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• How much does Website Development cost nowadays?

  - by Andreas Grech

  I am thinking of setting up my own freelance business but coming from a workplace that offers a particular service to huge clients, I do not know what are the current charges for websites are nowadays. I know that as technology just keeps changing and changing (most of the time, for the better...), the amount you charge for a single website is constantly differing. Like for example, I don't think static websites (with just static html pages) are that expensive today, no? (as i said, I might be mistaken since I haven't really touched on this freelance industry yet) So, freelance web-developers out there, can you give me estimates on how much you charge for your clients? Some examples of websites that I want to know an approx charge: ~10 static html pages ~10 dhtml pages (with maybe a flasy menu on the top/side) Database driven websites with a standard CMS (be it the one you developed, or an existing one) Database driven but with a custom-built cms for the particular client Using an existing template for a design Starting the design from scratch etc... I know that the normally clients don't really care about the technologies used to construct their websites, but do you charge differently according to which technology you use to build the website with?; as in, is the technology a factor when setting the price? ...being ASP.Net, PHP, Ruby On Rails etc... Also, how do you go on about charging your clients for your services? What are the major factors that you consider when setting a price tag for a website to a client ? And better yet, how do you even find prospective clients? <= [or should I leave this question for a different post?] Btw, in your post, also mention some numbers (in cash values, be it in USD, GBP, EUR or anything) because I want to be able to take calculate some averages from this post when some answers stack up

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• How 'terse' is too terse? -- Practical guidelines for expressing as much intent in as few characters

  - by Christopher Altman

  First, I love writing as little code as possible. I think, and please correct me, one of the golden rules of programming is to express your code in as few of character as possible while maintaining human readability. But I can get a little carried away. I can pack three or four lines into one statement, something like $startDate = $dateTime > time() ? mktime(0,0,0,date('m',time()-86400),date('d',time()*2),2011) : time(); (Note: this is a notional example) I can comprehend the above code when reading it. I prefer 'mushing' it all together because having less lines per page is a good thing to me. So my question: When writing code and thinking about how compact or terse you can express yourself, what are some guidelines you use? Do you write multiple lines because you think it helps other people? Do you write as little as possible, but use comments? Or do you always look for the way to write as little code as possible and enjoy the rewards of compact statements? (Just one slightly off topic comment: I love the Perl one-liners, but that is not what I am talking about here)

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• How can we best represent the SDLC process as a board game?

  - by Innogetics

  I recently got interested in financial board games and saw how they can be very useful in educating children about certain concepts. It got me thinking whether it was also possible to represent certain aspects of executing a software project via a boardgame and make it fun. Here are a few things that I have come up so far: human resources and tools / techniques are represented as cards. requirements are also represented as cards, which are dealt equally to each player, and the objective is to move all requirement cards through an "SDLC" board (one per player) that represent a series of squares grouped according to phases (design all the way to deployment) the passage of time is represented in a main square board like monopoly, and completing a trip around the board (passing "Go") allows the player to move each of the requirement cards a number of steps through the SDLC board depending on the capability of the resource cards (senior programmer allows one requirement to move two squares in the dev phase, junior programmer only one, etc.) players will start with play money representing the project budget, and at every pass at "Go" is payday. the player is out of the game if he runs out of funds. the main board also has "chance" / "risk" cards, which represent things that can mess up a project. damage is applied at the roll of a die, and chance modifiers depend on whether the user has "bought" tools / techniques. I haven't implemented this idea yet as I'm still looking at more play elements that can make the game more engaging, as well as soliciting for more ideas. I am planning to release this under Creative Commons license but haven't decided on the exact license yet. Any more game play suggestions are welcome. UPDATE: This was posted in BoardGameGeek and there's now an active discussion thread there. http://www.boardgamegeek.com/article/4436694

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• How do I create a good evaluation function for a new board game?

  - by A. Rex

  I write programs to play board game variants sometimes. The basic strategy is standard alpha-beta pruning or similar searches, sometimes augmented by the usual approaches to endgames or openings. I've mostly played around with chess variants, so when it comes time to pick my evaluation function, I use a basic chess evaluation function. However, now I am writing a program to play a completely new board game. How do I choose a good or even decent evaluation function? The main challenges are that the same pieces are always on the board, so a usual material function won't change based on position, and the game has been played less than a thousand times or so, so humans don't necessarily play it enough well yet to give insight. (PS. I considered a MoGo approach, but random games aren't likely to terminate.) Any ideas? Game details: The game is played on a 10-by-10 board with a fixed six pieces per side. The pieces have certain movement rules, and interact in certain ways, but no piece is ever captured. The goal of the game is to have enough of your pieces in certain special squares on the board. The goal of the computer program is to provide a player which is competitive with or better than current human players.

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• json parsing problems

  - by C.

  Hi I have the following Json : "{\"doc\":{\"info\":{\"allowDistribution\":\"true\",\"allowSearch\":\"true\",\"calaisRequestID\":\"67a02f61-7e45-cfc4-1276-e123c5f7422f\",\"externalID\":\"\",\"id\":\"http://id.opencalais.com/dBo1YRiQeqS-kfO-m9UeWA\",\"docId\":\"http://d.opencalais.com/dochash-1/8edabb36-eece-3f67-b187-ab64cd885ecb\",\"document\":\"What type of music do you listen to? How much would you pay for a cd? Do you still buy cds? Do you like Shakira? What genre of music do you listen to?\",\"docTitle\":\"\",\"docDate\":\"2010-03-17 17:40:41.323\",\"externalMetadata\":\"\",\"submitter\":\"\"},\"meta\":{\"contentType\":\"text/raw\",\"emVer\":\"7.1.1103.5\",\"langIdVer\":\"DefaultLangId\",\"processingVer\":\"CalaisJob01\",\"submitionDate\":\"2010-03-17 17:40:41.183\",\"submitterCode\":\"b54c734e-b865-185b-c83a-66e1c66272de\",\"signature\":\"digestalg-1|FXnvwLovOsqVoSPX0JfGvj3tp7s=|cyV2tZWY9OXG1RBO0SuND4kd3Pkvqv0cS2YpsEBQhXDfSV4KoE61sQ==\",\"language\":\"English\",\"messages\":[]}},\"http://d.opencalais.com/dochash-1/8edabb36-eece-3f67-b187-ab64cd885ecb/cat/1\":{\"_typeGroup\":\"topics\",\"category\":\"http://d.opencalais.com/cat/Calais/EntertainmentCulture\",\"classifierName\":\"Calais\",\"categoryName\":\"Entertainment_Culture\",\"score\":1},\"http://d.opencalais.com/dochash-1/8edabb36-eece-3f67-b187-ab64cd885ecb/cat/2\":{\"_typeGroup\":\"topics\",\"category\":\"http://d.opencalais.com/cat/Calais/HumanInterest\",\"classifierName\":\"Calais\",\"categoryName\":\"Human Interest\",\"score\":1},\"http://d.opencalais.com/dochash-1/8edabb36-eece-3f67-b187-ab64cd885ecb/cat/3\":{\"_typeGroup\":\"topics\",\"category\":\"http://d.opencalais.com/cat/Calais/TechnologyInternet\",\"classifierName\":\"Calais\",\"categoryName\":\"Technology_Internet\",\"score\":0.932}}" Can you please tell me why it won't parse this? This is my code: JObject o = JObject.Parse(json); String category = (string)o["doc"]["_typeGroup"]["categoryName"]; It tells me: Object reference not set to an instance of an object. Thanks :)

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• general learning methodology

  - by momo

  just wanted to hear on the different general learning paths people embark on when learning a new language/framework. the one i currently use, which is how i learned bash and am currently learning python, is: instant hacking tutorial (very short tutorial introducing the basic syntax, variable declaration, loops, data types, etc. and how they are generally used) in depth tutorial with good programming style and slightly topic-specific (e.g. Mark Pilgrim's Dive into Python), important topics for me personally are regex methods, file IO, and ways the different data types are utilized best (i wrote a very primitive bayesian spam filter using python's dictionaries to keep track of word occurrences) spaced-repition of syntax or short recipes (i use anki, with questions like 'create dictionary with filename and filesize metadata, human-readable' or simpler ones like 'match 0 - 3 occurences of the letter M in a string', or 'return/create an iterator from two sequences') the use of spaced-repitition has been invaluable, and i credit it with the ease that i can recall/create python algorithms. however, i've recently started looking into django, and i've found that spaced-repitition, at least in my case, doesn't work very well for learning a framework, it works best with short code recipes (either that or i should start looking into more basic django framework tutorials). the problem i'm encountering is that since framework programming is not only algorithms, but actually learning the API, which can be quite complex since you have to learn all the methods, modules, the places where they are stored, and the sequence of which things have to be done. for ex. in django to start a project that deals with polls (from the django tutorial), one has to create the project, edit the settings.py file, create the polls app, edit the models.py file (which requires knowing the classes that are present in the module models), edit the urls.py file, etc. i found that my spaced-repition method didn't work very well for this type of learning, so i wanted to ask you guys what method(s) you use for learning the different frameworks/APIs.

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• I'm looking for a way to evaluate reading rate in several languages

  - by i30817

  I have a software that is page oriented instead of scrollbar oriented so i can easily count the words, but i'd like a way to filter outliers and some default value for the text language (that is known). The goal is from the remaining text to calculate the remaining time. I'm not sure what is the best unit to use. WPM (words per minute) from here seems very fuzzy and human oriented. Besides i don't know how many "words" remain in the text. http://www.sfsu.edu/~testing/CalReadRate.htm So i came up with this: The user is reading the text. The total text size in characters is known. His position in the text is known. So the remaining characters to read is also known. If a language has a median word length of say 5 chars, then if i had a WPM speed for the user, i could calculate the remaining time. 3 things are needed for this: 1) A table of the median word length of the language. 2) A table of the median WPM of a median user per language. 3) Update the WPM to fit the user as data becomes available, filtering outliers. However i can't find these tables. And i'm not sure how precise it is assuming median word length.

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• Very weird C file-handling anomaly

  - by KáGé

  Hello, I got a very weird issue that I cant figure out in my school project, which is the simulation of a simple filesystem in a human-readable textfile. Unfortunately I don't yet have enough time to translate the comments in my code or make it less gibberish, so if you are bothered by that, you don't have to help, I understand. See the code HERE. Now in drive.h, at line 574 is this part: i = getline(); #ifdef DEBUG printf("Free space in all found at %d.\n\n", i); if(drive.disk != NULL){ printf("Disk OK\n\n"); } #endif //write in data state = seekline(i); Before this it finds place for the allocation database entry in the ALL sector (see the "image files" in the mounts folder, this issue was tested on mount_30.efs-dbf), then gets the line with i = getline() fine (getline is in lglobal.h, line 39), but after that any file manipulation (in this case seekline's fseek, but if I comment that out, then the first fprintf after that) crashes the program straight away. I think the file gets somehow corrupted (though the Disk OK message appears) but can't figure out how. I've tried putting i = getline(); into comment, but it didn't make any difference. I've also tried asking at local programming forums but they didn't really help either. The last few lines of the output before it crashes: Dir written. (drive.h line 562) Seekline entered: 268 (called at drive.h line 564) Getline entered. (called at drive.h line 574) Line got: 268. Free space in all found at 268. (drive.h line 576) Seekline entered: 268 (called at drive.h line 582, note that this exact call was run successfully less than 20 lines back. This one should set the pointer to the beginning of the line it is currently in) After this it crashes. Does anyone has any idea of what causes this and how could I fix it? Thank you.

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• DSP - Filter sweep effect

  - by Trap

  I'm implementing a 'filter sweep' effect (I don't know if it's called like that). What I do is basically create a low-pass filter and make it 'move' along a certain frequency range. To calculate the filter cut-off frequency at a given moment I use a user-provided linear function, which yields values between 0 and 1. My first attempt was to directly map the values returned by the linear function to the range of frequencies, as in cf = freqRange * lf(x). Although it worked ok it looked as if the sweep ran much faster when moving through low frequencies and then slowed down during its way to the high frequency zone. I'm not sure why is this but I guess it's something to do with human hearing perceiving changes in frequency in a non-linear manner. My next attempt was to move the filter's cut-off frequency in a logarithmic way. It works much better now but I still feel that the filter doesn't move at a constant perceived speed through the range of frequencies. How should I divide the frequency space to obtain a constant perceived sweep speed? Thanks in advance.

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• Best XML format for log events in terms of tool support for data mining and visualization?

  - by Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen

  We want to be able to create log files from our Java application which is suited for later processing by tools to help investigate bugs and gather performance statistics. Currently we use the traditional "log stuff which may or may not be flattened into text form and appended to a log file", but this works the best for small amounts of information read by a human. After careful consideration the best bet has been to store the log events as XML snippets in text files (which is then treated like any other log file), and then download them to the machine with the appropriate tool for post processing. I'd like to use as widely supported an XML format as possible, and right now I am in the "research-then-make-decision" phase. I'd appreciate any help both in terms of XML format and tools and I'd be happy to write glue code to get what I need. What I've found so far: log4j XML format: Supported by chainsaw and Vigilog. Lilith XML format: Supported by Lilith Uninvestigated tools: Microsoft Log Parser: Apparently supports XML. OS X log viewer: plus there is a lot of tools on http://www.loganalysis.org/sections/parsing/generic-log-parsers/ Any suggestions?

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• how to determine if a character vector is a valid numeric or integer vector

  - by Andrew Barr

  I am trying to turn a nested list structure into a dataframe. The list looks similar to the following (it is serialized data from parsed JSON read in using the httr package). myList <- list(object1 = list(w=1, x=list(y=0.1, z="cat")), object2 = list(w=2, x=list(y=0.2, z="dog"))) unlist(myList) does a great job of recursively flattening the list, and I can then use lapply to flatten all the objects nicely. flatList <- lapply(myList, FUN= function(object) {return(as.data.frame(rbind(unlist(object))))}) And finally, I can button it up using plyr::rbind.fill myDF <- do.call(plyr::rbind.fill, flatList) str(myDF) #'data.frame': 2 obs. of 3 variables: #$ w : Factor w/ 2 levels "1","2": 1 2 #$ x.y: Factor w/ 2 levels "0.1","0.2": 1 2 #$ x.z: Factor w/ 2 levels "cat","dog": 1 2 The problem is that w and x.y are now being interpreted as character vectors, which by default get parsed as factors in the dataframe. I believe that unlist() is the culprit, but I can't figure out another way to recursively flatten the list structure. A workaround would be to post-process the dataframe, and assign data types then. What is the best way to determine if a vector is a valid numeric or integer vector?

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• How do I get the WVGA Android browser to stop scaling my images?

  - by Dan Fabulich

  I'm designing an HTML page for display in Android browsers. Consider this simple example page: <html> <head><title>Simple!</title> </head> <body> <p><img src="http://sstatic.net/so/img/logo.png"></p> </body> </html> It looks just fine on the standard HVGA phones (320x480), but on HDPI WVGA sizes (480x800 or 480x854) the built-in browser automatically scales the image up; it looks ugly. I've read that I should be able to use this tag to force the browser to stop scaling my page: <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width; initial-scale=1.0; maximum-scale=1.0; minimum-scale=1.0; user-scalable=0;" /> ... but all that does is disable user scaling (the zoom buttons disappear); it doesn't actually prevent the browser from scaling my image. Adjusting the scale factors (setting them all to 2.0 or 0.5) has no effect at all. How can I force the WVGA browser to stop scaling my images?

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• How are you using C++0x today? [closed]

  - by Roger Pate

  This is a question in two parts, the first is the most important and concerns now: Are you following the design and evolution of C++0x? What blogs, newsgroups, committee papers, and other resources do you follow? Even where you're not using any new features, how have they affected your current choices? What new features are you using now, either in production or otherwise? The second part is a follow-up, concerning the new standard once it is final: Do you expect to use it immediately? What are you doing to prepare for C++0x, other than as listed for the previous questions? Obviously, compiler support must be there, but there's still co-workers, ancillary tools, and other factors to consider. What will most affect your adoption? Edit: The original really was too argumentative; however, I'm still interested in the underlying question, so I've tried to clean it up and hopefully make it acceptable. This seems a much better avenue than duplicating—even though some answers responded to the argumentative tone, they still apply to the extent that they addressed the questions, and all answers are community property to be cleaned up as appropriate, too.

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• Web-app currency input/manipulation/calculation with javascript .. there has got to be a better (fra

  - by dreftymac

  BACKGROUND: I am of the "user-input-lockdown" school of thought. Whenever possible, I try to mistrust and sanitize user input, both client side and server side; and I try to take multiple opportunities to restrict possible inputs to a known subset of possibilities, usually this means providing a lot of checkboxes and select lists. (This is from the usability side of things, I know security-wise that malicious users can easily bypass fixed user input GUI controls). PROBLEM: Anyway, the problem always arises with non-fixed input of currency. Whenever I have to accept a freely-specified dollar amount as user input, I always have to confront these problems/annoyances and it is always painful: 1) Make sure to give the user two input boxes for each currency_datapoint, one for the whole_dollar_part and another for the fractional_pennies_part 2) Whenever the user changes a currency_datapoint, provide keystroke-by-keystroke GUI feedback to let them know whether the currency_datapoint is well-formed, with context-appropriate validation rules (e.g., no negatives?, nonzero only?, numeric only!, no non-numeric punctuation! no symbols!) 3) For display purposes, every user-provided currency_datapoint should be translated to human-readable currency formatting (dollar sign, period, commas provided by the app, where appropriate) 4) For calculation purposes, every user-provided currency_datapoint has to be converted to integer (all pennies, to avoid floating point errors) and summed into a grand total with zero or more subtotals. 5) Every user-provided currency_datapoint should be displayed or displayable in a nice "tabular" format, which auto-updates as the user enters each currency_datapoint, including a baloon that warns when one or more currency_datapoints is not well-formed. I seem to be re-inventing this wheel every time I have to work with currency in Javascript on the client side (server side is a bit more flexible since most programming languages have higher-level currency formatting logic). QUESTION: Has anyone out there solved the problem of dealing with the above issues, client side, in a way that is server-side-technology-stack agnostic, (preferrably plain javascript or jquery)? This is getting old, there has to be a better way.

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• Effective Method to Manage and Search Through 100,000+ Objects Instantly? (C#)

  - by Kirk

  I'm writing a media player for enthusiasts with large collections (over 100,000 tracks) and one of my main goals is speed in search. I would like to allow the user to perform a Google-esque search of their entire music collection based on these factors: Song Path and File Name Items in ID3 Tag (Title, Artist, Album, etc.) Lyrics What is the best way for me to store this data and search through it? Currently I am storing each track in an object and iterating over an array of these objects checking each of their variables for string matches based on given search text. I've run into problems though where my search is not effective because it is always a phrase search and I'm not sure how to make it more fuzzy. Would an internal DB like SQLlite be faster than this? Any ideas on how I should structure this system? I also need playlist persistence, so that when they close the app and open the app their same playlist loads immediately. How should I store the playlist information so it can load quickly when the application starts? Currently I am JSON encoding the entire playlist, storing it in a text file, and reading it into the ListView at runtime, but it is getting sluggish over 20,000 tracks. Thanks!

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• Need Help finding an appropriate task asignment algoritm for a collage project involving coordinatin

  - by Trif Mircea

  Hello. I am a long time lurker here and have found over time many answers regarding jquery and web development topics so I decided to ask a question of my own. This time I have to create a c++ project for collage which should help manage the workflow of a company providing all kinds of services through in the field teams. The ideas I have so far are: client-server application; the server is a dispatcher where all the orders from clients get and the clients are mobile devices (PDAs) each team in the field having one a order from a client is a task. Each task is made up of a series of subtasks. You have a database with estimations on how long a task should take to complete you also know what tasks or subtasks each team on the field can perform based on what kind of specialists made up the team (not going to complicate the problem by adding needed materials, it is considered that if a member of a team can perform a subtask he has the stuff needed) Now knowing these factors, what would a good task assignment algorithm be? The criteria is: how many tasks can a team do, how many tasks they have in the queue, it could also be location, how far away are they from the place but I don't think I can implement that.. It needs to be efficient and also to adapt quickly is the human dispatcher manually assigns a task. Any help or leads would be really appreciated. Also I'm not 100% sure in the idea so if you have another way you would go about creating such an application please share, even if it just a quick outline. I have to write a theoretical part too so even if the ideas are far more complex that what i outlined that would be ok ; I'd write those and implement what I can.

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• Use ini/appconfig file or sql server file to store user config?

  - by h2g2java

  I know that the preference for INI or appconfig XML is their human readability. Let's say user preferences stored for my app are hierarchical and numbers about a thousand items and it would be really confusing for a user to edit an INI to change things anyway. I have always been using a combination of INI with appconfig. I am leaning towards using sql server db file, now. Every time the user changes a preference while using the app, it would be stored into the db file - that's my line of thought. I am also thinking that such a config db file could move around with the app too, just like an INI. Before I do that, any advice 1. If there are any disadvantages against using a db file over INI or appconfig. 2. If a shop uses mysql or oracle, do you think your colleagues would lift up their pro-mysql or pro-oracle eyebrow questioning why you would use sql server technology in a mysql or oracle shop? I mean, I am just using it like an INI file or app.config anyway, right?

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• Is there any algorithm that can solve ANY traditional sudoku puzzles, WITHOUT guessing (or similar techniques)?

  - by justin

  Is there any algorithm that solves ANY traditional sudoku puzzle, WITHOUT guessing? Here Guessing means trying an candidate and see how far it goes, if a contradiction is found with the guess, backtracking to the guessing step and try another candidate; when all candidates are exhausted without success, backtracking to the previous guessing step (if there is one; otherwise the puzzle proofs invalid.), etc. EDIT1: Thank you for your replies. traditional sudoku means 81-box sudoku, without any other constraints. Let us say the we know the solution is unique, is there any algorithm that can GUARANTEE to solve it without backtracking? Backtracking is a universal tool, I have nothing wrong with it but, using a universal tool to solve sudoku decreases the value and fun in deciphering (manually, or by computer) sudoku puzzles. How can a human being solve the so called "the hardest sudoku in the world", does he need to guess? I heard some researcher accidentally found that their algorithm for some data analysis can solve all sudoku. Is that true, do they have to guess too?

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• MS hotfix delayed delivery.

  - by MOE37x3

  I just requested a hotfix from support.microsoft.com and put in my email address, but I haven't received the email yet. The splash page I got after I requested the hotfix said: Hotfix Confirmation We will send these hotfixes to the following e-mail address: (my correct email address) Usually, our hotfix e-mail is delivered to you within five minutes. However, sometimes unforeseen issues in e-mail delivery systems may cause delays. We will send the e-mail from the “[email protected]” e-mail account. If you use an e-mail filter or a SPAM blocker, we recommend that you add “[email protected]” or the “microsoft.com” domain to your safe senders list. (The safe senders list is also known as a whitelist or an approved senders list.) This will help prevent our e-mail from going into your junk e-mail folder or being automatically deleted. I'm sure that the email is not getting caught in a spam catcher. How long does it normally take to get one of these hotfixes? Am I waiting for some human to approve it, or something? Should I just give up and try to get the file I need some other way? (Update: Replaced "[email protected]" with "(my correct email address)" to resolve Martín Marconcini's ambiguity.)

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• How to approach parallel processing of messages?

  - by Dan

  I am redesigning the messaging system for my app to use intel threading building blocks and am stumped trying to decide between two possible approaches. Basically, I have a sequence of message objects and for each message type, a sequence of handlers. For each message object, I apply each handler registered for that message objects type. The sequential version would be something like this (pseudocode): for each message in message_sequence <- SEQUENTIAL for each handler in (handler_table for message.type) apply handler to message <- SEQUENTIAL The first approach which I am considering processes the message objects in turn (sequentially) and applies the handlers concurrently. Pros: predictable ordering of messages (ie, we are guaranteed a FIFO processing order) (potentially) lower latency of processing each message Cons: more processing resources available than handlers for a single message type (bad parallelization) bad use of processor cache since message objects need to be copied for each handler to use large overhead for small handlers The pseudocode of this approach would be as follows: for each message in message_sequence <- SEQUENTIAL parallel_for each handler in (handler_table for message.type) apply handler to message <- PARALLEL The second approach is to process the messages in parallel and apply the handlers to each message sequentially. Pros: better use of processor cache (keeps the message object local to all handlers which will use it) small handlers don't impose as much overhead (as long as there are other handlers also to be run) more messages are expected than there are handlers, so the potential for parallelism is greater Cons: Unpredictable ordering - if message A is sent before message B, they may both be processed at the same time, or B may finish processing before all of A's handlers are finished (order is non-deterministic) The pseudocode is as follows: parallel_for each message in message_sequence <- PARALLEL for each handler in (handler_table for message.type) apply handler to message <- SEQUENTIAL The second approach has more advantages than the first, but non-deterministic ordering is a big disadvantage.. Which approach would you choose and why? Are there any other approaches I should consider (besides the obvious third approach: parallel messages and parallel handlers, which has the disadvantages of both and no real redeeming factors as far as I can tell)? Thanks!

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• How can you transform a set of numbers into mostly whole ones?

  - by Alice

  Small amount of background: I am working on a converter that bridges between a map maker (Tiled) that outputs in XML, and an engine (Angel2D) that inputs lua tables. Most of this is straight forward However, Tiled outputs in pixel offsets (integers of absolute values), while Angel2D inputs OpenGL units (floats of relative values); a conversion factor between these two is needed (for example, 32px = 1gu). Since OpenGL units are abstract, and the camera can zoom in or out if the objects are too small or big, the actual conversion factor isn't important; I could use a random number, and the user would merely have to zoom in or out. But it would be best if the conversion factor was selected such that most numbers outputted were small and whole (or fractions of small whole numbers), because that makes it easier to work with (and the whole point of the OpenGL units is that they are easy to work with). How would I find such a conversion factor reliably? My first attempt was to use the smallest number given; this resulted in no fractions below 1, but often lead to lots of decimal places where the factors didn't line up. Then I tried the mode of the sequence, which lead to the largest number of 1's possible, but often lead to very long floats for background images. My current approach gets the GCD of the whole sequence, which, when it works, works great, but can easily be thrown off course by a single bad apple. Note that while I could easily just pass the numbers I am given along, or pick some fixed factor, or use one of the conversions I specified above, I am looking for a method to reliably scale this list of integers to small, whole numbers or simple fractions, because this would most likely be unsurprising to the end user; this is not a one off conversion. The end users tend to use 1.0 as their "base" for manipulations (because it's simple and obvious), so it would make more sense for the sizes of entities to cluster around this.

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• Number of simple mutations to change one string to another?

  - by mstksg

  Hi; I'm sure you've all heard of the "Word game", where you try to change one word to another by changing one letter at a time, and only going through valid English words. I'm trying to implement an A* Algorithm to solve it (just to flesh out my understanding of A*) and one of the things that is needed is a minimum-distance heuristic. That is, the minimum number of one of these three mutations that can turn an arbitrary string a into another string b: 1) Change one letter for another 2) Add one letter at a spot before or after any letter 3) Remove any letter Examples aabca => abaca: aabca abca abaca = 2 abcdebf => bgabf: abcdebf bcdebf bcdbf bgdbf bgabf = 4 I've tried many algorithms out; I can't seem to find one that gives the actual answer every time. In fact, sometimes I'm not sure if even my human reasoning is finding the best answer. Does anyone know any algorithm for such purpose? Or maybe can help me find one? Thanks.

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• Why are compilers so stupid?

  - by martinus

  I always wonder why compilers can't figure out simple things that are obvious to the human eye. They do lots of simple optimizations, but never something even a little bit complex. For example, this code takes about 6 seconds on my computer to print the value zero (using java 1.6): int x = 0; for (int i = 0; i < 100 * 1000 * 1000 * 1000; ++i) { x += x + x + x + x + x; } System.out.println(x); It is totally obvious that x is never changed so no matter how often you add 0 to itself it stays zero. So the compiler could in theory replace this with System.out.println(0). Or even better, this takes 23 seconds: public int slow() { String s = "x"; for (int i = 0; i < 100000; ++i) { s += "x"; } return 10; } First the compiler could notice that I am actually creating a string s of 100000 "x" so it could automatically use s StringBuilder instead, or even better directly replace it with the resulting string as it is always the same. Second, It does not recognize that I do not actually use the string at all, so the whole loop could be discarded! Why, after so much manpower is going into fast compilers, are they still so relatively dumb? EDIT: Of course these are stupid examples that should never be used anywhere. But whenever I have to rewrite a beautiful and very readable code into something unreadable so that the compiler is happy and produces fast code, I wonder why compilers or some other automated tool can't do this work for me.

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• LINQ Joins - Performance

  - by Meiscooldude

  I am curious on how exactly LINQ (not LINQ to SQL) is performing is joins behind the scenes in relation to how Sql Server performs joins. Sql Server before executing a query, generates an Execution Plan. The Execution Plan is basically an Expression Tree on what it believes is the best way to execute the query. Each node provides information on whether to do a Sort, Scan, Select, Join, ect. On a 'Join' node in our execution plan, we can see three possible algorithms; Hash Join, Merge Join, and Nested Loops Join. Sql Server will choose which algorithm to for each Join operation based on expected number of rows in Inner and Outer tables, what type of join we are doing (some algorithms don't support all types of joins), whether we need data ordered, and probably many other factors. Join Algorithms: Nested Loop Join: Best for small inputs, can be optimized with ordered inner table. Merge Join: Best for medium to large inputs sorted inputs, or an output that needs to be ordered. Hash Join: Best for medium to large inputs, can be parallelized to scale linearly. LINQ Query: DataTable firstTable, secondTable; ... var rows = from firstRow in firstTable.AsEnumerable () join secondRow in secondTable.AsEnumerable () on firstRow.Field<object> (randomObject.Property) equals secondRow.Field<object> (randomObject.Property) select new {firstRow, secondRow}; SQL Query: SELECT * FROM firstTable fT INNER JOIN secondTable sT ON fT.Property = sT.Property Sql Server might use a Nested Loop Join if it knows there are a small number of rows from each table, a merge join if it knows one of the tables has an index, and Hash join if it knows there are a lot of rows on either table and neither has an index. Does Linq choose its algorithm for joins? or does it always use one?

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• How can you ask a sensitive work question anonymously but still inform readers of your credibility a

  - by Rob

  I would like to request opinions about my career/situation at work with a software development project. I would like to ask anonymously or created a new stackoverflow.com account because I think I may be identified by co-workers at my employer since I have referred them to (non-sensititive) technical questions I have asked here. So they might know my account and be able to follow my activity. If I create a new account it will have no reputation and some readers may ignore it, for example, because they might think that the user only wishes to take ideas from here and not contribute, i.e. not a committed stackoverflow poster. What are your thoughts? (I do feel that it is appropriate to ask such pogramming career/situational questions here as many others have and there are some good questions -and answers and it seems that the stackoverflow community accepts such questions even thought the site's strict guidelines are for specific answers and not discussion, and non-subjective questions. And thank goodness that is the case - not all problems faced by programmers are about the craft but also the human factors around it - where else would folks go?)

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