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  • SSW Scrum Rule: Do you know to use clear task descriptions?

    - by Martin Hinshelwood
    When you create tasks in Scrum you are doing this within a time box and you tend to add only the information you need to remember what the task is. And the entire Team was at the meeting and were involved in the discussions around the task, so why do you need more? Once you have accepted a task you should then add as much information as possible so that anyone can pick up that task; what if your numbers come up? Will you be into work the next day? Figure: What if your numbers come up in the lottery? What if the Team runs a syndicate and all your numbers come up? The point is that anything can happen and you need to protect the integrity of the project, the company and the Customer. Add as much information to the task as you think is necessary for anyone to work on the task. If you need to add rich text and images you can do this by attaching an email to the task.   Figure: Bad example, there is not enough information for a non team member to complete this task Figure: Julie provided a lot more information and another team should be able to pick this up. This has been published as Do you know to ensure that relevant emails are attached to tasks in our Rules to Better Scrum using TFS.   Technorati Tags: Scrum,SSW Rules,TFS 2010

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  • How can a non-technical person learn to write a spec for small projects?

    - by Joseph Turian
    How can a non-technical person learn to write specs for small projects? A friend of mine is trying to outsource some development on a statistics project. In particular, he does a lot of work in excel, and wants to outsource the creation of scripts to do what he now does by hand. However, my friend is extremely non-technical. He is poor at writing technical specs. When he does write a spec, it is written the way you would describe doing something in excel (go to this cell and then copy the value to that cell). It is also overly verbose, and does examples several times. I'm not sure if he properly describes corner cases. The first project he outsourced was a failure. I think he overdescribed some details, but underdescribed corner cases. That and/or the coder he hired didn't think through the corner cases and ask appropriate questions. I'm not sure. I got on IM with him and it took me half an hour to dig out a description that should have taken five minutes or less to describe. I wrote the scripts for him at the end, but didn't examine why his process with the coder failed. He has asked me for help. However, I refuse to get involved, because taking his spec and translating it into clear requirements is 10x more work than executing on a clearly written spec. What is the right way for him to learn? Are there resources he could use? Are there ways he can learn from small, low-pressure practice projects with coders? Most of his scripts are statistical and data processing oriented. e.g. take this column and run an average over it. Remove these rows under these conditions. So the challenge is different than spec'ing a web app.

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  • unit level testing, agile, and refactoring

    - by dsollen
    I'm working on a very agile development system, a small number of people with my doing the vast majority of progaming myself. I've gotten to the testing phase and find myself writing mostly functional level testing, which I should in theory be leavning for our tester (in practice I don't entirely...trust our tester to detect and identify defects enough to leave him the sole writter of functional tests). In theory what I should be writing is Unit level tests. However, I'm not sure it's worth the expense. Unit testing takes some time to do, more then functional testing since I have to set up mocks and plugs into smaller units that weren't design to run in issolation. More importantly, I find I refactor and redesign heavily-part of this is due to my inherriting code that needed heavy redesign and is still being cleaned up, but even once I've finished removing parts that need work I'm sure in the act of expanding the code I'll still do a decent amount of refactoring and redesign. It feels as if I will break my unit tests, forcing wasted time to refactor them as well, often due to unit test, by definition, having to be coupled so closely to the code structure. So.is it worth all the wasted time when functional tests, that will never break when I refactor/redesign, should find most defects? Do unit tests really provide that much extra defect detetection over through functional? and how does one create good unit tests that work with very quick and agile code that is modified rapidly? ps, I would be fine/happy with links to anything one considers an excellent resource for how to 'do' unit testing in a highly changing enviroment. edit: to clarify I am doing a bit of very unoffical TDD, I just seem to be writing tests on what would be considered a functional level rather then unit level. I think part of this is becaus I own nearly all of the project I don't feel I need to limit the scope as much; and part of it is that it's daunting to think of trying to go back and retroactively add the unit tests needed to cover enough code that I can feel comfortable testing only a unit without the full functionality and trust that unit still works with the rest of the units.

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  • Translation and Localization Resources for UX Designers

    - by ultan o'broin
    Here is a handy list of translation and localization-related resources for user experience professionals. Following these will help you design an easily translatable user experience. Most of the references here are for web pages or software. Fundamentally, remember your designs will be consumed globally, and never divorce the design process from the development or deployment effort that goes into bringing your designs to life in code. Ask yourself today: Do you know how the text you are using in your designs are delivered to the customer, even in English? Key areas that UX designers always seen to fall foul of, in my space anyway, are: Terminology that is impossible to translate (jargon, multiple modifiers, gerunds) or is used inconsistently Poorly written, verbose text (really, just write well in English, no special considerations) String construction (concatenation of parts assembled dynamically) Composite widget positioning (my favourite) Hard-coded fonts, small font sizes, or character formatting or casing that doesn't work globally Format that is not separate from content Restricted real estate not allowing for text expansion in translation Forcing formatting with breaks, and hard-coding alphabetical sorting Graphics that do not work in Bi-Di languages (because they indicate directionality and can't flip) or contain embedded text. The problems of culturally offensive icons are well known by now in the enterprise applications space, though there are some dangers, such as the use of flags to indicate language, for example. Resources Internationalization Techniques: Authoring HTML & CSS Global By Design Insert Title Here : Variables in Interface Language Prose: Internationalisation Doc and help considerations I can deal with later.

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  • SEO - Index images (lazyload)

    - by Guilherme Nascimento
    Note:My question is not about Javascript. I'm developing a plugin for jQuery/Mootols/Prototype, that work with DOM. This plugin will be to improve page performance (better user experience). The plugin will be distributed to other developers so that they can use in their projects. How does the lazyload: The images are only loaded when you scroll down the page (will look like this: http://www.appelsiini.net/projects/lazyload/enabled_timeout.html LazyLoad). But he does not need HTML5, I refer to this attribute: data-src="image.jpg" Two good examples of website use LazyLoad are: youtube.com (suggested videos) and facebook.com (photo gallery). I believe that the best alternative would be to use: <A href="image.jpg">Content for ALT=""</a> and convert using javascript, for this: <IMG alt="Content for ALT=\"\"" src="image.jpg"> Then you question me: Why do you want to do that anyway? I'll tell you: Because HTML5 is not supported by any browser (especially mobile) And the attribute data-src="image.jpg" not work at all Indexers. I need a piece of HTML code to be fully accessible to search engines. Otherwise the plugin will not be something good for other developers. I thought about doing so to help in indexing: <noscript><img src="teste.jpg"></noscript> But noscript has negative effect on the index (I refer to the contents of noscript) I want a plugin that will not obstruct the image indexing in search engines. This plugin will be used by other developers (and me too). This is my question: How to make a HTML images accessible to search engines, which can minimize the requests?

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

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

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  • Craftsmanship Tour Day 1: Didit Long Island

    - by Liam McLennan
    On Monday I was at Didit for my first ever craftsmanship visit. Didit seem to occupy a good part of a non-descript building in Rockville Centre Long Island. Since I had arrived early from Seattle I had some time to kill, so I stopped at the Rockville Diner on the corner of N Park Ave and Sunrise Hwy. I thoroughly enjoyed the pancakes and the friendly service. After walking to the Didit office I met Rik Dryfoos, the Didit Engineering Manager who organised my visit, and got the introduction to Didit and the work they are doing. I spent the morning in the room shared by the Didit developers, who are working on some fascinating deep engineering problems. After lunch at a local Thai place I setup a webcam to record an interview with Rik and Matt Roman (Didit VP of Engineering). I had a lot of trouble with the webcam, including losing several minutes of conversation, but in the end I was very happy the result. Here are the full interviews with Rik and Matt: Interview with Rik Dryfoos Interview with Matt Roman We had a great chat, much of which is captured in the recording. It was such great conversation that I almost missed my train to Manhattan. I’m sure Didit will continue to do well with such a dedicated and enthusiastic team. I sincerely thank them for hosting me for the day. If you are looking for a true agile environment and the opportunity to work with a high quality team then you should talk to Didit.

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  • Reflector Pro has now been released!

    - by CliveT
    After moving into the .NET division in May , and having a great time working on Reflector, I'm pleased to say that the results of that work are now available. Reflector Pro has now been released! The old Reflector as you know and love it is still available free of charge, and as part of this project we've fixed a number of bugs in the de-compilation that have been around for a long time. The Pro version comes as an add-in for Visual Studio - this offers dynamic de-compilation and generation of pdb files which allow you to step into the de-compiled code. Alex has some good pictures of this functionality on his beta post from around a month ago. Thanks to the other guys who've worked on this for taking me along for the ride - Alex, Andrew, Bart and Jason. Stephen did some great usability work, Chris Alford did some great technical authoring and Laila handled the launch publicity. Like all projects, there's always more I'd like to have done, but what we have looks like a pretty powerful addition to the developer's set of tools to me. Please try it and give us feedback on the forum.

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  • How to join video files from terminal?

    - by Leon Vitanos
    I have tried avidemux2_cli, mencoder, ffmpeg, cat.. But this doesn't always work (With the most of the times the error is that the audio codec is not the same) Maybe i put wrong options in the commands. So the commands: cat Sample.avi rrr.avi > complete.avi ffmpeg -i Sample.avi -i output.avi -vcodec copy -acodec copy complete.avi mencoder -ovc lavc -oac copy Sample.avi rrr.avi -o complete.avi avidemux2_cli --audio-codec copy --video-codec copy --output-format avi --load Sample.avi -append output.avi --save video.avi The cat problem is that it doesn't show error but it doesn't work always..Like the complete.avi will be exactly the same with Sample.avi Fmmpeg does nothing. The complete.avi is always the same with Sample.avi Mencoder error: All files must have identical audio codec and format for -oac copy. So the complete.avi is the same with Sample.avi avidemux2_cli there is no error but the complete.avi is again the same with Sample.avi.. So to sum up, all complete.avi are the same with Sample.avi.. And the problem is that they don't have the same audio codec ( i quess ).. Any ideas?

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  • Give Chromium-Based Browser Desktop Notifications a Native System Look in Ubuntu

    - by Asian Angel
    Desktop notifications from Chromium-based browsers are an awesome feature, but they do not blend in well at all with the native system theming in Ubuntu. Now you can fix that small problem using the wonderful Chromify-OSD extension created by Marco Ceppi. Once you get the extension installed you can give it a quick test run using the link and information we have listed below. As you can see in the image above the new notification style looks absolutely wonderful. Chromify-OSD (Chrome Web Store) [via OMG! Ubuntu!] You can test the new look of the notifications for yourself using the following webpage. Keep in mind that the extension needs to be installed first before this will work though. Note: Enter the following image URL into the Icon Blank (http://www.rgraph.net/images/logo.png) or the URL for an appropriate image, otherwise the notification may not work properly during your test. Chromify Sample HTML5 Notification Test Page The wallpaper shown in the screenshot above can be downloaded here: anime sport [DesktopNexus] Latest Features How-To Geek ETC How to Enable User-Specific Wireless Networks in Windows 7 How to Use Google Chrome as Your Default PDF Reader (the Easy Way) How To Remove People and Objects From Photographs In Photoshop Ask How-To Geek: How Can I Monitor My Bandwidth Usage? Internet Explorer 9 RC Now Available: Here’s the Most Interesting New Stuff Here’s a Super Simple Trick to Defeating Fake Anti-Virus Malware The Citroen GT – An Awesome Video Game Car Brought to Life [Video] Final Man vs. Machine Round of Jeopardy Unfolds; Watson Dominates Give Chromium-Based Browser Desktop Notifications a Native System Look in Ubuntu Chrome Time Track Is a Simple Task Time Tracker Google Sky Map Turns Your Android Phone into a Digital Telescope Walking Through a Seaside Village Wallpaper

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  • Programming by dictation?

    - by Andrew M
    ie. you speak out the code, and someone else across the room types it in Anyone tried this? Obviously the person taking the dictation would need to be a coder too, so you didn't have to explain everything and go into tedious detail (not 'open bracket, new line...' but more like 'create a new class called myParser that takes three arguments, first one is...'). I thought of it because sometimes I'm too easily distracted at my computer. Surrounded by buttons, instant gratification a click away, the world at my fingertips. To get stuff done, I want to get away, write my code on paper. But that would mean losing access to necessary resources, and necessitate tedious typing-up later on. The solution? Dictate. Pros: no chance to check reddit, stackexchange, gmail, etc. code while you pace the room, lie down, play billiards, whatever train your brain to think more abstractedly (have to visualize things if you can't just see the screen) skip the tedious details (closing brackets etc.) the typist gets to shadow a more experienced programmer and learn how they work the typist can provide assistance/suggestions external pressure of typist expecting instructions, urging you to stay focussed Cons might be too hard might not work any better rather inefficient use of assisting programmer need to find/pay someone to do this

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  • Who is code wanderer?

    - by DigiMortal
    In every area of life there are people with some bad habits or misbehaviors that affect the work process. Software development is also not free of this kind of people. Today I will introduce you code wanderer. Who is code wanderer? Code wandering is more like bad habit than serious diagnose. Code wanderers tend to review and “fix” source code in files written by others. When code wanderer has some free moments he starts to open the code files he or she has never seen before and starts making little fixes to these files. Why is code wanderer dangerous? These fixes seem correct and are usually first choice to do when considering nice code. But as changes are made by coder who has no idea about the code he or she “fixes” then “fixing” usually ends up with messing up working code written by others. Often these “fixes” are not found immediately because they doesn’t introduce errors detected by compilers. So these “fixes” find easily way to production environments because there is also very good chance that “fixed” code goes through all tests without any problems. How to stop code wanderer? The first thing is to talk with person and explain him or her why those changes are dangerous. It is also good to establish rules that state clearly why, when and how can somebody change the code written by other people. If this does not work it is possible to isolate this person so he or she can post his or her changes to code repository as patches and somebody reviews those changes before applying them.

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  • Are More Comments Better in High-Turnover Environments?

    - by joshin4colours
    I was talking with a colleague today. We work on code for two different projects. In my case, I'm the only person working on my code; in her case, multiple people work on the same codebase, including co-op students who come and go fairly regularly (between every 8-12 months). She said that she is liberal with her comments, putting them all over the place. Her reasoning is that it helps her remember where things are and what things do since much of the code wasn't written by her and could be changed by someone other than her. Meanwhile, I try to minimize the comments in my code, putting them in only in places with a unobvious workaround or bug. However, I have a better understanding of my code overall, and have more direct control over it. My opinion in that comments should be minimal and the code should tell most of the story, but her reasoning makes sense too. Are there any flaws in her reasoning? It may clutter the code but it ultimately could be quite helpful if there are many people working on it in the short- to medium-run.

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  • Developing a feature which sole purpose to be taken out?

    - by adib
    What is the name of the pattern in which individual contributors (programmers/designers) developed an artifact for the sole purpose is to serve as a diversion so that management can remove that feature in the final product? This is a folklore I heard from an ex-colleague who used to work at a large game development company. At that company, it is well known that middle management is pressurized to "give inputs" and "make changes" to the product otherwise they risk being seen as not contributing to the project. This situation have delayed many projects because of these superfluous "management inputs". In one project at the above company, the artists and developers created a supernumerary animated character that appears in every cutscene and sticks out like a sore thumb. They designed it in such a way that it can be easily removed before the game is shipped (this was when games were still sold in physical media and not a downloadable product). Obviously the management then voted to remove the animation. On the positive side, management didn't introduced any unnecessary changes that would have delayed the project because they have shown that they provided constructive inputs to the product. This process pattern has a name among game programmers that work in corporates, but I forgot what was the actual name. I believe it's duck-something. Anybody can help pointing out the name and perhaps some rather credible reference to how the pattern develops?.

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  • Understanding normal maps on terrain

    - by JohnB
    I'm having trouble understanding some of the math behind normal map textures even though I've got it to work using borrowed code, I want to understand it. I have a terrain based on a heightmap. I'm generating a mesh of triangles at load time and rendering that mesh. Now for each vertex I need to calculate a normal, a tangent, and a bitangent. My understanding is as follows, have I got this right? normal is a unit vector facing outwards from the surface of the triangle. For a vertex I take the average of the normals of the triangles using that vertex. tangent is a unit vector in the direction of the 'u' coordinates of the texture map. As my texture u,v coordinates follow the x and y coordinates of the terrain, then my understanding is that this vector is simply the vector along the surface in the x direction. So should be able to calculate this as simply the difference between vertices in the x direction to get a vector, (and normalize it). bitangent is a unit vector in the direction of the 'v' coordinates of the texture map. As my texture u,v coordinates follow the x and y coordinates of the terrain, then my understanding is that this vector is simply the vector along the surface in the y direction. So should be able to calculate this as simply the difference between vertices in the y direction to get a vector, (and normalize it). However the code I have borrowed seems much more complicated than this and takes into account the actual values of u, and v at each vertex which I don't understand the need for as they increase in exactly the same direction as x, and y. I implemented what I thought from above, and it simply doesn't work, the normals are clearly not working for lighting. Have I misunderstood something? Or can someone explain to me the physical meaning of the tangent and bitangent vectors when applied to a mesh generated from a hightmap like this, when u and v texture coordinates map along the x and y directions. Thanks for any help understanding this.

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  • Warnings When Undo Isn't Possible

    - by ultan o'broin
    Enjoyed this post Never Use a Warning When you Mean Undo by Aza Raskin. It makes sense never to warn users if an undo option is possible. The examples given are from the web space. Here's the conclusion: Warnings cause us to lose our work, to mistrust our computers, and to blame ourselves. A simple but foolproof design methodology solves the problem: "Never use a warning when you mean undo." And when a user is deleting their work, you always mean undo. However, in enterprise apps you may find that an undo option isn't technically possible or desirable. Objects may be shared, part of a flow elsewhere, or undoing something committed to the database (a rollback I guess) may not be feasible if it becomes locked by another process. Plus, what constitutes user ownership of objects isn't always clear to users. The implications of delete (and other) actions need to be clearly communicated out in advance. Really, warnings are important in the enterprise space. Data has a very high value, and users can perform a wide variety of actions that may risk that data, not always within the application itself (at browser level, for example). That said, throwing warnings all over the place when an undo option is possible is annoying. Instead, treat warnings with respect. When there is no undo option possible, use warning messages to communicate potentially dangerous or irrecoverable actions or the downstream consequences of user actions on the process or task flow. Force the user to respond to a warning message by using a modal dialog with clearly labeled action buttons. Here's a couple of examples. A great article that got me thinking. Let's see more like that. Let's not forget there's more types of messages than just error messages. User assistance and user experience professionals need to understand when best to use confirmation, information, and warning types too!

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  • Unity scaling instantiated GameObject at Start() doesn't "keep"

    - by Shivan Dragon
    I have a very simple scenario: A box-like Prefab which is imported from Blender automatically (I have the .blend file in the Assets folder). A script that has two public GameObject fields. In one I place the above prefab, and in the other I place a terrain object (which I've created in Unity's graphical view): public Collider terrain; public GameObject aStarCellHighlightPrefab; This script is attached to the camera. The idea is to have the Blender prefab instantiated, have the terrain set as its parent, and then scale said prefab instance up. I first did it like this, in the Start() method: void Start () { cursorPositionOnTerrain = new RaycastHit(); aStarCellHighlight = (GameObject)Instantiate(aStarCellHighlightPrefab, new Vector3(300,300,300), terrain.transform.rotation); aStarCellHighlight.name = "cellHighlight"; aStarCellHighlight.transform.parent = terrain.transform; aStarCellHighlight.transform.localScale = new Vector3(100,100,100); } and first thought it didn't work. However later I noticed that it did in fact work, in the sense where the scale was applied right at the start, but then right after the prefab instance came back to its initial scale. Putting the scale code in the Update() methods fixes it in the sense where now it stays scaled all the time: void Update () { aStarCellHighlight.transform.localScale = new Vector3(100,100,100); //... } However I've noticed that when I run this code, the object is first displayed without the scale being applied, and it takes about 5-10 seconds for the scale to happen. During this time everything works fine (like input and logging, etc). The scene is very simple, it's not like it has a lot of stuff to load or anything (there's a Ray cast from the camera on to the terrain, but that seems to happen without such delays). My (2 part) question is: Why doesn't it take the scale transform when I do it at the beginning in the Start() method. Why do I have to keep scaling it in the Update() method? Why does it take so long for the scale to "apply/show up".

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  • Slick2D + LWJGL collision system

    - by Connor W
    So I've been learning java for a while and have explored slick and lwjgl before but went away from using Slick for a while. But I've recently gone back to using it (as I'm making a platformer and Tiled will be really helpful). But here's where my problems begin: collision. I have a player polygon and I check to see if it's colliding with my tiled map with this method: public static boolean playerCollisionWith() { for(int i = 0; i < Blockmap.entities.size(); i++) { Block entity1 = (Block) Blockmap.entities.get(i); if(playerPoly.intersects(entity1.poly)) { return true; } } return false; } This would work normally but I'm using a different method for movement. Instead of just adding a speed variable to the player's x axis. I move like this: if(Keyboard.isKeyDown(Keyboard.KEY_RIGHT)) { speedX = Math.min(5, speedX + 1); moving = true; playerPoly.setX(x); if(playerCollisionWith()) { speedX = -5; playerPoly.setX(x); } } That Math.min call is what is messing me up =. I can't just call speedX = -5, because when I do the player "bounces" when the right mouse button is down and it's colliding. Bounces as in flashes back and forth REALLY quickly. But I don't really know how I would make it so that collisions on the y axis would work either, whether the player is jumping or not. So if I could get some help with how to fix this problem that would be great. Thank you for the help!

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  • See the Lord of the Rings Epic from the Perspective of Mordor [eBook]

    - by ETC
    Much like the wildly popular book “Wicked” mixed up the good/bad dichotomy in the Wizard of Oz, “The Last Ring-Bearer” shows us the Mordor’s take on the Lord of the Rings. The work of a Russian paleontologist, Kirill Yeskov, “The Last Ring-Bearer” frames the conflict in the Lord of the Rings from the perspective of the citizens of Mordor. Salon magazine offers this summary, as part of their larger review: In Yeskov’s retelling, the wizard Gandalf is a war-monger intent on crushing the scientific and technological initiative of Mordor and its southern allies because science “destroys the harmony of the world and dries up the souls of men!” He’s in cahoots with the elves, who aim to become “masters of the world,” and turn Middle-earth into a “bad copy” of their magical homeland across the sea. Barad-dur, also known as the Dark Tower and Sauron’s citadel, is, by contrast, described as “that amazing city of alchemists and poets, mechanics and astronomers, philosophers and physicians, the heart of the only civilization in Middle-earth to bet on rational knowledge and bravely pitch its barely adolescent technology against ancient magic.” Hit up the link below to grab a PDF of the official English translation of Yeskov’s work. The Last Ring-Bearer [via Salon] Latest Features How-To Geek ETC How To Make Hundreds of Complex Photo Edits in Seconds With Photoshop Actions How to Enable User-Specific Wireless Networks in Windows 7 How to Use Google Chrome as Your Default PDF Reader (the Easy Way) How To Remove People and Objects From Photographs In Photoshop Ask How-To Geek: How Can I Monitor My Bandwidth Usage? Internet Explorer 9 RC Now Available: Here’s the Most Interesting New Stuff Lucky Kid Gets Playable Angry Birds Cake [Video] See the Lord of the Rings Epic from the Perspective of Mordor [eBook] Smart Taskbar Is a Thumb Friendly Android Task Launcher Comix is an Awesome Comics Archive Viewer for Linux Get the MakeUseOf eBook Guide to Speeding Up Windows for Free Need Tech Support? Call the Star Wars Help Desk! [Video Classic]

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  • Strict Pomodoro and other time management Chrome extensions

    - by kerry
    I have recently begun using the Pomodoro Technique to increase my productivity. However, I still find myself getting sucked in to the vortex of useless information that is the internet. With that in mind I began searching for a useful chrome extension to replace the Android Pomodoro app I have been using to manage my ‘doros. I even considered writing it myself. Luckily, I stumbled on one that had a similar featureset to what I was looking for. Strict Pomodoro is an excellent Chrome extension for practicing Pomodoro. Though lacking a few key features, such as the ability to set the duration of your pomodoros and breaks, it still has a key feature that helps me stay on task. It blocks time sucking websites. You can set filter lists and it will keep you from accessing them during a Pomodoro. Effectively reminding you to stay on task. Also, the author readily admits that it was quickly put together and new features may be added down the road. For now, it is still an excellent option. For those of you who do not practice Pomodoro but are trying to stay on task. The StayFocusd extension will effectively manage the amount of time you spend on useless (non-productive) sites. It also has a rich feature set that may be better for your work habits. OK, breaks over. Time to get back to work. 25 minutes at a time.

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  • How would I implement this application idea?

    - by Mike Wills
    I am a D&D gamer and a developer that has mostly worked with ASP.NET applications professionally. I have written some chat bots in Node.js and I have only played a little with PHP but wrote nothing serious. I have had inspiration to create a site that allows a person to keep track of characters (aka the character sheet). I am thinking of using this as a learning opportunity to learn noSQL and to write a full javascript front-end. I want this application to save the value as I change it. So if I edit the armor class, it is saved immediately instead of waiting until I hit the submit button. I think that will make it easier to use while gaming and not losing anything because I forgot to save the change. I have never done anything like this. How do you implement this style of application? Is there a tutorial or howto to get me on the right path? While I would really like to use ASP.NET but I don't have a Windows server to publish on (and I really can't afford to pay for a service). What language that runs on Linux would work well for this type of application? Note: I feel noSQL would work in this case because of the sheer number of tables required to create something like this in SQL.

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  • How do graphics programmers deal with rendering vertices that don't change the image?

    - by canisrufus
    So, the title is a little awkward. I'll give some background, and then ask my question. Background: I work as a web GIS application developer, but in my spare time I've been playing with map rendering and improving data interchange formats. I work only in 2D space. One interesting issue I've encountered is that when you're rendering a polygon at a small scale (zoomed way out), many of the vertices are redundant. An extreme case would be that you have a polygon with 500,000 vertices that only takes up a single pixel. If you're sending this data to the browser, it would make sense to omit ~499,999 of those vertices. One way we achieve that is by rendering an image on a server and and sending it as a PNG: voila, it's a point. Sometimes, though, we want data sent to the browser where it can be rendered with SVG (or canvas, or webgl) so that it can be interactive. The problem: It turns out that, using modern geographic data sets, it's very easy to overload SVG's rendering abilities. In an effort to cope with those limitations, I'm trying to figure out how to visually losslessly reduce a data set for a given scale and map extent (and, if necessary, for a known map pixel width and height). I got a great reduction in data size just using the Douglas-Peucker algorithm, and I believe I was able to get it to keep the polygons true to within one pixel. Unfortunately, Douglas-Peucker doesn't preserve topology, so it changed how borders between polygons got rendered. I couldn't readily find other algorithms to try out and adapt to the purpose, but I don't have much CS/algorithm background and might not recognize them if I saw them.

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  • How can a non-technical person can learn to write a spec for small projects?

    - by Joseph Turian
    How can a non-technical person learn to write specs for small projects? A friend of mine is trying to outsource some development on a statistics project. In particular, he does a lot of work in excel, and wants to outsource the creation of scripts to do what he now does by hand. However, my friend is extremely non-technical. He is poor at writing technical specs. When he does write a spec, it is written the way you would describe doing something in excel (go to this cell and then copy the value to that cell). It is also overly verbose, and does examples several times. I'm not sure if he properly describes corner cases. The first project he outsourced was a failure. I think he overdescribed some details, but underdescribed corner cases. That and/or the coder he hired didn't think through the corner cases and ask appropriate questions. I'm not sure. I got on IM with him and it took me half an hour to dig out a description that should have taken five minutes or less to describe. I wrote the scripts for him at the end, but didn't examine why his process with the coder failed. He has asked me for help. However, I refuse to get involved, because taking his spec and translating it into clear requirements is 10x more work than executing on a clearly written spec. What is the right way for him to learn? Are there resources he could use? Are there ways he can learn from small, low-pressure practice projects with coders? [edit: Most of his scripts are statistical and data processing oriented. e.g. take this column and run an average over it. Remove these rows under these conditions. So the challenge is different than spec'ing a web app.]

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  • Leadership does not see value in standard process for machine configuration and new developer orientation

    - by opensourcechris
    About 3 months ago our lead web developer and designer(same person) left the company, greener pastures was the reason for leaving. Good for them I say. My problem is that his department was completely undocumented. Things have been tough since the lead left, there is a lot of knowledge both theoretical knowledge we use to quote new projects and technical/implementation knowledge of our existing products that we have lost as a result of his departure. My normal role is as a product manager (for our products themselves) and as a business analyst for some of our project based consulting work. I've taught myself to code over the past year and in an effort to continue moving forward I've taken on the task of setting my laptop up as a development machine with hopes of implementing some of the easier feature requests and fixing some of the no brainer bugs that get submitted into our ticketing system. But, no one knows how to take a fresh Windows machine and configure it to work seamlessly with our production apps. I have requested my boss, who is still in contact with the developer who left, ask them to document and create a process to onboard a new developer, software installation, required packages, process to deploy to the productions application servers, etc. None of this exists, and I'm spinning my wheels trying to get my computer working as a functional development machine. But she does not seem to understand the need for such a process to exist. Apparently the new developer who replaced the one who left has been using a machine that was pre-configured for our environment, so even the new developer could not set up a new machine if we added another developer. My question is two part: Am I wrong in assuming a process to on-board and configure a new computer to be part of our development eco-system should exist? Am I being a whinny baby and should I figure the process out and create a document on my own?

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  • 7u45 Caller-Allowable-Codebase and Trusted-Library

    - by costlow
    Java 7 update 45 (October 2013) changed the interactions between JavaScript and Java Applets made through LiveConnect. The 7u45 update is a critical patch update that has also raised the security baseline and users are strongly recommended to upgrade. Versions below the security baseline used to apply the Trusted-Library Manifest attribute to call between sandboxed code and higher-privileged code. The Trusted-Library value was a Boolean true or false. Security changes for the current security baseline (7u45) introduced a different Caller-Allowable-Codebase that indicates precisely where these LiveConnect calls can originate. For example, LiveConnect calls should not necessarily originate from 3rd party components of a web page or other DOM-based browser manipulations (pdf). Additional information about these can be located at “JAR File Manifest Attributes for Security.” The workaround for end-user dialogs is described on the 7u45 release notes, which explains removing the Trusted-Library attribute for LiveConnect calls in favor of Caller-Allowable-Codebase. This provides necessary protections (without warnings) for all users at or above the security baseline. Client installations automatically detect updates to the secure baseline and prompt users to upgrade. Warning dialogs above or below Both of these attributes should work together to support the various versions of client installations. We are aware of the issue that modifying the Manifest to use the newer Caller-Allowable-Codebase causes warnings for users below the security baseline and that not doing it displays a warning for users above. Manifest Attribute 7u45 7u40 and below Only Caller-Allowable-Codebase No dialog Displays prompt Only Trusted-Library Displays prompt No dialog Both Displays prompt (*) No dialog This will be fixed in a future release so that both attributes can co-exist. The current work-around would be to favor using Caller-Allowable-Codebase over the old Trusted-Library call. For users who need to stay below the security baseline System Administrators that schedule software deployments across managed computers may consider applying a Deployment Rule Set as described in Option 1 of “What to do if your applet is blocked or warns of mixed code.” System Administrators may also sign up for email notifications of Critical Patch Updates.

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