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  • Do open world games need less backstory?

    - by Raceimaztion
    I've played a few open-world games and really enjoyed them, though the ones I've really enjoyed have generally received complaints about how little story there is to them. The Saboteur is one example of this. Fully open-world, good enough story (for me, anyway), engaging gameplay, and still has received complaints in reviews about not having enough story. Do open-world games actually need a full, all-encompassing story? Or can fun and engaging gameplay fill in the gap and let the designer get away with a slightly less complete story?

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  • Multithreaded game fails on SwapBuffers in render thread at exit

    - by user782220
    The render loop and windows message loop run on separate threads. The way the program exits is that after PostQuitMessage is called in WM_DESTROY the message loop thread signals the render loop thread to exit. As far as I can tell before the render loop thread can even process the signal it tries SwapBuffers and that fails. My question, is there something about how Windows processes WM_DESTROY and WM_QUIT, in maybe DefWindowProc that causes various objects associated with rendering to go away even though I haven't explicitly deleted anything? And that would explain why the rendering thread is making bad calls at exit?

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  • Is the Apple iPad for you now or should you wait until the iPhone 4 is released?

    The iPad came to the market last Saturday and as always with the Apple marketing came the big lines and small tents that never seen a camp site but the Apple stores. There are the people that want one right away and want to be the first person to own the new shiny device from Apple and there are the people that are willing to wait a month for the device with 3G instead of just WiFi only. The iPad is an interesting concept, a bigger iTouch that can be used as a replacement for your Netbook, Kindle,...Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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  • Notes from AT&T ARO Session at Oredev 2013

    - by Geertjan
    The mobile internet is 12 times bigger than internet was 12 years ago. Explosive growth, faster networks, and more powerful devices. 85% of users prefer mobile apps, while 56% have problems. Almost 60% want less than 2 second mobile app startup. App with poor mobile experience results in not buying stuff, going to competitor, not liking your company. Battery life. Bad mobile app is worse than no app at all because it turns people away from brand, etc. Apps didn't exist 10 years ago, 72 billion dollars a year in 2013, 151 billion in 2017.Testing performance. Mobile is different than regular app. Need to fix issues before customers discover them. ARO is free and open source AT&T tool for identifying mobile app performance problems. Mobile data is different -- radio resource control state machine. Radio resource control -- radio from idle to continuous reception -- drains battery, sends data, packets coming through, after packets come through radio is still on which is tail time, after 10 seconds of no data coming through radio goes off. For example, YouTube, e.g., 10 to 15 seconds after every connection, can be huge drain on battery, app traffic triggers RRC state. Goal. Balance fast network connectivity against battery usage. ARO is free and open source and test any platform and won awards. How do I test my app? pcap or tcdump network. Native collector: Android and iOS. Android rooted device is needed. Test app on phone, background data, idle for ads and analytics. Graded against 25 best practices. See all the processes, all network traffic mapped to processes, stats about trace, can look just at your app, exlude Facebook, etc. Many tests conducted, e.g., file download, HTML (wrapped applications, e.g., cordova). Best Practices. Make stuff smaller. GZIP, smaller files, download faster, best for files larger than 800 bytes, minification -- remove tabs and commenting -- browser doesn't need that, just give processor what it needs remove wheat from chaff. Images -- make images smaller, 1024x1024 image for a checkmark, swish it, make it 33% smaller, ARO records the screen, probably could be 9 times smaller. Download less stuff. 17% of HTTP content on mobile is duplicate data because of caching, reloading from cache is 75% to 99% faster than downloading again, 75% possible savings which means app will start up faster because using cache -- everyone wants app starting up 2 seconds. Make fewer HTTP requests. Inline and combine CSS and JS when possible reduces the number of requests, spread images used often. Fewer connections. Faster and use less battery, for example, download an image every 60 secs, download an add every 60 seconds, send analytics every 60 seconds -- instead of that, use transaction manager, download everything at once, reduce amount of time connected to network by 40% also -- 80% of applications do NOT close connections when they are finished, e.g., download picture, 10 seconds later the radio turns off, if you do not explicitly close, eventually server closes, 38% more tail time, 40% less energy if you close connection right away, background data traffic is 27% of data and 55% of network time, this kills the battery. Look at redirection. Adds 200 to 600 ms on each connection, waterfall diagram to all the requests -- e.g., xyz.com redirect to www.xyz.com redirect to xyz.mobi to www.xyz.com, waterfall visualization of packets, minimize redirects but redirects are fine. HTML best practices. Order matters and hiding code (JS downloading blocks rendering, always do CSS before JS or JS asynchronously, CSS 'display:none' hides images from user but the browser downloads them which adds latency to application. Some apps turn on GPS for no reason. Tell network when down, but maybe some other app is using the radio at the same time. It's all about knowing best practices: everyone wins with ARO (carriers, e.g., AT&T, developers, customers). Faster apps, better battery usage, network traffic better, better app reviews, happier customers. MBTA app, referenced as an example.ARO is free, open source, can test all platforms.

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  • f12 and ctrl + f5 not working correctly [migrated]

    - by ComatoseDuck
    When I came back to my work computer after being away for a week I found out when I try to clear the cache and refresh the page via ctrl + f5 (or just f5) I get the prompt "Type the Internet address of a document, and Internet Explorer will open it for you" with a drop down list in IE. When I try f5 in Chrome and FF it opens the "Open file" dialog box. When I try to f12 for Dev tools in IE, Chrome & FF it opens up the print dialog box. Why is this happening and what can I do to revert it back to the way it was?

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  • CSS&ndash;margin or padding

    - by woodbase
    I was beginning the implementation of a new design, and once again I found that my margin property on a div-tag, did not behave as I expected. So I decided to look for best practice when it comes to using margin or padding. What I found was this very short and concise description of the difference between the two: “Margin is on the outside of block elements while padding is on the inside. Use margin to separate the block from things outside it, padding to move the contents away from the edges of the block.” So what is best practice? Well it depends on the context. In my case I should have used padding…

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  • Is it possible to put software in a queue to be installed later?

    - by Gourik Goswami
    Sometime I find some software that is interesting and want to install it. At office I use pocket WiFi so I do not want to download big files. I want some how to tag these files so I can install them later when I am at home at connected with wifi network (More faster network). So is there any way that these software installation can be put in a queue, so that when I am at home it can start right away. Is there any way to do this?

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  • Less known Solaris features: pwait

    - by user13366125
    This is a nifty small tool that i'm using quite often in scripts that stop something and do some tasks afterwards and i don't want to hassle around with the contract file system. It's not a cool feature, but it's useful and relatively less known. An example: As i wrote long ago, you should never use kill -9 because often the normal kill is intercepted by the application and it starts to do some clean up tasks first before really stopping the process. So just because kill has returned, it doesn't imply that the process is away. How do you wait for process to disappear? (more)

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  • Weird sound problems after upgrading to 13.10 (macbook)

    - by Atsch
    I have been having a very weird problem with my sound lately: 1)My right channel is extremely disorted with relativly loud noises, tested with several headphones. 2) After a while, wiered noises start coming from my speakers 3) playing lots of sounds at once causes the the output to become really mushed, e.g. in lmms or games. all points to a: a fault in my sound card, or b: a fault in alsa or pulseaudio, but I don't know how to find out. I will now try using the alsa-daily, and edit this away depending on my results after a restart

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  • Does anyone write games in Delphi?

    - by MDV2000
    I am a very seasoned Delphi developer (over 12 years of experience not counting my Turbo Pascal experience) and was wondering does anyone write games in Delphi? I have seen DirectX API wrappers in Delphi that allow you to program against DirectX (even wrote a simple solitaire game with a friend), but haven't seen anything out there that shows me that I should keep up with Delphi. I just hate to walk away from so much knowledge and Object Pascal language, but I am not seeing much as to a reason to keep going with Delphi. I currently program in C# and thinking about XNA, but it seems to me that the dominating opinion is go C/C++ route with DirectX. Any other Delphi developers out there struggle with this too? Thanks, MDV

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  • gnome-panel has multiple rows -- how to undo that?

    - by towi
    On Ubuntu 12.04 I use openbox with a single "gnome-panel" started. But after trying to configure my two screen in Xinerama mode I got additional rows of panels each time X restarted. And despite I completely reverted to my one-screen-X-config the gnome-panel displayed has 4 rows (4 at top sreen, 4 at bottom) only the outermost row has content, the other 3 are empty there is only one gnome-panel process running some widgets appear 4 times, too, although they run only once when I switch away from openbox using unity I am back to 1 row temporarily What went wrong here? How do I undo that? Things that did not help: rm -Rf .gnome2 .gconf/ .compiz-1/ pkill panel, and restarting it

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  • Google Games Chat #3!

    Google Games Chat #3! The Google Games Chat is back! Now with a little bit of structure! Come check out the hot new property that Web Pro News raved "a show", and what we here at Google call "45 minutes away from doing real work." We'll be chatting about games, industry trends, and making bold new predictions that will probably look ridiculously wrong in three years. As always, please ask questions in the Google Moderator section below, and we might even get around to answering one or two. From: GoogleDevelopers Views: 0 0 ratings Time: 00:00 More in Science & Technology

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  • System.Device.Location.GeoLocation

    - by Aligned
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/Aligned/archive/2013/06/26/system.device.location.geolocation.aspxA co-worker (Scott) sent out this email and it was so good I asked him if I could share it with all of you. I changed the latitude and longitude to random locations to protect the innocent. “Stumbled across this method this morning while coding all the math out by hand to calculate distances. This one is definitely worth filing away for future reference, saved me a ton of work. This was added in v4 of the framework, and is in the core framework install, so should work in services as well as client applications. var location1 = new GeoCoordinate(40.102, -94.788171); var location2 = new GeoCoordinate(50.0011, -96.699148); // distance shown is straight line meters. Console.WriteLine(location1.GetDistanceTo(location2)); Console.ReadKey();   http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.device.location.geocoordinate.getdistanceto(v=vs.100).aspx http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haversine_formula”

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  • What's the best way to include a hosted blog on a site?

    - by Blankasaurus
    The way I see it you have a couple of options for including a blog on your site. Roll your own Install Something Like Wordpress Use a hosted service like Tumblr Obviously, if you can get away with Option 3 you have done yourself a favor. I have been using Tumblr and pointing blog.mydomain.com to the domains.tumblr.com CNAME to get a free blog that looks like it belongs to my site. I want to be able to display my blog on my root level hostname like mydomain.com/blog. The whole point of moving from blog.mydomain.com to mydomain.com/blog is for SEO purposes. Whats the best way to go about this and still get to leverage a hosted blogging platform like Tumblr?

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  • IIS Media Services 4 Changing the Game

    The more I see of IIS Media Services 4 the more I observe the fundamental shift away from specialised and expense media servers to core services that run on top of any windows web server. In this case change is good as it provides options to the growing number of people that want to create and broadcast video online. Key Announcement #1: IIS Media Services will support a version of PlayReady DRM to enable protected HTTP streaming. The PlayReady DRM IIS Media Services solution will deploy on a single...Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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  • Implementing hitbox polygon

    - by Delusional Logic
    I'm creating a shooter, it's still very early, but i'm implementing some polygon hitboxes. So far i have created a polygon class, and i'm looking into how i can hook it onto my player. I'm trying to stay away from having a Tick() function in my polygon class, and I would rather not update the position every tick (it would clutter up my tick functions). At the same time I would really like to have the positions in there somehow (it has a drawing function, and i will be using it for hit detection) How would i go about implementing this polygon object into my entities?

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  • what is the best way to add avoidance behaviour to an AI framework?

    - by SirYakalot
    I have a small AI framework for a shooting based game. Although this is rarely needed, as when agents are close to each other they are usually fighting, I would none the less like some way of implementing avoidance behaviour. For example, if in the future I wanted to take away their weapons and have many of them wonder around in a crowd, how would I make them not hit / pass through each other, but instead avoid each other? two ideas I had would be to add steering behaviour and allow that to deviate from their path, or to use a dynamic pathfinding technique. Are there better ways? What is the more respected practice?

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  • NetBeans 7.1 Release Candidate (RC) 1 is here

    - by alexismp
    NetBeans 7.1 RC 1 is here. Grab it from the usual place! As previously discussed, NetBeans 7.1 has full JavaFX 2.0 support but also a lot in store for Java EE and Web developers (CDI in particular is very neat). One of my personal favorite feature is that Deploy on Save is now set by default on Maven projects. Maybe one important part that didn't get proper coverage so far is CSS 3 support, an important feature which can be used from both Java EE and PHP but also from JavaFX. Java Downloads of NetBeans 7.1 start at 69 MB and a 166 MB download will get you everything you need to start coding right away with Java EE - a great tool and a fully integrated runtime (GlassFish 3.1.1). You really need to be not using Maven, not be interested in recent standards (Java EE 6, Java SE 7, Java FX 2.0, ...) and like to hand-craft assemble your IDE to afford ignoring NetBeans nowadays.

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  • Issue with div image size [migrated]

    - by nextyear
    I hope this helps explain the issue I am having I have recently designed a horizontal scrolling portfolio for a client, the rights and wrongs of horizontal web design, is a sligtly seperate topic but alas the client wanted something different. Im having a real issue with the bottom div though As the monitor size is reduced its creating the browser scroll bar down the side as the div image is overlapping the monitor size. Wouldnt be such a huge issue but because of the nature of the horizontal site its producing a diagional scrolling effect. Is there away to prevent the screen expanding from the actual monitor size using css or anyother solution? I'm probably staring at the answer as I type but brain doesnt seem to be working unfortunately.

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  • Ubuntu will not install on my Dell Inspiron 580

    - by AndrewC
    I'm trying to install ubuntu on my Inspiron 580 (Intel Core i3 4Gb Ram Intel HD Graphics) but am having no success installing from CD or Windows installer all result in a purple rapidly flashing screen with the Ubuntu with 5 dots below it splash which doesn't change. I have tried releases 12.04.1 LTS (CD and windows installer), 11.10 (CD after reading it was certified for the 580) and today 12.10 (CD) all produce the same install failure. My Dell 1704PT monitor is connected to the intel HD board using an HDMI to DVI adaptor though I have tried a VGA cable and still got the same flashing screen. Any help gratefully received as i want to get away from Windows 7 Home Premium.

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  • Need some help fixing fonts (11.04 Alpha 3)

    - by Spacecraft
    Hi I changed my Application Font and Window Font to something much better looking but it has a few problems. The font is Umpush Light. It's doing this in the software center: http://img851.imageshack.us/img851/8307/workspace1004.png If I increase the font size from 11 to 12, that problem goes away, but then everything is too large. When I increase it this also happens: http://img819.imageshack.us/img819/6231/workspace1006e.png It starts moving the text in the search box up, and the "All Applications" drop down gets messed up too. It seems like there is too much padding around the font or something. Anyone have any ideas on how I can fix this?

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  • Selling Your Website - How the Experts Do It

    When selling your website you need to watch out for a couple of things. Firstly, you need to make sure that you don't get conned and end up giving your site away for free. This usually happens when you agree to transfer your domain information over to the 'buyer' before they've paid you. Secondly, you want to get the most money that you can for your site. The unwritten rule of the market is that you usually sell your site for around ten times what it makes in a month.

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  • Red Gate Coder interviews: Alex Davies

    - by Michael Williamson
    Alex Davies has been a software engineer at Red Gate since graduating from university, and is currently busy working on .NET Demon. We talked about tackling parallel programming with his actors framework, a scientific approach to debugging, and how JavaScript is going to affect the programming languages we use in years to come. So, if we start at the start, how did you get started in programming? When I was seven or eight, I was given a BBC Micro for Christmas. I had asked for a Game Boy, but my dad thought it would be better to give me a proper computer. For a year or so, I only played games on it, but then I found the user guide for writing programs in it. I gradually started doing more stuff on it and found it fun. I liked creating. As I went into senior school I continued to write stuff on there, trying to write games that weren’t very good. I got a real computer when I was fourteen and found ways to write BASIC on it. Visual Basic to start with, and then something more interesting than that. How did you learn to program? Was there someone helping you out? Absolutely not! I learnt out of a book, or by experimenting. I remember the first time I found a loop, I was like “Oh my God! I don’t have to write out the same line over and over and over again any more. It’s amazing!” When did you think this might be something that you actually wanted to do as a career? For a long time, I thought it wasn’t something that you would do as a career, because it was too much fun to be a career. I thought I’d do chemistry at university and some kind of career based on chemical engineering. And then I went to a careers fair at school when I was seventeen or eighteen, and it just didn’t interest me whatsoever. I thought “I could be a programmer, and there’s loads of money there, and I’m good at it, and it’s fun”, but also that I shouldn’t spoil my hobby. Now I don’t really program in my spare time any more, which is a bit of a shame, but I program all the rest of the time, so I can live with it. Do you think you learnt much about programming at university? Yes, definitely! I went into university knowing how to make computers do anything I wanted them to do. However, I didn’t have the language to talk about algorithms, so the algorithms course in my first year was massively important. Learning other language paradigms like functional programming was really good for breadth of understanding. Functional programming influences normal programming through design rather than actually using it all the time. I draw inspiration from it to write imperative programs which I think is actually becoming really fashionable now, but I’ve been doing it for ages. I did it first! There were also some courses on really odd programming languages, a bit of Prolog, a little bit of C. Having a little bit of each of those is something that I would have never done on my own, so it was important. And then there are knowledge-based courses which are about not programming itself but things that have been programmed like TCP. Those are really important for examples for how to approach things. Did you do any internships while you were at university? Yeah, I spent both of my summers at the same company. I thought I could code well before I went there. Looking back at the crap that I produced, it was only surpassed in its crappiness by all of the other code already in that company. I’m so much better at writing nice code now than I used to be back then. Was there just not a culture of looking after your code? There was, they just didn’t hire people for their abilities in that area. They hired people for raw IQ. The first indicator of it going wrong was that they didn’t have any computer scientists, which is a bit odd in a programming company. But even beyond that they didn’t have people who learnt architecture from anyone else. Most of them had started straight out of university, so never really had experience or mentors to learn from. There wasn’t the experience to draw from to teach each other. In the second half of my second internship, I was being given tasks like looking at new technologies and teaching people stuff. Interns shouldn’t be teaching people how to do their jobs! All interns are going to have little nuggets of things that you don’t know about, but they shouldn’t consistently be the ones who know the most. It’s not a good environment to learn. I was going to ask how you found working with people who were more experienced than you… When I reached Red Gate, I found some people who were more experienced programmers than me, and that was difficult. I’ve been coding since I was tiny. At university there were people who were cleverer than me, but there weren’t very many who were more experienced programmers than me. During my internship, I didn’t find anyone who I classed as being a noticeably more experienced programmer than me. So, it was a shock to the system to have valid criticisms rather than just formatting criticisms. However, Red Gate’s not so big on the actual code review, at least it wasn’t when I started. We did an entire product release and then somebody looked over all of the UI of that product which I’d written and say what they didn’t like. By that point, it was way too late and I’d disagree with them. Do you think the lack of code reviews was a bad thing? I think if there’s going to be any oversight of new people, then it should be continuous rather than chunky. For me I don’t mind too much, I could go out and get oversight if I wanted it, and in those situations I felt comfortable without it. If I was managing the new person, then maybe I’d be keener on oversight and then the right way to do it is continuously and in very, very small chunks. Have you had any significant projects you’ve worked on outside of a job? When I was a teenager I wrote all sorts of stuff. I used to write games, I derived how to do isomorphic projections myself once. I didn’t know what the word was so I couldn’t Google for it, so I worked it out myself. It was horrifically complicated. But it sort of tailed off when I started at university, and is now basically zero. If I do side-projects now, they tend to be work-related side projects like my actors framework, NAct, which I started in a down tools week. Could you explain a little more about NAct? It is a little C# framework for writing parallel code more easily. Parallel programming is difficult when you need to write to shared data. Sometimes parallel programming is easy because you don’t need to write to shared data. When you do need to access shared data, you could just have your threads pile in and do their work, but then you would screw up the data because the threads would trample on each other’s toes. You could lock, but locks are really dangerous if you’re using more than one of them. You get interactions like deadlocks, and that’s just nasty. Actors instead allows you to say this piece of data belongs to this thread of execution, and nobody else can read it. If you want to read it, then ask that thread of execution for a piece of it by sending a message, and it will send the data back by a message. And that avoids deadlocks as long as you follow some obvious rules about not making your actors sit around waiting for other actors to do something. There are lots of ways to write actors, NAct allows you to do it as if it was method calls on other objects, which means you get all the strong type-safety that C# programmers like. Do you think that this is suitable for the majority of parallel programming, or do you think it’s only suitable for specific cases? It’s suitable for most difficult parallel programming. If you’ve just got a hundred web requests which are all independent of each other, then I wouldn’t bother because it’s easier to just spin them up in separate threads and they can proceed independently of each other. But where you’ve got difficult parallel programming, where you’ve got multiple threads accessing multiple bits of data in multiple ways at different times, then actors is at least as good as all other ways, and is, I reckon, easier to think about. When you’re using actors, you presumably still have to write your code in a different way from you would otherwise using single-threaded code. You can’t use actors with any methods that have return types, because you’re not allowed to call into another actor and wait for it. If you want to get a piece of data out of another actor, then you’ve got to use tasks so that you can use “async” and “await” to await asynchronously for it. But other than that, you can still stick things in classes so it’s not too different really. Rather than having thousands of objects with mutable state, you can use component-orientated design, where there are only a few mutable classes which each have a small number of instances. Then there can be thousands of immutable objects. If you tend to do that anyway, then actors isn’t much of a jump. If I’ve already built my system without any parallelism, how hard is it to add actors to exploit all eight cores on my desktop? Usually pretty easy. If you can identify even one boundary where things look like messages and you have components where some objects live on one side and these other objects live on the other side, then you can have a granddaddy object on one side be an actor and it will parallelise as it goes across that boundary. Not too difficult. If we do get 1000-core desktop PCs, do you think actors will scale up? It’s hard. There are always in the order of twenty to fifty actors in my whole program because I tend to write each component as actors, and I tend to have one instance of each component. So this won’t scale to a thousand cores. What you can do is write data structures out of actors. I use dictionaries all over the place, and if you need a dictionary that is going to be accessed concurrently, then you could build one of those out of actors in no time. You can use queuing to marshal requests between different slices of the dictionary which are living on different threads. So it’s like a distributed hash table but all of the chunks of it are on the same machine. That means that each of these thousand processors has cached one small piece of the dictionary. I reckon it wouldn’t be too big a leap to start doing proper parallelism. Do you think it helps if actors get baked into the language, similarly to Erlang? Erlang is excellent in that it has thread-local garbage collection. C# doesn’t, so there’s a limit to how well C# actors can possibly scale because there’s a single garbage collected heap shared between all of them. When you do a global garbage collection, you’ve got to stop all of the actors, which is seriously expensive, whereas in Erlang garbage collections happen per-actor, so they’re insanely cheap. However, Erlang deviated from all the sensible language design that people have used recently and has just come up with crazy stuff. You can definitely retrofit thread-local garbage collection to .NET, and then it’s quite well-suited to support actors, even if it’s not baked into the language. Speaking of language design, do you have a favourite programming language? I’ll choose a language which I’ve never written before. I like the idea of Scala. It sounds like C#, only with some of the niggles gone. I enjoy writing static types. It means you don’t have to writing tests so much. When you say it doesn’t have some of the niggles? C# doesn’t allow the use of a property as a method group. It doesn’t have Scala case classes, or sum types, where you can do a switch statement and the compiler checks that you’ve checked all the cases, which is really useful in functional-style programming. Pattern-matching, in other words. That’s actually the major niggle. C# is pretty good, and I’m quite happy with C#. And what about going even further with the type system to remove the need for tests to something like Haskell? Or is that a step too far? I’m quite a pragmatist, I don’t think I could deal with trying to write big systems in languages with too few other users, especially when learning how to structure things. I just don’t know anyone who can teach me, and the Internet won’t teach me. That’s the main reason I wouldn’t use it. If I turned up at a company that writes big systems in Haskell, I would have no objection to that, but I wouldn’t instigate it. What about things in C#? For instance, there’s contracts in C#, so you can try to statically verify a bit more about your code. Do you think that’s useful, or just not worthwhile? I’ve not really tried it. My hunch is that it needs to be built into the language and be quite mathematical for it to work in real life, and that doesn’t seem to have ended up true for C# contracts. I don’t think anyone who’s tried them thinks they’re any good. I might be wrong. On a slightly different note, how do you like to debug code? I think I’m quite an odd debugger. I use guesswork extremely rarely, especially if something seems quite difficult to debug. I’ve been bitten spending hours and hours on guesswork and not being scientific about debugging in the past, so now I’m scientific to a fault. What I want is to see the bug happening in the debugger, to step through the bug happening. To watch the program going from a valid state to an invalid state. When there’s a bug and I can’t work out why it’s happening, I try to find some piece of evidence which places the bug in one section of the code. From that experiment, I binary chop on the possible causes of the bug. I suppose that means binary chopping on places in the code, or binary chopping on a stage through a processing cycle. Basically, I’m very stupid about how I debug. I won’t make any guesses, I won’t use any intuition, I will only identify the experiment that’s going to binary chop most effectively and repeat rather than trying to guess anything. I suppose it’s quite top-down. Is most of the time then spent in the debugger? Absolutely, if at all possible I will never debug using print statements or logs. I don’t really hold much stock in outputting logs. If there’s any bug which can be reproduced locally, I’d rather do it in the debugger than outputting logs. And with SmartAssembly error reporting, there’s not a lot that can’t be either observed in an error report and just fixed, or reproduced locally. And in those other situations, maybe I’ll use logs. But I hate using logs. You stare at the log, trying to guess what’s going on, and that’s exactly what I don’t like doing. You have to just look at it and see does this look right or wrong. We’ve covered how you get to grip with bugs. How do you get to grips with an entire codebase? I watch it in the debugger. I find little bugs and then try to fix them, and mostly do it by watching them in the debugger and gradually getting an understanding of how the code works using my process of binary chopping. I have to do a lot of reading and watching code to choose where my slicing-in-half experiment is going to be. The last time I did it was SmartAssembly. The old code was a complete mess, but at least it did things top to bottom. There wasn’t too much of some of the big abstractions where flow of control goes all over the place, into a base class and back again. Code’s really hard to understand when that happens. So I like to choose a little bug and try to fix it, and choose a bigger bug and try to fix it. Definitely learn by doing. I want to always have an aim so that I get a little achievement after every few hours of debugging. Once I’ve learnt the codebase I might be able to fix all the bugs in an hour, but I’d rather be using them as an aim while I’m learning the codebase. If I was a maintainer of a codebase, what should I do to make it as easy as possible for you to understand? Keep distinct concepts in different places. And name your stuff so that it’s obvious which concepts live there. You shouldn’t have some variable that gets set miles up the top of somewhere, and then is read miles down to choose some later behaviour. I’m talking from a very much SmartAssembly point of view because the old SmartAssembly codebase had tons and tons of these things, where it would read some property of the code and then deal with it later. Just thousands of variables in scope. Loads of things to think about. If you can keep concepts separate, then it aids me in my process of fixing bugs one at a time, because each bug is going to more or less be understandable in the one place where it is. And what about tests? Do you think they help at all? I’ve never had the opportunity to learn a codebase which has had tests, I don’t know what it’s like! What about when you’re actually developing? How useful do you find tests in finding bugs or regressions? Finding regressions, absolutely. Running bits of code that would be quite hard to run otherwise, definitely. It doesn’t happen very often that a test finds a bug in the first place. I don’t really buy nebulous promises like tests being a good way to think about the spec of the code. My thinking goes something like “This code works at the moment, great, ship it! Ah, there’s a way that this code doesn’t work. Okay, write a test, demonstrate that it doesn’t work, fix it, use the test to demonstrate that it’s now fixed, and keep the test for future regressions.” The most valuable tests are for bugs that have actually happened at some point, because bugs that have actually happened at some point, despite the fact that you think you’ve fixed them, are way more likely to appear again than new bugs are. Does that mean that when you write your code the first time, there are no tests? Often. The chance of there being a bug in a new feature is relatively unaffected by whether I’ve written a test for that new feature because I’m not good enough at writing tests to think of bugs that I would have written into the code. So not writing regression tests for all of your code hasn’t affected you too badly? There are different kinds of features. Some of them just always work, and are just not flaky, they just continue working whatever you throw at them. Maybe because the type-checker is particularly effective around them. Writing tests for those features which just tend to always work is a waste of time. And because it’s a waste of time I’ll tend to wait until a feature has demonstrated its flakiness by having bugs in it before I start trying to test it. You can get a feel for whether it’s going to be flaky code as you’re writing it. I try to write it to make it not flaky, but there are some things that are just inherently flaky. And very occasionally, I’ll think “this is going to be flaky” as I’m writing, and then maybe do a test, but not most of the time. How do you think your programming style has changed over time? I’ve got clearer about what the right way of doing things is. I used to flip-flop a lot between different ideas. Five years ago I came up with some really good ideas and some really terrible ideas. All of them seemed great when I thought of them, but they were quite diverse ideas, whereas now I have a smaller set of reliable ideas that are actually good for structuring code. So my code is probably more similar to itself than it used to be back in the day, when I was trying stuff out. I’ve got more disciplined about encapsulation, I think. There are operational things like I use actors more now than I used to, and that forces me to use immutability more than I used to. The first code that I wrote in Red Gate was the memory profiler UI, and that was an actor, I just didn’t know the name of it at the time. I don’t really use object-orientation. By object-orientation, I mean having n objects of the same type which are mutable. I want a constant number of objects that are mutable, and they should be different types. I stick stuff in dictionaries and then have one thing that owns the dictionary and puts stuff in and out of it. That’s definitely a pattern that I’ve seen recently. I think maybe I’m doing functional programming. Possibly. It’s plausible. If you had to summarise the essence of programming in a pithy sentence, how would you do it? Programming is the form of art that, without losing any of the beauty of architecture or fine art, allows you to produce things that people love and you make money from. So you think it’s an art rather than a science? It’s a little bit of engineering, a smidgeon of maths, but it’s not science. Like architecture, programming is on that boundary between art and engineering. If you want to do it really nicely, it’s mostly art. You can get away with doing architecture and programming entirely by having a good engineering mind, but you’re not going to produce anything nice. You’re not going to have joy doing it if you’re an engineering mind. Architects who are just engineering minds are not going to enjoy their job. I suppose engineering is the foundation on which you build the art. Exactly. How do you think programming is going to change over the next ten years? There will be an unfortunate shift towards dynamically-typed languages, because of JavaScript. JavaScript has an unfair advantage. JavaScript’s unfair advantage will cause more people to be exposed to dynamically-typed languages, which means other dynamically-typed languages crop up and the best features go into dynamically-typed languages. Then people conflate the good features with the fact that it’s dynamically-typed, and more investment goes into dynamically-typed languages. They end up better, so people use them. What about the idea of compiling other languages, possibly statically-typed, to JavaScript? It’s a reasonable idea. I would like to do it, but I don’t think enough people in the world are going to do it to make it pick up. The hordes of beginners are the lifeblood of a language community. They are what makes there be good tools and what makes there be vibrant community websites. And any particular thing which is the same as JavaScript only with extra stuff added to it, although it might be technically great, is not going to have the hordes of beginners. JavaScript is always to be quickest and easiest way for a beginner to start programming in the browser. And dynamically-typed languages are great for beginners. Compilers are pretty scary and beginners don’t write big code. And having your errors come up in the same place, whether they’re statically checkable errors or not, is quite nice for a beginner. If someone asked me to teach them some programming, I’d teach them JavaScript. If dynamically-typed languages are great for beginners, when do you think the benefits of static typing start to kick in? The value of having a statically typed program is in the tools that rely on the static types to produce a smooth IDE experience rather than actually telling me my compile errors. And only once you’re experienced enough a programmer that having a really smooth IDE experience makes a blind bit of difference, does static typing make a blind bit of difference. So it’s not really about size of codebase. If I go and write up a tiny program, I’m still going to get value out of writing it in C# using ReSharper because I’m experienced with C# and ReSharper enough to be able to write code five times faster if I have that help. Any other visions of the future? Nobody’s going to use actors. Because everyone’s going to be running on single-core VMs connected over network-ready protocols like JSON over HTTP. So, parallelism within one operating system is going to die. But until then, you should use actors. More Red Gater Coder interviews

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  • Mongodb vs. Cassandra

    - by ming yeow
    I am evaluating what might be the best migration option. Currently, i am on a sharded mysql (horizontal partition), with most of my data stored in json blobs. I do not have any complex SQL queries( already migrated away after since I partitioned my db) Right now, it seems like both Mongodb and Cassandra would be likely options. My situation lots of reads in every query, less regular writes not worried about "massive" scalability more concerned about simple setup, maintenance and code minimize hardware/server cost

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  • BlackBerry - GUI design prototyping mockup (Visio stencils)

    - by Max Gontar
    Hi! Just want to share information (and ask for some challenge) My company has published a set of Visio 2003 stencils for BlackBerry GUI prototyping RIM BlackBerry 8300, BlackBerry OS 4.5 RIM BlackBerry 9000, BlackBerry OS 4.6 RIM BlackBerry 9500, BlackBerry OS 4.7 RIM BlackBerry 9700, BlackBerry OS 5.0 It's free, however for download you will need to fill email form. Question: Is there other sets like that, so we could learn and make our one better (or just throw it away)? If it's too "self-promotional", feel free to close :) Thank you!

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