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• How to monetize and protect a engine's and its framework's copyrights and patents?

  - by Arthur Wulf White

  I created a game engine that handles: Rendering levels with 2d textured curved surfaces Collisions with curved surfaces Animationn paths on and navigation in 2d-sapce I have also made a framework for: Procedural organic level generation with round surfaces Level editing Light weight sprite design The engine and framework are written in AS3 and I am in the process of translating the code into HaXe to better support other platforms. I am also interested in adding Animated curved platforms More advanced level editing features Currently, I have a part time job and any time I spend on this engine is either taken out of my limited free time (I'm a student working to support myself through school) or out my time working at my job. I really believe this engine can make life much easier for people designing Tower Defence games, Shooters and and Platformers while also possibly improving their results. It could also support RTS, RPGs and racing games very well. It continains original algorithms that could be used for procedural generation of organic round and smooth levels. The algorithms I used are new and are not available in any other level editor I've seen. In order to constantly improve the Engine and have it tested thoroughly I think the best route is releasing it to the public. What are the best ways to benefit myself and others with my new framework? I want to have some lisence, allowing me to share the framework and still benefit from it. Any advice would be appreciated. This issue has been on my mind a lot this year. I am hoping to find a solution that will bring me some relief. I am thinking of designing three sample games, releasing them and starting a kickstarter, any advice and thoughts on the matter would be valuable. My goal is like Markus von Broady suggested, to get people involved in developing the engine and let people use it for games for either a symbolic fee or for free and charge for support. That or use some form of croud sourcing. Do I need to hire a lawyer to get some sort of legal document to protect my work?

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• Standards & compliances for secure web application development?

  - by MarkusK

  I am working with developers right now that write code the way they want and when i tell them to do it other way they respond that its just matter of preference how to do it and they have their way and i have mine. I am not talking about the formatting of code, but rather of way site is organized in classes and the way the utilize them. and the way they create functions and process forms etc. Their coding does not match my standards, but again they argue that its matter of preference and as long as goal achieved the can be different way's to do it. I agree but their way is proven to have bugs and we spend a lot of time going back and forth with them to fix all problems security or functionality, yet they still write same code no matter how many times i asked them to stop doing certain things. Now i am ready to dismiss them but friend of mine told me that he has same exact problem with freelance developers he work with. So i don't want to trade one bad apple for another. Question is is there some world wide (or at least europe and usa) accepted standard or compliance on how write secure web based applications. What application architecture should be for maintainable application. Is there are some general standard that can be used for any language ruby php or java govern security and functionality and quality of code? Or at least for PHP and MySQL i use for my website. So i can make them follow this strict standard and stop making excuses.

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• Easter eggs as IP protection in software

  - by Simon

  I work in embedded software, and for some reason, management wants to hide an Easter egg as means of IP protection. They call it a watermark, and since our software interact with the video preview feed (the image displayed on a screen before you take a photo), they want me to implement a trigger which will react to some unusual video input (a video konami code like dark - bright - dark - bright - whatever). When this trigger fires, something strange happens (which is outside of the normal behavior of the software). The goal is to check whether our software is included in a device. Does it sound like a good idea? I have many argument against this move: What if the konami code is too sensitive and user triggers it? Does this kind of watermark have any legal value? What if this "feature" is discovered by the client? The performance penalty should be very small, since the soft run on small devices. I am the one developping this trigger. If things go wrong, what is my responsibility? What is your opinion about this method? I can't find a link, but I remember seeing an answer on this site suggesting that putting Easter eggs for protection purpose was a good idea. Has anyone tried it with good results?

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• Getting the PC speaker to beep

  - by broiyan

  There has been much written on getting the beep sound from Ubuntu releases over the years. Example: fixing the beep My needs are slightly different in that I do not want to ensure sound card beeps are functioning. Instead, I want PC speaker beeps, the kind produced by the original built-in speaker because I believe they will produce less CPU load. I have confirmed that my computer has the PC speaker by unplugging the external speakers and shutting down Ubuntu. At some point in the shutdown and restart process a beep is heard even though the external speakers have no power. I have tried the following: In /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf, turn these lines into comments: #blacklist snd_pcsp #blacklist pcspkr In .bashrc /usr/bin/xset b on /usr/bin/xset b 100 Enable in the gnome terminal: Edit Profile Prefs General Terminal Bell Ensure no "mute" selections in: System Prefs Sound various tabs (uncheck them all). Select "Enable window and button sounds" in: System Prefs Sound Sound Effects In gconf-editor desktop gnome sound, select the three sound check boxes. In gconf-editor apps metacity general select the audible bell check box. Still I get no PC speaker beeps when I send code 7 to the console via my Java program or use echo -e '\a' on the bash command line. What else should I try? Update Since my goal is to minimize load on the CPU, here is a comparison of elapsed times. Each test is for 100,000 iterations. Each variant was performed three times so three results are presented for each. printwriter.format("%c", 7); // 1.3 seconds, 1.5 seconds, 1.5 seconds Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().beep(); // 0.8 seconds, 0.3 seconds, 0.5 seconds try { Runtime.getRuntime().exec("beep"); } catch (IOException e) { } // 10.3 seconds, 16.3 seconds, 11.4 seconds These runs were done inside Eclipse so multiply by some value less than 1 for standalone execution. Unfortunately, Toolkit's beep is silent on my computer and so is code 7. The beep utility works but has the most cost.

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• JDK8 New Build Infrastructure

  - by kto

  I unintentionally posted this before I verified everything, so once I have verified it all works, I'll updated this post. But this is what should work... Most Interesting Builder in the World: "I don't always build the jdk, but when I do, I prefer The New JDK8 Build Infrastructure. Stay built, my friends." So the new Build Infrastructure changes have been integrated into the jdk8/build forest along side the older Makefiles (newer in makefiles/ and older ones in make/). The default is still the older makefiles. Instructions can be found in the Build-Infra Project User Guide. The Build-Infra project's goal is to create the fastest build possible and correct many of the build issues we have been carrying around for years. I cannot take credit for much of this work, and wish to recognize the people who do so much work on this (and will probably still do more), see the New Build Infrastructure Changeset for a list of these talented and hard working JDK engineers. A big "THANK YOU" from me. Of course, every OS and system is different, and the focus has been on Linux X64 to start, Ubuntu 11.10 X64 in particular. So there are at least a base set of system packages you need. On Ubuntu 11.10 X64, you should run the following after getting into a root permissions situation (e.g. have run "sudo bash"): apt-get install aptitude aptitude update aptitude install mercurial openjdk-7-jdk rpm ssh expect tcsh csh ksh gawk g++ build-essential lesstif2-dev Then get the jdk8/build sources: hg clone http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk8/build jdk8-build cd jdk8-build sh ./get_source.sh Then do your build: cd common/makefiles bash ../autoconf/configure make We still have lots to do, but this is a tremendous start. -kto

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• Joining a company to get experience vs. going alone [closed]

  - by daniels

  My goal is to build a successful web startup, say the next Digg or Twitter, and I am in doubt regarding what is the best route to follow as a programmer. I see basically two options: Get an internship/job with an established online company, so that I could get a mentor and learn from more experienced programmers, learn their processes, methodology and so on. I could do this for 1-2 years, and then quit to start working on my own stuff. Start working on my own projects right away, starting with small ones and moving up gradually. This would give me more control on the things I would be working with, but I would lack contact with more experienced people, so I would need to figure basic things on my own. Doing both is not an option in my opinion, cause I would need to put a lot of effort/time into each if I was to learn/improve as a programmer. So is one route definitely better than the other? Is there a third one I am not considering? Background: I already work by myself developing content-based websites and doing SEO, and I am decent at it so money is not a problem. Last year I started learning to program, first by myself and now I enrolled in a CS degree on a good university.

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• proper way to creation multiple similiar buttons/panels

  - by JayAvon

  I have the below Code which i tried to do, but it only shows(the minus/plus button) on the last GirdLayout (Intelligence stat): JButton plusButton = new JButton("+"); JButton minusButton = new JButton("-"); statStrengthGridPanel = new JPanel(new GridLayout(1,3)); statStrengthGridPanel.add(minusButton); statStrengthGridPanel.add(new JLabel("10")); statStrengthGridPanel.add(plusButton); statConstitutionGridPanel = new JPanel(new GridLayout(1,3)); statConstitutionGridPanel.add(minusButton); statConstitutionGridPanel.add(new JLabel("10")); statConstitutionGridPanel.add(plusButton); statDexterityGridPanel = new JPanel(new GridLayout(1,3)); statDexterityGridPanel.add(minusButton); statDexterityGridPanel.add(new JLabel("10")); statDexterityGridPanel.add(plusButton); statIntelligenceGridPanel = new JPanel(new GridLayout(1,3)); statIntelligenceGridPanel.add(minusButton); statIntelligenceGridPanel.add(new JLabel("10")); statIntelligenceGridPanel.add(plusButton); I know I can do something like I did for the Panel names(have multiple ones), but I did not want to do that for the Panels in the first place. I am trying to use best practice and not have my code be repetitive. Any suggestions?? The goal is to have 4 stats, to assign points to, with decrement and increment buttons(I decided against sliders). Eventually I will have them have upper and lower limits, decrement the "unused" label, and all of that good stuff, but I just want to not be repetitive. Thanks for any help.

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• Track sales and commission with third-party tool

  - by Andrew

  I have a clothing website where I link to various clothing retailers. I have reached an agreement with one of the retailers whereby they will pay a commission to us for every sale they make from traffic that was referred by our site. I need a mechanism for tracking how much commission should be paid to us, that involves as little work as possible to implement from their side. We both have Google Analytics. Option 1: They record a goal in their GA account whenever someone makes a purchase on their site. They see how many completed goals are marked as referral traffic from our site and calculate commission accordingly. The problem with this is that the whole process of calculating and paying commission will be manual. They will need to frequently check how many sales were generated by referral traffic from our site, and probably we will have to chase them for commission payments. Also - since we won't have access to their GA data - we will need to trust that they report all sales accurately. Option 2: Sign them up to an affiliate network like Commission Junction or Google's Affiliate Network, and connect to them through this network. The problem with this solution is that it seems too heavyweight; ideally we don't want to ask a retailer to go through the whole sign up process just to deal with us and pay us commission. I am assuming that there must be some lightweight service that tracks the number of sales by one site and pays commission accordingly to the other site, where the sign up and installation procedure is simple and fast.

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• DDDNorth2 Bradford, 13th October 2012 - Async Patterns presentation and source code

  - by Liam Westley

  Many thanks to Andy Westgarth and his team for organising a fantastic conference at the rather elegant Bradford University School of Management. Also, a big congratulations to all the delegates who gave up there free time to come and hear us speak and who were, in general, enthusiastic and asked some cracking questions to keep us speakers on our toes. For those who attended my Async my source code and presentation are now available on GitHub, https://github.com/westleyl/DDDNorth2-AsyncPatterns If you are new to Git then the easiest client to install is GitHub for Windows, a graphical UI for accessing GitHub. Personally, I also have TortoiseGit installed – the file explorer add-in that works in a familiar manner to TortoiseSVN. As I mentioned during the presentation I have not included the sample data, the music files, in the source code placed on GitHub but I have included instructions on how to download them from http://silents.bandcamp.com and place them in the correct folders. What I forgot to mention is that Windows Media Player by default does not play Ogg Vorbis and Flac music files, however you can download the codec installer for these, for free, from http://xiph.org/dshow. I am planning to break down this little project into a series of blog posts, with each pattern being a single blog post over several weeks. In these I will flesh out the background behind the pattern, the basic goal being achieved and how to monitor the progress of the sample data being processed. Basically, what I said during the presentation and is missing from the slides.

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• Update to SQL Server Configuration Scripting Utility

  - by Bill Graziano

  Last spring I released a utility to script SQL Server configuration information on CodePlex.  I’ve been making small changes in this application as my needs have changed.  The application is a .NET 2.0 console application.  This utility serves two needs for me.  First it helps with disaster recovery.  All server level objects (logins, jobs, linked servers, audits) are scripted to a single file per object type.  This enables the scripts to be easily run against a DR server.  If these are checked into source control you can view the history of the script and find out what changed and when. The second goal is to capture what changed inside a database.  Objects inside a database (tables, stored procedures, views, etc.) are each scripted to their own file.  This makes it easier to track the changes to an object over time.  This does include permissions and role membership so you can capture security changes.  My assumption is that a database backup is the primary method of disaster recovery for databases so this utility is designed to capture changes to objects.  You can find the full list of changes from the original on the Downloads page on CodePlex.

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• How should I load level data in java?

  - by Matthew G.

  I'm setting up my engine for a certain action/arcade game to have a set of commands that would look something like this. Set landscape to grass Create rocks at ... Create player at X, Y Set goal to "Get to point X Y" Spawn enemy at X, Y I'd then have each object knowing what it has to do, and acting on its own. I've been thinking about how to store this data. External data files could be parsed by a level class, and certain objects can be spawned through that. I could also create a base level class and extend it for each level, but that'd create a large amount of classes. Another idea is to have one level parser class, but have a case for each level. This would be extremely silly and bulky, but I mention it because I found that I did this at 2 AM last night. I'm finally getting why I have to plan out my inheritances, though. RIP project. I might be completely missing another option.

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• Hack Fest at Devoxx

  - by Yolande Poirier

  On November 11th and 12th, Devoxx attendees will get the chance to build a Java embedded application onsite. During the Raspberry Pi & Leap Motion hands-on labs on Monday and Tuesday mornings, you will learn about Raspberry Pi development with Java embedded using Leap Motion and other sensors. The afternoons are hacking time on a project of your choice. You can get your inspiration from existing projects. You can also use their project source code and improve on already developed applications.  The goal is for you to create something fun and innovative in only a couple of days, no matter your experience in embedded systems.  We provide you with equipment like the Raspberry Pi, sensors, and Leap Motion. Thanks to Stephan Janssen for lending us 10 Leap Motions for the Hack Fest. Raspberry Pi and sensors are pre-configured. You will access the sensors via a web address. You can build a project alone if you want. We also give the opportunity to brainstorm ideas with other attendees and maybe build something more complex. You will get one-on-one help from top-notch coaches. Vinicius Senger has tons of experience with Java and the Raspberry. He runs Java embedded challenges and give training year round. Geert Bevin contributed to many open source projects and his latest venture is with the Leap Motion. Bruno Borges's expertise is in connecting backend logic with great interfaces. Yara Senger is a Java Champion and a great Java embedded mentor.    Don't miss this opportunity! This is your chance to transform your idea into a Raspberry Pi or a Leap Motion application.

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• A Great Work : ADF Architecture TV

  - by mustafakaya

  I would like to information about Oracle ADF Product Management's great work ; ADF Architecture TV. This channel has various subjects such as before start a new ADF or any software project what will you need or how can you select team member's skills, or how to implement and design an ADF projects etc. When developing with a new technology, one of the challenges for technical staff is to both learn the features of the technology and how to implement them, and also consider the broader concepts of design, engineering and architecture. Many an IT project has come undone because IT staff have been focused on the nitty gritty details of writing software, rather than looking at the "bigger picture" of how it will all go together. Oracle's "ADF Architecture TV" plans to address this issue by focusing on architectural issues and developer guidelines for writing ADF software solutions. The goal, to give ADF developers an understanding of the decisions you need to build a successful ADF application, potential architectural blueprints to choose from when putting the ADF application together, and potential best practices to take back to your development team.  You can click here for ADF Architecture TV. 

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• Best Architecture for ASP.NET WebForms Application

  - by stack man

  I have written an ASP.NET WebForms portal for a client. The project has kind of evolved rather than being properly planned and structured from the beginning. Consequently, all the code is mashed together within the same project and without any layers. The client is now happy with the functionality, so I would like to refactor the code such that I will be confident about releasing the project. As there seems to be many differing ways to design the architecture, I would like some opinions about the best approach to take. FUNCTIONALITY The portal allows administrators to configure HTML templates. Other associated "partners" will be able to display these templates by adding IFrame code to their site. Within these templates, customers can register and purchase products. An API has been implemented using WCF allowing external companies to interface with the system also. An Admin section allows Administrators to configure various functionality and view reports for each partner. The system sends out invoices and email notifications to customers. CURRENT ARCHITECTURE It is currently using EF4 to read/write to the database. The EF objects are used directly within the aspx files. This has facilitated rapid development while I have been writing the site but it is probably unacceptable to keep it like that as it is tightly coupling the db with the UI. Specific business logic has been added to partial classes of the EF objects. QUESTIONS The goal of refactoring will be to make the site scalable, easily maintainable and secure. 1) What kind of architecture would be best for this? Please describe what should be in each layer, whether I should use DTO's / POCO / Active Record pattern etc. 2) Is there a robust way to auto-generate DTO's / BOs so that any future enhancements will be simple to implement despite the extra layers? 3) Would it be beneficial to convert the project from WebForms to MVC?

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• My Obligatory IPad Post

  - by mark.wilcox

  I've had my IPad for about a week now. So I thought I'd write some thoughts down based on my initial experiences. Here are my initial take-aways: 1 - Netflix OnDemand - I'm a movie junkie. I'm now more apt to just start a movie as background sound for my workday (I telecommute - so except for the occasional bark from my dog, it's awfully quiet here if I don't have something going). 2 - The Email Client is really nice and I'm as fast or faster typing when I have the wireless keyboard engaged. Even with onscreen keyboard - I'm already close to 75% of desktop speed 3 - The battery life is incredible - I think this is the first case where a mobile device actually under-promised on battery 4 - It totally has killed the notion of using a normal PC for my wife and mother-in-law - neither of which had wanted an iPhone/iPod Touch or really any Apple device until they got to play with my iPad. The concept of - instant on, easy to hold and touch-based navigation has them hooked. Heck, it has me hooked. My ultimate goal is to be able to have it at least replace the need to take my netbook with me on the road. I haven't had a chance to complete my testing on that front yet - between work, my wife traveling (for a change) and now my wife home sick - I haven't had time to just play with it. But so far my only regret - that I haven't already bought two more for everyone else in my family who wants to use mine. Posted via email from Virtual Identity Dialogue

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• Is the development of CLI apps considered "backwards"?

  - by user61852

  I am a DBA fledgling with a lot of experience in programming. I have developed several CLI, non interactive apps that solve some daily repetitive tasks or eliminate the human error from more complex albeit not so daily tasks. These tools are now part of our tool box. I find CLI apps are great because you can include them in an automated workflow. Also the Unix philosophy of doing a single thing but doing it well, and letting the output of a process be the input of another, is a great way of building a set of tools than would consolidate into an strategic advantage. My boss recently commented that developing CLI tools is "backwards", or constitutes a "regression". I told him I disagreed, because most CLI tools that exist now are not legacy but are live projects with improved versions being released all the time. Is this kind of development considered "backwards" in the market? Does it look bad on a rèsumè? I also considered all solutions whether they are web or desktop, should have command line, non-interactive options. Some people consider this a waste of programming resources. Is this goal a worthy one in a software project?

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• Can too much abstraction be bad?

  - by m3th0dman

  As programmers I feel that our goal is to provide good abstractions on the given domain model and business logic. But where should this abstraction stop? How to make the trade-off between abstraction and all it's benefits (flexibility, ease of changing etc.) and ease of understanding the code and all it's benefits. I believe I tend to write code overly abstracted and I don't know how good is it; I often tend to write it like it is some kind of a micro-framework, which consists of two parts: Micro-Modules which are hooked up in the micro-framework: these modules are easy to be understood, developed and maintained as single units. This code basically represents the code that actually does the functional stuff, described in requirements. Connecting code; now here I believe stands the problem. This code tends to be complicated because it is sometimes very abstracted and is hard to be understood at the beginning; this arises due to the fact that it is only pure abstraction, the base in reality and business logic being performed in the code presented 1; from this reason this code is not expected to be changed once tested. Is this a good approach at programming? That it, having changing code very fragmented in many modules and very easy to be understood and non-changing code very complex from the abstraction POV? Should all the code be uniformly complex (that is code 1 more complex and interlinked and code 2 more simple) so that anybody looking through it can understand it in a reasonable amount of time but change is expensive or the solution presented above is good, where "changing code" is very easy to be understood, debugged, changed and "linking code" is kind of difficult. Note: this is not about code readability! Both code at 1 and 2 is readable, but code at 2 comes with more complex abstractions while code 1 comes with simple abstractions.

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• Moving from a static site to a CMS with new URLs and meta-data for pages

  - by Chris J

  Hi I am in the process of rebuilding a site from static pages to a CMS which will be using mod_rewrite to generate new page URLs. In this process our marketing people and myself have decided to tidy up the descriptions, keywords and titles. Eg: a page which who's URL is currently "website-name/about_us.html" and has a title of "website-name - something not quite page specific" will change to "website-name/about-us/" and title: "about us - website-name" and may have a few keywords and the description changed. Our goal with updating the meta data is to improve our page rankings and try to keep in line with some best practices for SEO. Though our current page rankings are quite good in many aspects, there is room for improvement. All of the pages will also have content changes (like rearranging heading tags, new menu on all pages, new content in footer, extra pieces of dynamic content relating to other pages). In this new site process I plan to use 301 redirects for all the old URLs pointing to the new URLs. My question is what can I expect to happen to the page rankings in Google, in the sort term and long term? Will this be like kicking off a new site which will have to build up trust over time or will the original page rankings have affect?

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• Using HTML5 Today part 4&ndash;What happened to XHTML?

  - by Steve Albers

  This is the fourth entry in a series of descriptions & demos from the “Using HTML5 Today” user group presentation. For practical purposes, the original XHTML standard is a historical footnote, although XHTML transitional will probably live on forever in the default web page templates of old web page editors. The original XHTML spec was released in 2000, on the heels of the HTML 4.01 spec.  The plan was to move web development away from HTML to the more formal, rigorous approach that XHTML offered, but it was built on a principle that conflicts with the history and culture of the Internet: XHTML introduced the idea of Draconian Error Handling, which essentially means that invalid XML markup on a page will cause a page to stop rendering. There is a transitional mode offered in the original XHTML spec, but the goal was to move to D.E.H.  You can see the result by changing the doc type for a document to “application/xhtml+xml” - for my class example we change this setting in the web.config file: <staticContent> <remove fileExtension=".html" /> <mimeMap fileExtension=".html" mimeType="application/xhtml+xml" /> </staticContent> With the new strict syntax a simple error, in this case a duplicate </td> tag, can cause a critical page error: While XHTML became very popular in the ensuing decade, the Strict form of XHTML never achieved widespread use. Draconian Error Handling was one of the factors that led in time to the creation of the WHATWG, or Web Hypertext Application Technology Group.  WHATWG contributed to the eventually disbanding of the XHTML 2.0 working group and the W3C’s move to embrace the HTML5 standard. For developers who long for XML markup the W3C HTML5 standard includes an XHTML5 syntax. For the longer, more definitive look at what happened to XHTML and how HTML5 came to be check out the Dive Into HTML mirror site or Bruce Lawson’s “HTML5: Who, What, When Why” talk.

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• How to refactor a myriad of similar classes

  - by TobiMcNamobi

  I'm faced with similar classes A1, A2, ..., A100. Believe it or not but yeah, there are roughly hundred classes that almost look the same. None of these classes are unit tested (of course ;-) ). Each of theses classes is about 50 lines of code which is not too much by itself. Still this is way too much duplicated code. I consider the following options: Writing tests for A1, ..., A100. Then refactor by creating an abstract base class AA. Pro: I'm (near to totally) safe by the tests that nothing goes wrong. Con: Much effort. Duplication of test code. Writing tests for A1, A2. Abstracting the duplicated test code and using the abstraction to create the rest of the tests. Then create AA as in 1. Pro: Less effort than in 1 but maintaining a similar degree of safety. Con: I find generalized test code weird; it often seems ... incoherent (is this the right word?). Normally I prefer specialized test code for specialized classes. But that requires a good design which is my goal of this whole refactoring. Writing AA first, testing it with mock classes. Then inheriting A1, ..., A100 successively. Pro: Fastest way to eliminate duplicates. Con: Most Ax classes look very much the same. But if not, there is the danger of changing the code by inheriting from AA. Other options ... At first I went for 3. because the Ax classes are really very similar to each other. But now I'm a bit unsure if this is the right way (from a unit testing enthusiast's perspective).

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• Questions before I revamp my rendering engine to use shaders (GLSL)

  - by stephelton

  I've written a fairly robust rendering engine using OpenGL ES 1.1 (fixed-function.) I've been looking into revamping the engine to use OpenGL ES 2.0, which necessitates that I use shaders. I've been absorbing information all day long and still have some questions. Firstly, lighting. The fixed-function pipeline is guaranteed to have at least 8 lights available. My current engine finds lights that are "close" to the primitives being drawn and enables them; I don't know how many lights are going to be enabled until I draw a given model. Nothing is dynamically allocated in GLSL, so I have to define in a shader some number of lights to be used, right? So if I want to stick with 8, should I write my general purpose shader to have 8 lights and then use uniforms to tell it how many / which lights to use? Which brings me to another question: should I be concerned with the amount of data I'm allocating in a shader? Recent video cards have hundreds of "stream processors." If I've got a fragment shader being used on some number of fragments in a given triangle, I assume they must each have their own stack to work on. Are read-only variables copied here, or read when needed? My initial goal is to rework my code so that it is virtually identical to the current implementation. What I have in mind is to create my own matrix stack so that I can implement something along the lines of push/popMatrix and apply all my translations, rotations, and scales to this matrix, then provide the matrix to the vertex shader so that it can make very quick vertex translations. Is this approach sound? Edit: My original intention was to ask if there was a tutorial that would explain the bare minimum necessary to jump from fixed-function to using shaders. Thanks!

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• getting started as a web developer [closed]

  - by kmote

  I have over 10 years of programming experience building (Windows-based) desktop applications and utilities (VC++, C#, Python). My goal over the next year is to start transitioning to web application development. I want to teach myself the fundamental tools and technologies that would be considered essential for building professional, online, interactive, visually-stunning, data-driven web apps -- the kind described in Google's recently released "Field Guide: Building Great Web Applications". So my question is, what are the primary, most commonly-used technologies that seasoned professionals will need in their tool belt in the coming years? My plan was to start coming up to speed in Javascript, HTML5, & CSS, and then to do a deep dive into ASP.NET and Ajax, along with SQL DBs. (I was surprised to not be able to find a single book at Amazon with a broad, general scope like this, which caused me to start second-guessing this approach.) So, seasoned professionals: am I on the right track? Are there some glaring omissions in my list? Or some unnecessary inclusions? I would welcome any book suggestions along these lines as well.

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• PDFtk Password Protection Help

  - by Dave W.

  I am using Ubuntu 11.10 and am looking for a solution to password protect a bunch of pdf files in a directory in batch. I came across PDFtk and it looks like it might do what I need, but I've reviewed the command line PDFtk examples and can't figure out if there is a way to do it in batch without having to individually specify the output file name for every file. I'm hoping a command-line guru can take a look at the PDFtk syntax and tell me if there is some trick / command that will allow me to password protect a directory of pdf files (e.g., *.pdf) and overwrite the existing files using the same name, or consistently rename the individual output files without having to specify each output name individually. Here's a link to the PDFtk command line examples page: http://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/ Thanks for your help. I think I've answered my own question. Here's a bash script that appears to do the trick. I'd welcome help evaluating why the code I've commented out doesn't work... #!/bin/bash # Created by Dave, 2012-02-23 # This script uses PDFtk to password protect every PDF file # in the directory specified. The script creates a directory named "protected_[DATE]" # to hold the password protected version of the files. # # I'm using the "user_pw" parameter, # which means no one will be able to open or view the file without # the password. # # PDFtk must be installed for this script to work. # # Usage: ./protect_with_pdftk.bsh [FILE(S)] # [FILE(S)] can use wildcard expansion (e.g., *.pdf) # This part isn't working.... ignore. The goal is to avoid errors if the # directory to be created already exists by only attempting to create # it if it doesn't exists # #TARGET_DIR="protected_$(date +%F)" #if [ -d "$TARGET_DIR" ] #then #echo # echo "$TARGET_DIR directory exists!" #else #echo # echo "$TARGET_DIR directory does not exist!" #fi # mkdir protected_$(date +%F) for i in *pdf ; do pdftk "$i" output "./protected_$(date +%F)/$i" user_pw [PASSWORD]; done echo "Complete. Output is in the directory: ./protected_$(date +%F)"

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• Geekswithblogs.net | Screen Resolutions of our Readers

  - by Jeff Julian

  Yesterday I talked about the Browsers we see being used by our readers driven off of our Google Analytics traffic and today I want to share with you the Screen Resolutions we see.  As a web developer most of my life, it is hard to decide how large you should build your application because typically you have a couple huge high resolution monitors on your desk, but you typical end user is thought to have 1024x768.  With HTML5/CSS3 out, it is a little better coming up with a design that will scale to all resolutions, but it is still nice to know the numbers when it comes to how much real estate do I have on my clients. If you look at these numbers for Geekswithblogs.net, we have a lot of high resolution monitors from users that visit the site.  After a little more investigation of the number you will notice we do not have as much height available as we do width.  If the primary goal of a site is to deliver as much data in the viewable area without scrolling, this becomes a challenge when most of our pages have long pieces of formatted data.  So our challenge is to build skins that use up more of the sides of the content toward the top on larger resolution browsers and then entice the reader to scroll to get the goodies embedded in the content of the posts.  Going to be an interesting battle for sure, but we really need more skin offerings on the site. Technorati Tags: Resolution Statistics,Geekswithblogs.net

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• How to turn off screen (DPMS) together with locking session in KDE?

  - by gertvdijk

  First of all, I'm aware a similar question for GNOME is asked here: "Switch off laptop backlight when locking screen". Objective I would like to turn off my screen on locking the session for power saving reasons. Actual problem Locking the screen on Kubuntu (KDE) inevitably triggers the screensaver as far as I can see. There's no screensaver option other than 'Blank screen' together with its background colour set to black that comes just close to my goal. It blanks the screen, but doesn't turn off the screen. Screen's backlight will still be on and not saving any power. Current workaround A workaround via a script + shortcut key is possible, however, it's just a workaround since it doesn't trigger on all ways to lock the session. Therefore, I think it should be possible to have it done more elegantly, for example by providing this option in KDE's configuration dialog of the screensaver. The workaround I am now using is the following. A script that locks the screen and turns off the screen: #!/bin/bash qdbus org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver /ScreenSaver Lock xset dpms force standby and let it run with a shortcut key via a custom menu entry. It works. Here's why I consider it to be a workaround rather than a solution. It doesn't work for other ways to trigger the locking of the session. My actual question(s) Do I need to touching/patching KDE's source? If not what are my options? If so, could someone point me to where I can get started? what do you think is the recommended place in the GUI for configuration? I'm using Kubuntu 12.04 and willing to upgrade to KDE 4.9 or waiting for the 12.10 release.

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