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  • What would be a good filter to create 'magnetic deformers' from a depth map?

    - by sebf
    In my project, I am creating a system for deforming a highly detailed mesh (clothing) so that it 'fits' a convex mesh. To do this I use depth maps of the item and the 'hull' to determine at what point in world space the deviation occurs and the extent. Simply transforming all occluded vertices to the depths as defined by the 'hull' is fairly effective, and has good performance, but it suffers the problem of not preserving the features of the mesh and requires extensive culling to avoid false-positives. I would like instead to generate from the depth deviation map a set of simple 'deformers' which will 'push'* all vertices of the deformed mesh outwards (in world space). This way, all features of the mesh are preserved and there is no need to have complex heuristics to cull inappropriate vertices. I am not sure how to go about generating this deformer set however. I am imagining something like an algorithm that attempts to match a spherical surface to each patch of contiguous deviations within a certain range, but do not know where to start doing this. Can anyone suggest a suitable filter or algorithm for generating deformers? Or to put it another way 'compressing' a depth map? (*Push because its fitting to a convex 'bulgy' humanoid so transforms are likely to be 'spherical' from the POV of the surface.)

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  • What stops HTML5 and JS apps to perform as good as native apps?

    - by Amogh Talpallikar
    From what I understand, HTML is a mark-up language, so is the content of XAML, XIB and whatever Android uses and other native UI development frameworks. JavaScript is a programming language used along with it to handle client side scripting which will include things like event handling, client side validations and anything else C#,Java,Objective-C or C++ do in various such frameworks. There are MVC/MVVM patterns available in form frameworks like Sencha's, Angular etc. We have localStorage in form of both sqlite and key-value store as other frameworks have and you have API specification for almost everything that it missing. Whenever a native UI frameworks has to render UI , it has to parse a similar the markup and render the UI. Question break-down What stops from doing the same in HTML and JS itself ? Instead of having a web-control or browser as a layer in between why can't HTML(along with CSS) and JS be made to perform the same way ? Even if there is a layer,so does .net runtime and JVM are in other cases where C++,C are not being used. So Lets take the case of Android, like Dalvik, why Can't Chromium be another option(along with dalvik and NDK) where HTML does what android markup does and JavaScript is used to do what Java does ? So the Question is, Even if current implementations aren't as good, but theoretically is it possible to get HTML5 based applications to work as other native apps specially on mobile ?

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  • what languages are good selling points on resume? [closed]

    - by Thomas Galvin
    I have a good amount of experience with C# and Java at the moment but after education and whatnot I wish to be able in more than just 2 high-level, comparatively limited languages, and from what I've seen languages like C(++) or PHP are in demand at the moment. I've thought about learning the following: C. Very standard, lightweight and available on everything. However very old and mostly procedural. C++. Standard like C but I've read in some places that it encourages bad programming design and use of dodgy libraries - but similar things have been said about C too so I'll take that with a grain of salt. D. Quite new but looks promising, but will it be relevant or applicable in the future though? PHP. With the internet becoming ever more important I think this might be the one to go with, but the code itself isn't very intuitive. CoffeeScript (or plain JavaScript). With Microsoft's new idea of HTML5+JS for everything under the sun this doesn't look like a bad choice. However things do change and I wish to be primarily a software dev, not web dev. So out of the above list, or any others that you could suggest, what would you say I should begin to focus on? What is your opinion on staying with C#?

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  • Is committing/checking in code everyday a good practice?

    - by ArtB
    I've been reading Martin Fowler's note on Continuous Integration and he lists as a must "Everyone Commits To the Mainline Every Day". I do not like to commit code unless the section I'm working on is complete and that in practice I commit my code every three days: one day to investigate/reproduce the task and make some preliminary changes, a second day to complete the changes, and a third day to write the tests and clean it up^ for submission. I would not feel comfortable submitting the code sooner. Now, I pull changes from the repository and integrate them locally usually twice a day, but I do not commit that often unless I can carve out a smaller piece of work. Question: is committing everyday such a good practice that I should change my workflow to accomodate it, or it is not that advisable? Edit: I guess I should have clarified that I meant "commit" in the CVS meaning of it (aka "push") since that is likely what Fowler would have meant in 2006 when he wrote this. ^ The order is more arbitrary and depends on the task, my point was to illustrate the time span and activities, not the exact sequence.

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  • What are some good courses to take my programming to the next level?

    - by absentx
    I am in search of either some in person, or online training that could take my coding to the next level. I am looking to attack two specific areas: Javascript: While I have been getting by with javascript for three or four years, I still feel like it takes a back seat to my other programming. I use Jquery a lot but would prefer to be proficient in pure JS also. PHP: I feel pretty proficient at PHP but I know there is only room to improve. Here I am interested in something that can teach me the more advanced aspects of the language, improve my code writing and perhaps cover object oriented php in depth also. I have looked into Netcom's training courses before but I can't tell if there advanced webmaster professional would be a good fit or not. Seems kind of like a force fed course but I am interested in it because I am looking for something in the one to two week range that is targeted at what I am looking for. I have zero experience with any type of online courses in terms of programming. It appears lots are available, but I am not sure on the quality.

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  • What are some good resources for creating a game engine in XNA?

    - by Glasser
    I'm currently a student game programmer working on an indie project. We have a team of eleven people (five programmers, four artists, and two audio designers) aboard, all working hard to help design this game. We've been meeting for months now and so far we have a pretty buffed out Game Design Document as well as much audio/visual concept art. Our programmers are itching to progress on our own end. Each person in our programming team is well versed in C++, but is very familiar with C#. We have enough experience and skill that we're confident that we will be successful with our game, and we're looking to build our own game engine in XNA as it seems like it would be worth our time and effort in the end. The game itself will be a 2D beat 'em up style game to be released over xbox live and the PC. It's play style will be similar to that of Castle Crashers or Scott Pilgrim vs The World. We want to design the game engine to allow us to better implement our assets into the game as well as to simplify the creation of design elements/mechanics. Currently between our programmers, we have books such as "XNA 4.0" and "Game Coding Complete, Third Edition," but we'd still like more information on both XNA and (especially) building a game engine from scratch. What are any other good books, websites, or resources we could use to further map out and program our game engine?

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  • Install a i386 printer driver into an amd64 distribution or how can I find a good printer based on features?

    - by Yanick Rochon
    Hi, I just bought a Lexmark Interpret S408 all-in-one printer. The box said that it supported Ubuntu 8.04, but I told myself it should work with Lucid... well no. The only driver I have found is for i386 while I have a amd64 image installed; the architecture is incompatible. So, the quesiton is : Is it possible to install that driver anyway, somehow? Or do I need to take that printer back to the store and buy another one? If the latter is the only alternative, I need a printer that has wireless connection capability can do color printing is of good price (less than $200 CAD) Thank you for your answers, help, and tips. ** UPDATE ** The driver was given in the form of deb package (for Debian distributions) and I managed to extract the actual deb package driver out of the install program. I ran sudo dpkg -i --force-all lexmark-inkjet-09-driver-1.5-1.i386.deb and the driver installed, and I was able to print something out. But that pretty much ends there; I cannot access anymore of the printer settings, etc. (i.g. scanner, fax, wifi settings, etc.) I should suffice for now as I'm satisfied with the printer's features (and size, and prince), but if I could have a full-linux-supported printer like that one, I would return this one in exchange for the other.

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  • Is it a good programming practice to have a class with several .h files?

    - by Jim Thio
    I suppose the class have several different interfaces. Some it shows to some class, some it shows to other classes. Are there any good reason for that? One thing I can think of is with one .h per class, interface would either be public or private. What about if I want some interface to be available to some friends' class and some interface to be truly public? Sample: @interface listNewController:BadgerStandardViewViewController <UITableViewDelegate,UITableViewDataSource,UITextFieldDelegate,NSFetchedResultsControllerDelegate,UIScrollViewDelegate,UIGestureRecognizerDelegate> { } @property (nonatomic) IBOutlet NSFetchedResultsController *FetchController; @property (nonatomic) IBOutlet UITextField *searchBar1; @property (nonatomic) IBOutlet UITableView *tableViewA; + (listNewController *) singleton; //For Easier Access -(void)collapseAll; -(void)TitleViewClicked:(TitleView *) theTitleView; -(NSUInteger) countOfEachSection:(NSInteger)section; @end Many of those public properties and function are only ever called by just one other classes. I wonder why I need to make them available to many classes. It's in Objective-c by the way

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  • Is Akka a good solution for a concurrent pipeline/workflow problem?

    - by herpylderp
    Disclaimer: I am brand new to Akka and the concept of Actors/Event-Driven Architectures in general. I have to implement a fairly complex problem where users can configure a "concurrent pipeline": Pipeline: consists of 1+ Stages; all Stages execute sequentially Stage: consists of 1+ Tasks; all Tasks execute in parallel Task: essentially a Java Runnable As you can see above, a Task is a Runnable that does some unit of work. Tasks are organized into Stages, which execute their Tasks in parallel. Stages are organized into the Pipeline, which executes its Stages sequentially. Hence if a user specifies the following Pipeline: CrossTheRoadSafelyPipeline Stage 1: Look Left Task 1: Turn your head to the left and look for cars Task 2: Listen for cars Stage 2: Look right Task 1: Turn your head to the right and look for cars Task 2: Listen for cars Then, Stage 1 will execute, and then Stage 2 will execute. However, while each Stage is executing, it's individual Tasks are executing in parallel/at the same time. In reality Pipelines will become very complicated, and with hundreds of Stages, dozens of Tasks per Stage (again, executing at the same time). To implement this Pipeline I can only think of several solutions: ESB/Apache Camel Guava Event Bus Java 5 Concurrency Actors/Akka Camel doesn't seem right because its core competency is integration not synchrony and orchestration across worker threads. Guava is great, but this doesn't really feel like a subscriber/publisher-type of problem. And Java 5 Concurrency (ExecutorService, etc.) just feels too low-level and painful. So I ask: is Akka a strong candidate for this type of problem? If so, how? If not, then why, and what is a good candidate?

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  • What would be a good opensource software for graphing circles, circular regions, and regions bounded by curves and/or arcs?

    - by Michael Dykes
    Hullo all. I have just started s job with Chegg, and my 1st assignment has me writign solutions for Stewart's Essential Calculus. I am dealing with the chapter on multiple integration, and need a good open-source software that I can easily use to draw regions (domains) that would require multiple integrals: i.e. circular regions, portions of circles, regions bounded by curves and/or arcs, and at some point 3D pictures. In most of these cases, I am not working with an exact equation or perhaps need to draw the region bounded by r (radius) between 1 and 2, and the angle theta bounded between pi/4 and 3 pi/4. I am not too terribly familiar with programs like Corel Draw, but the documents I have from this company suggest Corel Draw. So I think I am looking for an open-source free program like Corel Draw or something similar. Any additional suggestions would also be appreciated. I know I can do most, if not all of this using TikZ, but the learning curve is a bit steep, and at the moment I an on a time constraint. Thanks.

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  • Book Giveaway: We Have 10 Free Copies of the 4-Hour Chef (The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, Learning Anything, and Living the Good Life)

    - by The Geek
    The 4-Hour Chef isn’t just a cookbook. It’s a choose-your-own-adventure guide to the world of rapid learning from the best-selling author of the 4-Hour Workweek, and we’ve got 10 free copies for How-To Geek readers. Want more information? Here’s the description of the book, from the Amazon page. The 4-Hour Chef is a five-stop journey through the art and science of learning: 1. META-LEARNING. Before you learn to cook, you must learn to learn. META charts the path to doubling your learning potential. 2. THE DOMESTIC. DOM is where you learn the building blocks of cooking. These are the ABCs (techniques) that can take you from Dr, Seuss to Shakespeare. 3. THE WILD. Becoming a master student requires self-sufficiency in all things. WILD teaches you to hunt, forage, and survive. 4. THE SCIENTIST. SCI is the mad scientist and modernist painter wrapped into one. This is where you rediscover whimsy and wonder. 5. THE PROFESSIONAL. Swaraj, a term usually associated with Mahatma Gandhi, can be translated as “self-rule.” In PRO, we’ll look at how the best in the world become the best in the world, and how you can chart your own path far beyond this book. Still not sold? There’s more information and pictures over on the Amazon page for the book. The 4-Hour Chef: The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, Learning Anything, and Living the Good Life Why Your Android Phone Isn’t Getting Operating System Updates and What You Can Do About It How To Delete, Move, or Rename Locked Files in Windows HTG Explains: Why Screen Savers Are No Longer Necessary

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  • What are some good ways for an intermediate programmer to build skills?

    - by Jordan
    Preface: I work mostly in Python, and Web Dev languages (HTML, CSS, Javascript and Jquery, PHP) I'm proficient at coding but I want to get better. In larger more advanced projects my programming skills break down. The more code there is the more trouble I have fitting all the pieces together. I understand syntax well, and I can catch and correct errors fairly easier. But the more advanced it gets the more I struggle. I believe I have a good understand of the basic and nuts and bolts of programming and I understand what's going on, but when it comes to larger projects, especially ones with heavy math involved my confidence flags and I start making mistakes. It's not that I can't do it, I'm just not used to doing it. Does anyone have any advice for someone who knows programming, but wants to get better? The only tutorials I can really find are beginner basic type stuff. Basically what I'm saying is I want to be confident when I'm tackling advanced projects, but I can't because I have little experience dealing with difficult situations.

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  • Is having a single `IndexWriter` instance in Lucene a good idea?

    - by Dragos
    I am trying to understand how Lucene should be used. From what I have read, creating an IndexReader is costly, so using a Search Manager shoulg be the right choice. However, a SearchManager should be produced by a NRTManager(which, by the way, should replace the IndexWriter for every add or delete operation performed). But in order to have a NRTManager, I should first have an IndexWriter, and here comes my problem. The documentation says: an IndexWriter is thread-safe the constructor of this class takes a Directory object, so it seems creating an instace should be costly(as in the case of an IndexReader) all changes are buffered and flushed periodically(so they seem to encourage using a single instance) but: the changes, although flushed will only be visible after commit or close after finished making updates(add/delete), the instance should be closed I also found this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5374419/forgot-to-close-the-lucene-indexwriter-after-adding-documents-to-the-index where it is said that not closing a writer might ruin everything So what am I really supposed to do? Is having a single IndexWriter instance a good idea (make only commit and never close it)? EDIT: What is more, if I use NRTManager, how can I make acommit`? Is it even possible?

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  • Whats a good host for an active vBulletin site?

    - by Kyle
    I've been switching hosts using a VPS each time and I'm just really not sure I'm finding the right VPS's. I've used a VPS from burst.net & rubyringtech and I just feel like it's slowly killing my site because of the slow speed. I really don't know if it's the network or the VPS itself but I really wish to fix this. When I TOP into the VPS peak times it shows this: top - 03:18:56 up 16:33, 1 user, load average: 1.33, 1.40, 1.33 Tasks: 30 total, 1 running, 29 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu(s): 27.2%us, 13.6%sy, 0.0%ni, 59.2%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Mem: 1048576k total, 679712k used, 368864k free, 0k buffers Swap: 0k total, 0k used, 0k free, 0k cached And pages take atleast a good 2-3 minutes to load. I have only like 50-60 members on the forum also. I had a shared hosting account and the forum was lightning fast.... Is a VPS a bad idea? :\ What should I do to fix this? I'm running lighttpd with xcache, and the latest mysql + php version. The server is a intel i7 2600 w/ 1gb uplink (I think the 1gb uplink is a lie because I've tested the network and the highest download speed I've seen was 20mb/s from a code.google page) All in all I've seen people talking about linode. Should I try them? I honestly don't need a dedicated server yet it's only 50-70 members online. What should I do? I really want a VPS because I enjoy root access. Does anyone have any suggestions?

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  • How to build a good service layer in ASP.NET?

    - by Swippen
    I have looked through some questions, technologies for building a good service layer but I have some questions regarding this that I need help with. First some information of what I have for requirements. We currently have a number of web applications that talk to each other in a spiderweb looking way (all talking to each other in a confusing way via webservices and database data). We want to change this so that all applications go through a service layer where we can work more with cache and encapsulate common functionality and more. We want this layer to also have a Web API so that 3rd party clients can consume information from the service. The problem I see is that if we build the service layer with say MVC4 Web API don't we need to communicate between the application using the webAPI meaning we have to construct URLs and consume JSON/Xml. That does not sound too effective. I assume a better method would be working with entities and WCF to communicate between the application but then we might loose the Web API magic? So the question is if there is a way to consume a service layer as both a Web API (JSON/XML) and as a more backend service layer with entities. If we are forced to use 2 different service layers we might have to duplicate some functionality and other bad things. Hope the question is clear enough and please ask if you need any more information.

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  • what's a good approach to working with multiple databases?

    - by Riz
    I'm working on a project that has its own database call it InternalDb, but also it queries two other databases, call them ExternalDb1 and ExternalDb2. Both ExternalDb1 and ExternalDb2 are actually required by a few other projects. I'm wondering what the best approach for dealing with this is? Currently, I've just created a project for each of these external databases and then generated Edmx and entities using the entity-framework approach. My thought was that I could then include these projects in any of my solutions that require access to these databases. Also, I don't have any separate business layers. I just have a solution like below: Project.Domain ExternalDb1Project.Domain ExternalDb2Project.Domain Project.Web So my Domain projects contain the data access as well as the POCOs generated by Entity Framework and any business logic. But I'm not sure if this is a good approach. For example if I want to do Validation in my Project.Domain on the entities in the InternalDb, it's fine. But if I want to do Validation for entities from either of the ExternalDbs, then I wonder where it should go? To be more specific, I retrieve Employees from ExternalDb1Project.Domain. However, I want to make sure they are Active. Where should this Validation go? How to architect a project like this at a high level? Also, I want to make sure that I use IoC for my data contexts so I can create Fakes when writing tests. I wonder where the interfaces for these various data contexts would reside?

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  • Is it a good idea to dynamically position and size controls on a form or statically set them?

    - by CrystalBlue
    I've worked mostly with interface building tools such as xCode's Interface Builder and Visual Studio's environment to place forms and position them on screens. But I'm finding that with my latest project, placing controls on the form through a graphical interface is not going to work. This more has to do with the number of custom controls I have to create that I can't visually see before hand. When I first tackled this, I began to position all of my controls relative to the last ones that I created. Doing this had its own pros and cons. On the one hand, this gave me the opportunity to set one number (a margin for example) and when I changed the margin, the controls all sized correctly to one another (such as shortening controls in the center while keeping controls next to the margin the same). But this started to become a spiders-web of code that I knew wouldn't go very far before getting dangerous. Change one number and everything re sizes, but remove one control and you've created many more errors and size problems for all the other controls. It became more surgery then small changes to controls and layout. Is there a good way or maybe a preferred way to determine when I should be using relative or absolute positioning in forms?

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  • Isn't Java a quite good choice for desktop applications?

    - by tactoth
    At present most applications are still developed with C++, painfully. Lack of portability, in compatible libraries, memory leaks, slow compilation, and poor productivity. Even if you pick only a single from these shortages, it's still a big headache. However the surprising truth is that C++ remains the first choice for desktop applications. Compared to C++ Java has lots of advantages. The success in server side development shows that the language itself is good, Swing is also thought to be as programmer friendly as the highly recognized QT framework (No, never say even a single word about MFC!). All the disadvantages of C++ listed above has a solution in Java. "Performance!", Well that might still be the problem but to my experience it's a slight problem. I'd been using Java to decode some screen video and generate key frames. The video has a duration of more than 1 hour. The time spent on an average machine is just 1 minute. With C++ I don't expect even faster speed. In recent days there are many news on the JIT performance improvements, that make us feel Java is gradually becoming very suitable for desktop development, without people realizing it. Isn't it?

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  • Any good reason to open files in text mode?

    - by Tinctorius
    (Almost-)POSIX-compliant operating systems and Windows are known to distinguish between 'binary mode' and 'text mode' file I/O. While the former mode doesn't transform any data between the actual file or stream and the application, the latter 'translates' the contents to some standard format in a platform-specific manner: line endings are transparently translated to '\n' in C, and some platforms (CP/M, DOS and Windows) cut off a file when a byte with value 0x1A is found. These transformations seem a little useless to me. People share files between computers with different operating systems. Text mode would cause some data to be handled differently across some platforms, so when this matters, one would probably use binary mode instead. As an example: while Windows uses the sequence CR LF to end a line in text mode, UNIX text mode will not treat CR as part of the line ending sequence. Applications would have to filter that noise themselves. Older Mac versions only use CR in text mode as line endings, so neither UNIX nor Windows would understand its files. If this matters, a portable application would probably implement the parsing by itself instead of using text mode. Implementing newline interpretation in the parser might also remove some overhead of using text mode, as buffers would need to be rewritten (and possibly resized) before returning to the application, while this may be less efficient than when it would happen in the application instead. So, my question is: is there any good reason to still rely on the host OS to translate line endings and file truncation?

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  • Is it a good practice to create a list of definitions for all symbols and words in a programming language?

    - by MrDaniel
    After arriving at this point in Learning Python The Hard Way I am wondering if this is a good practice to create a list of symbols and define what they do as noted in bold below, for every programming language. This seems reasonable, and might be very useful to have when jumping between programming languages? Is this something that programmers do or is it just a waste of effort? Exercise 22: What Do You Know So Far? There won't be any code in this exercise or the next one, so there's no WYSS or Extra Credit either. In fact, this exercise is like one giant Extra Credit. I'm going to have you do a form of review what you have learned so far. First, go back through every exercise you have done so far and write down every word and symbol (another name for 'character') that you have used. Make sure your list of symbols is complete. Next to each word or symbol, write its name and what it does. If you can't find a name for a symbol in this book, then look for it online. If you do not know what a word or symbol does, then go read about it again and try using it in some code. You may run into a few things you just can't find out or know, so just keep those on the list and be ready to look them up when you find them. Once you have your list, spend a few days rewriting the list and double checking that it's correct. This may get boring but push through and really nail it down. Once you have memorized the list and what they do, then you should step it up by writing out tables of symbols, their names, and what they do from memory. When you hit some you can't recall from memory, go back and memorize them again.

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  • Is this JS code a good way for defining class with private methods?

    - by tigrou
    I was recently browsing a open source JavaScript project. The project is a straight port from another project in C language. It mostly use static methods, packed together in classes. Most classes are implemented using this pattern : Foo = (function () { var privateField = "bar"; var publicField = "bar";     function publicMethod() { console.log('this is public');     } function privateMethod() { console.log('this is private'); } return {   publicMethod : publicMethod, publicField : publicField }; })(); This was the first time I saw private methods implemented that way. I perfectly understand how it works, using a anonymous method. Here is my question : is this pattern a good practice ? What are the actual limitations or caveats ? Usually i declare my JavaScript classes like that : Foo = new function () { var privateField = "test"; this.publicField = "test";     this.publicMethod = function()     { console.log('this method is public'); privateMethod();     } function privateMethod() { console.log('this method is private'); } }; Other than syntax, is there any difference with the pattern show above ?

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  • What's a good algorithm for a random, uneven distribution of a fixed amount of a resource?

    - by NickC
    Problem I have X, a positive integer, of some resource, R. There are N potential targets. I want to distribute all of R to the N targets in some "interesting" way. "Interesting" means: Some targets may not get any R. It should rarely be near even (with a majority of target getting near X/N of the resource). There should be at least a small chance of one target getting all of R. Bad solutions The naive approach would be to pick a random target and give one R to it and repeat X times. This would result in too even of an approach. The next idea is to pick a random number between 1 and X and give it to a random target. This results in too large of a number (at least X/2 on average) being given to one target. Question This algorithm will be used frequently and I want the distribution to be interesting and uneven so that the surprise doesn't wear off for users. Is there a good algorithm for something in between these two approaches, that fits the definition of interesting above?

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  • Do I have to change my company to make sure I'm good enough? [closed]

    - by superM
    I have been working as a developer since my fourth year of university until now. I'm getting my master's degree next year (in math modeling). I've worked for the same company all the time, first on .Net, then on Android, and now .Net again. It seems I'm doing quite well in my current company. Some of my coursemates have tried to work in my company, but they failed after some time. This (and not only this) makes me think that I'm really worth something. But we're working on a very specific project. I was wondering if I am good enough and if I can make it in another company. I love my current job, but sometimes I have a feeling that I'm not moving on. So, is it possible to keep improving when working at the same company with the same technology and at similar tasks? I know that most of the programmers go from one place to another very frequently. Is it the only way?

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  • Is the Joel Test really a good gauging tool?

    - by henry
    I just learned about the Joel Test. I have been computer programmer for 22 years, but somehow I never heard about it before. I consider my best job so far to be this small investment managing company with 30 employees and only three people in the IT department. I am no longer with them, but I had being working there for five years – my longest streak with any given company. To my surprise they scored extremely poor on the Joel Test. The only two questions I would answer “yes” are #4: Do you have a bug database? And #9: Do you use the best tools money can buy? Everything else is either “sometimes” or straight “no”. Here is what I liked about the company however: Good pay. They bragged about it to my face, and I bragged about it to their face, so it was almost like a family environment. I always knew the big picture. When writing code to solve a particular problem there were no ambiguity about the business nature of that problem. Even though we did not always had written specifications we could ask business users a question anytime, often yelling it across the floor. I could even talk to executives any time I felt like doing it: no appointment necessary. Immediate feedback. Once we implement a solution and make business users happy they immediately let us know that, we (programmers) become heroes of the moment. No red tape. I could always buy any tools I deemed necessary, and design solutions the way my professional judgment dictates. Flexibility. If I had mid-day dental appointment that is near my house rather than near the office, I would send email to the company: "FYI: I work from home today". As long as one of three IT guys was on the floor (to help traders in case their monitors go dark) they did not care where two others were. So the question thus becomes: How valuable is the Joel Test? Why bother with it?

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  • How can a solo programmer become a good team player?

    - by Nick
    I've been programming (obsessively) since I was 12. I am fairly knowledgeable across the spectrum of languages out there, from assembly, to C++, to Javascript, to Haskell, Lisp, and Qi. But all of my projects have been by myself. I got my degree in chemical engineering, not CS or computer engineering, but for the first time this fall I'll be working on a large programming project with other people, and I have no clue how to prepare. I've been using Windows all of my life, but this project is going to be very unix-y, so I purchased a Mac recently in the hopes of familiarizing myself with the environment. I was fortunate to participate in a hackathon with some friends this past year -- both CS majors -- and excitingly enough, we won. But I realized as I worked with them that their workflow was very different from mine. They used Git for version control. I had never used it at the time, but I've since learned all that I can about it. They also used a lot of frameworks and libraries. I had to learn what Rails was pretty much overnight for the hackathon (on the other hand, they didn't know what lexical scoping or closures were). All of our code worked well, but they didn't understand mine, and I didn't understand theirs. I hear references to things that real programmers do on a daily basis -- unit testing, code reviews, but I only have the vaguest sense of what these are. I normally don't have many bugs in my little projects, so I have never needed a bug tracking system or tests for them. And the last thing is that it takes me a long time to understand other people's code. Variable naming conventions (that vary with each new language) are difficult (__mzkwpSomRidicAbbrev), and I find the loose coupling difficult. That's not to say I don't loosely couple things -- I think I'm quite good at it for my own work, but when I download something like the Linux kernel or the Chromium source code to look at it, I spend hours trying to figure out how all of these oddly named directories and files connect. It's a programming sin to reinvent the wheel, but I often find it's just quicker to write up the functionality myself than to spend hours dissecting some library. Obviously, people who do this for a living don't have these problems, and I'll need to get to that point myself. Question: What are some steps that I can take to begin "integrating" with everyone else? Thanks!

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