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• How to manage and estimate unstructured requirements received from customers

  - by user20358

  A lot of the times I receive a software system's requirements from our customers in a very unstructured format. It is usually a bunch of "product development" guys from the customer's who come up with these "proposed solutions" to the business problems they have. While they are the experts at the business domain, a lot of the times they don't have the solutions right. This results in multiple versions of the same requirement mixing up of two requirements into one a few versions of the requirement later down the line, the requirements which were combined together get separated out again, each taking with it some of the new additions How do you work with such requirements coming in and sort them out into proper use cases and before development begins? What tools can we use to track a particular requirement's history, from the first time it was conceived till the time it gets crystallized into a proper use case? Estimating work against requirements received in such a fashion is a nightmare which ends up in making mistakes in understanding the requirement correctly and estimating the effort against it correctly. Any tips, tools, tricks to make this activity more manageable? I'm just trying to get some insights from someone more experienced than I am in requirements management and effort estimation.

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• Experienced programmer, beginner at web design, tools for effective maintainable web design? [closed]

  - by Clinton

  I do quite a bit of programming in my work, which I'm comfortable with, but recently I've being trying to do some web-design for non-work related reasons. I've got a Drupal site up and running, and added some content. But they all look fairly basic. Header with some content. It doesn't look particularly polished. Anyway, as an example, what I wanted to do was make some "bubbles", each with some text in them. From a programmers point of view, say: bubble(question_text, answer_text) might expand to a box with some border, with "Question: " + question_text then "Answer: " + answer_text. Of course I'd have lots of these bubbles, but I'd like to change their look and feel in one place, so simple HTML would be a maintainable nightmare. I also want to lay them out on the screen in some fashion. I was thinking a mixture of javascript and CSS, or possibly use PHP which Drupal uses. On the other hand, I fear I might be taking a 1990s approach to this, and that there's actually tools available now that make this process a lot easier. I'm just wondering what the best approach to this sort of task is? Should I be using offline web design software and copying the code to Drupal, and if so, any recommendations? I'm sorry if my question is a bit vague, because I'm not really sure what question I should be asking. I'd appreciate if you answer and comment, and I'll try my best to be more specific as I understand more.

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• What are some efficient ways to set up my environment when working on a remote site?

  - by Prefix

  Hello fellow Programmers, I am still a relatively new programmer and have recently gotten my first on-campus programming position. I am the sole dev responsible for 8 domains as well as 3 small sized PHP web apps. The campus has its web environment divided into staging and live servers -- we develop on the staging via SFTP and then push the updates to the live server through a web GUI. I use Sublime Text 2 and the Sublime SFTP plugin currently for all my dev work (its my preferred editor). If I am just making an edit to a page I'll open that individual file via the ftp browser. If I am working on the PHP web app projects, I have the app directory mapped to a local folder so that when I save locally the file is auto-uploaded through Sublime SFTP. I feel like this workflow is slow and sub-optimal. How can I improve my workflow for working with remote content? I'd love to set up a local environment on my machine as that would eliminate the constant SFTP upload/download, but as I said there are many sites and the space required for a local copy of the entire domain would be quite large and complex; not to mention keeping it updated with whatever the latest on the staging server is would be a nightmare. Anyone know how I can improve my general web dev workflow from what I've described? I'd really like to cut out constantly editing over FTP but I'm not sure where to start other than ripping the entire directory and dumping it into XAMP.

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• 301 redirect: Is this good or bad for 2 domains?

  - by Tim

  Since i couldn't find any appropriate answer to my specific question, I wanted to ask you. I've read alot of things about the 301-redirect for moving pages and so on. A customer of mine has booked a new domain last year for better search results (he included his main keyword into the domain. Before he had only a domain with his business name, which had nothing to say about what he does). I told him, that he should do a 301-redirect so he doesn't loose his position in Google and to redirect all new customers coming from the old domain to the new domain. After about one year where his site hat a good amount of traffic the search results of Google for his keywords are getting more worse. Since he didn't maintain his website (no new content, bad content on all pages and so on) I assumed this would be the problem. He gave his website to another company which also makes websites. They told him, that this 301-redirection is very bad for his website. They removed it, and also updated his content and the template so now he has the same meta keywords on every page (instead of the specific ones I put there before). He also removed the canonical-tag which I placed there to ensure no duplicate content. What I am now afraid of is, that without this redirect Google now will find duplicate content and therefore kick him out of the index, which would be a nightmare, since most of his customers come over his website. I need verification of the fact, that the 301 isn't bad but in fact the correct way of working with 2 domains. If possible with good sources I can point out to him since he don't wants to hear anything about this. If someone also has a few words about the keywords and the canonical-tag I would really appreciate it! Thank you very much!

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• SQL Source Control Contest

  - by Ajarn Mark Caldwell

  If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know that I have written several posts about how important I think it is to protect your source code, to version it, and in particular, all the aspects I like about Red Gate’s SQL Source Control product.  But for a moment, let’s take a break from my writing and I want to hear your stories.  What nightmare situation are you in, or can you imagine, where source control for your database would save the world.  Or maybe your life is not so dramatic, but you do see a challenge that, if you just had a good tool like SQL Source Control, it would go much smoother.  What’s your pain?  You have read my writings, now tell me your story, and be in the running for a free copy of SQL Source Control from Red Gate. Yes, that’s right.  Although I am just a fan of Red Gate, they have authorized me to give out a handful of licenses to blog readers who are willing to share their story by posting a comment to this blog entry.  Simply add your comment below (be sure to include a valid email address in the box that asks for that) to be entered.  The contest starts immediately and over the next few days, the best stories will win.

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• Want Google to index redirect urls

  - by Dave Goten

  I'm having issues with users who think that Google Search is the address bar. Some of the sites that link to my site use user friendly addresses with 301 redirects to pages that have less friendly URLs. So, for example if I enter www.foo.com/bar it goes to www.bar.com/page.php?some-parameters-and-utm-codes-etc usually this is done by a 301 redirect in order to keep the SEO from foo.com on bar.com and so on, which I believe is standard practice. However, lately there have been more and more people searching www.foo.com/bar instead of going to www.foo.com/bar directly and because the page /bar is nothing more than a redirect it has no SEO that I know of. Things I've thought of but haven't been able to test, because Google takes forever to update :) (and I'm lazy like that), include using Google sitemaps and having them enter their redirects as entries there. (I could see this working if they were the top search entry all the time, and it might appear as a sitelink, but I don't know if that'll make the url itself show up in searches) Using Canonical tags on my pages to the redirects they set up. Which is a nightmare in itself because of the nature of my pages. One week the www.foo.com/bar might go to www.bar.com/pageA.php the next it might goto www.bar.com/pageB.php and having to remember to take the canonical tag off of pageA, so that it doesn't get confused with pageB would be a pain. Using 302 redirects -.- So I guess the question here is, does anyone have any experience or knowledge about this? What should I do to make www.foo.com/bar show up when someone 'searches' for this redirect url?

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• Is Version control with GIT useful to work in small projects fon an individual developer? [closed]

  - by chefnelone

  I work as website developer. I develop with Drupal CSM. I have a drupal base installation which has some settings which are sort of default for all my proyects. This drupal installation is my drupal-base folder Every time I start a new project I just duplicate the `drupal-base- folder and start coding the new features I need for the new proyect. The problem is that sometimes I work in more than one projects at the same time and I get a new feature in one of the project that I'd like to commit to my drupal base installation and also to the other projects. Then keeping the sync of all this is nightmare. I thought that Version Control with GIT could help me with this and I went into a tutorial about it. But now I'm not sure if this will be usefull for me. Then my question is: I think that GIT is just usefull for big projects where a team is working all together in the same files. But it is not usefull to work in small and individual projects. Am I right?

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• How to implement behavior in a component-based game architecture?

  - by ghostonline

  I am starting to implement player and enemy AI in a game, but I am confused about how to best implement this in a component-based game architecture. Say I have a following player character that can be stationary, running and swinging a sword. A player can transit to the swing sword state from both the stationary and running state, but then the swing must be completed before the player can resume standing or running around. During the swing, the player cannot walk around. As I see it, I have two implementation approaches: Create a single AI-component containing all player logic (either decoupled from the actual component or embedded as a PlayerAIComponent). I can easily how to enforce the state restrictions without creating coupling between individual components making up the player entity. However, the AI-component cannot be broken up. If I have, for example, an enemy that can only stand and walk around or only walks around and occasionally swing a sword, I have to create new AI-components. Break the behavior up in components, each identifying a specific state. I then get a StandComponent, WalkComponent and SwingComponent. To enforce the transition rules, I have to couple each component. SwingComponent must disable StandComponent and WalkComponent for the duration of the swing. When I have an enemy that only stands around, swinging a sword occasionally, I have to make sure SwingComponent only disables WalkComponent if it is present. Although this allows for better mix-and-matching components, it can lead to a maintainability nightmare as each time a dependency is added, the existing components must be updated to play nicely with the new requirements the dependency places on the character. The ideal situation would be that a designer can build new enemies/players by dragging components into a container, without having to touch a single line of engine or script code. Although I am not sure script coding can be avoided, I want to keep it as simple as possible. Summing it all up: Should I lob all AI logic into one component or break up each logic state into separate components to create entity variants more easily?

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• what other bash variables are available during execution such as $USER that can assist on my script?

  - by semi-newbie

  This is related to question 19245, in that one of the responders answered the question in an awesome way, and very VERY clear to any newbie. Now here is a question that i can't seem to figure. i wrote a script for starting the vmware firefox plugin (don't worry. i gave that up and now run vBox VERY happily. i left vmware for my servers :) ) I needed to start the plugin as sudo, but i also needed to pass an argument (password) to it, that happen to be the same. So, if my password was Hello123, the command would be: sudo ./myscript.sh hi other Hello123 running from command line, the script would ask for my sudo password and then run. i wanted to capture THAT password and pass it as well. i also wanted to run graphically, so i tried gksudo, and there is an option -p that returns the password for variable assignment. well, that was a nightmare, because i would still get prompted for the original sudo: see below Find UserName vUser=$USER Find password (and hopefully enable sudo) vP=gksudo -p -D somedescriptiontext echo Execute command gksudo ./myscript.sh hi $vUser $vP and i still get prompted twice. so my question is tri-fold: is there a variable i can use for the password, just like there is one for user, $USER? is there a different way i should be assigning the value resulting of the command i have in $vP? i am wondering if executing the way i have it, does it in an uninitiated session and not the current one, since i am getting some addtl warning type errors on some variables blah blah i tried using Zenity to just capture the text, but then of course, i couldn't pass that value to sudo, so i could only use as a parameter, which puts me back in 2 prompts. Thanksssssssssss!

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• Spring Cleaning

  - by Tim Dexter

  I recently got a shiny new laptop; moving my shiz from old to new, was not the nightmare it used to be. I have gotten into the habit of using a second hard drive in the media bay where the CDROM normally sits. That drive contains my life's work with BIP. I can pull it out and plug it into another machine very easily. I have been sorting through some old directories and files, archiving some, sharing others with colleagues. For instance, a little dated but if you were looking for a list of Publisher reports available in EBS R12.1, here it is. Im trying to track down a more recent R12 instance and will re-post the document. I also found another gem; its a little out there in terms of usefulness but Im sharing it none the less. You can embed, locally or remotely reference SVG graphics (in XML format) and bring the images into the BIP outputs. Template and sample data here. A nice set of templates showing page number control and page suppression - they will need some explanation, so I'll save them for another post. The list goes on but I'll save them for later. Back to the clean up!

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• How do I get HDMI output working on a Dell XPS 15 L502x?

  - by Jones

  Recently I've bought my dream's notebook, a Dell XPS 15 but since then this dream became a kind of endless nightmare. I'm almost getting crazy to make my graphic card driver work properly, but it seems to be just impossible. Yes, I have a 2GB NVIDIA GeForce GT 540m (Optimus) in it! It simply doesn't work. Every time I generate the xorg.conf Ubuntu hangs on while starting up, which forces me to remove this file to be able to start the notebook with the standard graphic settings. Another problem is that the Dell XPS 15 does NOT have a VGA output, but a HDMI. So, to be able to use a second monitor I have to configure it by the NVIDIA X Server Settings, which just works if the driver is properly initialized with the xorg.conf. I've also tried to make it work with the Bumblebee, but unfortunately it didn't help me much with the HDMI output. Do you guys have any idea to solve this deadlock? Is there any way for me to use my second monitor?

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• PHP Debugging

  - by Bob Porter

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/blogofbob/archive/2013/06/25/php-debugging.aspxI have been experimenting setting up a PHP development environment. I have been trying on Windows, Linux (Ubuntu) and Mac OS X. So far my favorite environment is on Mac OS X. I have tried a number of IDE's and debuggers as well.  IDE's Eclipse with the PDT Add On The PDT version of Eclipse Aptana Zend Netbeans  Debuggers Zend XDebug So far the only environments that I could get running quickly were Zend and Netbeans. Eclipse is a nightmare of versions and capabilities. I could only get Eclipse working well on Windows. On Ubuntu I was able to get the debugger working once. Thats it, one session, then it never worked again. I love the Zend tools and environment and it worked well everywhere I tried it, but it was beyond my budget.  Aptana also worked best on Windows, on Mac OS X it was fragile and I never could get debugging to work.  Netbeans worked first time, every time, every where. With one oddity, after several debugging sessions the debugger would refuse to connect. On every platform, I would end having to reboot to restore debugging, which would then work correctly for quite some time. I am sure I will discover that some process is hanging and there is a less intrusive way to clear the issue, but for now rebooting always works. In a future post I will go over how exactly I set my environment up, for now I have decided to stay with OS X. By the way, I did NOT use MAMP or the Zend Server, I stuck with PHP compiled and built from source, as well as Apache and MySQL installed locally. I use Homebrew as a package manager for OS X. I tried PORT but did not like the fact I had to sudo all the time to use it, and it installed things in /opt which I was not used to. Homebrew does sandbox the apps but it is nice enough to symlink them to their "normal" locations usually in /usr/local.

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• What is a good way to refactor a large, terribly written code base by myself? [closed]

  - by AgentKC

  Possible Duplicate: Techniques to re-factor garbage and maintain sanity? I have a fairly large PHP code base that I have been writing for the past 3 years. The problem is, I wrote this code when I was a terrible programmer and now it's tens of thousands of lines of conditionals and random MySQL queries everywhere. As you can imagine, there are a ton of bugs and they are extremely hard to find and fix. So I would like a good method to refactor this code so that it is much more manageable. The source code is quite bad; I did not even use classes or functions when I originally wrote it. At this point, I am considering rewriting the whole thing. I am the only developer and my time is pretty limited. I would like to get this done as quickly as possible, so I can get back to writing new features. Since rewriting the code would take a long time, I am looking for some methods that I can use to clean up the code as quickly as possible without leaving more bad architecture that will come back to haunt me later. So this is the basic question: What is a good way for a single developer to take a fairly large code base that has no architecture and refactor it into something with reasonable architecture that is not a nightmare to maintain and expand?

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• Is there a better strategy than relying on the compiler to catch errors?

  - by koan

  I've been programming in C and C++ for some time, although I would say I'm far from being an expert. For some time, I've been using various strategies to develop my code such as unit tests, test driven design, code reviews and so on. When I wrote my first programs in BASIC, I typed in long blocks before finding they would not run and they were a nightmare to debug. So I learned to write a small bit and then test it. These days, I often find myself repeatedly writing a small bit of code then using the compiler to find all the mistakes. That's OK if it picks up a typo but when you start adjusting the parameters types etc just to make it compile you can screw up the design. It also seems that the compiler is creeping into the design process when it should only be used for checking syntax. There's a danger here of over reliance on the compiler to make my programs better. Are there better strategies than this? I vaguely remember some time ago an article on a company developing a type of C compiler where an extra header file also specified the prototypes. The idea was that inconsistencies in the API definition would be easier to catch if you had to define it twice in different ways.

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• Reliance on the compiler

  - by koan

  I've been programming in C and C++ for some time, although I would say I'm far from being expert. For some time I've been using various strategies to develop my code such as unit tests, test driven design, code reviews and so on. When I wrote my first programs in BASIC I typed in long listings before finding they would not run and they were a nightmare to debug. So I learnt to write a small bit and then test it. These days I often find myself repeatedly writing a small bit of code then using the compiler to find all the mistakes. That's OK if it picks up a typo but when you start adjusting the parameters types etc just to make it compile you can screw up the design. It also seems that the compiler is creeping into the design process when it should only be used for checking syntax. There's a danger here of over reliance on the compiler to make my programs better. Are there better strategies than this ? I vaguely remember some time ago an article on a company developing a type of C compiler where an extra header file also specified the prototypes. The idea was that inconsistencies in the API definition would be easier to catch if you had to define it twice in different ways.

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• What are the design principles that promote testable code? (designing testable code vs driving design through tests)

  - by bot

  Most of the projects that I work on consider development and unit testing in isolation which makes writing unit tests at a later instance a nightmare. My objective is to keep testing in mind during the high level and low level design phases itself. I want to know if there are any well defined design principles that promote testable code. One such principle that I have come to understand recently is Dependency Inversion through Dependency injection and Inversion of Control. I have read that there is something known as SOLID. I want to understand if following the SOLID principles indirectly results in code that is easily testable? If not, are there any well-defined design principles that promote testable code? I am aware that there is something known as Test Driven Development. Although, I am more interested in designing code with testing in mind during the design phase itself rather than driving design through tests. I hope this makes sense. One more question related to this topic is whether it's alright to re-factor an existing product/project and make changes to code and design for the purpose of being able to write a unit test case for each module?

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• Add an objective @property attribute in objective-c

  - by morticae

  Does anyone know of a way to add additional attribute types to the @property keyword without modifying the compiler? Or can anyone think of another way to genericize getter/setter creation? Basically, I have a lot of cases in a recent project where it's handy for objects to lazily instantiate their array properties. This is because we have "event" objects that can have a wide variety of collections as properties. Subclassing for particular events is undesirable because many properties are shared, and it would become a usability nightmare. For example, if I had an object with an array of songs, I'd write a getter like the following: - (NSMutableArray *)songs { if (!songs) { songs = [[NSMutableArray alloc] init]; } return songs; } Rather than writing dozens of these getters, it would be really nice to get the behavior via... @property (nonatomic, retain, lazyGetter) NSMutableArray *songs; Maybe some fancy tricks via #defines or something? Other ideas?

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• LoadFromContext was detected

  - by Alhambra Eidos

  HI all misters When I try Debug my project (unit tests) i get the following error: LoadFromContext was detected Message: The assembly named 'Microsoft.VisualStudio.QualityTools.Common' was loaded from 'file:///C:/Program Files/Microsoft Visual Studio 8/Common7/IDE/PrivateAssemblies/Microsoft.VisualStudio.QualityTools.Common.DLL' using the LoadFrom context. The use of this context can result in unexpected behavior for serialization, casting and dependency resolution. In almost all cases, it is recommended that the LoadFrom context be avoided. This can be done by installing assemblies in the Global Assembly Cache or in the ApplicationBase directory and using Assembly.Load when explicitly loading assemblies. It's nightmare for me...!!! I am using VS 2008 profession, XP sp2 Any suggestions , please ?? Thanks.

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• Device driver with generic communication media layer

  - by Tom

  Greetings all, I'm trying to implement driver for an embedded device with generic communication media layer. Not sure what is the best way to do it so I'm seeking an advice from more experienced stackoverflow users:). Basically we've got devices around the country communicating with our head office. Usual form of communication is over TCP/IP, but could be also using usb, RF dongle, IR, etc. The plan is to have object corresponding with each of these devices, handling the proprietary protocol on one side and requests/responses from other internal systems on the other. The thing is how create something generic in between the media and the handling objects. I had a play around with the TCP dispatcher using boost.asio but trying to create something generic seems like a nightmare :). Anybody tried to do something like that? What is the best way how to do it? Cheers, Tom

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• Where is the displaytag of scheduled reporting?

  - by Nathan Feger

  So I have been making some reports and using displaytag to output these reports in html, csv, excel, pdf, etc. They are paginated, and take a simple object graph... and output excellent results everytime, with very little code. However, I need to use displaytag or its equivalent outside of a jsp. So that a user can schedule a report to run, and that report is stored in a db, or emailed for later viewing. I have looked at jasper-based reporting solutions, but making a jasper jrxml file is just a nightmare. I know there are gui tools to help, but I'm content with the simple output of displaytable, so I'm happy to give up that control for ease of implementation. Really, if I could take the display:table config out of the jsp I would, so please keep that in mind when proposing a solution. btw, java solutions would be my cup of tea.

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• Sitemaps on multiple front end servers using a http handler, is that a good idea?

  - by Rihan Meij

  Question 1 We would like to generate a site map for our CMS site We have multiple front end servers with approx a million articles. Environment multiple MS SQL servers multiple front end servers (load balanced) ASP.net - and IIS 6 Windows 2003 To have the site maps (the site map index file, and the site map files) physically on the front end servers will be a operations nightmare and error prone. So we are considering using http handlers instead so that it does not matter what server gets the request, it will be able to serve the correct xml file. Question 2 If we ping Google each time we publish a new article will that effect us negatively if that happens more than once a hour. Thanks!

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• .NET Code Access Security: Useful or just overcomplicated?

  - by routeNpingme

  see also Is “Code Access Security” of any real world use? I want to get some other opinions on this... I like the idea of Code Access Security for desktop applications. But in the lifetime of .NET I have to admit I've never actually had a situation where CAS has actually blocked something to my benefit. I have, however, had many times where something as simple as sharing a quick .NET application across a mapped drive becomes an enterprise code access nightmare. Having to break out caspol.exe to create trusted path rules and having no clear way of knowing why something failed makes it seem like CAS adds way more frustration to the development and deployment process than it offers in security. I'd like to hear either some situations where CAS has actually helped more than hurt, or if there are other people out there frustrated with its current implementation and defaults.

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• Keyboard layout for international programmers?

  - by splattne

  I think everybody who had to program using a standard German (or any other international) keyboard layout on Windows (or Mac) will complain about the conundrum of either having all special characters ( [ ] | { } / etc. ) needed for most programming languages "at the fingertip" and "losing" the language specific characters (umlauts ä ö ü etc.) on the keyboard or viceversa: having simple access to umlauts, but not to brackets etc. If you are programming in C / C++ / C# / Java / Javascript for example, it is very exhausting if you have to press Alt-Gr + 7 for every opening curly bracket. It is an ergonomic nightmare and reduces your typing efficiency. What is the best way to cope with this problem? Is there a satisfying solution? Maybe there are special layouts or keyboards which address this issue?

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• Repeated Scene Trees (Java3d / OpenGL)

  - by Jim

  Hello, I want to make a 3d scene that loops around on its self. That is to say, if you keep going in any direction, you will loop back to the other side. My current implementation is so bad, it's embarrassing to admit to it. I redraw the each change twenty-seven times, to make a 3x3x3 scene cube. When the user reaches the end of the middle cube, I jump them over to the other side. Maintaining consistency (let alone performance) is a nightmare. Total Disaster. This doesn't seem like it would be an unusual request, so I'm wondering if anyone knows of a more legit solution. Thanks!

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• Managing Team Development with SSAS, TFS, & BIDS

  - by Kevin D. White

  I am currently a single BI developer over a corporate datawarehouse and cube. I use SQL Server 2008, SSAS, and SSIS as my basic toolkit. I use Visual Studio +BIDS and TFS for my IDE and source control. I am about to take on multiple projects with an offshore vendor and I am worried about managing change. My major concern is manging merges and changes between me and the offshore team. Merging and managing changes to SQL & XML for just one person is bad enough but with multiple developers it seems like a nightmare. Any thoughts on how best to structure development knowing that sometimes there is no way to avoid multiple individuals making changes to the same file?

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