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• Abstracting functionality

  - by Ralf Westphal

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/theArchitectsNapkin/archive/2014/08/22/abstracting-functionality.aspxWhat is more important than data? Functionality. Yes, I strongly believe we should switch to a functionality over data mindset in programming. Or actually switch back to it. Focus on functionality Functionality once was at the core of software development. Back when algorithms were the first thing you heard about in CS classes. Sure, data structures, too, were important - but always from the point of view of algorithms. (Niklaus Wirth gave one of his books the title “Algorithms + Data Structures” instead of “Data Structures + Algorithms” for a reason.) The reason for the focus on functionality? Firstly, because software was and is about doing stuff. Secondly because sufficient performance was hard to achieve, and only thirdly memory efficiency. But then hardware became more powerful. That gave rise to a new mindset: object orientation. And with it functionality was devalued. Data took over its place as the most important aspect. Now discussions revolved around structures motivated by data relationships. (John Beidler gave his book the title “Data Structures and Algorithms: An Object Oriented Approach” instead of the other way around for a reason.) Sure, this data could be embellished with functionality. But nevertheless functionality was second. When you look at (domain) object models what you mostly find is (domain) data object models. The common object oriented approach is: data aka structure over functionality. This is true even for the most modern modeling approaches like Domain Driven Design. Look at the literature and what you find is recommendations on how to get data structures right: aggregates, entities, value objects. I´m not saying this is what object orientation was invented for. But I´m saying that´s what I happen to see across many teams now some 25 years after object orientation became mainstream through C++, Delphi, and Java. But why should we switch back? Because software development cannot become truly agile with a data focus. The reason for that lies in what customers need first: functionality, behavior, operations. To be clear, that´s not why software is built. The purpose of software is to be more efficient than the alternative. Money mainly is spent to get a certain level of quality (e.g. performance, scalability, security etc.). But without functionality being present, there is nothing to work on the quality of. What customers want is functionality of a certain quality. ASAP. And tomorrow new functionality needs to be added, existing functionality needs to be changed, and quality needs to be increased. No customer ever wanted data or structures. Of course data should be processed. Data is there, data gets generated, transformed, stored. But how the data is structured for this to happen efficiently is of no concern to the customer. Ask a customer (or user) whether she likes the data structured this way or that way. She´ll say, “I don´t care.” But ask a customer (or user) whether he likes the functionality and its quality this way or that way. He´ll say, “I like it” (or “I don´t like it”). Build software incrementally From this very natural focus of customers and users on functionality and its quality follows we should develop software incrementally. That´s what Agility is about. Deliver small increments quickly and often to get frequent feedback. That way less waste is produced, and learning can take place much easier (on the side of the customer as well as on the side of developers). An increment is some added functionality or quality of functionality.[1] So as it turns out, Agility is about functionality over whatever. But software developers’ thinking is still stuck in the object oriented mindset of whatever over functionality. Bummer. I guess that (at least partly) explains why Agility always hits a glass ceiling in projects. It´s a clash of mindsets, of cultures. Driving software development by demanding small increases in functionality runs against thinking about software as growing (data) structures sprinkled with functionality. (Excuse me, if this sounds a bit broad-brush. But you get my point.) The need for abstraction In the end there need to be data structures. Of course. Small and large ones. The phrase functionality over data does not deny that. It´s not functionality instead of data or something. It´s just over, i.e. functionality should be thought of first. It´s a tad more important. It´s what the customer wants. That´s why we need a way to design functionality. Small and large. We need to be able to think about functionality before implementing it. We need to be able to reason about it among team members. We need to be able to communicate our mental models of functionality not just by speaking about them, but also on paper. Otherwise reasoning about it does not scale. We learned thinking about functionality in the small using flow charts, Nassi-Shneiderman diagrams, pseudo code, or UML sequence diagrams. That´s nice and well. But it does not scale. You can use these tools to describe manageable algorithms. But it does not work for the functionality triggered by pressing the “1-Click Order” on an amazon product page for example. There are several reasons for that, I´d say. Firstly, the level of abstraction over code is negligible. It´s essentially non-existent. Drawing a flow chart or writing pseudo code or writing actual code is very, very much alike. All these tools are about control flow like code is.[2] In addition all tools are computationally complete. They are about logic which is expressions and especially control statements. Whatever you code in Java you can fully (!) describe using a flow chart. And then there is no data. They are about control flow and leave out the data altogether. Thus data mostly is assumed to be global. That´s shooting yourself in the foot, as I hope you agree. Even if it´s functionality over data that does not mean “don´t think about data”. Right to the contrary! Functionality only makes sense with regard to data. So data needs to be in the picture right from the start - but it must not dominate the thinking. The above tools fail on this. Bottom line: So far we´re unable to reason in a scalable and abstract manner about functionality. That´s why programmers are so driven to start coding once they are presented with a problem. Programming languages are the only tool they´ve learned to use to reason about functional solutions. Or, well, there might be exceptions. Mathematical notation and SQL may have come to your mind already. Indeed they are tools on a higher level of abstraction than flow charts etc. That´s because they are declarative and not computationally complete. They leave out details - in order to deliver higher efficiency in devising overall solutions. We can easily reason about functionality using mathematics and SQL. That´s great. Except for that they are domain specific languages. They are not general purpose. (And they don´t scale either, I´d say.) Bummer. So to be more precise we need a scalable general purpose tool on a higher than code level of abstraction not neglecting data. Enter: Flow Design. Abstracting functionality using data flows I believe the solution to the problem of abstracting functionality lies in switching from control flow to data flow. Data flow very naturally is not about logic details anymore. There are no expressions and no control statements anymore. There are not even statements anymore. Data flow is declarative by nature. With data flow we get rid of all the limiting traits of former approaches to modeling functionality. In addition, nomen est omen, data flows include data in the functionality picture. With data flows, data is visibly flowing from processing step to processing step. Control is not flowing. Control is wherever it´s needed to process data coming in. That´s a crucial difference and needs some rewiring in your head to be fully appreciated.[2] Since data flows are declarative they are not the right tool to describe algorithms, though, I´d say. With them you don´t design functionality on a low level. During design data flow processing steps are black boxes. They get fleshed out during coding. Data flow design thus is more coarse grained than flow chart design. It starts on a higher level of abstraction - but then is not limited. By nesting data flows indefinitely you can design functionality of any size, without losing sight of your data. Data flows scale very well during design. They can be used on any level of granularity. And they can easily be depicted. Communicating designs using data flows is easy and scales well, too. The result of functional design using data flows is not algorithms (too low level), but processes. Think of data flows as descriptions of industrial production lines. Data as material runs through a number of processing steps to be analyzed, enhances, transformed. On the top level of a data flow design might be just one processing step, e.g. “execute 1-click order”. But below that are arbitrary levels of flows with smaller and smaller steps. That´s not layering as in “layered architecture”, though. Rather it´s a stratified design à la Abelson/Sussman. Refining data flows is not your grandpa´s functional decomposition. That was rooted in control flows. Refining data flows does not suffer from the limits of functional decomposition against which object orientation was supposed to be an antidote. Summary I´ve been working exclusively with data flows for functional design for the past 4 years. It has changed my life as a programmer. What once was difficult is now easy. And, no, I´m not using Clojure or F#. And I´m not a async/parallel execution buff. Designing the functionality of increments using data flows works great with teams. It produces design documentation which can easily be translated into code - in which then the smallest data flow processing steps have to be fleshed out - which is comparatively easy. Using a systematic translation approach code can mirror the data flow design. That way later on the design can easily be reproduced from the code if need be. And finally, data flow designs play well with object orientation. They are a great starting point for class design. But that´s a story for another day. To me data flow design simply is one of the missing links of systematic lightweight software design. There are also other artifacts software development can produce to get feedback, e.g. process descriptions, test cases. But customers can be delighted more easily with code based increments in functionality. ? No, I´m not talking about the endless possibilities this opens for parallel processing. Data flows are useful independently of multi-core processors and Actor-based designs. That´s my whole point here. Data flows are good for reasoning and evolvability. So forget about any special frameworks you might need to reap benefits from data flows. None are necessary. Translating data flow designs even into plain of Java is possible. ?

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• The Changing Face of PASS

  - by Bill Graziano

  I’m starting my sixth year on the PASS Board.  I served two years as the Program Director, two years as the Vice-President of Marketing and I’m starting my second year as the Executive Vice-President of Finance.  There’s a pretty good chance that if PASS has done something you don’t like or is doing something you don’t like, that I’m involved in one way or another. Andy Leonard asked in a comment on his blog if the Board had ever reversed itself based on community input.  He asserted that it hadn’t.  I disagree.  I’m not going to try and list all the changes we make inside portfolios based on feedback from and meetings with the community.  I’m going to focus on major governance issues since I was elected to the Board. Management Company The first big change was our management company.  Our old management company had a standard approach to running a non-profit.  It worked well when PASS was launched.  Having a ready-made structure and process to run the organization enabled the organization to grow quickly.  As time went on we were limited in some of the things we wanted to do.  The more involved you were with PASS, the more you saw these limitations.  Key volunteers were regularly providing feedback that they wanted certain changes that were difficult for us to accomplish.  The Board at that time wanted changes that were difficult or impossible to accomplish under that structure. This was not a simple change.  Imagine a $2.5 million dollar company letting all its employees go on a Friday and starting with a new staff on Monday.  We also had a very narrow window to accomplish that so that we wouldn’t affect the Summit – our only source of revenue.  We spent the year after the change rebuilding processes and putting on the Summit in Denver.  That’s a concrete example of a huge change that PASS made to better serve its members.  And it was a change that many in the community were telling us we needed to make. Financials We heard regularly from our members that they wanted our financials posted.  Today on our web site you can find audited financials going back to 2004.  We publish our budget at the start of each year.  If you ask a question about the financials on the PASS site I do my best to answer it.  I’m also trying to do a better job answering financial questions posted in other locations.  (And yes, I know I owe a few of you some blog posts.) That’s another concrete example of a change that our members asked for that the Board agreed was a good decision. Minutes When I started on the Board the meeting minutes were very limited.  The minutes from a two day Board meeting might fit on one page.  I think we did the bare minimum we were legally required to do.  Today Board meeting minutes run from 5 to 12 pages and go into incredible detail on what we talk about.  There are certain topics that are NDA but where possible we try to list the topic we discussed but that the actual discussion was under NDA.  We also publish the agenda of Board meetings ahead of time. This is another specific example where input from the community influenced the decision.  It was certainly easier to have limited minutes but I think the extra effort helps our members understand what’s going on. Board Q&A At the 2009 Summit the Board held its first public Q&A with our members.  We’d always been available individually to answer questions.  There’s a benefit to getting us all in one room and asking the really hard questions to watch us squirm.  We learn what questions we don’t have good answers for.  We get to see how many people in the crowd look interested in the various questions and answers. I don’t recall the genesis of how this came about.  I’m fairly certain there was some community pressure though. Board Votes Until last November, the Board only reported the vote totals and not how individual Board members voted.  That was one of the topics at a great lunch I had with Tim Mitchell and Kendal van Dyke at the Summit.  That was also the topic of the first question asked at the Board Q&A by Kendal.  Kendal expressed his opposition to to anonymous votes clearly and passionately and without trying to paint anyone into a corner.  Less than 24 hours later the PASS Board voted to make individual votes public unless the topic was under NDA.  That’s another area where the Board decided to change based on feedback from our members. Summit Location While this isn’t actually a governance issue it is one of the more public decisions we make that has taken some public criticism.  There is a significant portion of our members that want the Summit near them.  There is a significant portion of our members that like the Summit in Seattle.  There is a significant portion of our members that think it should move around the country.  I was one that felt strongly that there were significant, tangible benefits to our attendees to being in Seattle every year.  I’m also one that has been swayed by some very compelling arguments that we need to have at least one outside Seattle and then revisit the decision.  I can’t tell you how the Board will vote but I know the opinion of our members weighs heavily on the decision. Elections And that brings us to the grand-daddy of all governance issues.  My thesis for this blog post is that the PASS Board has implemented policy changes in response to member feedback.  It isn’t to defend or criticize our election process.  It’s just to say that is has been under going continuous change since I’ve been on the Board.  I ran for the Board in the fall of 2005.  I don’t know much about what happened before then.  I was actively volunteering for PASS for four years prior to that as a chapter leader and on the program committee.  I don’t recall any complaints about elections but that doesn’t mean they didn’t occur.  The questions from the Nominating Committee (NomCom) were trivial and the selection process rudimentary (For example, “Tell us about your accomplishments”).  I don’t even remember who I ran against or how many other people ran.  I ran for the VP of Marketing in the fall of 2007.  I don’t recall any significant changes the Board made in the election process for that election.  I think a lot of the changes in 2007 came from us asking the management company to work on the election process.  I was expecting a similar set of puff ball questions from my previous election.  Boy, was I in for a shock.  The NomCom had found a much better set of questions and really made the interview portion difficult.  The questions were much more behavioral in nature.  I’d already written about my vision for PASS and my goals.  They wanted to know how I handled adversity, how I handled criticism, how I handled conflict, how I handled troublesome volunteers, how I motivated people and how I responded to motivation. And many, many other things. They grilled me for over an hour.  I’ve done a fair bit of technical sales in my time.  I feel I speak well under pressure addressing pointed questions.  This interview intentionally put me under pressure.  In addition to wanting to know about my interpersonal skills, my work experience, my volunteer experience and my supervisory experience they wanted to see how I’d do under pressure.  They wanted to see who would respond under pressure and who wouldn’t.  It was a bit of a shock. That was the first big change I remember in the election process.  I know there were other improvements around the process but none of them stick in my mind quite like the unexpected hour-long grilling. The next big change I remember was after the 2009 elections.  Andy Warren was unhappy with the election process and wanted to make some changes.  He worked with Hannes at HQ and they came up with a better set of processes.  I think Andy moved PASS in the right direction.  Nonetheless, after the 2010 election even more people were very publicly clamoring for changes to our election process.  In August of 2010 we had a choice to make.  There were numerous bloggers criticizing the Board and our upcoming election.  The easy change would be to announce that we were changing the process in a way that would satisfy our critics.  I believe that a knee-jerk response to criticism is seldom correct. Instead the Board spent August and September and October and November listening to the community.  I visited two SQLSaturdays and asked questions of everyone I could.  I attended chapter meetings and asked questions of as many people as they’d let me.  At Summit I made it a point to introduce myself to strangers and ask them about the election.  At every breakfast I’d sit down at a table full of strangers and ask about the election.  I’m happy to say that I left most tables arguing about the election.  Most days I managed to get 2 or 3 breakfasts in. I spent less time talking to people that had already written about the election.  They were already expressing their opinion.  I wanted to talk to people that hadn’t spoken up.  I wanted to know what the silent majority thought.  The Board all attended the Q&A session where our members expressed their concerns about a variety of issues including the election. The PASS Board also chose to create the Election Review Committee.  We wanted people from the community that had been involved with PASS to look at our election process with fresh eyes while listening to what the community had to say and give us some advice on how we could improve the process.  I’m a part of this as is Andy Warren.  None of the other members are on the Board.  I’ve sat in numerous calls and interviews with this group and attended an open meeting at the Summit.  We asked anyone that wanted to discuss the election to come speak with us.  The ERC held an open meeting at the Summit and invited anyone to attend.  There are forums on the ERC web site where we’ve invited people to participate.  The ERC has reached to key people involved in recent elections.  The years that I haven’t mentioned also saw minor improvements in the election process.  Off the top of my head I don’t recall what exact changes were made each year.  Specifically since the 2010 election we’ve gone out of our way to seek input from the community about the process.  I’m not sure what more we could have done to invite feedback from the community. I think to say that we haven’t “fixed” the election process isn’t a fair criticism at this time.  We haven’t rushed any changes through the process.  If you don’t see any changes in our election process in July or August then I think it’s fair to criticize us for ignoring the community or ask for an explanation for what we’ve done. In Summary Andy’s main point was that the PASS Board hasn’t changed in response to our members wishes.  I think I’ve shown that time and time again the PASS Board has changed in response to what our members want.  There are only two outstanding issues: Summit location and elections.  The 2013 Summit location hasn’t been decided yet.  Our work on the elections is also in progress.  And at every step in the election review we’ve gone out of our way to listen to the community and incorporate their feedback on the process. I also hope I’m not encouraging everyone that wants some change in the organization to organize a “blog rush” against the Board.  We take public suggestions very seriously but we also take the time to evaluate those suggestions and learn what the rest of our members think and make a measured decision.

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• Down Tools Week Cometh: Kissing Goodbye to CVs/Resumes and Cover Letters

  - by Bart Read

  I haven't blogged about what I'm doing in my (not so new) temporary role as Red Gate's technical recruiter, mostly because it's been routine, business as usual stuff, and because I've been trying to understand the role by doing it. I think now though the time has come to get a little more radical, so I'm going to tell you why I want to largely eliminate CVs/resumes and cover letters from the application process for some of our technical roles, and why I think that might be a good thing for candidates (and for us). I have a terrible confession to make, or at least it's a terrible confession for a recruiter: I don't really like CV sifting, or reading cover letters, and, unless I've misread the mood around here, neither does anybody else. It's dull, it's time-consuming, and it's somewhat soul destroying because, when all is said and done, you're being paid to be incredibly judgemental about people based on relatively little information. I feel like I've dirtied myself by saying that - I mean, after all, it's a core part of my job - but it sucks, it really does. (And, of course, the truth is I'm still a software engineer at heart, and I'm always looking for ways to do things better.) On the flip side, I've never met anyone who likes writing their CV. It takes hours and hours of faffing around and massaging it into shape, and the whole process is beset by a gnawing anxiety, frustration, and insecurity. All you really want is a chance to demonstrate your skills - not just talk about them - and how do you do that in a CV or cover letter? Often the best candidates will include samples of their work (a portfolio, screenshots, links to websites, product downloads, etc.), but sometimes this isn't possible, or may not be appropriate, or you just don't think you're allowed because of what your school/university careers service has told you (more commonly an issue with grads, obviously). And what are we actually trying to find out about people with all of this? I think the common criteria are actually pretty basic: Smart Gets things done (thanks for these two Joel) Not an a55hole* (sorry, have to get around Simple Talk's swear filter - and thanks to Professor Robert I. Sutton for this one) *Of course, everyone has off days, and I don't honestly think we're too worried about somebody being a bit grumpy every now and again. We can do a bit better than this in the context of the roles I'm talking about: we can be more specific about what "gets things done" means, at least in part. For software engineers and interns, the non-exhaustive meaning of "gets things done" is: Excellent coder For test engineers, the non-exhaustive meaning of "gets things done" is: Good at finding problems in software Competent coder Team player, etc., to me, are covered by "not an a55hole". I don't expect people to be the life and soul of the party, or a wild extrovert - that's not what team player means, and it's not what "not an a55hole" means. Some of our best technical staff are quiet, introverted types, but they're still pleasant to work with. My problem is that I don't think the initial sift really helps us find out whether people are smart and get things done with any great efficacy. It's better than nothing, for sure, but it's not as good as it could be. It's also contentious, and potentially unfair/inequitable - if you want to get an idea of what I mean by this, check out the background information section at the bottom. Before I go any further, let's look at the Red Gate recruitment process for technical staff* as it stands now: (LOTS of) People apply for jobs. All these applications go through a brutal process of manual sifting, which eliminates between 75 and 90% of them, depending upon the role, and the time of year**. Depending upon the role, those who pass the sift will be sent an assessment or telescreened. For the purposes of this blog post I'm only interested in those that are sent some sort of programming assessment, or bug hunt. This means software engineers, test engineers, and software interns, which are the roles for which I receive the most applications. The telescreen tends to be reserved for project or product managers. Those that pass the assessment are invited in for first interview. This interview is mostly about assessing their technical skills***, although we're obviously on the look out for cultural fit red flags as well. If the first interview goes well we'll invite candidates back for a second interview. This is where team/cultural fit is really scoped out. We also use this interview to dive more deeply into certain areas of their skillset, and explore any concerns that may have come out of the first interview (these obviously won't have been serious or obvious enough to cause a rejection at that point, but are things we do need to look into before we'd consider making an offer). We might subsequently invite them in for lunch before we make them an offer. This tends to happen when we're recruiting somebody for a specific team and we'd like them to meet all the people they'll be working with directly. It's not an interview per se, but can prove pivotal if they don't gel with the team. Anyone who's made it this far will receive an offer from us. *We have a slightly quirky definition of "technical staff" as it relates to the technical recruiter role here. It includes software engineers, test engineers, software interns, user experience specialists, technical authors, project managers, product managers, and development managers, but does not include product support or information systems roles. **For example, the quality of graduate applicants overall noticeably drops as the academic year wears on, which is not to say that by now there aren't still stars in there, just that they're fewer and further between. ***Some organisations prefer to assess for team fit first, but I think assessing technical skills is a more effective initial filter - if they're the nicest person in the world, but can't cut a line of code they're not going to work out. Now, as I suggested in the title, Red Gate's Down Tools Week is upon us once again - next week in fact - and I had proposed as a project that we refactor and automate the first stage of marking our programming assessments. Marking assessments, and in fact organising the marking of them, is a somewhat time-consuming process, and we receive many assessment solutions that just don't make the cut, for whatever reason. Whilst I don't think it's possible to fully automate marking, I do think it ought to be possible to run a suite of automated tests over each candidate's solution to see whether or not it behaves correctly and, if it does, move on to a manual stage where we examine the code for structure, decomposition, style, readability, maintainability, etc. Obviously it's possible to use tools to generate potentially helpful metrics for some of these indices as well. This would obviously reduce the marking workload, and would provide candidates with quicker feedback about whether they've been successful - though I do wonder if waiting a tactful interval before sending a (nicely written) rejection might be wise. I duly scrawled out a picture of my ideal process, which looked like this: The problem is, as soon as I'd roughed it out, I realised that fundamentally it wasn't an ideal process at all, which explained the gnawing feeling of cognitive dissonance I'd been wrestling with all week, whilst I'd been trying to find time to do this. Here's what I mean. Automated assessment marking, and the associated infrastructure around that, makes it much easier for us to deal with large numbers of assessments. This means we can be much more permissive about who we send assessments out to or, in other words, we can give more candidates the opportunity to really demonstrate their skills to us. And this leads to a question: why not give everyone the opportunity to demonstrate their skills, to show that they're smart and can get things done? (Two or three of us even discussed this in the down tools week hustings earlier this week.) And isn't this a lot simpler than the alternative we'd been considering? (FYI, this was automated CV/cover letter sifting by some form of textual analysis to ideally eliminate the worst 50% or so of applications based on an analysis of the 20,000 or so historical applications we've received since 2007 - definitely not the basic keyword analysis beloved of recruitment agencies, since this would eliminate hardly anyone who was awful, but definitely would eliminate stellar Oxbridge candidates - #fail - or some nightmarishly complex Google-like system where we profile all our currently employees, only to realise that we're never going to get representative results because we don't have a statistically significant sample size in any given role - also #fail.) No, I think the new way is better. We let people self-select. We make them the masters (or mistresses) of their own destiny. We give applicants the power - we put their fate in their hands - by giving them the chance to demonstrate their skills, which is what they really want anyway, instead of requiring that they spend hours and hours creating a CV and cover letter that I'm going to evaluate for suitability, and make a value judgement about, in approximately 1 minute (give or take). It doesn't matter what university you attended, it doesn't matter if you had a bad year when you took your A-levels - here's your chance to shine, so take it and run with it. (As a side benefit, we cut the number of applications we have to sift by something like two thirds.) WIN! OK, yeah, sounds good, but will it actually work? That's an excellent question. My gut feeling is yes, and I'll justify why below (and hopefully have gone some way towards doing that above as well), but what I'm proposing here is really that we run an experiment for a period of time - probably a couple of months or so - and measure the outcomes we see: How many people apply? (Wouldn't be surprised or alarmed to see this cut by a factor of ten.) How many of them submit a good assessment? (More/less than at present?) How much overhead is there for us in dealing with these assessments compared to now? What are the success and failure rates at each interview stage compared to now? How many people are we hiring at the end of it compared to now? I think it'll work because I hypothesize that, amongst other things: It self-selects for people who really want to work at Red Gate which, at the moment, is something I have to try and assess based on their CV and cover letter - but if you're not that bothered about working here, why would you complete the assessment? Candidates who would submit a shoddy application probably won't feel motivated to do the assessment. Candidates who would demonstrate good attention to detail in their CV/cover letter will demonstrate good attention to detail in the assessment. In general, only the better candidates will complete and submit the assessment. Marking assessments is much less work so we'll be able to deal with any increase that we see (hopefully we will see). There are obviously other questions as well: Is plagiarism going to be a problem? Is there any way we can detect/discourage potential plagiarism? How do we assess candidates' education and experience? What about their ability to communicate in writing? Do we still want them to submit a CV afterwards if they pass assessment? Do we want to offer them the opportunity to tell us a bit about why they'd like the job when they submit their assessment? How does this affect our relationship with recruitment agencies we might use to hire for these roles? So, what's the objective for next week's Down Tools Week? Pretty simple really - we want to implement this process for the Graduate Software Engineer and Software Engineer positions that you can find on our website. I will be joined by a crack team of our best developers (Kevin Boyle, and new Red-Gater, Sam Blackburn), and recruiting hostess with the mostest Laura McQuillen, and hopefully a couple of others as well - if I can successfully twist more arms before Monday.* Hopefully by next Friday our experiment will be up and running, and we may have changed the way Red Gate recruits software engineers for good! Stay tuned and we'll let you know how it goes! *I'm going to play dirty by offering them beer and chocolate during meetings. Some background information: how agonising over the initial CV/cover letter sift helped lead us to bin it off entirely The other day I was agonising about the new university/good degree grade versus poor A-level results issue, and decided to canvas for other opinions to see if there was something I could do that was fairer than my current approach, which is almost always to reject. This generated quite an involved discussion on our Yammer site: I'm sure you can glean a pretty good impression of my own educational prejudices from that discussion as well, although I'm very open to changing my opinion - hopefully you've already figured that out from reading the rest of this post. Hopefully you can also trace a logical path from agonising about sifting to, "Uh, hang on, why on earth are we doing this anyway?!?" Technorati Tags: recruitment,hr,developers,testers,red gate,cv,resume,cover letter,assessment,sea change

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• Comparing strings with user-created string class

  - by meepz

  Basically, I created my own string class, mystring.h and mystring.c. What I want to do is write a function that compares two "strings" and then returns 1 first word is larger than the second, the opposite if word 2 is larger than word 1, and 0 if the two words are equal. What I have so far is this: int compareto(void * S1, void * S2){ String s1 = (String S1); String s2 = (String S2); int i, cs1 = 0, cs2 = 0; //cs1 is count of s1, cs2 is count of s2 while(s1->c[i] != '\0'){ //basically, while there is a word if(s1->c[i] < s2->c[i]) // if string 1 char is less than string 2 char cs2++; //add to string 2 count else (s1->c[i] > s2->c[i]) //vice versa cs1++; i++; } for my return I basically have if(cs1>cs2){ return 1; } else if(cs2 > cs1){ return 2; } return 0; here is mystring.h typedef struct mystring { char * c; int length; int (*sLength)(void * s); char (*charAt)(void * s, int i); int (*compareTo)(void * s1, void * s2); struct mystring * (*concat)(void * s1, void * s2); struct mystring * (*subString)(void * s, int begin, int end); void (*printS)(void * s); } string_t; typedef string_t * String; This does what I want, but only for unspecified order. What I want to do is search through my linked list for the last name. Ex. I have two entries in my linked list, smith and jones; Jones will be output as greater than smith, but alphabetically it isnt. (I'm using this to remove student entries from a generic link list I created) Any suggestions, all of my google searches involve using the library, so I've had no luck)

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• Post parameters are becoming null (at random)

  - by Raghuram Duraisamy

  Hi, My web application is developed with Struts2 and it was working fine till recently. All of a sudden one of the modules has started malfunctioning. The malfunctioning module is 'Update Student details' page. This page has a lot of fields like 'schoolName', 'degreeName', etc . School 1: <input name="schoolName"> School 2: <input name="schoolName"> ..... School n: <input name="schoolName"> As mentioned earlier, the page was working perfectly fine till recently. Now, one/many of the values of 'schoolName', 'degreeName', etc are being received as "" (EMPTY STRING) on the server-side. For debugging, I used firebug and remote-debugging in eclipse. I find that the post-parameters are correct on the client-side. For instance, during one of the submissions the post-parameters were as below (i noted them from firebug). Content-Type: multipart/form-data; boundary=---------------------------2921238217421 Content-Length: 48893 <OTHER_PARAMETERS> <!--Truncated for clarity --> -----------------------------2921238217421 Content-Disposition: form-data; name="schoolName" ABC Institute -----------------------------2921238217421 Content-Disposition: form-data; name="schoolName" Test School -----------------------------2921238217421 Content-Disposition: form-data; name="schoolName" XYZ -----------------------------2921238217421 Content-Disposition: form-data; name="schoolName" Texas Institute -----------------------------2921238217421 Content-Disposition: form-data; name="schoolName" XXXX School -----------------------------2921238217421-- But on the server-side, the request params were as below: schoolName=[ABC Institute, Test School, XYZ, , XXXX School], "Texas Institute" was received as "" (EMPTY STRING) in this particular case. This is not happening consistently. The parameters that become NULL (or EMPTY STRING) seem random to me - during one instance, parameter schoolName[3] became null as illustrated above, parameter schoolName[2] became null during yet another submission, etc. At times, none of the parameters are nullified. The following is the list of the interceptors in the action definition. List of interceptors: ---------------------- FileUploadInterceptor org.apache.struts2.interceptor.FileUploadInterceptor ServletConfigInterceptor org.apache.struts2.interceptor.ServletConfigInterceptor StaticParametersInterceptor com.opensymphony.xwork2.interceptor.StaticParametersInterceptor ParametersInterceptor com.opensymphony.xwork2.interceptor.ParametersInterceptor MyCustomInterceptor com.xxxx.yyyy.interceptors.GetLoggedOnUserInterceptor This issue appears rather weird to me and I have not been able to zero-in on the exact cause of the issue. Any help in this regard would be highly appreciated. Thanks in advance. Thanks, Raghuram

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• C++ classes & linked list: adding & counting items

  - by user342289

  I need to make a linked list with classes. Each list will store two values: a URI and IP. After doing all the adding, I need to be able count the total number of items in the linked list. I have tried the following code but it doesn't compile. Any suggestions please? #include <iostream> #include <cstdlib> #include <string> using namespace std; class ip_uri_store { protected: string ip; string uri; ip_uri_store *next; public: ip_uri_store(string huri, string hip); void additem(string auri, string aip); void deleteitem(string duri); void findbyuri(string furi); void findbyip(string fip); int totalitems(); }; ip_uri_store *head = NULL; ip_uri_store *curr = NULL; void ip_uri_store::additem(string auri, string aip) { curr = head; while (curr->next != NULL) { curr = curr->next; } curr->uri = auri; curr->next = new ip_uri_store; curr->ip = aip; curr->next = new ip_uri_store; curr = curr->next; curr = head; } int ip_uri_store::totalitems() { int i = 0; curr = head; while (curr->next != NULL) { i += 1; curr = curr->next; } return i; } int main(int argc, char *argv[]) { if (argc == 1) { cout << "123456, [email protected], Gordon Brown" << endl; return (0); } head = new ip_uri_store; curr = head; int i; for (i = 1; i < argc; i++) { if (argv[i][0] == 'A') //add item { ip_uri_store.additem(argv[i + 1], argv[i + 2]); i += 2; } else if (argv[i][0] == 'N') //print total tiems { cout << ip_uri_store.totalitems() << endl; } else { cout << "command error\n"; return 0; } } return (0); }

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• Better way to "find parent" and if statements

  - by Luke Abell

  I can't figure out why this isn't working: $(document).ready(function() { if ($('.checkarea.unchecked').length) { $(this).parent().parent().parent().parent().parent().parent().parent().removeClass('checked').addClass('unchecked'); } else { $(this).parent().parent().parent().parent().parent().parent().parent().removeClass('unchecked').addClass('checked'); } }); Here's a screenshot of the HTML structure: http://cloud.lukeabell.com/JV9N (Updated with correct screenshot) Also, there has to be a better way to find the parent of the item (there are multiple of these elements on the page, so I need it to only effect the one that is unchecked) Here's some other code that is involved that might be important: $('.toggle-open-area').click(function() { if($(this).parent().parent().parent().parent().parent().parent().parent().hasClass('open')) { $(this).parent().parent().parent().parent().parent().parent().parent().removeClass('open').addClass('closed'); } else { $(this).parent().parent().parent().parent().parent().parent().parent().removeClass('closed').addClass('open'); } }); $('.checkarea').click(function() { if($(this).hasClass('unchecked')) { $(this).removeClass('unchecked').addClass('checked'); $(this).parent().parent().parent().parent().parent().parent().parent().removeClass('open').addClass('closed'); } else { $(this).removeClass('checked').addClass('unchecked'); $(this).parent().parent().parent().parent().parent().parent().parent().removeClass('closed').addClass('open'); } }); (Very open to improvements for that section as well) Thank you so much! Here's a link to where this is all happening: http://linkedin.guidemytech.com/sign-up-for-linkedin-step-2-set-up-linkedin-student/ Update: I've improved the code from the comments, but still having issues with that first section not working. $(document).ready(function() { if ($('.checkarea.unchecked').length) { $(this).parents('.whole-step').removeClass('checked').addClass('unchecked'); } else { $(this).parents('.whole-step').removeClass('unchecked').addClass('checked'); } }); -- $('.toggle-open-area').click(function() { if($(this).parent().parent().parent().parent().parent().parent().parent().hasClass('open')) { $(this).parents('.whole-step').removeClass('open').addClass('closed'); } else { $(this).parents('.whole-step').removeClass('closed').addClass('open'); } }); $('.toggle-open-area').click(function() { $(this).toggleClass('unchecked checked'); $(this).closest(selector).toggleClass('open closed'); }); $('.checkarea').click(function() { if($(this).hasClass('unchecked')) { $(this).removeClass('unchecked').addClass('checked'); $(this).parent().parent().parent().parent().parent().parent().parent().removeClass('open').addClass('closed'); } else { $(this).removeClass('checked').addClass('unchecked'); $(this).parent().parent().parent().parent().parent().parent().parent().removeClass('closed').addClass('open'); } });

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• Conway's Game of Life - C++ and Qt

  - by Jeff Bridge

  I've done all of the layouts and have most of the code written even. But, I'm stuck in two places. 1) I'm not quite sure how to set up the timer. Am I using it correctly in the gridwindow class? And, am I used the timer functions/signals/slots correctly with the other gridwindow functions. 2) In GridWindow's timerFired() function, I'm having trouble checking/creating the vector-vectors. I wrote out in the comments in that function exactly what I am trying to do. Any help would be much appreciated. main.cpp // Main file for running the grid window application. #include <QApplication> #include "gridwindow.h" //#include "timerwindow.h" #include <stdexcept> #include <string> #include <fstream> #include <sstream> #include <iostream> void Welcome(); // Welcome Function - Prints upon running program; outputs program name, student name/id, class section. void Rules(); // Rules Function: Prints the rules for Conway's Game of Life. using namespace std; // A simple main method to create the window class and then pop it up on the screen. int main(int argc, char *argv[]) { Welcome(); // Calls Welcome function to print student/assignment info. Rules(); // Prints Conway's Game Rules. QApplication app(argc, argv); // Creates the overall windowed application. int rows = 25, cols = 35; //The number of rows & columns in the game grid. GridWindow widget(NULL,rows,cols); // Creates the actual window (for the grid). widget.show(); // Shows the window on the screen. return app.exec(); // Goes into visual loop; starts executing GUI. } // Welcome Function: Prints my name/id, my class number, the assignment, and the program name. void Welcome() { cout << endl; cout << "-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------" << endl; cout << "Name/ID - Gabe Audick #7681539807" << endl; cout << "Class/Assignment - CSCI-102 Disccusion 29915: Homework Assignment #4" << endl; cout << "-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------" << endl << endl; } // Rules Function: Prints the rules for Conway's Game of Life. void Rules() { cout << "Welcome to Conway's Game of Life." << endl; cout << "Game Rules:" << endl; cout << "\t 1) Any living cell with fewer than two living neighbours dies, as if caused by underpopulation." << endl; cout << "\t 2) Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies, as if by overcrowding." << endl; cout << "\t 3) Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives on to the next generation." << endl; cout << "\t 4) Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes a live cell." << endl << endl; cout << "Enjoy." << endl << endl; } gridcell.h // A header file for a class representing a single cell in a grid of cells. #ifndef GRIDCELL_H_ #define GRIDCELL_H_ #include <QPalette> #include <QColor> #include <QPushButton> #include <Qt> #include <QWidget> #include <QFrame> #include <QHBoxLayout> #include <iostream> // An enum representing the two different states a cell can have. enum CellType { DEAD, // DEAD = Dead Cell. --> Color = White. LIVE // LIVE = Living Cell. ---> Color = White. }; /* Class: GridCell. A class representing a single cell in a grid. Each cell is implemented as a QT QFrame that contains a single QPushButton. The button is sized so that it takes up the entire frame. Each cell also keeps track of what type of cell it is based on the CellType enum. */ class GridCell : public QFrame { Q_OBJECT // Macro allowing us to have signals & slots on this object. private: QPushButton* button; // The button inside the cell that gives its clickability. CellType type; // The type of cell (DEAD or LIVE.) public slots: void handleClick(); // Callback for handling a click on the current cell. void setType(CellType type); // Cell type mutator. Calls the "redrawCell" function. signals: void typeChanged(CellType type); // Signal to notify listeners when the cell type has changed. public: GridCell(QWidget *parent = NULL); // Constructor for creating a cell. Takes parent widget or default parent to NULL. virtual ~GridCell(); // Destructor. void redrawCell(); // Redraws cell: Sets new type/color. CellType getType() const; //Simple getter for the cell type. private: Qt::GlobalColor getColorForCellType(); // Helper method. Returns color that cell should be based from its value. }; #endif gridcell.cpp #include <iostream> #include "gridcell.h" #include "utility.h" using namespace std; // Constructor: Creates a grid cell. GridCell::GridCell(QWidget *parent) : QFrame(parent) { this->type = DEAD; // Default: Cell is DEAD (white). setFrameStyle(QFrame::Box); // Set the frame style. This is what gives each box its black border. this->button = new QPushButton(this); //Creates button that fills entirety of each grid cell. this->button->setSizePolicy(QSizePolicy::Expanding,QSizePolicy::Expanding); // Expands button to fill space. this->button->setMinimumSize(19,19); //width,height // Min height and width of button. QHBoxLayout *layout = new QHBoxLayout(); //Creates a simple layout to hold our button and add the button to it. layout->addWidget(this->button); setLayout(layout); layout->setStretchFactor(this->button,1); // Lets the buttons expand all the way to the edges of the current frame with no space leftover layout->setContentsMargins(0,0,0,0); layout->setSpacing(0); connect(this->button,SIGNAL(clicked()),this,SLOT(handleClick())); // Connects clicked signal with handleClick slot. redrawCell(); // Calls function to redraw (set new type for) the cell. } // Basic destructor. GridCell::~GridCell() { delete this->button; } // Accessor for the cell type. CellType GridCell::getType() const { return(this->type); } // Mutator for the cell type. Also has the side effect of causing the cell to be redrawn on the GUI. void GridCell::setType(CellType type) { this->type = type; redrawCell(); } // Handler slot for button clicks. This method is called whenever the user clicks on this cell in the grid. void GridCell::handleClick() { // When clicked on... if(this->type == DEAD) // If type is DEAD (white), change to LIVE (black). type = LIVE; else type = DEAD; // If type is LIVE (black), change to DEAD (white). setType(type); // Sets new type (color). setType Calls redrawCell() to recolor. } // Method to check cell type and return the color of that type. Qt::GlobalColor GridCell::getColorForCellType() { switch(this->type) { default: case DEAD: return Qt::white; case LIVE: return Qt::black; } } // Helper method. Forces current cell to be redrawn on the GUI. Called whenever the setType method is invoked. void GridCell::redrawCell() { Qt::GlobalColor gc = getColorForCellType(); //Find out what color this cell should be. this->button->setPalette(QPalette(gc,gc)); //Force the button in the cell to be the proper color. this->button->setAutoFillBackground(true); this->button->setFlat(true); //Force QT to NOT draw the borders on the button } gridwindow.h // A header file for a QT window that holds a grid of cells. #ifndef GRIDWINDOW_H_ #define GRIDWINDOW_H_ #include <vector> #include <QWidget> #include <QTimer> #include <QGridLayout> #include <QLabel> #include <QApplication> #include "gridcell.h" /* class GridWindow: This is the class representing the whole window that comes up when this program runs. It contains a header section with a title, a middle section of MxN cells and a bottom section with buttons. */ class GridWindow : public QWidget { Q_OBJECT // Macro to allow this object to have signals & slots. private: std::vector<std::vector<GridCell*> > cells; // A 2D vector containing pointers to all the cells in the grid. QLabel *title; // A pointer to the Title text on the window. QTimer *timer; // Creates timer object. public slots: void handleClear(); // Handler function for clicking the Clear button. void handleStart(); // Handler function for clicking the Start button. void handlePause(); // Handler function for clicking the Pause button. void timerFired(); // Method called whenever timer fires. public: GridWindow(QWidget *parent = NULL,int rows=3,int cols=3); // Constructor. virtual ~GridWindow(); // Destructor. std::vector<std::vector<GridCell*> >& getCells(); // Accessor for the array of grid cells. private: QHBoxLayout* setupHeader(); // Helper function to construct the GUI header. QGridLayout* setupGrid(int rows,int cols); // Helper function to constructor the GUI's grid. QHBoxLayout* setupButtonRow(); // Helper function to setup the row of buttons at the bottom. }; #endif gridwindow.cpp #include <iostream> #include "gridwindow.h" using namespace std; // Constructor for window. It constructs the three portions of the GUI and lays them out vertically. GridWindow::GridWindow(QWidget *parent,int rows,int cols) : QWidget(parent) { QHBoxLayout *header = setupHeader(); // Setup the title at the top. QGridLayout *grid = setupGrid(rows,cols); // Setup the grid of colored cells in the middle. QHBoxLayout *buttonRow = setupButtonRow(); // Setup the row of buttons across the bottom. QVBoxLayout *layout = new QVBoxLayout(); // Puts everything together. layout->addLayout(header); layout->addLayout(grid); layout->addLayout(buttonRow); setLayout(layout); } // Destructor. GridWindow::~GridWindow() { delete title; } // Builds header section of the GUI. QHBoxLayout* GridWindow::setupHeader() { QHBoxLayout *header = new QHBoxLayout(); // Creates horizontal box. header->setAlignment(Qt::AlignHCenter); this->title = new QLabel("CONWAY'S GAME OF LIFE",this); // Creates big, bold, centered label (title): "Conway's Game of Life." this->title->setAlignment(Qt::AlignHCenter); this->title->setFont(QFont("Arial", 32, QFont::Bold)); header->addWidget(this->title); // Adds widget to layout. return header; // Returns header to grid window. } // Builds the grid of cells. This method populates the grid's 2D array of GridCells with MxN cells. QGridLayout* GridWindow::setupGrid(int rows,int cols) { QGridLayout *grid = new QGridLayout(); // Creates grid layout. grid->setHorizontalSpacing(0); // No empty spaces. Cells should be contiguous. grid->setVerticalSpacing(0); grid->setSpacing(0); grid->setAlignment(Qt::AlignHCenter); for(int i=0; i < rows; i++) //Each row is a vector of grid cells. { std::vector<GridCell*> row; // Creates new vector for current row. cells.push_back(row); for(int j=0; j < cols; j++) { GridCell *cell = new GridCell(); // Creates and adds new cell to row. cells.at(i).push_back(cell); grid->addWidget(cell,i,j); // Adds to cell to grid layout. Column expands vertically. grid->setColumnStretch(j,1); } grid->setRowStretch(i,1); // Sets row expansion horizontally. } return grid; // Returns grid. } // Builds footer section of the GUI. QHBoxLayout* GridWindow::setupButtonRow() { QHBoxLayout *buttonRow = new QHBoxLayout(); // Creates horizontal box for buttons. buttonRow->setAlignment(Qt::AlignHCenter); // Clear Button - Clears cell; sets them all to DEAD/white. QPushButton *clearButton = new QPushButton("CLEAR"); clearButton->setFixedSize(100,25); connect(clearButton, SIGNAL(clicked()), this, SLOT(handleClear())); buttonRow->addWidget(clearButton); // Start Button - Starts game when user clicks. Or, resumes game after being paused. QPushButton *startButton = new QPushButton("START/RESUME"); startButton->setFixedSize(100,25); connect(startButton, SIGNAL(clicked()), this, SLOT(handleStart())); buttonRow->addWidget(startButton); // Pause Button - Pauses simulation of game. QPushButton *pauseButton = new QPushButton("PAUSE"); pauseButton->setFixedSize(100,25); connect(pauseButton, SIGNAL(clicked()), this, SLOT(handlePause())); buttonRow->addWidget(pauseButton); // Quit Button - Exits program. QPushButton *quitButton = new QPushButton("EXIT"); quitButton->setFixedSize(100,25); connect(quitButton, SIGNAL(clicked()), qApp, SLOT(quit())); buttonRow->addWidget(quitButton); return buttonRow; // Returns bottom of layout. } /* SLOT method for handling clicks on the "clear" button. Receives "clicked" signals on the "Clear" button and sets all cells to DEAD. */ void GridWindow::handleClear() { for(unsigned int row=0; row < cells.size(); row++) // Loops through current rows' cells. { for(unsigned int col=0; col < cells[row].size(); col++) { GridCell *cell = cells[row][col]; // Grab the current cell & set its value to dead. cell->setType(DEAD); } } } /* SLOT method for handling clicks on the "start" button. Receives "clicked" signals on the "start" button and begins game simulation. */ void GridWindow::handleStart() { this->timer = new QTimer(this); // Creates new timer. connect(this->timer, SIGNAL(timeout()), this, SLOT(timerFired())); // Connect "timerFired" method class to the "timeout" signal fired by the timer. this->timer->start(500); // Timer to fire every 500 milliseconds. } /* SLOT method for handling clicks on the "pause" button. Receives "clicked" signals on the "pause" button and stops the game simulation. */ void GridWindow::handlePause() { this->timer->stop(); // Stops the timer. delete this->timer; // Deletes timer. } // Accessor method - Gets the 2D vector of grid cells. std::vector<std::vector<GridCell*> >& GridWindow::getCells() { return this->cells; } void GridWindow::timerFired() { // I'm not sure how to write this code. // I want to take the original vector-vector, and also make a new, empty vector-vector of the same size. // I would then go through the code below with the original vector, and apply the rules to the new vector-vector. // Finally, I would make the new vector-vecotr the original vector-vector. (That would be one step in the simulation.) cout << cells[1][2]; /* for (unsigned int m = 0; m < original.size(); m++) { for (unsigned int n = 0; n < original.at(m).size(); n++) { unsigned int neighbors = 0; //Begin counting number of neighbors. if (original[m-1][n-1].getType() == LIVE) // If a cell next to [i][j] is LIVE, add one to the neighbor count. neighbors += 1; if (original[m-1][n].getType() == LIVE) neighbors += 1; if (original[m-1][n+1].getType() == LIVE) neighbors += 1; if (original[m][n-1].getType() == LIVE) neighbors += 1; if (original[m][n+1].getType() == LIVE) neighbors += 1; if (original[m+1][n-1].getType() == LIVE) neighbors += 1; if (original[m+1][n].getType() == LIVE) neighbors += 1; if (original[m+1][n+1].getType() == LIVE) neighbors += 1; if (original[m][n].getType() == LIVE && neighbors < 2) // Apply game rules to cells: Create new, updated grid with the roundtwo vector. roundtwo[m][n].setType(LIVE); else if (original[m][n].getType() == LIVE && neighbors > 3) roundtwo[m][n].setType(DEAD); else if (original[m][n].getType() == LIVE && (neighbors == 2 || neighbors == 3)) roundtwo[m][n].setType(LIVE); else if (original[m][n].getType() == DEAD && neighbors == 3) roundtwo[m][n].setType(LIVE); } }*/ }

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• How can I fix the website's splash page to work in IE8 and below?

  - by Abriel

  I have been trying to figure out for the longest time how I can get the splash page on this website to work correctly in IE8 and below? Right now, it works on all the other browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Safari). Here is the website: http://gds.parkland.edu/student/fall10/gds220/ashipley/p2/final_revised/index.html jQuery code: /* Sliding Affect Splash Page */ $(function() { $('.box').each(function() { var $this = $(this); $.data(this, 'css', { width: $this.css('width'), background: $this.css('background-image') }); }); }); function restore() { $('.box').each(function() { var orig = $.data(this, 'css'); $(this).animate({ width: orig.width },{queue:false}); $(this).css({backgroundImage: orig.background}); }); } /* box 1 */ function boxHover(){ $('.box').stop().animate({'width' : '596px'},{queue:false}); } function box1master(){ $('.box2').css({backgroundImage: 'url(images/splash/zatgun_midtop.jpg)'}); $('.box3').css({backgroundImage: 'url(images/splash/zatgun_midbottom.jpg)'}); $('.box4').css({backgroundImage: 'url(images/splash/zatgun_bottom.jpg)'}); } function box2master(){ $('.box1').css({backgroundImage: 'url(images/splash/bryan_top.jpg)'}); $('.box3').css({backgroundImage: 'url(images/splash/bryan_midbottom.jpg)'}); $('.box4').css({backgroundImage: 'url(images/splash/bryan_bottom.jpg)'}); } function box3master(){ $('.box1').css({backgroundImage:'url(images/splash/galleries_top.jpg)'}); $('.box2').css({backgroundImage: 'url(images/splash/galleries_midtop.jpg)'}); $('.box4').css({backgroundImage: 'url(images/splash/galleries_bottom.jpg)'}); } function box4master(){ $('.box1').css({backgroundImage: 'url(images/splash/contact_top.jpg)'}); $('.box2').css({backgroundImage: 'url(images/splash/contact_midtop.jpg)'}); $('.box3').css({backgroundImage: 'url(images/splash/contact_midbottom.jpg)'}); } $(document).ready(function(){ $('.box1').hover(function(){ boxHover(); box1master(); }, function(){ restore(); }); $('.box2').hover(function(){ boxHover(); box2master(); }, function(){ restore(); }); $('.box3').hover(function(){ boxHover(); box3master(); }, function(){ restore(); }); $('.box4').hover(function(){ boxHover(); box4master(); }, function(){ restore(); }); }); I wonder if I could change the spacing in-between each of the boxes using jQuery or if I somehow have to do this in the CSS/HTML?

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• Scared of Calculus - Required to pass Differential Calculus as part of my Computer science major

  - by ke3pup

  Hi guys I'm finishing my Computer science degree in university but my fear of maths (lack of background knowledge) made me to leave all my maths units til' the very end which is now. i either take them on and pass or have to give up. I've passed all my programming units easily but knowing my poor maths skills won't do i've been staying clear of the maths units. I have to pass Differential Calculus and Linear Algebra first. With a help of book named "Linear Algebra: A Modern Introduction" i'm finding myself on track and i think i can pass the Linear Algebra unit. But with differential calculus i can't find a book to help me. They're either too advanced or just too simple for what i have to learn. The things i'm required to know for this units are: Set notation, the real number line, Complex numbers in cartesian form. Complex plane, modulus. Complex numbers in polar form. De Moivre’s Theorem. Complex powers and nth roots. Definition of ei? and ez for z complex. Applications to trigonometry. Revision of domain and range of a function Working in R3. Curves and surfaces. Functions of 2 variables. Level curves.Partial derivatives and tangent planes. The derivative as a difference quotient. Geometric significance of the derivative. Discussion of limit. Higher order partial derivatives. Limits of f(x,y). Continuity. Maxima and minima of f(x,y). The chain rule. Implicit differentiation. Directional derivatives and the gradient. Limit laws, l’Hoˆpital’s rule, composition law. Definition of sinh and cosh and their inverses. Taylor polynomials. The remainder term. Taylor series. Is there a book to help me get on track with the above? Being a student i can't buy too many books hence why i'm looking for a book that covers topics I need to know. The University library has a fairly limited collection which i took as loan but didn't find useful as it was too complex.

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• Network communication for a turn based board game

  - by randooom

  Hi all, my first question here, so please don't be to harsh if something went wrong :) I'm currently a CS student (from Germany, if this info is of any use ;) ) and we got a, free selectable, programming assignment, which we have to write in a C++/CLI Windows Forms Application. My team, two others and me, decided to go for a network-compatible port of the board game Risk. We divided the work in 3 Parts, namely UI, game logic and network. Now we're on the part where we have to get everything working together and the big question mark is, how to get the clients synchronized with each other? Our approach so far is, that each client has all information necessary to calculate and/or execute all possible actions. Actually the clients have all information available at all, aside from the game-initializing phase (add players, select map, etc.), which needs one "super-client" with some extra stuff to control things. This is the standard scenario of our approach: player performs action, the action is valid and got executed on the players client action is sent over the network action is executed on the other clients The design (i.e. no or code so far) we came up with so far, is something like the following pseudo sequence diagram. Gui, Controller and Network implement all possible actions (i.e. all actions which change data) as methods from an interface. So each part can implement the method in a way to get their job done. Example with Action(): On the player side's Client: Player-->Gui.Action() Gui-->Controller.Action() Controller-->Logic.Action (Logic.Action() == NoError)? Controller-->Network.Action() Network-->Parser.ParseAction() Network.Send(msg) On all other clients: Network.Recv(msg) Network-->Parser.Deparse(msg) Parser-->Logic.Action() Logic-->Gui.Action() The questions: Is this a viable approach to our task? Any better/easier way to this? Recommendations, critique? Our knowledge (so you can better target your answer): We are on the beginner side, in regards to programming on a somewhat larger projects with a small team. All of us have some general programming experience and basic understanding of the .Net Libraries and Windows Forms. If you need any further information, please feel free to ask.

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• Reading Source Code Aloud

  - by Jon Purdy

  After seeing this question, I got to thinking about the various challenges that blind programmers face, and how some of them are applicable even to sighted programmers. Particularly, the problem of reading source code aloud gives me pause. I have been programming for most of my life, and I frequently tutor fellow students in programming, most often in C++ or Java. It is uniquely aggravating to try to verbally convey the essential syntax of a C++ expression. The speaker must give either an idiomatic translation into English, or a full specification of the code in verbal longhand, using explicit yet slow terms such as "opening parenthesis", "bitwise and", et cetera. Neither of these solutions is optimal. On the one hand, an idiomatic translation is only useful to a programmer who can de-translate back into the relevant programming code—which is not usually the case when tutoring a student. In turn, education (or simply getting someone up to speed on a project) is the most common situation in which source is read aloud, and there is a very small margin for error. On the other hand, a literal specification is aggravatingly slow. It takes far far longer to say "pound, include, left angle bracket, iostream, right angle bracket, newline" than it does to simply type #include <iostream>. Indeed, most experienced C++ programmers would read this merely as "include iostream", but again, inexperienced programmers abound and literal specifications are sometimes necessary. So I've had an idea for a potential solution to this problem. In C++, there is a finite set of keywords—63—and operators—54, discounting named operators and treating compound assignment operators and prefix versus postfix auto-increment and decrement as distinct. There are just a few types of literal, a similar number of grouping symbols, and the semicolon. Unless I'm utterly mistaken, that's about it. So would it not then be feasible to simply ascribe a concise, unique pronunciation to each of these distinct concepts (including one for whitespace, where it is required) and go from there? Programming languages are far more regular than natural languages, so the pronunciation could be standardised. Speakers of any language would be able to verbally convey C++ code, and due to the regularity and fixity of the language, speech-to-text software could be optimised to accept C++ speech with a high degree of accuracy. So my question is twofold: first, is my solution feasible; and second, does anyone else have other potential solutions? I intend to take suggestions from here and use them to produce a formal paper with an example implementation of my solution.

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• Asp.net MVC appliction showing popup message after updating user

  - by kumar

  This is my Update Json method.. public JsonResult Update(StudentInfo e) { var cache = CacheFactory.GetCacheManager(); var Status= false; for (int i = 0; i <= cache.Count; i++) { var x = (StudentInfo )cache.GetData("a" + i); if (x != null) { Status= common.UpdateStudent(e.Student); } } return Json(Status); } this is my veiw.. <% using (Html.BeginForm("Update", "home", FormMethod.Post)) { %> <%= Html.ValidationSummary(true)%> my scripts.. <script type="text/javascript"> $(document).ready(function() { $('#btnSelectAll').click(function() { $('#btnSelect').click(function() { $('#input[type=checkbox]').attr('checked', 'checked'); }); function validate_excpt(formData, jqForm, options) { var form = jqForm[0]; return true; } // post-submit callback function showResponse(responseText, statusText, xhr, $form) { if (responseText[0].substring(0, 16) != "System.Exception") { $('#error-msg- span:last').html('<strong>Update successful.</strong>'); } else { $('#error-msg- span:last').html('<strong>Update failed.</strong> ' + responseText[0].substring(0, 48)); } $('#error-msg-').removeClass('hide'); $('#gui-stat-').html(responseText[1]); } // post-submit callback $('#exc-').ajaxForm({ target: '#error-msg-', beforeSubmit: validate_excpt, success: showResponse, dataType: 'json' }); $('.button').button(); }); $('.button').button(); $("input[id^='exc-flwup-']").datepicker({ duration: '', showTime: true, constrainInput: true, stepMinutes: 30, stepHours: 1, altTimeField: '', time24h: true, minDate: 0 }); $('#ui-timepicker-div').bgiframe(); }); </script> I am getting popupmessage when Jsonresult Update method has done..but I am seeing that user is updating perfectly.. popup window saying something like you have choosed to open if I open that I am getting string as True in the file.. is that above code I am doing something wrong?

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• [NEWVERSION]algorithm || method to write prog[UNSOLVED] [closed]

  - by fatai

  I am one of the computer science student. Everyone solve problem with a different or same method, ( but actually I dont know whether they use method or I dont know whether there are such common method to approach problem.) if there are common method, What is it ? If there are different method, which method are you using ? All teacher give us problem which in simple form sometimes, but they donot introduce any approach or method(s) so that we cannot make a decision to choose the method then apply that one to problem , afterward find solution then write code.No help from teacher , push us to find method to solve homework. Ex: my friend is using no method , he says "I start to construct algorithm while I try to write prog." I have found one method when I failed the course, More accurately, my method: When I counter problem in language , I will get more paper and then ; first, input/ output step ; my prog will take this / these there argument(s) and return namely X , ex : in c, input length is not known and at same type , so I must use pointer desired output is in form of package , so use structure second, execution part ; in that step , I am writing all step which are goes to final output ex : in python ; 1.) [ + , [- , 4 , [ * , 1 , 2 ]], 5] 2.) [ + , [- , 4 , 2 ],5 ] 3.) [ + , 2 , 5] 4.) 7 ==> return 7 third, I will write test code ex : in c++ input : append 3 4 5 6 vector_x remove 0 1 desired output vector_x holds : 5 6 now, my other question is ; What is/are other method(s) which have/has been; used to construct class :::: for c++ , python, java used to communicate classes / computers used for solving embedded system problem ::::: for c by other user? Some programmer uses generalized method without considering prog-language(java , perl .. ), what is this method ? Why I wonder , because I learn if you dont costruct algorithm on paper, you may achieve your goal. Like no money no lunch , I can say no algorithm no prog therefore , feel free when you write your own method , a way which is introduced by someone else but you are using and you find it is so efficient

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• Web-Frameworks for Education Management Systems?

  - by Indebi

  So, I'm working on an idea and I'll go into a brief overview of that but my question is, What are some good web frameworks for this situation? I have some experience in the following languages: C# Python I have considerably more experience in C# than Python, however I am expecting to learn new things. My idea is this, a completely web-based community-oriented Education Management System that focuses on making students and teachers day-to-day lives easier. For students it will provide a centralized place for them to do homework, study for tests, and reinforce concepts learned previously in class. For teachers it will give them a centralized place to handle assignments, attendance, homework, tests, and all other major parts of classroom management. All of that, but in a community-oriented fashion. Everything a teacher does is shared and open to constructive criticism, allowing other teachers to use their assignments/tests and for students or other teachers to comment, rate and criticize their assignments. This encourages an environment of openness that will allow teacher's to focus on teaching and student's to focus on learning. And that community wouldn't be limited to one school or school-district, this system would be completely school-independent. Please note that I have no problem with hearing constructive criticism on this idea, however I would prefer if this post was more focused on my question. I have somewhat explored about the following options: Django ASP.NET Ruby on Rails Silverlight (1) I have Django installed and I played with it for a little bit, I really like how easy setting up databases are and how it handles the database completely for you. I don't really know how to use it very well and I don't quite understand the Model-View-Controller paradigm(?) for it yet but I haven't thought about it much. I also like the fact that it uses Python. (2) I don't really like Visual Studio for developing in ASP.NET, I hate the way the web-designer works and it just feels clunky and old. I like the server-side development part though. I don't like how expensive ASP.NET and overall Visual Studio is, even if I do get it for free for now using DreamSpark (3) I haven't been able to explore much with this, I could not get Rails (or maybe Ruby) properly installed. I first installed it within RadRails and that didn't work so I uninstalled RadRails and then installed the latest version of Ruby off the official Windows Installer and then installed Ruby on Rails through gem and even after all that it still didn't work, so I installed Netbeans and attempted to use it there but it still did not work (4) I like Silverlight in some extents, I've played with this one the most, it's very similar to WPF (which I've used the most) in a lot of ways but I don't like how database connectivity works, at least in comparison to Django. I also dislike how expensive everything with Microsoft is, even if I get it for free for now with DreamSpark. I would like to hear some suggestions from experienced web-developers as to what I should use and why, or at least what some good options are for my scenario Your help would be very appreciated

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• How do we, as a community, help encourage programming in public schools? (Or state Schools for the U

  - by NoMoreZealots

  PRIMARY MOTIVATION My office gets involved with the "First Robotics" competitions and one thing that lingers year to year is the students typically have no preparation for doing even simple programming as part of the public schools system. While the science classes provide some basic grasp of mechanical and electrical concepts, by in large computer programming gets no coverage from the curriculum. (This my be different in other areas of the country/world.) What makes it worse is there is only a short period of time you have to prepare the student's and help them design the robot. Talking to some professors from local colleges, it's a problem because you can't assume even the most basic understanding for freshman CS majors. Languages like Python, Lua and BASIC are simple enough for at least high school level students, if not younger. SCOPE So how do you get public schools to support a programming, at least to the level of "Try it in BASIC" examples that used to be at the end of a chapter in my Algebra book? At least enough to prepare them for event's such as the FIRST Robotic competitions. Which the primary objectives are to teach problem solving and team work, and to possible foster an interest in Math, Science and Engineering in general. (Not force feed to them, as some people her seem to be implying.) Edit: Why teach kids: (Since 2000 CS enrollment in US colleges has decreased by 70% while college enrollment has increased, this is a PROBLEM.) Saying there is no value in teaching someone programming in Jr./High school because they might think "they know programming." Is like saying there's no value in teaching High school science and physics, because they might decide they "know physics." Leading to abuse like: "I passed a high school physics class, I'm going to develop a Unified Quantum Gravitational Theory." Better Prepared students are better students. Instead it would allows college programs to raise the bar on the entry level courses, allowing students to be weeded out based on their understanding of more advanced material. Plus people who did poorly in that in topic in High school aren't as likely to say "I think there's money in computer's so I'll computer science." Plus if people take it in high school and decide THEN that it's not for them, it's better than them wasting their money to PAY a college to figure that out. The result is that people who take the degree are more likely to succeed and be there for the RIGHT reasons. (i.e. It's what they REALLY want to do. And that's REALLY the key to being good at anything.) Programming is like anything else, the more practice and genuine interest you have the better you get. If you start them later, they get less practice. The earlier give them the opportunity to start, the more practice they will get. All other things equal, the more practice the better the programmer.

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• Java problem cant find image file

  - by user363035

  I am a student working on a homework project. I spent DAYS trying to get the following code to display an image on my new windows 7 laptop. I compiled it and ran it on my old xp pc and it worked! I really want to use my laptop. Any suggestions on how to get it to display the image? import java.awt.*; import java.applet.*; import java.awt.event.*; import java.awt.image.*; public class MoveIt extends Applet implements ActionListener { // set variables and componets private Image cup; Panel keypad = new Panel(); public int top = 15; public int left = 15; private Button keysArray[]; public void init() { cup = getImage(getDocumentBase(), "cup.gif"); Canvas myCanvas = new Canvas(); keysArray = new Button[5]; setLayout(new BorderLayout(5,5)); setBackground(Color.blue); // set up keypad layout keypad.setLayout(new BorderLayout(0,0)); keysArray[0] = new Button("Up"); keysArray[1] = new Button("Left"); keysArray[2] = new Button("Center"); keysArray[3] = new Button("Right"); keysArray[4] = new Button("Down"); // add buttons to the keypad panel keypad.add(keysArray[0], BorderLayout.NORTH); keysArray[0].addActionListener(this); keypad.add(keysArray[1], BorderLayout.EAST); keysArray[1].addActionListener(this); keypad.add(keysArray[2], BorderLayout.CENTER); keysArray[2].addActionListener(this); keypad.add(keysArray[3], BorderLayout.WEST); keysArray[3].addActionListener(this); keypad.add(keysArray[4], BorderLayout.SOUTH); keysArray[4].addActionListener(this); // add canvas and keypad to the BorderLayout add(myCanvas, BorderLayout.NORTH); add(keypad, BorderLayout.SOUTH); } public void paint(Graphics g) { g.drawImage( cup, left, top, this ); } public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) { // test for menu item clicks String arg = e.getActionCommand(); if (arg == "Up") top -=15; else if (arg == "Down") top +=15; else if (arg == "Left") left -=15; else if (arg == "Right") left +=15; else { top = 60; left =125; } repaint(); } }

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• How to do a search from a list with non-prefix keywords

  - by aNui

  First of all, sorry if my english or my post got any mistakes. I am programming a program to search the name from the list and I need to find them if the keyword is not in front of the names (that's what I mean non-prefix) e.g. if I my list is the music instruments and I type "guit" to the search textbox. It should find the names "Guitar, Guitarrón, Acoustic Guitar, Bass Guitar, ..." or something like this Longdo Dictionary's search suggestion. here is my simple and stupid algorithm (that's all I can do) const int SEARCHROWLIMIT = 30; private string[] DoSearch(string Input, string[] ListToSearch) { List<string> FoundNames = new List<string>(); int max = 0; bool over = false; for (int k = 0; !over; k++) { foreach (string item in ListToSearch) { max = (max > item.Length) ? max : item.Length; if (k > item.Length) continue; if (k >= max) { over = true; break; } if (!Input.Equals("Search") && item.Substring(k, item.Length - k).StartsWith(Input, StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase)) { bool exist = false; int i = 0; while (!exist && i < FoundNames.Count) { if (item.Equals(FoundNames[i])) { exist = true; break; } i++; } if (!exist && FoundNames.Count < SEARCHROWLIMIT) FoundNames.Add(item); else if (FoundNames.Count >= SEARCHROWLIMIT) over = true; } } } return FoundNames.ToArray(); } I think this algorithm is too slow for a large number of names and after several trial-and-error, I decided to add SEARCHROWLIMIT to breaks the operation And I also think there're some readymade methods that can do that. And another problem is I need to search music instruments by a category like strings, percussions, ... and by the country of origins. So I need to search them with filter by type and country. please help me. P.S. Me and my friends are just student from Thailand and developing the project to compete in Microsoft Imagine Cup 2010 and please become fan on our facebook page [KRATIB][3]. And we're so sorry we don't have much information in English but you can talk to us in English.

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• How to do a search from a list with non-prefix keywords[Solved]

  - by aNui

  The Problem is Solved. Thanks for every answers. First of all, sorry if my english or my post got any mistakes. I am programming a program to search the name from the list and I need to find them even if the keyword is not in front of the names (that's what I mean non-prefix) e.g. if I my list is the music instruments and I type "guit" to the search textbox. It should find the names "Guitar, Guitarrón, Acoustic Guitar, Bass Guitar, ..." or something like this Longdo Dictionary's search suggestion. here is my simple and stupid algorithm (that's all I can do) const int SEARCHROWLIMIT = 30; private string[] DoSearch(string Input, string[] ListToSearch) { List<string> FoundNames = new List<string>(); int max = 0; bool over = false; for (int k = 0; !over; k++) { foreach (string item in ListToSearch) { max = (max > item.Length) ? max : item.Length; if (k > item.Length) continue; if (k >= max) { over = true; break; } if (!Input.Equals("Search") && item.Substring(k, item.Length - k).StartsWith(Input, StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase)) { bool exist = false; int i = 0; while (!exist && i < FoundNames.Count) { if (item.Equals(FoundNames[i])) { exist = true; break; } i++; } if (!exist && FoundNames.Count < SEARCHROWLIMIT) FoundNames.Add(item); else if (FoundNames.Count >= SEARCHROWLIMIT) over = true; } } } return FoundNames.ToArray(); } I think this algorithm is too slow for a large number of names and after several trial-and-error, I decided to add SEARCHROWLIMIT to breaks the operation And I also think there're some readymade methods that can do that. And another problem is I need to search music instruments by a category like strings, percussions, ... and by the country of origins. So I need to search them with filter by type and country. please help me. P.S. Me and my friends are just student from Thailand and developing the project to compete in Microsoft Imagine Cup 2010 and please become fan on our facebook page [KRATIB][3]. And we're so sorry we don't have much information in English but you can talk to us in English.

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• Exception: attempt to acquire a reference on a close SQLiteClosable

  - by CommonsWare

  I posted this back in May on the [android-developers] Google Group. I never heard back and was not able to reproduce the problem until one of my students did last week. I figured I'd post it here and see if it rang any bells for anyone. In one of my code samples, I have the following method: static Cursor getAll(SQLiteDatabase db, String orderBy) { return(db.rawQuery("SELECT * FROM restaurants "+orderBy, null)); } When I run it, sporadically, I get this: 05-01 14:45:05.849: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(1145): java.lang.IllegalStateException: attempt to acquire a reference on a close SQLiteClosable 05-01 14:45:05.849: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(1145): at android.database.sqlite.SQLiteClosable.acquireReference(SQLiteClosable.java:31) 05-01 14:45:05.849: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(1145): at android.database.sqlite.SQLiteProgram.<init>(SQLiteProgram.java:56) 05-01 14:45:05.849: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(1145): at android.database.sqlite.SQLiteQuery.<init>(SQLiteQuery.java:49) 05-01 14:45:05.849: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(1145): at android.database.sqlite.SQLiteDirectCursorDriver.query(SQLiteDirectCursorDriver.java:49) 05-01 14:45:05.849: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(1145): at android.database.sqlite.SQLiteDatabase.rawQueryWithFactory(SQLiteDatabase.java:1118) 05-01 14:45:05.849: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(1145): at android.database.sqlite.SQLiteDatabase.rawQuery(SQLiteDatabase.java:1092) 05-01 14:45:05.849: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(1145): at apt.tutorial.Restaurant.getAll(Restaurant.java:14) This makes no sense to me. The database is definitely open. The SQLiteClosable is the SQLiteQuery created by SQLiteQueryDriver, and I see no evidence that there is an object pool or something going on here that might explain how a "new" SQLiteClosable is already closed. The fact that it is sporadic (meaning the same UI operations sometimes trigger the exception, but not always) suggests some sort of pool, race condition, or something...but I'm not sure where. Thoughts? Thanks! UPDATE: The code in question is from the LunchList tutorials out of my Android Programming Tutorials book. It's a bit spread out and not terribly suitable for posting directly in SO. You can download the code for that book from the above link if you want to take a look at it. I do not recall exactly which edition of the tutorial the student was working on at the time, though it was in the Tutorial 12-Tutorial 16 range. I was mostly hoping to run across somebody who had tripped over this problem before and had a likely culprit. I'm fairly certain my database is open. Thanks again!

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• Catch Multiple Custom Exceptions? - C++

  - by Alex

  Hi all, I'm a student in my first C++ programming class, and I'm working on a project where we have to create multiple custom exception classes, and then in one of our event handlers, use a try/catch block to handle them appropriately. My question is: How do I catch my multiple custom exceptions in my try/catch block? GetMessage() is a custom method in my exception classes that returns the exception explanation as a std::string. Below I've included all the relevant code from my project. Thanks for your help! try/catch block // This is in one of my event handlers, newEnd is a wxTextCtrl try { first.ValidateData(); newEndT = first.ComputeEndTime(); *newEnd << newEndT; } catch (// don't know what do to here) { wxMessageBox(_(e.GetMessage()), _("Something Went Wrong!"), wxOK | wxICON_INFORMATION, this);; } ValidateData() Method void Time::ValidateData() { int startHours, startMins, endHours, endMins; startHours = startTime / MINUTES_TO_HOURS; startMins = startTime % MINUTES_TO_HOURS; endHours = endTime / MINUTES_TO_HOURS; endMins = endTime % MINUTES_TO_HOURS; if (!(startHours <= HOURS_MAX && startHours >= HOURS_MIN)) throw new HourOutOfRangeException("Beginning Time Hour Out of Range!"); if (!(endHours <= HOURS_MAX && endHours >= HOURS_MIN)) throw new HourOutOfRangeException("Ending Time Hour Out of Range!"); if (!(startMins <= MINUTE_MAX && startMins >= MINUTE_MIN)) throw new MinuteOutOfRangeException("Starting Time Minute Out of Range!"); if (!(endMins <= MINUTE_MAX && endMins >= MINUTE_MIN)) throw new MinuteOutOfRangeException("Ending Time Minute Out of Range!"); if(!(timeDifference <= P_MAX && timeDifference >= P_MIN)) throw new PercentageOutOfRangeException("Percentage Change Out of Range!"); if (!(startTime < endTime)) throw new StartEndException("Start Time Cannot Be Less Than End Time!"); } Just one of my custom exception classes, the others have the same structure as this one class HourOutOfRangeException { public: // param constructor // initializes message to passed paramater // preconditions - param will be a string // postconditions - message will be initialized // params a string // no return type HourOutOfRangeException(string pMessage) : message(pMessage) {} // GetMessage is getter for var message // params none // preconditions - none // postconditions - none // returns string string GetMessage() { return message; } // destructor ~HourOutOfRangeException() {} private: string message; };

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• Audio/video streaming on Windows platform

  - by bushtucker

  I'm building an interactive language learning application to be used in a classroom environment. The idea is that a teacher should be able to talk to the students (=audio stream to all students), let students talk to each other (= audio P2P) in groups of two or more, let students watch a video coming from a the DVD player or coming from a media server. It should be possible to save the audio/video streams. The teacher should also be able to monitor, take-over or block the desktop of the students. The platform is Windows and it's a desktop application, no web application. The audio delay should be as minimal as poosible. Optionally a student sitting at home should be supported, but it's not a high priority. I am now finished with the classroom control part of the application (login, monitor, block, ...) and want to start the audio and video part. I've been evaluating several options like DirectX, GStreamer and SIP but now I have to make a decision. DirectX seems an obvious choice for the Windows platform, but it only lets me capture and playback audio and video. The encoding/decoding/network part I should do myself. GStreamer contains all kinds of options to capture/encode/stream/save audio and video streams. I've experimented a bit with it (ossbuild) and it does seem to involve a lot of trial and error to make something work: - microphone capture (via directsoundsrc) produces cracking noises on some computers - rtpL16 payloader didn't work well - streaming raw audio over the network only working at a sampling rate of 8000, no higher - there are a lot of errors when receiving mpeg4 video (bad I-frame), on some computers worse than others It is my impression that gstreamer is primary targetted at linux platforms. Development and support for the Windows platform seems to be a little behind. Nevertheless it's a powerful framework that could save me months and years of work. SIP seems to be able to do everything I want, but it is targeted towards telephony and IM. I don't know how flexible SIP is. It seems to me that the SIP layer would just be overhead as I already have a central (teacher) application that can control and setup all the streams. The interesting parts of frameworks like opalvoip and freeswitch are the actual audio/video capture, the encoding and transmission. Does anyone know how these interesting parts relate a framework like gstreamer? Are they easy to integrate into a custom application? Are they flexible enough? Does anyone have experience with all or one of these technologies? Maybe there are even other options I can look at? Many thanks for your advice

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• using Object input\ output Streams with files and array list

  - by soad el-hayek

  hi every one .. i'm an it student , and it's time to finish my final project in java , i've faced too many problems , this one i couldn't solve it and i'm really ubset ! :S my code is like this : in Admin class : public ArrayList cos_info = new ArrayList(); public ArrayList cas_info = new ArrayList(); public int cos_count = 0 ; public int cas_count = 0 ; void coustmer_acount() throws FileNotFoundException, IOException{ String add=null; do{ person p = new person() ; cos_info.add(cos_count, p); cos_count ++ ; add =JOptionPane.showInputDialog("Do you want to add more coustmer..\n'y'foryes ..\n 'n'for No .."); } while(add.charAt(0) == 'Y'||add.charAt(0)=='y'); writenew_cos(); // add_acounts(); } void writenew_cos() throws IOException{ ObjectOutputStream aa = new ObjectOutputStream(new FileOutputStream("coustmer.txt")); aa.writeObject(cos_info); JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(null,"Added to file done sucessfuly.."); aa.close(); } in Coustmer class : void read_cos() throws IOException, ClassNotFoundException{ person p1= null ; int array_count = 0; ObjectInputStream d = new ObjectInputStream(new FileInputStrea ("coustmer.txt")); JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(null,d.available() ); for(int i = 0;d.available() == 0;i++){ a.add(array_count,(ArrayList) d.readObject()); array_count++; JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(null,"Haaaaai :D" ); JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(null,array_count ); } d.close(); JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(null,array_count +"1111" ); for(int i = 0 ; i<a.size()&& found!= true ; i++){ count++ ; p1 =(person)a.get(i); user=p1.user; pass = p1.pass; cas_checkpass(); } } it just print JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(null,d.available() ); and having excep. here a.add(array_count,(ArrayList) d.readObject()); p.s : person object from my own class and it's Serializabled

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• How do I pass the value of the previous form element into an "onchange" javascript function?

  - by Jen

  Hello, I want to make some UI improvements to a page I am developing. Specifically, I need to add another drop down menu to allow the user to filter results. This is my current code: HTML file: <select name="test_id" onchange="showGrid(this.name, this.value, 'gettestgrid')"> <option selected>Select a test--></option> <option value=1>Test 1</option> <option value=2>Test 2</option> <option value=3>Test 3</option> </select> This is pseudo code for what I want to happen: <select name="test_id"> <option selected>Select a test--></option> <option value=1>Test 1</option> <option value=2>Test 2</option> <option value=3>Test 3</option> </select> <select name="statistics" onchange="showGrid(PREVIOUS.name, PREVIOUS.VALUE, THIS.value)"> <option selected>Select a data display --></option> <option value='gettestgrid'>Show averages by student</option> <option value='gethomeroomgrid'>Show averages by homeroom</option> <option value='getschoolgrid'>Show averages by school</option> </select> How do I access the previous field's name and value? Any help much appreciated, thx! Also, JS function for reference: function showGrid(name, value, phpfile) { xmlhttp=GetXmlHttpObject(); if (xmlhttp==null) { alert ("Browser does not support HTTP Request"); return; } var url=phpfile+".php"; url=url+"?"+name+"="+value; url=url+"&sid="+Math.random(); xmlhttp.onreadystatechange=stateChanged; xmlhttp.open("GET",url,true); xmlhttp.send(null); }

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• Simple RSA encryption (Java)

  - by jake blue

  This is simply for fun. This will not be used for any actual encryption. I'm only first year comp sci student and love cryptography. This took a long time to get working. At approximately N = 18, it begins breaking down. It won't encrypt messages properly after that point. I'm not sure why. Any insights? I'd also appreciate any links you could provide me to tutorials or interesting reading about Cryptography. import java.math.BigInteger; import java.security.SecureRandom; /** * Cryptography. * * Generates public and private keys used in encryption and * decryption * */ public class RSA { private final static BigInteger one = new BigInteger("1"); private final static SecureRandom random = new SecureRandom(); // prime numbers private BigInteger p; private BigInteger q; // modulus private BigInteger n; // totient private BigInteger t; // public key private BigInteger e; // private key private BigInteger d; private String cipherText; /** * Constructor for objects of class RSA */ public RSA(int N) { p = BigInteger.probablePrime(N/2, random); q = BigInteger.probablePrime(N/2, random); // initialising modulus n = p.multiply(q); // initialising t by euclid's totient function (p-1)(q-1) t = (p.subtract(one)).multiply(q.subtract(one)); // initialising public key ~ 65537 is common public key e = new BigInteger("65537"); } public int generatePrivateKey() { d = e.modInverse(t); return d.intValue(); } public String encrypt(String plainText) { String encrypted = ""; int j = 0; for(int i = 0; i < plainText.length(); i++){ char m = plainText.charAt(i); BigInteger bi1 = BigInteger.valueOf(m); BigInteger bi2 = bi1.modPow(e, n); j = bi2.intValue(); m = (char) j; encrypted += m; } cipherText = encrypted; return encrypted; } public String decrypt() { String decrypted = ""; int j = 0; for(int i = 0; i < cipherText.length(); i++){ char c = cipherText.charAt(i); BigInteger bi1 = BigInteger.valueOf(c); BigInteger bi2 = bi1.modPow(d, n); j = bi2.intValue(); c = (char) j; decrypted += c; } return decrypted; } }

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