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  • Learn Many Languages

    - by Jeff Foster
    My previous blog, Deliberate Practice, discussed the need for developers to “sharpen their pencil” continually, by setting aside time to learn how to tackle problems in different ways. However, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, a contested and somewhat-controversial concept from language theory, seems to hold reasonably true when applied to programming languages. It states that: “The structure of a language affects the ways in which its speakers conceptualize their world.” If you’re constrained by a single programming language, the one that dominates your day job, then you only have the tools of that language at your disposal to think about and solve a problem. For example, if you’ve only ever worked with Java, you would never think of passing a function to a method. A good developer needs to learn many languages. You may never deploy them in production, you may never ship code with them, but by learning a new language, you’ll have new ideas that will transfer to your current “day-job” language. With the abundant choices in programming languages, how does one choose which to learn? Alan Perlis sums it up best. “A language that doesn‘t affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing“ With that in mind, here’s a selection of languages that I think are worth learning and that have certainly changed the way I think about tackling programming problems. Clojure Clojure is a Lisp-based language running on the Java Virtual Machine. The unique property of Lisp is homoiconicity, which means that a Lisp program is a Lisp data structure, and vice-versa. Since we can treat Lisp programs as Lisp data structures, we can write our code generation in the same style as our code. This gives Lisp a uniquely powerful macro system, and makes it ideal for implementing domain specific languages. Clojure also makes software transactional memory a first-class citizen, giving us a new approach to concurrency and dealing with the problems of shared state. Haskell Haskell is a strongly typed, functional programming language. Haskell’s type system is far richer than C# or Java, and allows us to push more of our application logic to compile-time safety. If it compiles, it usually works! Haskell is also a lazy language – we can work with infinite data structures. For example, in a board game we can generate the complete game tree, even if there are billions of possibilities, because the values are computed only as they are needed. Erlang Erlang is a functional language with a strong emphasis on reliability. Erlang’s approach to concurrency uses message passing instead of shared variables, with strong support from both the language itself and the virtual machine. Processes are extremely lightweight, and garbage collection doesn’t require all processes to be paused at the same time, making it feasible for a single program to use millions of processes at once, all without the mental overhead of managing shared state. The Benefits of Multilingualism By studying new languages, even if you won’t ever get the chance to use them in production, you will find yourself open to new ideas and ways of coding in your main language. For example, studying Haskell has taught me that you can do so much more with types and has changed my programming style in C#. A type represents some state a program should have, and a type should not be able to represent an invalid state. I often find myself refactoring methods like this… void SomeMethod(bool doThis, bool doThat) { if (!(doThis ^ doThat)) throw new ArgumentException(“At least one arg should be true”); if (doThis) DoThis(); if (doThat) DoThat(); } …into a type-based solution, like this: enum Action { DoThis, DoThat, Both }; void SomeMethod(Action action) { if (action == Action.DoThis || action == Action.Both) DoThis(); if (action == Action.DoThat || action == Action.Both) DoThat(); } At this point, I’ve removed the runtime exception in favor of a compile-time check. This is a trivial example, but is just one of many ideas that I’ve taken from one language and implemented in another.

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  • Dealing with "Coder's Block" (or blank form syndrome)

    - by robsoft
    I know this is the sort of somewhat open-ended question that we're discouraged from asking, but there are lots of open-ended questions around already, and this is something quite relevant to me right now. Do you ever get those times when you're about to start work on a new function/feature of an established system, and you get "coder's block"?. It's like a mental freeze at the sight of a large, completely unpopulated dialog, or an empty code file with just the stub reference headers etc. Do you ever have that 'ulp' moment that seems to sap all your momentum and leave you wide open to distractions (surfing the web for inspiration, checking out 'crackoverflow' etc)? Not that I'd wish it on anyone, but hopefully some of you do, and hopefully some of you can suggest tips or strategies for overcoming the situation, regaining your momentum and becoming productive again. I usually try to reduce what I'm about to do down to absurdly small steps, in the hope that as the job becomes just a series of 'doh' tasks, I'll kickstart myself into working through them. However sometimes, particularly when a deadline is looming, I'll get overwhelmed by this approach as I realise I probably don't have enough time to do all of those tiny steps properly. Those are the darkest moments, (often literally) just before dawn! This situation can be particularly crippling if you mostly work alone, too. Any thoughts or suggestions? Any methods that you found helpful yourself?

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  • How do you keep all your languages straight?

    - by Chris Blackwell
    I think I'm going a little crazy. Right now, I'm working with the following languages (I was just doing a mental inventory): C++ - our game engine Assembler - low level debugging and a few co-processor specific routines Lua - our game engine scripting language HLSL - for shaders Python - our build system and utility tools Objective C/C++ - game engine platform code for Mac and iPhone C# - A few tools developed in our overseas office ExtendScript - Photoshop exporting tools ActionScript - UI scripting VBScript - some spreadsheet related stuff PHP - some web related stuff SQL - some web and tool related stuff On top of this are the plethora of API's that often have many different ways of doing the same thing: std library, boost, .NET, wxWidgets, Cocoa, Carbon, native script libraries for Python, Lua, etc, OpenGL, Direct3d, GDI, Aqua, augh! I find myself inadvertently conflating languages and api's, not realizing what I'm doing until I get syntax errors. I feel like I can't possibly keep up with it, and I can't possibly be proficient in all of these areas. Especially outside the realm of C++ and Python, I find myself programming more by looking at manuals that from memory. Do you have a similar problem? Ideas for compartmentalizing so you're more efficient? Deciding where you want to stay proficient? Organizational tips? Good ways to remember when you switch from Lua to C++ you need to start using semi-colons again? Rants on how complicated we programmers have made things for ourselves? Any ideas welcome!

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  • Bubble Breaker Game Solver better than greedy?

    - by Gregory
    For a mental exercise I decided to try and solve the bubble breaker game found on many cell phones as well as an example here:Bubble Break Game The random (N,M,C) board consists N rows x M columns with C colors The goal is to get the highest score by picking the sequence of bubble groups that ultimately leads to the highest score A bubble group is 2 or more bubbles of the same color that are adjacent to each other in either x or y direction. Diagonals do not count When a group is picked, the bubbles disappear, any holes are filled with bubbles from above first, ie shift down, then any holes are filled by shifting right A bubble group score = n * (n - 1) where n is the number of bubbles in the bubble group The first algorithm is a simple exhaustive recursive algorithm which explores going through the board row by row and column by column picking bubble groups. Once the bubble group is picked, we create a new board and try to solve that board, recursively descending down Some of the ideas I am using include normalized memoization. Once a board is solved we store the board and the best score in a memoization table. I create a prototype in python which shows a (2,15,5) board takes 8859 boards to solve in about 3 seconds. A (3,15,5) board takes 12,384,726 boards in 50 minutes on a server. The solver rate is ~3k-4k boards/sec and gradually decreases as the memoization search takes longer. Memoization table grows to 5,692,482 boards, and hits 6,713,566 times. What other approaches could yield high scores besides the exhaustive search? I don't seen any obvious way to divide and conquer. But trending towards larger and larger bubbles groups seems to be one approach Thanks to David Locke for posting the paper link which talks above a window solver which uses a constant-depth lookahead heuristic.

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  • Hiring a programmer: looking for the "right attitude"

    - by Totophil
    It's actually two questions in one: What is the right attitude for a programmer? How do you (or would you) look for one when interviewing or during hiring process? Please note this question is not about personality or traits of a candidate, it is about their attitude towards what they do for living. This is also not about reverse of programmers pet peeves. The question has been made community wiki, since I am interested in a good answer rather than reputation. I disagree that the question is purely subjective and just a matter of opinion: clearly some attitudes make a better programmer than others. Consecutively, there might quite possibly exist an attitude that is common to the most of the better programmers. Update: After some deliberation I came up with the following attitude measurement scales: identifies themselves with the job ? fully detached perceives code as a collection of concepts ? sees code as a sequence of steps thinks of creating software as an art ? takes 100% rational approach to design and development Answers that include some sort of a comment on the appropriateness of these scales are greatly appreciated. Definition of "attitude": a complex mental state involving beliefs and feelings and values and dispositions to act in certain ways; "he had the attitude that work was fun" The question came as a result of some reflection on the top voted answer to "How do you ensure code quality?" here on Stack Overflow.

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  • Handling conflicting priorities and expectations in project development

    - by jasonk
    There are any number of situations in the standard day where priority conflicts exist for projects. Management wants maximum productivity from employees. Marketing wants maximum salability and fast turnaround. Ownership wants maximum profit. Customers want usability and low cost. Regardless of the origin of the demands, time and money are always the limiting factor in business. Sometimes project elements have intrinsic or goodwill benefits for which there is not a hard, fast way to measure with monetary means (e.g. arguments for an attractive UI appeal vs. functional but plain). Other elements of software may have a method of providing “mental breaks” or motivating “cool factor” for developers that can get them back on track on other bigger, complex issues. While they may sidetrack the project short term they may have greater results long term through improved job satisfaction, etc. Continued training is a must, but working it in can setup back progress. What are your suggestions for setting priorities? How do you evaluate requests/demands on your projects? What are your suggestions for communicating and passing those on to your team in a way that they stay focused?

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  • Adding database results to array

    - by Jason
    Hi all, I am having a mental blank here and cannot for the life of me figure out a solution. My scenario is that I am programming in PHP and MySQL. I have a database table returning the results for a specific orderid. The query can return a maximum of 4 rows per order and a minimum of 1 row. Here is an image of how I want to return the results. I have all the orderdetails (Name, address) ect stored in a table named "orders". I have all the packages for that order stored in a table named "packages". What I need to do is using a loop I need to have access to each specific element of the database results (IE package1, itemstype1, package2, itemtype2) ect I am using a query like this to try and get hold of just the "number of items: $sql = "SELECT * FROM bookings_onetime_packages WHERE orderid = '".$orderid."' ORDER BY packageid DESC"; $total = $db-database_num_rows($db-database_query($sql)); $query = $db-database_query($sql); $noitems = ''; while($info = $db-database_fetch_assoc($query)){ $numberitems = $info['numberofitems']; for($i=0; $i $noitems .= $numberitems[$i]; } } print $noitems; I need to have access to each specific element because I them need to create fill out a pdf template using "fpdf". I hope this makes sense. Any direction would be greatly appreciated.

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  • Do I need Response.End() in ASP.Net 2.0

    - by Hamish Grubijan
    Hi, I am just starting with ASP.Net. I copied a ex-co-worker's code (from .Net 1.1 era) and it has a Response.End(); in case of an error. There is also a: catch (Exception ex) { Response.Write(ex.Message); Response.End(); } at the end of Page_Load(object sender, System.EventArgs e) which always appends "Thread was aborted." or something like that at the end. I suspect that this worked differently before, or the error conditions were not tested very well. Anyhow, I was able to stop using Response.End(); in case when I do not like the GET parameters, and use return; instead. It seemed to do the right think in a simple case. Is this Ok in general? There are some problems with the code I copied, but I do not want to do a rewrite; I just want to get it running first and find wrinkles later. The Response.End(); caused a mental block for me, however, so I want to figure it out. I want to keep the catch all clause just in case, at least for now. I could also end the method with: catch (System.Threading.ThreadAbortException) { Response.End(); } catch (Exception ex) { Response.Write(ex.Message); Response.End(); } but that just seems extremely stupid, once you think about all of the exceptions being generated. Please give me a few words of wisdom. Feel free to ask if something is not clear. Thanks! P.S. Ex-coworker was not fired and is a good coder - one more reason to reuse his example.

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  • ASP.NET MVC Authorize by Group

    - by Jimmo
    I have what seems like a common issue with SaaS applications, but have not seen this question on here anywhere. I am using ASP.NET MVC with Forms Authentication. I have implemented a custom membership provider to handle logic, but have one issue (perhaps the issue is in my mental picture of the system). As with many SaaS apps, Customers create accounts and use the app in a way that looks like they are the only ones present (they only see their items, users, etc.) In reality, there are generic controllers and views presenting data depending on their account. When calling something like ValidateUser, I have access to their affiliation in the User object - what I don't have is the context of the request to which to compare it. As an example, One company called ABC goes to abc.mysite.com Another company called XYZ goes to xyz.mysite.com When an ABC user calls http://abc.mysite.com/product/edit/12 I have an [Authorize] attribute on the Edit method in the ProductController to make sure he is signed in and has sufficient permission to do so. If that same ABC user tried to access http://xyz.mysite.com/product/edit/12 I would not want to validate him in the context of that call. In the ValidateUser of the MembershipProvider, I have the information about the user, but not about the request. I can tell that the user is from ABC, but I cannot tell that the request is for XYZ at that point in the code. How should I resolve this?

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  • What's the best way to learn .NET?

    - by duffymo
    I've been developing Java EE for quite a while now. I've used WebLogic, Tomcat, Spring, and Hibernate extensively, so I have a mental model of what features are available and how things are developed and deployed. The problem that I have with .NET is that I don't have a clear mapping of its features onto Java EE. Here's what I know so far: Java EE - .NET Java - C# JAR - DLL WAR - ? (deployment in general) EAR - ? (deployment in general) Tomcat - IIS web server JSP - ASP? JDBC - ODBC JMS - MSMQ JTA - Microsoft Transaction Manager So much of the functionality that WebLogic handles appears to be dispersed throughout the Windows OS. My confusion kicks in when I see the waves of books at Borders - VB.NET, ASP.NET, C#, etc. If I'm not a VB programmer, would it be possible to stick with C# and write enterprise apps that are the equivalent of what I'm used to with Java EE? If there were a Top Three list of books to learn from, what would they be? The "Head First" series has certainly been successful for Java. http://www.amazon.com/Head-First-C-Brain-Friendly-Guides/dp/0596514824/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1224121193&sr=8-1 Equally well recommended for .NET learning? Thanks. - %

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  • ASP.NET MVC Authorize by Subdomain

    - by Jimmo
    I have what seems like a common issue with SaaS applications, but have not seen this question on here anywhere. I am using ASP.NET MVC with Forms Authentication. I have implemented a custom membership provider to handle logic, but have one issue (perhaps the issue is in my mental picture of the system). As with many SaaS apps, customers create accounts and use the app in a way that looks like they are the only ones present (they only see their items, users, etc.). In reality, there are generic controllers and views presenting data depending on the customer represented in the URL. When calling something like the MembershipProvider.ValidateUser, I have access to the user's customer affiliation in the User object - what I don't have is the context of the request to compare whether it is a data request for the same customer as the user. As an example, One company called ABC goes to abc.mysite.com Another company called XYZ goes to xyz.mysite.com When an ABC user calls http://abc.mysite.com/product/edit/12 I have an [Authorize] attribute on the Edit method in the ProductController to make sure he is signed in and has sufficient permission to do so. If that same ABC user tried to access http://xyz.mysite.com/product/edit/12 I would not want to validate him in the context of that call. In the ValidateUser of the MembershipProvider, I have the information about the user, but not about the request. I can tell that the user is from ABC, but I cannot tell that the request is for XYZ at that point in the code. How should I resolve this?

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  • Keeping updated with the latest technologies.

    - by Prashanth
    I am a software developer and I have been programming since the past six years. I simply love the mental challenge involved in trying to come up with solutions to hard problems, reading up programming literature, blogs by prominent developers and so on. I work on Microsoft platform and I have trouble keeping up with the pace at which various frameworks are rolled out. Remoting,WCF,ASP.NET,ASP.NET MVC, LINQ, WPF, WWF, OSLO, ADO.NET data services, DSL tools etc etc. Even understanding all these frameworks at an abstract level and see how they are all tied up with MS vision itself is a major hurdle. Now when you add other non microsoft technologies, programming languages etc to the equation, I wonder how do people manage? Given that there are only 24 hours in a day, how does one keep himself updated about so many technology changes that happen everyday? My question is , is it even worth doing that? The thing is, I am also interested in other fields such as literature, science. I try my best to at least gain a superficial understanding of what is happening in other fields of my interest and don't want to give up on that :)

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  • What is the best way to store site configuration data?

    - by DaveDev
    I have a question about storing site configuration data. We have a platform for web applications. The idea is that different clients can have their data hosted and displayed on their own site which sits on top of this platform. Each site has a configuration which determines which panels relevant to the client appear on which pages. The system was originally designed to keep all the configuration data for each site in a database. When the site is loaded all the configuration data is loaded into a SiteConfiguration object, and the clients panels are generated based on the content of this object. This works, but I find it very difficult to work with to apply change requests or add new sites because there is so much data to sift through and it's difficult maintain a mental model of the site and its configuration. Recently I've been tasked with developing a subset of some of the sites to be generated as PDF documents for printing. I decided to take a different approach to how I would define the configuration in that instead of storing configuration data in the database, I wrote XML files to contain the data. I find it much easier to work with because instead of reading meaningless rows of data which are related to other meaningless rows of data, I have meaningful documents with semantic, readable information with the relationships defined by visually understandable element nesting. So now with these 2 approaches to storing site configuration data, I'd like to get the opinions of people more experienced in dealing with this issue on dealing with these two approaches. What is the best way of storing site configuration data? Is there a better way than the two ways I outlined here? note: StackOverflow is telling me the question appears to be subjective and is likely to be closed. I'm not trying to be subjective. I'd like to know how best to approach this issue next time and if people with industry experience on this could provide some input.

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  • How to get the second sub element of every element in a list in R

    - by PaulHurleyuk
    I know I've come across this problem before, but I'm having a bit of a mental block at the moment. and as I can't find it on SO, I'll post it here so I can find it next time. I have a dataframe that contains a field representing an ID label. This label has two parts, an alpha prefix and a numeric suffix. I want to split it apart and create two new fields with these values in. structure(list(lab = c("N00", "N01", "N02", "B00", "B01", "B02", "Z21", "BA01", "NA03")), .Names = "lab", row.names = c(NA, -9L ), class = "data.frame") df$pre<-strsplit(df$lab, "[0-9]+") df$suf<-strsplit(df$lab, "[A-Z]+") Which gives lab pre suf 1 N00 N , 00 2 N01 N , 01 3 N02 N , 02 4 B00 B , 00 5 B01 B , 01 6 B02 B , 02 7 Z21 Z , 21 8 BA01 BA , 01 9 NA03 NA , 03 So, the first strsplit works fine, but the second gives a list, each having two elements, an empty string and the result I want, and stuffs them both into the dataframe column. How can I select the second sub-element from each element of the list ? (or, is there a better way to do this) Thanks Paul.

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  • where does a novice begin with error logging in asp.net c# ?

    - by korben
    i'm a novice teaching myself asp.net in c# via trial and error learn by doing, unfortunately this means lots of errors! i have a custom errors page now that is basically a 404 so that site visitors don't get that ugly application error message .NET throws, but i WOULD like to be able to see what's going wrong myself as people use the site. so i'm looking to build or learn from a fairly basic error logging c# class, that will send the same information given in a browser when hitting a .NET error, send this into a TXT file and email me the error at the same time would be great i don't know where to even begin, can someone give me some pointers? an open source class that does this already that i could plugin and play with would work as well. otherwise some links or guidance on where to start reading would be great too. i sort of have a mental block on understand msdn info-dump pages though, i'm hoping to find some articles on real people talking about implementing the same thing themselves or something like that please note i'm not looking to use some extensive or complicated third party service for this, i'm hoping to learn from the process of implementing a concise customized one

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  • How do you keep application logic separate from UI when UI components have built-in functionality?

    - by Al C
    I know it's important to keep user interface code separated from domain code--the application is easier to understand, maintain, change, and (sometimes) isolate bugs. But here's my mental block ... Delphi comes with components with methods that do what I want, e.g., a RichText Memo component lets me work with rich text. Other components, like TMS's string grid not only do what I want, but I paid extra for the functionality. These features put the R in RAD. It seems illogical to write my own classes to do things somebody else has already done for me. It's reinventing the wheel [ever tried working directly with rich text? :-) ] But if I use the functionality built into components like these, then I will end up with lots of intermingled UI and domain code--I'll have a form with most of my code built into its event handlers. How do you deal with this issue? ... Or, if I want to continue using the code others have already written for me, how would you suggest I deal with the issue?

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  • Why is BorderLayout calling setSize() and setBounds()?

    - by ags
    I'm trying to get my head around proper use of the different LayoutManagers to make my GUI design skills more efficient and effective. For me, that usually requires a detailed understanding of what is going on under the hood. I've found some good discussion of the interaction and consequences of a Container using BorderLayout containing a Container using FlowLayout. I understand it for the most part, but wanted to confirm my mental model and to do so I am looking at the code for BorderLayout. In the code snippet below taken from BorderLayout.layoutContainer(), note the calls to the child Component's setSize() method followed by setBounds(). Looking at the source for these methods of Component, setSize() actually calls setBounds() with the current values for Component.x and Component.y. Why is this done (and not entirely redudant?) Doesn't the setBounds() call completely overwrite the results of the setSize() call? if ((c=getChild(NORTH,ltr)) != null) { c.setSize(right - left, c.height); Dimension d = c.getPreferredSize(); c.setBounds(left, top, right - left, d.height); top += d.height + vgap; } I'm also tring to understand where/when the child Component's size is initially set (before the LayoutManager.layoutContainer() method is called). Finally, this post itself raises a "meta-question": in a situation like this, where the source is available elsewhere, is the accepteed protocol to include the entire method? Or some other way to make it easier for folks to participate in the thread? Thanks.

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  • Hundreds of custom UserControls create thousands of USER Objects

    - by Andy Blackman
    I'm creating a dashboard application that shows hundreds of "items" on a FlowLayoutPanel. Each "item" is a UserControl that is made up of 12 or labels. My app queries a database and then creates an "item" instance for each record, populating ethe labels and textboxes with data before adding it to the FlowLayoutPanel. After adding about 560 items to the panel, I noticed that the USER Objects count in my Task Manager had gone up to about 7300, which was much much larger than any other app on my machine. I did a quick spot of mental arithmetic (OK, I might have used calc.exe) and figured that 560 * 13 (12 labels plus the UserControl itself) is 7280. So that suddenly gave away where all the objects were coming from... Knowing that there is a 10,000 USER object limit before windows throws in the towel, I'm trying to figure better ways of drawing these items onto the FlowLayoutPanel. My ideas so far are as follows: 1) User-draw the "item", using graphics.DrawText and DrawImage in place of many of the labels. I'm hoping that this will mean 1 item = 1 USER Object, not 13. 2) Have 1 instance of the "item", then for each record, populate the instance and use the Control.DrawToBitmap() method to grab an image and then use that in the FlowLayoutPanel (or similar) So... Does anyone have any other suggestions ??? P.S. It's a zoomable interface, so I have already ruled out "Paging" as there is a requirement to see all items at once :( Thanks everyone.

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  • Access VBA question: Change the query being referenced by a function, depending on context

    - by Tara Amatista
    I have a custom function in Access2007 that hinges on grabbing data out of a specific query. It opens Outlook, creates a new email and populates the fields with specific addresses and data taken from the query ("DecisionEmail"). Now I want to make a different query ("RequestEmail") and have it populate the email with that data. So all I have to do is change this line: Set MailList = db.OpenRecordset("DecisionEmail") and that's where I get stumped. This is my desired result: If the user is on Form_Decision and clicks the button "Send email", "DecisionEmail" will get plugged into the function and that data will appear in the email. If the user on Form_SendRequest and clicks the button "Send email", "RequestEmail" will instead get plugged in. The reason that these are different queries is because they contain very different information that is smudged about in different ways. However, since it's just one little thing that needs to change in the function code, I don't think a brand new function is a good idea. My last resort would be to make a brand new function and use the Conditions field in the Macro interface to choose between them, but I have a feeling there's a more elegant solution possible. I have a vague notion of setting the query names as variables and using an If statement but I just don't have the mental vocabulary for thinking through this.

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  • kQuery : Trying to find a specific instance of a class by number

    - by mattelliottIT
    I guess I have just hit a mental block with this one; maybe some fresh eyes will help. Basically I have a few instance of the class "menu-item" which when clicked call the click function via jQuery and bring up a video. Instead of giving each on an id as well as a class I am trying to find which instance of the class was clicked (1, 2, 3, etc). Just can't seem to get it though. //click listener for menu-items $('.menu-item').click(function(event) { var o = $('.menu-item'); var count = o.length(); // switch(count) { case 0 : filename == 'letters'; break; case 1 : filename == 'the-gift'; break; } var videoPlayer = '<video controls width="618px">'; videoPlayer += '<source src="_video/' + filename + '.mp4" />'; videoPlayer += '</video>'; //place video $('#videoCont').html(videoPlayer); }); I'm trying to create an array there where each instance of the 'menu-item' is one array item. (btw, for now I am just proofing this with an mp4 filetype before I add in the ogv and webm formats). Thanks for any and all help!

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  • Asynchronous Controller is blocking requests in ASP.NET MVC through jQuery

    - by Jason
    I have just started using the AsyncController in my project to take care of some long-running reports. Seemed ideal at the time since I could kick off the report and then perform a few other actions while waiting for it to come back and populate elements on the screen. My controller looks a bit like this. I tried to use a thread to perform the long task which I'd hoped would free up the controller to take more requests: public class ReportsController : AsyncController { public void LongRunningActionAsync() { AsyncManager.OutstandingOperations.Increment(); var newThread = new Thread(LongTask); newThread.Start(); } private void LongTask() { // Do something that takes a really long time //....... AsyncManager.OutstandingOperations.Decrement(); } public ActionResult LongRunningActionCompleted(string message) { // Set some data up on the view or something... return View(); } public JsonResult AnotherControllerAction() { // Do a quick task... return Json("..."); } } But what I am finding is that when I call LongRunningAction using the jQuery ajax request, any further requests I make after that back up behind it and are not processed until LongRunningAction completes. For example, call LongRunningAction which takes 10 seconds and then call AnotherControllerAction which is less than a second. AnotherControllerAction simply waits until LongRunningAction completes before returning a result. I've also checked the jQuery code, but this still happens if I specifically set "async: true": $.ajax({ async: true, type: "POST", url: "/Reports.aspx/LongRunningAction", dataType: "html", success: function(data, textStatus, XMLHttpRequest) { // ... }, error: function(XMLHttpRequest, textStatus, errorThrown) { // ... } }); At the moment I just have to assume that I'm using it incorrectly, but I'm hoping one of you guys can clear my mental block!

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  • How do I pass a value to a method in Objective C

    - by user268124
    I'm new to Obj-C and I have run in to a very, very basic mental block that's making me feel a little stupid. I want to pass a variable from one method to another in an purely objective-C way. So far I'm stuck and have resorted to writing it in C. In C it goes as follows; //detect the change in the segmented switch so we can; change text - (IBAction)switchChanged:(id)sender { NSLog(@"Switch change detected"); //grab the info from the sender UISegmentedControl *selector = sender; //grab the selected segment info from selector. This returns a 0 or a 1. int selectorIndex = [selector selectedSegmentIndex]; changeText (selectorIndex); } int changeText (int selectorPosition) { NSLog(@"changeText received a value. Selector position is %d", selectorPosition); //Idea is to receive a value from the segmented controler and change the screen text accordingly return 0; } This works perfectly well, but I want to learn how to do this with objects and messages. How would I rewrite these two methods to do this? Cheers Rich

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  • Confused about std::runtime_error vs. std::logic_error

    - by David Gladfelter
    I recently saw that the boost program_options library throws a logic_error if the command-line input was un-parsable. That challenged my assumptions about logic_error vs. runtime_error. I assumed that logic errors (logic_error and its derived classes) were problems that resulted from internal failures to adhere to program invariants, often in the form of illegal arguments to internal API's. In that sense they are largely equivalent to ASSERT's, but meant to be used in released code (unlike ASSERT's which are not usually compiled into released code.) They are useful in situations where it is infeasible to integrate separate software components in debug/test builds or the consequences of a failure are such that it is important to give runtime feedback about the invalid invariant condition to the user. Similarly, I thought that runtime_errors resulted exclusively from runtime conditions outside of the control of the programmer: I/O errors, invalid user input, etc. However, program_options is obviously heavily (primarily?) used as a means of parsing end-user input, so under my mental model it certainly should throw a runtime_error in the case of bad input. Where am I going wrong? Do you agree with the boost model of exception typing?

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  • Parallelism in .NET – Part 1, Decomposition

    - by Reed
    The first step in designing any parallelized system is Decomposition.  Decomposition is nothing more than taking a problem space and breaking it into discrete parts.  When we want to work in parallel, we need to have at least two separate things that we are trying to run.  We do this by taking our problem and decomposing it into parts. There are two common abstractions that are useful when discussing parallel decomposition: Data Decomposition and Task Decomposition.  These two abstractions allow us to think about our problem in a way that helps leads us to correct decision making in terms of the algorithms we’ll use to parallelize our routine. To start, I will make a couple of minor points. I’d like to stress that Decomposition has nothing to do with specific algorithms or techniques.  It’s about how you approach and think about the problem, not how you solve the problem using a specific tool, technique, or library.  Decomposing the problem is about constructing the appropriate mental model: once this is done, you can choose the appropriate design and tools, which is a subject for future posts. Decomposition, being unrelated to tools or specific techniques, is not specific to .NET in any way.  This should be the first step to parallelizing a problem, and is valid using any framework, language, or toolset.  However, this gives us a starting point – without a proper understanding of decomposition, it is difficult to understand the proper usage of specific classes and tools within the .NET framework. Data Decomposition is often the simpler abstraction to use when trying to parallelize a routine.  In order to decompose our problem domain by data, we take our entire set of data and break it into smaller, discrete portions, or chunks.  We then work on each chunk in the data set in parallel. This is particularly useful if we can process each element of data independently of the rest of the data.  In a situation like this, there are some wonderfully simple techniques we can use to take advantage of our data.  By decomposing our domain by data, we can very simply parallelize our routines.  In general, we, as developers, should be always searching for data that can be decomposed. Finding data to decompose if fairly simple, in many instances.  Data decomposition is typically used with collections of data.  Any time you have a collection of items, and you’re going to perform work on or with each of the items, you potentially have a situation where parallelism can be exploited.  This is fairly easy to do in practice: look for iteration statements in your code, such as for and foreach. Granted, every for loop is not a candidate to be parallelized.  If the collection is being modified as it’s iterated, or the processing of elements depends on other elements, the iteration block may need to be processed in serial.  However, if this is not the case, data decomposition may be possible. Let’s look at one example of how we might use data decomposition.  Suppose we were working with an image, and we were applying a simple contrast stretching filter.  When we go to apply the filter, once we know the minimum and maximum values, we can apply this to each pixel independently of the other pixels.  This means that we can easily decompose this problem based off data – we will do the same operation, in parallel, on individual chunks of data (each pixel). Task Decomposition, on the other hand, is focused on the individual tasks that need to be performed instead of focusing on the data.  In order to decompose our problem domain by tasks, we need to think about our algorithm in terms of discrete operations, or tasks, which can then later be parallelized. Task decomposition, in practice, can be a bit more tricky than data decomposition.  Here, we need to look at what our algorithm actually does, and how it performs its actions.  Once we have all of the basic steps taken into account, we can try to analyze them and determine whether there are any constraints in terms of shared data or ordering.  There are no simple things to look for in terms of finding tasks we can decompose for parallelism; every algorithm is unique in terms of its tasks, so every algorithm will have unique opportunities for task decomposition. For example, say we want our software to perform some customized actions on startup, prior to showing our main screen.  Perhaps we want to check for proper licensing, notify the user if the license is not valid, and also check for updates to the program.  Once we verify the license, and that there are no updates, we’ll start normally.  In this case, we can decompose this problem into tasks – we have a few tasks, but there are at least two discrete, independent tasks (check licensing, check for updates) which we can perform in parallel.  Once those are completed, we will continue on with our other tasks. One final note – Data Decomposition and Task Decomposition are not mutually exclusive.  Often, you’ll mix the two approaches while trying to parallelize a single routine.  It’s possible to decompose your problem based off data, then further decompose the processing of each element of data based on tasks.  This just provides a framework for thinking about our algorithms, and for discussing the problem.

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  • Do Not Optimize Without Measuring

    - by Alois Kraus
    Recently I had to do some performance work which included reading a lot of code. It is fascinating with what ideas people come up to solve a problem. Especially when there is no problem. When you look at other peoples code you will not be able to tell if it is well performing or not by reading it. You need to execute it with some sort of tracing or even better under a profiler. The first rule of the performance club is not to think and then to optimize but to measure, think and then optimize. The second rule is to do this do this in a loop to prevent slipping in bad things for too long into your code base. If you skip for some reason the measure step and optimize directly it is like changing the wave function in quantum mechanics. This has no observable effect in our world since it does represent only a probability distribution of all possible values. In quantum mechanics you need to let the wave function collapse to a single value. A collapsed wave function has therefore not many but one distinct value. This is what we physicists call a measurement. If you optimize your application without measuring it you are just changing the probability distribution of your potential performance values. Which performance your application actually has is still unknown. You only know that it will be within a specific range with a certain probability. As usual there are unlikely values within your distribution like a startup time of 20 minutes which should only happen once in 100 000 years. 100 000 years are a very short time when the first customer tries your heavily distributed networking application to run over a slow WIFI network… What is the point of this? Every programmer/architect has a mental performance model in his head. A model has always a set of explicit preconditions and a lot more implicit assumptions baked into it. When the model is good it will help you to think of good designs but it can also be the source of problems. In real world systems not all assumptions of your performance model (implicit or explicit) hold true any longer. The only way to connect your performance model and the real world is to measure it. In the WIFI example the model did assume a low latency high bandwidth LAN connection. If this assumption becomes wrong the system did have a drastic change in startup time. Lets look at a example. Lets assume we want to cache some expensive UI resource like fonts objects. For this undertaking we do create a Cache class with the UI themes we want to support. Since Fonts are expensive objects we do create it on demand the first time the theme is requested. A simple example of a Theme cache might look like this: using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Drawing; struct Theme { public Color Color; public Font Font; } static class ThemeCache { static Dictionary<string, Theme> _Cache = new Dictionary<string, Theme> { {"Default", new Theme { Color = Color.AliceBlue }}, {"Theme12", new Theme { Color = Color.Aqua }}, }; public static Theme Get(string theme) { Theme cached = _Cache[theme]; if (cached.Font == null) { Console.WriteLine("Creating new font"); cached.Font = new Font("Arial", 8); } return cached; } } class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { Theme item = ThemeCache.Get("Theme12"); item = ThemeCache.Get("Theme12"); } } This cache does create font objects only once since on first retrieve of the Theme object the font is added to the Theme object. When we let the application run it should print “Creating new font” only once. Right? Wrong! The vigilant readers have spotted the issue already. The creator of this cache class wanted to get maximum performance. So he decided that the Theme object should be a value type (struct) to not put too much pressure on the garbage collector. The code Theme cached = _Cache[theme]; if (cached.Font == null) { Console.WriteLine("Creating new font"); cached.Font = new Font("Arial", 8); } does work with a copy of the value stored in the dictionary. This means we do mutate a copy of the Theme object and return it to our caller. But the original Theme object in the dictionary will have always null for the Font field! The solution is to change the declaration of struct Theme to class Theme or to update the theme object in the dictionary. Our cache as it is currently is actually a non caching cache. The funny thing was that I found out with a profiler by looking at which objects where finalized. I found way too many font objects to be finalized. After a bit debugging I found the allocation source for Font objects was this cache. Since this cache was there for years it means that the cache was never needed since I found no perf issue due to the creation of font objects. the cache was never profiled if it did bring any performance gain. to make the cache beneficial it needs to be accessed much more often. That was the story of the non caching cache. Next time I will write something something about measuring.

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