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• C++ Matrix class hierachy

  - by bpw1621

  Should a matrix software library have a root class (e.g., MatrixBase) from which more specialized (or more constrained) matrix classes (e.g., SparseMatrix, UpperTriangluarMatrix, etc.) derive? If so, should the derived classes be derived publicly/protectively/privately? If not, should they be composed with a implementation class encapsulating common functionality and be otherwise unrelated? Something else? I was having a conversation about this with a software developer colleague (I am not per se) who mentioned that it is a common programming design mistake to derive a more restricted class from a more general one (e.g., he used the example of how it was not a good idea to derive a Circle class from an Ellipse class as similar to the matrix design issue) even when it is true that a SparseMatrix "IS A" MatrixBase. The interface presented by both the base and derived classes should be the same for basic operations; for specialized operations, a derived class would have additional functionality that might not be possible to implement for an arbitrary MatrixBase object. For example, we can compute the cholesky decomposition only for a PositiveDefiniteMatrix class object; however, multiplication by a scalar should work the same way for both the base and derived classes. Also, even if the underlying data storage implementation differs the operator()(int,int) should work as expected for any type of matrix class. I have started looking at a few open-source matrix libraries and it appears like this is kind of a mixed bag (or maybe I'm looking at a mixed bag of libraries). I am planning on helping out with a refactoring of a math library where this has been a point of contention and I'd like to have opinions (that is unless there really is an objective right answer to this question) as to what design philosophy would be best and what are the pros and cons to any reasonable approach.

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• How to add an extra plist property using CMake?

  - by Jesse Beder

  I'm trying to add the item <key>UIStatusBarHidden</key><true/> to my plist that's auto-generated by CMake. For certain keys, it appears there are pre-defined ways to add an item; for example: set(MACOSX_BUNDLE_ICON_FILE ${ICON}) But I can't find a way to add an arbitrary property. I tried using the MACOSX_BUNDLE_INFO_PLIST target property as follows: I'd like the resulting plist to be identical to the old one, except with the new property I want, so I just copied the auto-generated plist and set that as my template. But the plist uses some Xcode variables, which also look like ${foo}, and CMake grumbles about this: Syntax error in cmake code when parsing string <string>com.bedaire.${PRODUCT_NAME:identifier}</string> syntax error, unexpected cal_SYMBOL, expecting } (47) Policy CMP0010 is not set: Bad variable reference syntax is an error. Run "cmake --help-policy CMP0010" for policy details. Use the cmake_policy command to set the policy and suppress this warning. This warning is for project developers. Use -Wno-dev to suppress it. In any case, I'm not even sure that this is the right thing to do. I can't find a good example or any good documentation about this. Ideally, I'd just let CMake generate everything as before, and just add a single extra line. What can I do?

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• CMS for managing plain-text content, with tagging

  - by user575606

  Hi, We have some quite-specific requirements for our app that a CMS may help us with, and were hoping that someone may know of a CMS that matches these requirements (it's quite a laborous task to download each CMS and verify this manually). We want a CMS to allow users to create and manage articles, but storing the articles in plain-text only. All of the CMSs that we have looked at so far are geared towards creating HTML pages. We want the CMS to manage workflow (approval process), and tracking of history. The requirements for plain text only is that the intent is to allow business people to generate content which we are going to display in our Silverlight application - we don't want to go down the route of hosting and displaying arbitrary HTML in the app as we want the styling to be seamless with our app, amongst other reasons. We would also want to allow the user to be able to link between articles, but not to external sites (i.e. HTML with no formatting, or some other way of specifying article links), and the third requirement is the ability to tag articles and search on articles. Does anyone know of any non-HTML targetted CMS systems that may match these requirements? Thanks, Gary

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• Appropriate uses of Monad `fail` vs. MonadPlus `mzero`

  - by jberryman

  This is a question that has come up several times for me in the design code, especially libraries. There seems to be some interest in it so I thought it might make a good community wiki. The fail method in Monad is considered by some to be a wart; a somewhat arbitrary addition to the class that does not come from the original category theory. But of course in the current state of things, many Monad types have logical and useful fail instances. The MonadPlus class is a sub-class of Monad that provides an mzero method which logically encapsulates the idea of failure in a monad. So a library designer who wants to write some monadic code that does some sort of failure handling can choose to make his code use the fail method in Monad or restrict his code to the MonadPlus class, just so that he can feel good about using mzero, even though he doesn't care about the monoidal combining mplus operation at all. Some discussions on this subject are in this wiki page about proposals to reform the MonadPlus class. So I guess I have one specific question: What monad instances, if any, have a natural fail method, but cannot be instances of MonadPlus because they have no logical implementation for mplus? But I'm mostly interested in a discussion about this subject. Thanks! EDIT: One final thought occured to me. I recently learned (even though it's right there in the docs for fail) that monadic "do" notation is desugared in such a way that pattern match failures, as in (x:xs) <- return [] call the monad's fail. It seems like the language designers must have been strongly influenced by the prospect of some automatic failure handling built in to haskell's syntax in their inclusion of fail in Monad.

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• Java reflection appropriateness

  - by jsn

  This may be a fairly subjective question, but maybe not. My application contains a bunch of forms that are displayed to the user at different times. Each form is a class of its own. Typically the user clicks a button, which launches a new form. I have a convenience function that builds these buttons, you call it like this: buildButton( "button text", new SelectionAdapter() { @Override public void widgetSelected( SelectionEvent e ) { showForm( new TasksForm( args... ) ); } } ); I do this dozens of times, and it's really cumbersome having to make a SelectionAdapter every time. Really all I need for the button to know is what class to instantiate when it's clicked and what arguments to give the constructor, so I built a function that I call like this instead: buildButton( "button text", TasksForm.class, args... ); Where args is an arbitrary list of objects that you could use to instantiate TasksForm normally. It uses reflection to get a constructor from the class, match the argument list, and build an instance when it needs to. Most of the time I don't have to pass any arguments to the constructor at all. The downside is obviously that if I'm passing a bad set of arguments, it can't detect that at compilation time, so if it fails, a dialog is displayed at runtime. But it won't normally fail, and it'll be easy to debug if it does. I think this is much cleaner because I come from languages where the use of function and class literals is pretty common. But if you're a normal Java programmer, would seeing this freak you out, or would you appreciate not having to scan a zillion SelectionAdapters?

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• Run a command as cron would but from the command line.

  - by BCS

  I have a script that I'm trying to run from cron. When I run it from bash, it work just fine. However when I let cron do it's thing, I get a: myscript.sh: line 122: syntax error: unexpected end of file What I want is a way to run a command as if it was a cron job, but do it in my shell. As a side note: does anyone know what would be differnt under cron? (the script already has a #!/bin/sh line) To answer my own question: I added this to my crontab: * * * * * bcs for ((i=1; i <= 55; i++)) ; do find ~/.crontemp/ -name '*.run' -exec "{}" ";" ; sleep 1; done` and created this script: #!/bin/sh tmp=$(mktemp ~/.crontemp/cron.XXXXX) mknod $tmp.pipe p mv $tmp $tmp.pre echo $* '>' $tmp.pipe '1>&2' >> $tmp.pre echo rm $tmp.run >> $tmp.pre chmod 700 $tmp.pre mv $tmp.pre $tmp.run cat $tmp.pipe rm $tmp.pipe With that, I can run an arbitrary command with a delay of not more than one second. (And yes, I know there are all kinds of security issue involved in that)

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• How can I stop the iPhone from displaying a transform change until after the screen is redrawn

  - by Ed Marty

  I have found the UIScrollView's zooming mechanism to be clunk and essentially unusable. So instead, I'm rolling my own. I have a UIView that resizes itself with the pinch-zoom, and that's working fine. When the zoom is complete, the view needs to reset its transform and redraw the images. The zoom works essentially in the same way the UIScrollView does. It sets the transform property of the UIView until complete. Then, when the zoom finishes, I want to reset the transform to CGAffineTransformIdentity, resize the frame to be the size it was before, and tell the view to redraw itself at the new size. It all works pretty well, except when I change the transform to identity then redraw the image, there is a slight flicker before the image completely redraws. This is due to the fact that I'm using a subclass of CATiledLayer, since the view can be of arbitrary size. I've overridden the fadeDuration to be zero, but there is still a flicker while the transform is reset before the redraw is finished. Is there any simple way to overcome this without creating another view to draw with then replacing it?

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• detecting object-reference duplication across JavaScript files

  - by AnC

  I have a number of files with contents like this: function hello() { ... element1.text = foo.locale.lorem; element2.text = foo.locale.ipsum; ... elementn.text = foo.locale.whatever; ... } function world() { ... var label = bar.options.baz.blah; var toggle = bar.options.baz.use_toggle; ... } This could be written more efficiently, and also be more readable, by creating a shortcut to the locale object: function hello() { var loc = foo.locale; ... element1.text = loc.lorem; element2.text = loc.ipsum; ... elementn.text = loc.whatever; ... } function world() { var options = bar.options.baz; ... var label = options.blah; var toggle = options.use_toggle; ... } Is there a simple way to detect occurrences of such duplication for any arbitrary object (it's not always as simple as "locale", or foo.something)? Basically, I wanna know where lengthy object references appear two or more times within a function. Thanks!

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• Searching Natural Language Sentence Structure

  - by Cerin

  What's the best way to store and search a database of natural language sentence structure trees? Using OpenNLP's English Treebank Parser, I can get fairly reliable sentence structure parsings for arbitrary sentences. What I'd like to do is create a tool that can extract all the doc strings from my source code, generate these trees for all sentences in the doc strings, store these trees and their associated function name in a database, and then allow a user to search the database using natural language queries. So, given the sentence "This uploads files to a remote machine." for the function upload_files(), I'd have the tree: (TOP (S (NP (DT This)) (VP (VBZ uploads) (NP (NNS files)) (PP (TO to) (NP (DT a) (JJ remote) (NN machine)))) (. .))) If someone entered the query "How can I upload files?", equating to the tree: (TOP (SBARQ (WHADVP (WRB How)) (SQ (MD can) (NP (PRP I)) (VP (VB upload) (NP (NNS files)))) (. ?))) how would I store and query these trees in a SQL database? I've written a simple proof-of-concept script that can perform this search using a mix of regular expressions and network graph parsing, but I'm not sure how I'd implement this in a scalable way. And yes, I realize my example would be trivial to retrieve using a simple keyword search. The idea I'm trying to test is how I might take advantage of grammatical structure, so I can weed-out entries with similar keywords, but a different sentence structure. For example, with the above query, I wouldn't want to retrieve the entry associated with the sentence "Checks a remote machine to find a user that uploads files." which has similar keywords, but is obviously describing a completely different behavior.

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• How to change CSS color values in real-time off a javascript slider?

  - by bflora

  I'm making a page where the user gets a javascript slider that goes from 0 to 100 and can use it to set the opacity of a div on the page. I want the opacity of that div to change in real-time as they work the slider. I've not done this before. What's the best approach? There cursor in the slider displays the slider's current value as you move it. It seems to be that I just need to find a way to display that value in any arbitrary other place on the page so I can display it in the style settings for the div. The .js file that generates the slider has a line that (I think) is setting the current value in the cursor: $(this).children(".ui-slider-handle", context).html(parseInt(settings[index]['default'])); TO get this changing number to display somewhere else at the same time, do I just need to add a div somewhere and then add a line like this? $("#newDivId").children(".ui-slider-handle", context).html(parseInt(settings[index]['default'])); That seems like it would give me the number showing up in a div. How then would I get it into a form I could put into the style settings for a div? If this was a php variable, I would do something like this, style="opacity:<?php print $value ?>;" What would be the .js equivalent?

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• What happens to class members when malloc is used instead of new?

  - by Felix

  I'm studying for a final exam and I stumbled upon a curious question that was part of the exam our teacher gave last year to some poor souls. The question goes something like this: Is the following program correct, or not? If it is, write down what the program outputs. If it's not, write down why. The program: #include<iostream.h> class cls { int x; public: cls() { x=23; } int get_x(){ return x; } }; int main() { cls *p1, *p2; p1=new cls; p2=(cls*)malloc(sizeof(cls)); int x=p1->get_x()+p2->get_x(); cout<<x; return 0; } My first instinct was to answer with "the program is not correct, as new should be used instead of malloc". However, after compiling the program and seeing it output 23 I realize that that answer might not be correct. The problem is that I was expecting p2->get_x() to return some arbitrary number (whatever happened to be in that spot of the memory when malloc was called). However, it returned 0. I'm not sure whether this is a coincidence or if class members are initialized with 0 when it is malloc-ed. Is this behavior (p2->x being 0 after malloc) the default? Should I have expected this? What would your answer to my teacher's question be? (besides forgetting to #include <stdlib.h> for malloc :P)

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• Rails Updating Nested Model Collection Select

  - by Timothy

  I have a contrived nested Rails form like the following <% form_for @a do |fa| %> <% fa.fields_for :b do |fb| %> <% fb.fields_for :c do |fc| %> <%= fc.label :option_id %> <%= fc.collection_select :option_id, ModelD.all(:select => "id, name"), :id, :name %> <% end %> <% end %> <% end %> and then somewhere else on the same page I have a remote form <% remote_form_for :modeld, ModelD.new, :url => new_modeld_path, :html => {:method => 'post'} do |f| %> <%= f.label :name %> <%= f.textarea :name %> <%= f.submit "Create" %> <% end %> Is there any way I could update all the collection selects in the first form using Ajax when I submit the second form? There are an arbitrary number of collection selects.

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• Spring MVC: How to get the remaining path after the controller path?

  - by Willis Blackburn

  I've spent over an hour trying to find the answer to this question, which seems like it should reflect a common use case, but I can't figure it out! Basically I am writing a file-serving controller using Spring MVC. The URLs are of the format http://www.bighost.com/serve/the/path/to/the/file.jpg, in which the part after "/serve" is the path to the requested file, which may have an arbitrary number of path segments. I have a controller like this: @Controller class ServerController { @RequestMapping(value = "/serve/???") public void serve(???) { } } What I am trying to figure out is: What do I use in place of "???" to make this work? I have two theories about how this should work. The first theory is that I could replace the first "???" in the RequestMapping with a path variable placeholder that has some special syntax meaning "capture to the end of the path." If a regular placeholder looks like "{path}" then maybe I could use "{path:**}" or "{path:/}" or something like that. Then I could use a @PathVariable annotation to refer to the path variable in the second "???". The other theory is that I could replace the first "???" with "**" (match anything) and that Spring would give me an API to obtain the remainder of the path (the part matching the "**"). But I can't find such an API. Thanks for any help you can provide!

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• is it possible to write a program which prints its own source code utilizing a "sequence-generating-

  - by guest

  is it possible to write a program which prints its own source code utilizing a "sequence-generating-function"? what i call a sequence-generating-function is simply a function which returns a value out of a specific interval (i.e. printable ascii-charecters (32-126)). the point now is, that this generated sequence should be the programs own source-code. as you see, implementing a function which returns an arbitrary sequence is really trivial, but since the returned sequence must contain the implementation of the function itself it is a highly non-trivial task. this is how such a program (and its corresponding output) could look like #include <stdio.h> int fun(int x) { ins1; ins2; ins3; . . . return y; } int main(void) { int i; for ( i=0; i<size of the program; i++ ) { printf("%c", fun(i)); } return 0; } i personally think it is not possible, but since i don't know very much about the underlying matter i posted my thoughts here. i'm really looking forward to hear some opinions!

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• What algorithms compute directions from point A to point B on a map?

  - by A. Rex

  How do map providers (such as Google or Yahoo! Maps) suggest directions? I mean, they probably have real-world data in some form, certainly including distances but also perhaps things like driving speeds, presence of sidewalks, train schedules, etc. But suppose the data were in a simpler format, say a very large directed graph with edge weights reflecting distances. I want to be able to quickly compute directions from one arbitrary point to another. Sometimes these points will be close together (within one city) while sometimes they will be far apart (cross-country). Graph algorithms like Dijkstra's algorithm will not work because the graph is enormous. Luckily, heuristic algorithms like A* will probably work. However, our data is very structured, and perhaps some kind of tiered approach might work? (For example, store precomputed directions between certain "key" points far apart, as well as some local directions. Then directions for two far-away points will involve local directions to a key points, global directions to another key point, and then local directions again.) What algorithms are actually used in practice? PS. This question was motivated by finding quirks in online mapping directions. Contrary to the triangle inequality, sometimes Google Maps thinks that X-Z takes longer and is farther than using an intermediate point as in X-Y-Z. But maybe their walking directions optimize for another parameter, too? PPS. Here's another violation of the triangle inequality that suggests (to me) that they use some kind of tiered approach: X-Z versus X-Y-Z. The former seems to use prominent Boulevard de Sebastopol even though it's slightly out of the way. (Edit: this example doesn't work anymore, but did at the time of the original post. The one above still works as of early November 2009.)

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• Does waitpid yield valid status information for a child process that has already exited?

  - by dtrebbien

  If I fork a child process, and the child process exits before the parent even calls waitpid, then is the exit status information that is set by waitpid still valid? If so, when does it become not valid; i.e., how do I ensure that I can call waitpid on the child pid and continue to get valid exit status information after an arbitrary amount of time, and how do I "clean up" (tell the OS that I am no longer interested in the exit status information for the finished child process)? I was playing around with the following code, and it appears that the exit status information is valid for at least a few seconds after the child finishes, but I do not know for how long or how to inform the OS that I won't be calling waitpid again: #include <assert.h> #include <pthread.h> #include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> #include <unistd.h> #include <sys/wait.h> int main() { pid_t pid = fork(); if (pid < 0) { fprintf(stderr, "Failed to fork\n"); return EXIT_FAILURE; } else if (pid == 0) { // code for child process _exit(17); } else { // code for parent sleep(3); int status; waitpid(pid, &status, 0); waitpid(pid, &status, 0); // call `waitpid` again just to see if the first call had an effect assert(WIFEXITED(status)); assert(WEXITSTATUS(status) == 17); } return EXIT_SUCCESS; }

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• Optimally place a pie slice in a rectangle.

  - by Lisa

  Given a rectangle (w, h) and a pie slice with start angle and end angle, how can I place the slice optimally in the rectangle so that it fills the room best (from an optical point of view, not mathematically speaking)? I'm currently placing the pie slice's center in the center of the rectangle and use the half of the smaller of both rectangle sides as the radius. This leaves plenty of room for certain configurations. Examples to make clear what I'm after, based on the precondition that the slice is drawn like a unit circle: A start angle of 0 and an end angle of PI would lead to a filled lower half of the rectangle and an empty upper half. A good solution here would be to move the center up by 1/4*h. A start angle of 0 and an end angle of PI/2 would lead to a filled bottom right quarter of the rectangle. A good solution here would be to move the center point to the top left of the rectangle and to set the radius to the smaller of both rectangle sides. This is fairly easy for the cases I've sketched but it becomes complicated when the start and end angles are arbitrary. I am searching for an algorithm which determines center of the slice and radius in a way that fills the rectangle best. Pseudo code would be great since I'm not a big mathematician.

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• how can i set up a uniqueness constraint in mysql for columns that can be null?

  - by user299689

  I know that in MySQL, UNIQUE constraits don't treat NULL values as equal. So if I have a unique constraint on ColumnX, then two separate rows can have values of NULL for ColumnX and this wouldn't violate the constraint. How can I work around this? I can't just set the value to an arbitrary constant that I can flag, because ColumnX in my case is actually a foreign key to another table. What are my options here? Please note that this table also has an "id" column that is its primary key. Since I'm using Ruby on Rails, it's important to keep this id column as the primary key. Note 2: In reality, my unique key encompasses many columns, and some of them have to be null, because they are foreign keys, and only one of them should be non-null. What I'm actually trying to do is to "simulate" a polymorphic relationship in a way that keep referential integrity in the db, but using the technique outlined in the first part of the question asked here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/922184/why-can-you-not-have-a-foreign-key-in-a-polymorphic-association

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• Big-O for GPS data

  - by HH

  A non-critical GPS module use lists because it needs to be modifiable, new routes added, new distances calculated, continuos comparisons. Well so I thought but my team member wrote something I am very hard to get into. His pseudo code int k =0; a[][] <- create mapModuleNearbyDotList -array //CPU O(n) for(j = 1 to n) // O(nlog(m)) for(i =1 to n) for(k = 1 to n) if(dot is nearby) adj[i][j]=min(adj[i][j], adj[i][k] + adj[k][j]); His ideas transformations of lists to tables His worst case time complexity is O(n^3), where n is number of elements in his so-called table. Exception to the last point with Finite structure: O(mlog(n)) where n is number of vertices and m is an arbitrary constants Questions about his ideas why to waste resources to transform constantly-modified lists to table? Fast? only point where I to some extent agree but cannot understand the same upper limits n for each for-loops -- perhaps he supposed it circular why does the code take O(mlog(n)) to proceed in time as finite structure? The term finite may be wrong, explicit?

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• How to map combinations of things to a relational database?

  - by Space_C0wb0y

  I have a table whose records represent certain objects. For the sake of simplicity I am going to assume that the table only has one row, and that is the unique ObjectId. Now I need a way to store combinations of objects from that table. The combinations have to be unique, but can be of arbitrary length. For example, if I have the ObjectIds 1,2,3,4 I want to store the following combinations: {1,2}, {1,3,4}, {2,4}, {1,2,3,4} The ordering is not necessary. My current implementation is to have a table Combinations that maps ObjectIds to CombinationIds. So every combination receives a unique Id: ObjectId | CombinationId ------------------------ 1 | 1 2 | 1 1 | 2 3 | 2 4 | 2 This is the mapping for the first two combinations of the example above. The problem is, that the query for finding the CombinationId of a specific Combination seems to be very complex. The two main usage scenarios for this table will be to iterate over all combinations, and the retrieve a specific combination. The table will be created once and never be updated. I am using SQLite through JDBC. Is there any simpler way or a best practice to implement such a mapping?

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• Flexible forms and supporting database structure

  - by sunwukung

  I have been tasked with creating an application that allows administrators to alter the content of the user input form (i.e. add arbitrary fields) - the contents of which get stored in a database. Think Modx/Wordpress/Expression Engine template variables. The approach I've been looking at is implementing concrete tables where the specification is consistent (i.e. user profiles, user content etc) and some generic field data tables (i.e. text, boolean) to store non-specific values. Forms (and model fields) would be generated by first querying the tables and retrieving the relevant columns - although I've yet to think about how I would setup validation. I've taken a look at this problem, and it seems to be indicating an EAV type approach - which, from my brief research - looks like it could be a greater burden than the blessings it's flexibility would bring. I've read a couple of posts here, however, which suggest this is a dangerous route: How to design a generic database whose layout may change over time? Dynamic Database Schema I'd appreciate some advice on this matter if anyone has some to give regards SWK

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• Windows Server 2008 R2 File Permissions

  - by Fly_Trap

  I’m having some problems understanding some particular file permissions behaviour. Here are the steps to reproduce: Log into the server using the default Administrator account Create a text file (testfile.txt) in C:\ProgramData containing some arbitrary text Create a new user account and make it a member of the Administrators group Log in using new account and open C:\ProgramData\testfile.txt Edit the text and try to save Upon clicking save I’m presented with the save as dialog, which indicates that i do not have the necessary permissions to edit the file. This seems odd considering that the new user account is a member of Administrators. When I view the permissions of the file I can see the there are three groups listed, System, Administrators and Users. SYSTEM and Administrators have full permissions, however, Users only has the Read & Execute and Read permissions checked. It would appear that when I open the testfile.txt from the new users account, it opens in the context of the Users group, despite being a member of Administrators, is this correct? It would certainly explain the behaviour. The reason that this is an issue for me is that if I deploy an application via 'Run as Administrator', will normal users be able to edit the text files I install to ProgramData. Is this behaviour confined to Windows server or is it the same in Vista and Win7.

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• How to draw shadows that don't suck?

  - by mystify

  A CAShapeLayer uses a CGPathRef to draw it's stuff. So I have a star path, and I want a smooth drop shadow with a radius of about 15 units. Probably there is some nice functionality in some new iPhone OS versions, but I need to do it myself for a old aged version of 3.0 (which most people still use). I tried to do some REALLY nasty stuff: I created a for-loop and sequentially created like 15 of those paths, transform-scaling them step by step to become bigger. Then assigning them to a new created CAShapeLayer and decreasing it's alpha a little bit on every iteration. Not only that this scaling is mathematically incorrect and sucks (it should happen relative to the outline!), the shadow is not rounded and looks really ugly. That's why nice soft shadows have a radius. The tips of a star shouldn't appear totally sharp after a shadow size of 15 units. They should be soft like cream. But in my ugly solution they're just as s harp as the star itself, since all I do is scale the star 15 times and decrease it's alpha 15 times. Ugly. I wonder how the big guys do it? If you had an arbitrary path, and that path must throw a shadow, how does the algorithm to do that work? Probably the path would have to be expanded like 30 times, point-by-point relative to the tangent of the outline away from the filled part, and just by 0.5 units to have a nice blending. Before I re-invent the wheel, maybe someone has a handy example or link?

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• Is there a general-purpose printf-ish routine defined in any C standard

  - by supercat

  In many C libraries, there is a printf-style routine which is something like the following: int __vgprintf(void *info, (void)(*print_function(void*, char)), const char *format, va_list params); which will format the supplied string and call print_function with the passed-in info value and each character in sequence. A function like fprintf will pass __vgprintf the passed-in file parameter and a pointer to a function which will cast its void* to a FILE* and output the passed-in character to that file. A function like snprintf will create a struct holding a char* and length, and pass the address of that struct to a function which will output each character in sequence, space permitting. Is there any standard for such a function, which could be used if e.g. one wanted a function to output an arbitrary format to a TCP port? A common approach is to allocate a buffer one hopes is big enough, use snprintf to put the data there, and then output the data from the buffer. It would seem cleaner, though, if there were a standard way to to specify that the print formatter should call a user-supplied routine with each character.

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• Mutually beneficial IP/copyright clauses for contract-based freelance work

  - by Nathan de Vries

  I have a copyright section in the contract I give to my clients stating that I retain copyright on any works produced during my work for them as an independent contractor. This is most definitely not intended to place arbitrary restrictions on my clients, but rather to maintain my ability to decide on how the software I create is licensed and distributed. Almost every project I work on results in at least one part of it being released as open source. Every project I work on makes use of third-party software released in the same fashion, so returning the favour is something I would like to continue doing. Unfortunately, the contract is not so clear when it comes to defining the rights of the client in the use of said software. I mention that the code will be licensed to them, but do not mention specifics about exclusivity, ability to produce derivatives etc. As such, a client has raised concerns about the copyright section of my contract, and has suggested that I reword it such that all copyrights are transferred entirely to the client on final payment for the project. This will almost certainly reduce my ability to distribute the software I have created; I would much prefer to find a more mutually beneficial agreement where both our concerns are appeased. Are there any tried and true approaches to licensing software in this kind of situation? To summarise: I want to maintain the ability to license (parts of) the software under my own terms, independently of my relationship with the client; with some guarantee to the client that no trade-secrets or critical business logic will be shared; giving them the ability to re-use my code in their future projects; but not necessarily letting them sell it (I'm not sure about this, though...what happens if they sell their business and the software along with it?) I realise that everyone's feedback is going to be prefixed with "IANAL", however I appreciate any thoughts you might have on the matter.

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