read lots of specifications, download tones of open source projects to understand concepts, and turn them into my runnable code. And it was so bad! My brain has never been very sure and very familiar with anything, and when it's close to be sure and familiar, it'll have to switch to next thing. I kind of envy people who build upper level applications because they can be very focusing, and their knowledge set includes most things their job requires. Everything is quite measurable, direct and straightforward. Have you ever had the similar feeling? I'm thinking of asking my boss to assign me some other piece of work so that I work like moving forward on a broad road instead of figuring out a way in the dark, I think it'll be more relaxing, any suggestion?

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• If I want to dual-boot Ubuntu with another OS, what partitioning method should I use?

  - by Jay

  I have Ubuntu running as a vm in VirtualBox at the moment, but in the future, if I want to dual-boot it with Windows or another OS installed on my hard-drive, what partitioning method should I use to make room for it? 1)Manually partition my hard drive via disk management in Windows (or the equivalent in another OS), making appropriate room for the main partition upon which Ubuntu will be installed and swap space; 2)Partition via the Ubuntu installer options; 3)Use gparted or another free tool like it. I am uncertain as to why I would want to use one over the other. Lastly, am I correct to think that it would be the acme of foolishness to try to partition drives within a virtual machine (since that partitioning would be inherently limited to the limitations set upon it by the virtualization software, e.g., VirtualBox)? Thanks! P.S. Oh, and I am also planning on not modifying the MBR of Windows if I ever do dual-boot with Ubuntu, using instead a piece of free software (like easyBCD or something) to avoid the headaches of Grub being overwritten by a Windows update.

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• Show and Tell: What work are you the most proud of? [closed]

  - by dannywartnaby

  Hey, In the spirit of building community, and because it's always cool to see great work being pushed out and created by people, anyone up for a little show and tell? The rules are really simple, and this is supposed to be a bit of fun, so; post a link to a single piece of work (anything you've produced, designed or developed (or helped developed)) and write a little paragraph or two on what it is, what you like about it, the technology you used and perhaps one thing that you learnt from the project. It could be a website, framework, open source project, game, mobile application... etc. So, allow me to start. I'm personally very proud of a tiny iPhone application I designed and developed. It's only available to UK AppStore users, and I only have a small userbase, but, I like it. The application is called Sushi Total: http://knowledgeisporridge.com/sushitotal.html It's written in Objective-C. It's a very simply application that allows you to total up your bill at Yo Sushi restaurants by tapping coloured plates. If I learnt anything from making this application it's this: I believe software should be simple and uncluttered, and that producing an application with one feature is absolutely fine as long as it works really well. So, who's next?

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• 'Buy the app' landing page implementations

  - by benwad

  My site (using Django) has an app that I'm trying to push - I currently have a piece of middleware that redirects the user to a page advertising the app if they're accessing the page on the iPhone, then setting a cookie so that the user isn't bugged by the message every time they visit the site. This works fine, however checking the page with the mobile Googlebot checker shows that the Googlebot gets stuck in the redirect (since it doesn't store cookies) and therefore won't index the proper content. So, I'm trying to think of an alternative implementation that won't hurt the site's Google ranking and won't have any other adverse effects. I've considered a couple of options: Redirect (the current solution), but don't redirect if the user agent matches the Googlebot's UA string. This would be ideal, however I'm not sure if Google like their bot being treated differently from other users, and I'm afraid the site's ranking may be somehow penalised if I go ahead with this. Use a Javascript popup instead of a redirect. This would make sure the Googlebot finds the content it needs, however I envision this approach causing compatibility issues with the myriad mobile devices/browsers out there, and may affect the page load time. How valid are these options? And is there a better option for implementing this feature out there? I've tried researching this topic but surprisingly can't find any reputable-looking blog posts that explore this topic. EDIT: I posted this on SF because it seemed unsuitable for SO, but if there's another site that would be better for this issue then I'd be happy to move the question elsewhere.

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• How to rotate a group of objects around a common center?

  - by user1662292

  I've made a model in 3D Studio Max 9. It consists of a variety of cubes, clyinders etc. In XNA I've imported the model okay and it shows correctly. However, when I apply rotation, each component in the model rotates around it's own centre. I want the model to rotate as a single unit. I've linked the components in 3D Max and they rotate as I want in Max. protected override void LoadContent() { spriteBatch = new SpriteBatch(GraphicsDevice); model = Content.Load<Model>("Models/Alien1"); } protected override void Update(GameTime gameTime) { camera.Update(1f, new Vector3(), graphics.GraphicsDevice.Viewport.AspectRatio); rotation += 0.1f; base.Update(gameTime); } protected override void Draw(GameTime gameTime) { GraphicsDevice.Clear(Color.CornflowerBlue); Matrix[] transforms = new Matrix[model.Bones.Count]; model.CopyAbsoluteBoneTransformsTo(transforms); Matrix worldMatrix = Matrix.Identity; Matrix rotationYMatrix = Matrix.CreateRotationY(rotation); Matrix translateMatrix = Matrix.CreateTranslation(location); worldMatrix = rotationYMatrix * translateMatrix; foreach (ModelMesh mesh in model.Meshes) { foreach (BasicEffect effect in mesh.Effects) { effect.World = worldMatrix * transforms[mesh.ParentBone.Index]; effect.View = camera.viewMatrix; effect.Projection = camera.projectionMatrix; effect.EnableDefaultLighting(); effect.PreferPerPixelLighting = true; } mesh.Draw(); } base.Draw(gameTime); } More Info: Rotating the object via it's properties works fine so I'm guessing there's something up with the code rather than with the object itself. Translating the object also causes the objects to get moved independently of each other rather than as a single model and each piece becomes spread around the scene. The model is in .X format.

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• Is SEO affected negatively by having densely encoded identifiers of content in URLs?

  - by casperOne

  This isn't about where to put the id of a piece of unique content in URLs, but more about densely packing the URL (or, does it just not matter). Take for example, a hypothetical post in a blog: http://tempuri.org/123456789/seo-friendly-title The ID that uniquely identifies this is 123456789. This corresponds to a look-up and is the direct key in the underlying data store. However, I could encode that in say, hexadecimal, like so: http://tempuri.org/75bcd15/seo-friendly-title And that would be shorter. One could take it even further and have more compact encodings; since URLs are case sensitive, one could imagine an encoding that uses numbers, lowercase and uppercase letters, for a base of 62 (26 upper case + 26 lower case + 10 digits): 0123456789ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz For a resulting URL of: http://tempuri.org/8M0kX/seo-friendly-title The question is, does densely packing the ID of the content (the requirement is that an ID is mandatory for look-ups) have a negative impact on SEO (and dare I ask, might it have any positive impact), or is it just not worth the time? Note that this is not for a URL shortening service, so saving space in the URL for browser limitation purposes is not an issue.

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• i18n and L10n (1)

  - by Aaron Li

  Internationalization (i18n) is a way of designing and developing a software product to function in multiple locales. This process involves identifying the locales that must be supported, designing features which support those locales, and writing code that functions equally well in any of the supported locales. Localization (L10n) is a process of modifying or adapting a software product to fit the requirements of a particular locale. This process includes (but may not be limited to) translating the user interface, documentation and packaging, changing dialog box geometries, customizing features (if necessary), and testing the translated product to ensure that it still works (at least as well as the original). i18n is a pre-requisite for L10n. Resource is 1. any part of a program which can appear to the user or be changed or configured by the user. 2. any piece of the program's data, as opposed to its code. Core product is the language independent portion of a software product (as distinct from any particular localized version of that product - including the English language version). Sometimes, however, this term is used to refer to the English product as opposed to other localizations.   Useful links http://www.mozilla.org/docs/refList/i18n/ http://www.w3.org/International/ http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Community+Group+int_localization/

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• How difficult is it for an artist to make their own artwork cohesive to another artists' style? [on hold]

  - by user36200

  I have a lot of artwork I purchased from a website, but the artist who drew the game assets is unavailable. I need to create additional artwork which fits with this style, but I am not an artist- nor do I have any idea of how artists work. Obviously, the solution is to find a new artist, who I can pay to draw this artwork while keeping it to look at certain way. I am scared of wasting money though. I don't want to contract an artist, only to find out it is extremely difficult for someone to match another person's art style. I don't need it to be identical, I just need it to be cohesive. I also want to know what I'm asking of people, before I ask them. Artists are workers just like me, and deserve to be understood when contracted. As an artist, is it extra difficult or time consuming to alter your artwork to match a certain style? Does it require a lot of talent to make a cohesive piece of art? To be specific, I am talking about structures, such as 2D symbols of towns for a map. They all have this "gritty" penciling effect to them and lots of saturated colors, which is what will be required when I say "cohesive". Along with looking like the architecture belongs in the same world.

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• Is it reasonable to null guard every single dereferenced pointer?

  - by evadeflow

  At a new job, I've been getting flagged in code reviews for code like this: PowerManager::PowerManager(IMsgSender* msgSender) : msgSender_(msgSender) { } void PowerManager::SignalShutdown() { msgSender_->sendMsg("shutdown()"); } I'm told that last method should read: void PowerManager::SignalShutdown() { if (msgSender_) { msgSender_->sendMsg("shutdown()"); } } i.e., I must put a NULL guard around the msgSender_ variable, even though it is a private data member. It's difficult for me to restrain myself from using expletives to describe how I feel about this piece of 'wisdom'. When I ask for an explanation, I get a litany of horror stories about how some junior programmer, some-year, got confused about how a class was supposed to work and accidentally deleted a member he shouldn't have (and set it to NULL afterwards, apparently), and things blew up in the field right after a product release, and we've "learned the hard way, trust us" that it's better to just NULL check everything. To me, this feels like cargo cult programming, plain and simple. A few well-meaning colleagues are earnestly trying to help me 'get it' and see how this will help me write more robust code, but... I can't help feeling like they're the ones who don't get it. Is it reasonable for a coding standard to require that every single pointer dereferenced in a function be checked for NULL first—even private data members? (Note: To give some context, we make a consumer electronics device, not an air traffic control system or some other 'failure-equals-people-die' product.) EDIT: In the above example, the msgSender_ collaborator isn't optional. If it's ever NULL, it indicates a bug. The only reason it is passed into the constructor is so PowerManager can be tested with a mock IMsgSender subclass.

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• Quaternions, Axis Angles and Rotation Matrices. Which of these should I use for FP Camera?

  - by Afonso Lage

  After 2 weeks of reading many math formulas and such I know what is a Quaternion, an Axis Angles and Matrices. I have made my own math libary (Java) to use on my game (LWJGL). But I'm really confused about all this. I want to have a 3D first person camera. The move (translation) is working fine but the rotation isnt working like I need. I need a camera to rotate arround world Axis and not about its own axis. But even using Quaternions, this doesnt work and no matter how much I read about Euler Angles, everybody says to me dont touch on it! This is a little piece of code that i'm using to make the rotation: Quaternion qPitch = Quaternion.createFromAxis(cameraRotate.x, 1.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f); Quaternion qYaw = Quaternion.createFromAxis(cameraRotate.y, 0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f); this.multiplicate(qPitch.toMatrix4f().toArray()); this.multiplicate(qYaw.toMatrix4f().toArray()); Where this is a Matrix4f view matrix and cameraRotate is a Vector3f that just handle the angles to rotate obtained from mouse move. So I think I'm doing everything right: Translate the view Matrix Rotate the Move Matrix So, after reading all this, I just want to know: To obtain a correct first person camera rotate, I must need to use Quaternios to make the rotations, but how to rotate around world axis? Thanks for reading it. Best regards, Afonso Lage

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• Problems moving a rectangle in Pygame.

  - by Yann Core

  Hi guys! I'm making a game in Pygame and I want to be able to target enemy unit. I made it so when I click on them a variable "targeted" becomes true, and stays true until I click somewhere else on the screen. I also want targeted units to have a small green circle around them, so I made it in GEDIT. I have made a function that draws everything on the screen (the background, the player, objects, etc) and in the part where it draws the units it checks if the variable "targeted" is true and if it is it should move that little green circle over the enemy units. here is the code that does that: screen.blit(enemy_unit.pic, enemy_unit.rect) #draw the unit if enemy_unit.targeted == True: #if the unit has been targeted then draw a circle over it target_rect.move_ip(enemy_unit.pos) #move the circle to the unit target_rect.fit(enemy_unit.rect) #there are some bigger units and some smaller ones, so we have to "scale" the circle screen.blit(target_pic, target_rect) #actually draw the circle This doesn't work, when I target the unit the circle just appears for a 1/5 of second next (not on, but just next) to the unit and then disappears. I am sure that I am keeping a good track of "enemy_unit.pos" because I tested it (I added a piece of code that would print one units position and mouse's position every time i clicked the mouse and when i was near him the numbers were same). If you could give me a hint about what I'm doing wrong. I think its in move_ip function, but I tried just move and it didn't work either (the circle didn't even show at all)!

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