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• Getting into game/game engine programming

  - by Darkslash

  So I am interested in learning game programming, but I really have an interest in the lower level engineering in games. I have openGL experience, and I am really interested in learning more about implementing AI, Physics, etc. I have a computer science degree, so I really like getting into technical stuff. Many times when I ask about this sort of thing, I get a lot of "Use an engine", "Use Unity3d", "Why waste your time writing code that already exists", etc etc. My idea was to use simpler libraries such as SFML or XNA so that I could learn how to implement the more complex systems. The thing is, although I do want to write games, I want to learn things that using something like Unity simply doesnt teach you. My goal is not to make a current generation quality 3D game to sell, I just want to make some cool smaller games and learn all I can about the programming side of game development. Is this something that people just do not do anymore? It seems like everywhere I turn people are using Unity or UDK or GameMaker. I fully understand why you would use a tool like these, but I cant see how they would suit my purposes. So where does someone like myself turn? Am I trying to learn something that people just do not bother doing anymore? Is the innovation in this area gone and just all about gameplay now? Im sorry if this question seems silly, but I am genuinely interested in knowing more about this and meeting more people who are interested in this sort of thing.

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• Colour coding of the status bar in SQL Server Management Studio - Oh dear

  - by simonsabin

  The new feature in SQL Server 2008 to have your query window status bar colour coded to the server you are on is great. Its a nice way to distinguish production from development servers. Unfortunately it was pointed out to me by a client recently that it doesn't always work. To me that sort of makes it pointless. Its a bit like having breaks that work some of the time. Are you going to place Russian roulette every time you execute the query. Whats more the colour doesn't change if you change the connection. So you can flip between dev and production servers but your status bar stays the colour you set for the dev server. It really annoys me to find features that sort of work. The reason I initially gave up on SQLPrompt was that it didn't work 100% of the time and for that time it didn't work I wasted so much time trying to get it to work I wasted more time than if I didn't have it. (I will say that was 2-3 years ago). If you would like to use this feature but aren't because of these features please vote on these bugs. https://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/details/504418/ssms-make-color-coding-of-query-windows-work-all-the-time https://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/details/361832/update-status-bar-colour-when-changing-connections  

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• Alternative to Game State System?

  - by Ricket

  As far as I can tell, most games have some sort of "game state system" which switches between the different game states; these might be things like "Intro", "MainMenu", "CharacterSelect", "Loading", and "Game". On the one hand, it totally makes sense to separate these into a state system. After all, they are disparate and would otherwise need to be in a large switch statement, which is obviously messy; and they certainly are well represented by a state system. But at the same time, I look at the "Game" state and wonder if there's something wrong about this state system approach. Because it's like the elephant in the room; it's HUGE and obvious but nobody questions the game state system approach. It seems silly to me that "Game" is put on the same level as "Main Menu". Yet there isn't a way to break up the "Game" state. Is a game state system the best way to go? Is there some different, better technique to managing, well, the "game state"? Is it okay to have an intro state which draws a movie and listens for enter, and then a loading state which loops on the resource manager, and then the game state which does practically everything? Doesn't this seem sort of unbalanced to you, too? Am I missing something?

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• Bash script using eyeD3 to remove extra tags from mp3 files

  - by jaguare22

  I found what looks like the perfect script for this but getting errors. Hoping someone can see problem. I am running 12.04 Server. Error is - awk: line 0: regular expression compile failed (missing '(') ): awk: line 0: regular expression compile failed (missing '(') ) The following tags have been found in the mp3s: These tags are to be stripped: Here is a the script obtained from savvyadmin !/bin/bash Script name: strip-tags.sh Original Author: Ian of DarkStarShout Blog Site: http://darkstarshout.blogspot.com/ Options slightly modified to liking of SavvyAdmin.com oktags="TALB APIC TCON TPE1 TPE2 TPE3 TIT2 TRCK TYER TCOM TPOS" indexfile=mktemp Determine tags present: find . -iname "*.mp3" -exec eyeD3 --no-color -v {} \; $indexfile tagspresent=sort -u $indexfile | awk -F\): '/^<.*$/ {print $1}' \ | uniq | awk -F\)\> '{print $1}' | awk -F\( '{print $(NF)}' \ | awk 'BEGIN {ORS=" "} {print $0}' rm $indexfile Determine tags to strip: tostrip=echo -n $tagspresent $oktags $oktags \ | awk 'BEGIN {RS=" "; ORS="\n"} {print $0}' | sort | uniq -u \ | awk 'BEGIN {ORS=" "} {print $0}' Confirm action: echo echo The following tags have been found in the mp3s: echo $tagspresent echo These tags are to be stripped: echo $tostrip echo echo -n Press enter to confirm, or Ctrl+C to cancel... read dummy Strip 'em stripstring=echo $tostrip \ | awk 'BEGIN {FS="\n"; RS=" "} {print "--set-text-frame=" $1 ": "}' First pass copies any v1.x tags to v2.3 and strips unwanted tag data. Second pass removes v1.x tags, since I don't like to use them. Without --no-tagging-time-frame, a new unwanted tag is added. :-) find . -iname "*.mp3" \ -exec eyeD3 --to-v2.3 --no-tagging-time-frame $stripstring {} \; \ -exec eyeD3 --remove-v1 --no-tagging-time-frame {} \; echo "Script complete!"

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• Suitability of ground fog using layered alpha quads?

  - by Nick Wiggill

  A layered approach would use a series of massive alpha-textured quads arranged parallel to the ground, intersecting all intervening terrain geometry, to provide the illusion of ground fog quite effectively from high up, looking down, and somewhat less effectively when inside the fog and looking toward the horizon (see image below). Alternatively, a shader-heavy approach would instead calculate density as function of view distance into the ground fog substrate, and output the fragment value based on that. Without having to performance-test each approach myself, I would like first to hear others' experiences (not speculation!) on what sort of performance impact the layered alpha texture approach is likely to have. I ask specifically due to the oft-cited impacts of overdraw (not sure how fill-rate bound your average desktop system is). A list of games using this approach, particularly older games, would be immensely useful: if this was viable on pre DX9/OpenGL2 hardware, it is likely to work fine for me. One big question is in regards to this sort of effect: (Image credit goes to Lume of lume.com) Notice how the vertical fog gradation is continuous / smooth. OTOH, using textured quad layers, I can only assume that layers would be mighty obvious when walking through them -- the more sparse they were, the more obvious this would be. This is in contrast to where fog planes are aligned to face the player every frame, where this coarseness would be much less obvious.

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• Microsoft Researchers shows off best Touch Screen ever made. Better than Apple touch screens!

  - by Gopinath

  All the touch devices we have in market today like iPads, iPhones, Samsung tablets and phones, etc.  have a very small issue – 100 milliseconds of lag. The lag is the amount of time a touch device takes to respond after you touch the device. The 100 milliseconds of lag may not be an issue when you are tapping and swapping the interface elements on a device, but they are apparent when you wing your finger around the screen faster. For example if you use any painting app, the lag is very obvious and screen responds slowly than an artist can paint with his finger. Researchers at Microsoft labs came out with a prototype of touch device that drastically cuts down the 100 milliseconds of lag time to just 1 millisecond. That’s 100 times faster than today’s touch screen devices. Check out the video embedded below for a demo of new touch screen. Over at TechCrunch, Chris Velazco says: The difference is staggering, especially when Dietz trots out the slow-motion footage. With the delay between touch input and screen response slashed by orders of magnitude, a device that sports the sort of super-low-latency Dietz envisions has the potential to feel far more (for lack of a better term) natural than its brethren. There’s zero delay when you slide a checker across a board, for example, and bringing that sort of instantaneous feedback to the many screens in our lives could help to bridge the gap between operating a bit of software and the feeling of interacting with objects.   It will be great boost to Microsoft’s tablet strategy if they succeed in bringing this research into mass market and allow it’s partners to use the technology on Windows 8 tablets.

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• Where should SQL/DB Queries be encapsulated in a software system?

  - by Stephen Bennet

  I frequently write small applications (either web based or otherwise) that require heavy database usage. i've attempted various ways of handling where to put the actual sql queries (sort of ad-hoc ORM systems). These include: Models that build themselves up - and only allowing SQL to be inside of a model. A sort of factory style method where the models are built by a factory class that is allowed to know about SQL. A third entity that maps models based on their fields/keys into the database and generates SQL code on the fly based on this. Is there a common knowledge of which method is best? Or another way I have missed? Clearly a lot of it will be based on the context of the system itself, which for me is usually to produce lightweight tools or utility frameworks. In experimenting, I've never found any of them that feel intuitively "right" and not clunky, but I also do not want to go for a full framework such as Django or Ruby - both because the tools I create are in a variety of languages and because they usually do not warrant that level of surrounding footprint.

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• Pathfinding and BSP with Box2D

  - by Amplify91

  I'm looking into implementing AI in my 2D side-scrolling platformer, and I'm looking into using algorithms such as A*. For many kinds of pathfinding, we need some sort of grid or systems of nodes or polygon areas. My problem is that I am using Box2d for physics and I am not sure how best to create a structure that my AI can use besides placing individual nodes manually (something I really want to avoid) and using some sort of steering behavior. My level design is tile-based with each tile being about half of the height/width of my main character. The tiles are not all square (some are sloped). I'd like to have a system that can see what the terrain looks like for pathfinding and also keep track of the positions of other actors such as enemies. I'd like to avoid directly placing any nodes into my level design except for possible endpoints or goals. This question is related: How do you do AI path following within a 2d physics engine like farseer/box2d?, but it doesn't specify what kind of structure I could use instead of a list of nodes. I'm looking for some kind of grid or type of BSP that I can query for algorithms like A*.

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• How can I rank teams based off of head to head wins/losses

  - by TMP

  I'm trying to write an algorithm (specifically in Ruby) that will rank teams based on their record against each other. If a team A and team B have won the same amount of games against each other, then it goes down to point differentials. Here's an example: A beat B two times B beats C one time A beats D three times C bests D two times D beats C one time B beats A one time Which sort of reduces to A[B] = 2 B[C] = 1 A[D] = 3 C[D] = 2 D[C] = 1 B[A] = 1 Which sort of reduces to A[B] = 1 B[C] = 1 A[D] = 3 C[D] = 1 D[C] = -1 B[A] = -1 Which is about how far I've got I think the results of this specific algorithm would be: A, B, C, D But I'm stuck on how to transition from my nested hash-like structure to the results. My psuedo-code is as follows (I can post my ruby code too if someone wants): For each game(g): hash[g.winner][g.loser] += 1 That leaves hash as the first reduction above hash2 = clone of hash For each key(winner), value(losers hash) in hash: For each key(loser), value(losses against winner): hash2[loser][winner] -= losses Which leaves hash2 as the second reduction Feel free to as me question or edit this to be more clear, I'm not sure of how to put it in a very eloquent way. Thanks!

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• Static "LoD" hack opinions

  - by David Lively

  I've been playing with implementing dynamic level of detail for rendering a very large mesh in XNA. It occurred to me that (duh) the whole point of this is to generate small triangles close to the camera, and larger ones far away. Given that, rather than constantly modifying or swapping index buffers based on a feature's rendered size or distance from the camera, it would be a lot easier (and potentially quite a bit faster), to render a single "fan" or flat wedge/frustum-shaped planar mesh that is tessellated into small triangles close to the near or small end of the frustum and larger ones at the far end, sort of like this (overhead view) (Pardon the gap in the middle - I drew one side and mirrored it) The triangle sizes are chosen so that all are approximately the same size when projected. Then, that mesh would be transformed to track the camera so that the Z axis (center vertical in this image) is always aligned with the view direction projected into the XZ plane. The vertex shader would then read terrain heights from a height texture and adjust the Y coordinate of the mesh to match a height field that defines the terrain. This eliminates the need for culling (since the mesh is generated to match the viewport dimensions) and the need to modify the index and/or vertex buffers when drawing the terrain. Obviously this doesn't address terrain with overhangs, etc, but that could be handled to a certain extent by including a second mesh that defines a sort of "ceiling" via a different texture. The other LoD schemes I've seen aren't particularly difficult to implement and, in some cases, are a lot more flexible, but this seemed like a decent quick-and-dirty way to handle height map-based terrain without getting into geometry manipulation. Has anyone tried this? Opinions?

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• SharePoint 2010 PowerShell Script to Find All SPShellAdmins with Database Name

  - by Brian Jackett

  Problem     Yesterday on Twitter my friend @cacallahan asked for some help on how she could get all SharePoint 2010 SPShellAdmin users and the associated database name.  I spent a few minutes and wrote up a script that gets this information and decided I’d post it here for others to enjoy.     Background     The Get-SPShellAdmin commandlet returns a listing of SPShellAdmins for the given database Id you pass in, or the farm configuration database by default.  For those unfamiliar, SPShellAdmin access is necessary for non-admin users to run PowerShell commands against a SharePoint 2010 farm (content and configuration databases specifically).  Click here to read an excellent guest post article my friend John Ferringer (twitter) wrote on the Hey Scripting Guy! blog regarding granting SPShellAdmin access.  Solution     Below is the script I wrote (formatted for space and to include comments) to provide the information needed. Click here to download the script.   # declare a hashtable to store results $results = @{}   # fetch databases (only configuration and content DBs are needed) $databasesToQuery = Get-SPDatabase | Where {$_.Type -eq 'Configuration Database' -or $_.Type -eq 'Content Database'}   # for each database get spshelladmins and add db name and username to result $databasesToQuery | ForEach-Object {$dbName = $_.Name; Get-SPShellAdmin -database $_.id | ForEach-Object {$results.Add($dbName, $_.username)}}   # sort results by db name and pipe to table with auto sizing of col width $results.GetEnumerator() | Sort-Object -Property Name | ft -AutoSize     Conclusion     In this post I provided a script that outputs all of the SPShellAdmin users and the associated database names in a SharePoint 2010 farm.  Funny enough it actually took me longer to boot up my dev VM and PowerShell (~3 mins) than it did to write the first working draft of the script (~2 mins).  Feel free to use this script and modify as needed, just be sure to give credit back to the original author.  Let me know if you have any questions or comments.  Enjoy!         -Frog Out   Links PowerShell Hashtables http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee692803.aspx SPShellAdmin Access Explained http://blogs.technet.com/b/heyscriptingguy/archive/2010/07/06/hey-scripting-guy-tell-me-about-permissions-for-using-windows-powershell-2-0-cmdlets-with-sharepoint-2010.aspx

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• Cross platform development query

  - by Ian

  I'm a Microsoft developer mainly, but there are a couple of small-ish projects I'd like to fiddle with which would benefit from being cross platform. The platforms I want to target are: Windows, Linux, Mac, Android and preferably iPhone, web (running in a browser). I need 3D (Around the level of support seen in something like Minecraft (I'm not writing Minecraft)), some networking. I'm pretty certain Java would work on all except iPhone. Looking at the "related questions" above it's offered up QT (no browser or phone afaik) and also HTML/CSS/Javascript (3D? package for desktop?) The other alternative is to have seperate versions for seperate platforms, developed with some common code where possible. That option isn't something I know anything about. Does anyone have experience of this sort of conundrum? I figured here was better than SO, because I imagine there are compromises which extend beyond technical choice. Finally, this is not a commercial operation, so some of the very expensive cross platform tools are out of the question unless they offer some sort of community edition. Thanks for your time.

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• Finding links among many written and spoken thoughts

  - by Peter Fren

  So... I am using a digital voice recorder to record anything I see important, ranging from business to private, from rants to new business ideas. Every finalized idea is one wma-file. I wrote a program to sort the wma-files into folders. From time to time I listen to the wma-files, convert them to text(manually) and insert them into a mindmap with mindmanager, which I sort hierarchically by area and type in turn. This works very well, no idea is being lost, when I am out of ideas for a special topic, I listen to what I said and can get started again. What could a search system look like that finds links between thoughts(written in the mindmap and in the wma files) or in general gives me good search results even when the keyword I searched for is not present but a synonym of it or related topic(for instance flower should output entries containing orchid aswell, even if they contain orchid but not the very keyword flower). I prefer something ready-made but small adjustments to a given system are fine aswell. How would you approach this task?

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• Saving Dragged Dropped items position on postback in asp.net [closed]

  - by Deeptechtons

  Ok i saw many post's on how to serialize the value of dragged items to get hash and they tell how to save them. Now the question is how do i persist the dragged items the next time when user log's in using the has value that i got eg: <ul class="list"> <li id="id_1"> <div class="item ui-corner-all ui-widget ui-widget-content"> </div> </li> <li id="id_2"> <div class="item ui-corner-all ui-widget ui-widget-content"> </div> </li> <li id="id_3"> <div class="item ui-corner-all ui-widget ui-widget-content"> </div> </li> <li id="id_4"> <div class="item ui-corner-all ui-widget"> </div> </li> </ul> which on serialize will give "id[]=1&id[]=2&id[]=3&id[]=4" Now think that i saved it to Sql server database in a single field called SortOrder. Now how do i get the items to these order again ? the code to make these sort is below,without which people didn't know which library i had used to sort and serialize <script type="text/javascript"> $(document).ready(function() { $(".list li").css("cursor", "move"); $(".list").sortable(); }); </script>

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• How to read default key value with dconf or gsettings?

  - by Zta

  I would like to know the default value of a dconf/gsettings key. My question is a followup of the question below: Where can I get a list of SCHEMA / PATH / KEY to use with gsettings? What I'm trying to do, so create a script that reads all my personal preferences so I can back them up and restore them. I plan to iterate though all keys, like the script above, see what keys have been changed from their default value, and make a note of these, that can be restored later. I see that the dconf-editor display the keys' default value, but I'd very much like to script this. Also, I don't see how parsing the schemas /usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas/ can be automated. Maybe someone can help? gsettings get-default|list-defaults would be nice =) (Geesh, it was much easier in the old days where you just kept your ~/.somethingrc in subversion ... =\ Based on the answer given below, I've updated the script to print schema, key, key's data type, default value, and actual value: #!/bin/bash for schema in $(gsettings list-schemas | sort); do for key in $(gsettings list-keys $schema | sort); do type="$(gsettings range $schema $key | tr "\n" " ")" default="$(XDG_CONFIG_HOME=/tmp/ gsettings get $schema $key | tr "\n" " ")" value="$(gsettings get $schema $key | tr "\n" " ")" echo "$schema :: $key :: $type :: $default :: $value" done done This workaround basically covers what I need. I'll continue working on the backup scrip from here.

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• Client-Server MMOG & data structures sync when joining / playing

  - by plang

  After reading a few articles on MMOG architecture, there is still one point on which I cannot find much information: it has to do with how you keep in sync server data on the client, when you join, and while you play. A pretty vague question, I agree. Let me refine it: Let's say we have an MMOG virtual world subdivided into geographical cells. A player in a cell is mostly interested in what happens in the cell itself, and all the surrounding cells, not more. When joining the game for the first time, the only thing we can do is send some sort of "database dump" of the interesting cells to the client. When playing, I guess it would be very inefficient to do the same thing regularly. I imagine the best thing to do is to send "deltas" to the client, which would allow keeping the local database in sync. Now let's say the player moves, and arrives in another cell. Surrounding cells change, and for all the new cells the player subscribes, the same technique as used when joining the game has to be used: some sort of "database dump". This mechanic of joining/moving in a cell-based MMOG virtual world interests me, and I was wondering if there were tried and tested techniques in this domain. Thanks!

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• Making Modular, Reusable and Loosely Coupled MVC Components

  - by Dusan

  I am building MVC3 application and need some general guidelines on how to manage complex client side interaction between my components. Here is my definition of one component in general way: Component which has it's own controller, model and view. All of the component's logic is placed inside these three parts and component is sort of "standalone", it contains it's own form, data needed for interaction, updates itself with Ajax and so on. Beside this internal logic and behavior of the component, it needs to be able to "Talk" to the outside world. By this I mean it should provide data and events (sort of) so when this component gets embedded in pages can notify other components which then can update based on the current state and data. I have an idea to use client ViewModel (in java-script) which would hookup all relevant components on page and control interaction between them. This would make components reusable, modular - independent of the context in which they are used. How would you do this, I am a bit stuck as I do not know if this is a good approach and there is a technical possibility to achieve this using java-script/jquery. The confusing part is about update via Ajax, how to ensure that component is properly linked to ViewModel when component is Ajax updated (or even worse removed or dynamically added). Also, how should this ViewModel be constructed and which technicalities to use here and in components to work as synergy??? On the web, I have found the various examples of the similar approach, but they are oversimplified (even for dummies) or over specific and do not provide valuable resource or general solution for this kind of implementation. If you have some serious examples it would be, also, very helpful. Note: My aim is to make interactions between many components on the same page simpler and more robust and elegant.

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• Need ideas for an innovation week

  - by slandau

  So 4 times a year we have an innovation week (to even out the odd sprint releases). This whole week is dedicated to experimenting with new technology/ideas that could potentially help progress the software department or the company as a whole, and serve as sort of a starting point for new ideas and brainstorming. For example, the last one contained a lot of projects. One was the re-design of our web app into more of a Web 2.0 look and feel using JQuery and a lot of cool CSS tricks. Another was a proposal for a new bug tracking software as opposed to the clearly outdated one we use, and another was a very cool JQuery/Js design that could show the same page to multiple users on different computers and allow each of them to take "charge" of the page, disabling the other one from doing anything, and vice versa, seeing all updates in real time -- sort of like Netmeeting through Js. Well, this is my first one as a new employee so I wanted to think of something cool. We get one week (anywhere from 40-60 hours or so), and we usually pair up or do this in groups of 3-4, depending on how many projects there are. Projects have to get approved but usually that doesn't prove to be too difficult. We are in the financial analysis software industry if the domain was leading you guys to think of anything helpful. I am primarily working on a web app in MVC 2 at the moment using a lot of JQuery and a C# backend. Do you guys have any idea of something that would be cool/beneficial/worth it?

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• Get 100 highest numbers from an infinite list

  - by Sachin Shanbhag

  One of my friend was asked this interview question - "There is a constant flow of numbers coming in from some infinite list of numbers out of which you need to maintain a datastructure as to return the top 100 highest numbers at any given point of time. Assume all the numbers are whole numbers only." This is simple, you need to keep a sorted list in descending order and keep a track on lowest number in that list. If new number obtained is greater than that lowest number then you have to remove that lowest number and insert the new number in sorted list as required. Then question was extended - "Can you make sure that the Order for insertion should be O(1)? Is it possible?" As far as I knew, even if you add a new number to list and sort it again using any sort algorithm, it would by best be O(logn) for quicksort (I think). So my friend told it was not possible. But he was not convinced, he asked to maintain any other data structure rather than a list. I thought of balanced Binary tree, but even there you will not get the insertion with order of 1. So the same question I have too now. Wanted to know if there is any such data structure which can do insertion in Order of 1 for above problem or it is not possible at all.

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• Where can I find design exercises to work on?

  - by Oak

  I feel it's important to continue practicing my problem-solving skills. Writing my own mini-projects is one way, but another is to try and solve problems posted online. It's easy to find interesting programming quizzes online that require applying clever algorithms to solve - Project Euler is one well-known example. However, in a lot of real-life projects the design of the software - especially in the initial phases - has a large impact and at later stages it cannot be tweaked as easily as plain algorithms. In order to improve these skills, I'm looking for any collection of design problems. When I say "design", I mean the abstract design of a software solution - for example what modules will there be and what are the dependencies between them, how data will flow in the program, what sort of data needs to be saved in the database, etc. Design problems are those problems that are critical to solve in the early stages of any project, but their solution is a whiteboard diagram without a single line of code. Of course these sort of problems do not have a single correct solution, but I'll be especially happy with any place that also displays pros and cons of the typical solutions that might be used to approach the problem.

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• suggestions for lonewolf dev setup

  - by d33j

  I'm looking for some suggestions for a better development setup. Background: I'm a crusty old software engineer (mostly java of late) and I have around 50 - 100 incomplete java projects scattered everywhere, usb keys, HDDs, and spanning across 5 or 6 computers etc, which have been put on hold for a few years (ie: family). I have no version control at home. I've been using IntelliJ for around 10 years, so that's the only constant. I'm thinking of nominating one machine as a headless server to put all my projects on, maybe a ubuntu box, that way It won't matter which device I'm on, all my projects can be accessed (and I don't have to waste time actually looking for them). I don't need to access code over the net. These are my own 'happy place' projects so I only work on them when I'm at home, however I can see the benefit of the tasking app being online, that way if I think of something while on public transport lets say, I can add it then & there, but it's not a requirement. I can wait until I get home to create tasks. Summary: So I need some sort of version control so I can rollback mistakes, and some sort of simple tasking software where I can assign tasks for myself later on when I get time. I use Subversion, Sonar, Jira and Crucible at work but I think it's a little bit of an overkill for me though. What do you suggest?

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• Which things instantly ring alarm bells when looking at code? [closed]

  - by FinnNk

  I attended a software craftsmanship event a couple of weeks ago and one of the comments made was "I'm sure we all recognize bad code when we see it" and everyone nodded sagely without further discussion. This sort of thing always worries me as there's that truism that everyone thinks they're an above average driver. Although I think I can recognize bad code I'd love to learn more about what other people consider to be code smells as it's rarely discussed in detail on people's blogs and only in a handful of books. In particular I think it'd be interesting to hear about anything that's a code smell in one language but not another. I'll start off with an easy one: Code in source control that has a high proportion of commented out code - why is it there? was it meant to be deleted? is it a half finished piece of work? maybe it shouldn't have been commented out and was only done when someone was testing something out? Personally I find this sort of thing really annoying even if it's just the odd line here and there, but when you see large blocks interspersed with the rest of the code it's totally unacceptable. It's also usually an indication that the rest of the code is likely to be of dubious quality as well.

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• Is there an idiot's guide to software licensing somewhere?

  - by Karpie

  Basically, my knowledge on the issue is zilch other than the fact that open-source and closed-source exists. I'm a web developer (not a designer in the slightest), so I look online for things like icons. I've always been a big fan of these icons, which have a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License. As far as I can see, this license says 'do whatever you want with them as long as you have a link back to me somewhere'. Is that assumption correct? Just today I found a new icon set, with a much more confusing license (found here), and to be quite honest I have no idea if I'm allowed to use them or not. At the moment I want to just use them for toy stuff that might never see the light of day, but then my source code is stored on Github, is it legal to store the icons there where they're publicly accessible? If I put them on my personal website that might have ads on it to make me five cents every now and then, is that legal? If I use them on a site that offers a free service to users, is that legal? If that site then starts making money (via things like paid subscriptions) or gets bought out by someone (highly unlikely but one day possible) is that legal? Is there some noob guide out there that explains all this stuff, because I would hate to start using this sort of stuff now only to have to change it all later. Even if I buy the icons, there's still licensing issues that I don't understand! :( And this sort of stuff keeps popping up more and more often...

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• Sorting for 2D Drawing

  - by Nexian

  okie, looked through quite a few similar questions but still feel the need to ask mine specifically (I know, crazy). Anyhoo: I am drawing a game in 2D (isometric) My objects have their own arrays. (i.e. Tiles[], Objects[], Particles[], etc) I want to have a draw[] array to hold anything that will be drawn. Because it is 2D, I assume I must prioritise depth over any other sorting or things will look weird. My game is turn based so Tiles and Objects won't be changing position every frame. However, Particles probably will. So I am thinking I can populate the draw[] array (probably a vector?) with what is on-screen and have it add/remove object, tile & particle references when I pan the screen or when a tile or object is specifically moved. No idea how often I'm going to have to update for particles right now. I want to do this because my game may have many thousands of objects and I want to iterate through as few as possible when drawing. I plan to give each element a depth value to sort by. So, my questions: Does the above method sound like a good way to deal with the actual drawing? What is the most efficient way to sort a vector? Most of the time it wont require efficiency. But for panning the screen it will. And I imagine if I have many particles on screen moving across multiple tiles, it may happen quite often. For reference, my screen will be drawing about 2,800 objects at any one time. When panning, it will be adding/removing about ~200 elements every second, and each new element will need adding in the correct location based on depth.

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• What are some good tips for a developer trying to design a scalable MySQL database?

  - by CFL_Jeff

  As the question states, I am a developer, not a DBA. I have experience with designing good ER schemas and am fairly knowledgeable about normalization and good schema design. I have also worked with data warehouses that use dimensional modeling with fact tables and dim tables. However, all of the database-driven applications I've developed at previous jobs have been internal applications on the company's intranet, never receiving "real-world traffic". Furthermore, at previous jobs, I have always had a DBA or someone who knew much more than me about these things. At this new job I just started, I've been asked to develop a public-facing application with a MySQL backend and the data stored by this application is expected to grow very rapidly. Oh, and we don't have a DBA. Well, I guess I am the DBA. ;) As far as designing a database to be scalable, I don't even know where to start. Does anyone have any good tips or know of any good educational materials for a developer who has been sort of shoved into a DBA/database designer role and has been tasked with designing a scalable database to support an application like this? Have any other developers been through this sort of thing? What did you do to quickly become good at this role? I've found some good slides on the subject here but it's hard to glean details from slides. Wish I could've attended that guy's talk. I also found a good blog entry called 5 Ways to Boost MySQL Scalability which had some good information, though some of it was over my head. tl;dr I just want to make sure the database doesn't have to be completely redesigned when it scales up, and I'm looking for tips to get it right the first time. The answer I'm looking for is a "list of things every developer should know about making a scalable MySQL database so your application doesn't perform like crap when the data gets huge".

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