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• Reflections on GiveCamp

  - by Reed

  I participated in the Seattle GiveCamp over the weekend, and am entirely impressed.  GiveCamp is a great event – I especially like how rewarding it is for everybody involved.  I strongly encourage any and all developers to watch for future GiveCamp events, and consider participating, for many reasons… GiveCamp provides real value to organizations that truly need help.  The Seattle event alone succeeded in helping sixteen non-profit organizations in many different ways.  The projects involved varied dramatically, including website redesigns, SEO, reworking data management workflows, and even game development.  Many non-profits have a strong need for good, quality technical help.  However, nearly every non-profit organization has an incredibly limited budget.  GiveCamp is a way to really give back, and provide incredibly valuable help to organizations that truly benefit. My experience has shown many developers to be incredibly generous – this is a chance to dedicate your energy to helping others in a way that really takes advantage of your expertise.  Your time as a developer is incredibly valuable, and this puts something of incredible value directly into the hands of places its needed. First, and foremost, GiveCamp is about providing technical help to non-profit organizations in need. GiveCamp can make you a better developer.  This is a fantastic opportunity for us, as developers, to work with new people, in a new setting.  The incredibly short time frame (one weekend for a deliverable project) and intense motivation to succeed provides a huge opportunity for learning from peers.  I’d personally like to thank off the developers with whom I worked – I learned something from each and every one of you.  I hope to see and work with all of you again someday. GiveCamp provides an opportunity for you to work outside of your comfort zone. While it’s always nice to be an expert, it’s also valuable to work on a project where you have little or no direct experience.  My team focused on a complete reworking of our organizations message and a complete new website redesign and deployment using WordPress.  While I’d used WordPress for my blog, and had some experience, this is completely unrelated to my professional work.  In fact, nobody on our team normally worked directly with the technologies involved – yet together we managed to succeed in delivering our goals.  As developers, it’s easy to want to stay abreast of new technology surrounding our expertise, but its rare that we get a chance to sit down and work on something practical that is completely outside of our normal realm of work.  I’m a desktop developer by trade, and spent much of the weekend working with CSS and Photoshop.  Many of the projects organizations need don’t match perfectly with the skill set in the room – yet all of the software professionals rose to the occasion and delivered practical, usable applications. GiveCamp is a short term, known commitment. While this seems obvious, I think it’s an important aspect to remember.  This is a huge part of what makes it successful – you can work, completely focused, on a project, then walk away completely when you’re done.  There is no expectation of continued involvement.  While many of the professionals I’ve talked to are willing to contribute some amount of their time beyond the camp, this is not expected. The freedom this provides is immense.  In addition, the motivation this brings is incredibly valuable.  Every developer in the room was very focused on delivering in time – you have one shot to get it as good as possible, and leave it with the organization in a way that can be maintained by them.  This is a rare experience – and excellent practice at time management for everyone involved. GiveCamp provides a great way to meet and network with your peers. Not only do you get to network with other software professionals in your area – you get to network with amazing people.  Every single person in the room is there to try to help people.  The balance of altruism, intelligence, and expertise in the room is something I’ve never before experienced. During the presentations of what was accomplished, I felt blessed to participate.  I know many people in the room were incredibly touched by the level of dedication and accomplishment over the weekend. GiveCamp is fun. At the end of the experience, I would have signed up again, even if it was a painful, tedious weekend – merely due to the amazing accomplishments achieved throughout the event.  However, the event is fun.  Everybody I talked to, the entire weekend, was having a good time.  While there were many faces focused into a near grimace at times (including mine, I’ll admit), this was always in response to a particularly challenging problem or task.  The challenges just added to the overall enjoyment of the weekend – part of why I became a developer in the first place is my love for challenge and puzzles, and a short deadline using unfamiliar technology provided plenty of opportunity for puzzles.  As soon as people would stand up, it was another smile.   If you’re a developer, I’d recommend looking at GiveCamp more closely.  Watch for an event in your area.  If there isn’t one, consider building a team and organizing an event.  The experience is worth the commitment. 

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• What are the major challenges in creating a platform such as StackOverflow?

  - by gablin

  Let us assume you were to create a platform such as StackOverflow. It needs to be functional, fast and scalable, just like SO, in order to be successful. What are the major challenges you would face in such a task? I'm looking for technical challenges rather than problems such as how to advertise it and stuff like that. (I'm not looking for ways of creating a new site to challenge SO; I'm just interested in how difficult it would be to create it if it didn't already exist.)

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• Selling your services when you use uncommon technologies

  - by speeder

  I took a look in Stackoverflow most popular profiles, and then I did the same in several other sites, and then I took a look in job postings in several boards, mostly out of curiosity, because I noticed this: If you work with Java, .NET or other managed languages, or you work with stuff that is popular for web development (Ruby, JavaScript, etc...) you can get lots of points on Stackoverflow, find lots of jobs and clients, find forums, friends, colleagues, etc... But how a programmer of uncommon languages (Lua, pure C, Lisp, D, ADA, Haskell, etc...) find information, sell his services, and so on? EDIT: This also applies to fields: You work with web, corporate software, database, etc... it is great... You dislike those previous 3, noone ever will hire your services...

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• What determines when an application requires mvvm?

  - by loyalpenguin

  I'm developing mobile applications for Windows Phone 7. This application calls some web services and occasionally sends responses out via web services. I recently started looking into MVVM and noticed that, although it is suggested when developing applications in WP7, alot of developers say only to use it if its necessary. Along with that they said that if the application is "small" enough or "simple" enough then it probably isn't worth the time. Hence my question. When should we use MVVM? Is it possible to build larger scale applications without it?

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• Suggestions for implementing a dynamic 2D level

  - by Wouter

  I am working on a game that needs a level that is completely generated. Currently my approach is to draw textures for the levels pixel by pixel during the game (in XNA with SpriteBatch). This is too intensive unfortunately. The game has frame drops even when I only draw 1 level texture each draw cycle. Here is an example of the current prototype. It is a simple sidescroller with the avatar swimming through a cave. The shape of this cave will alter throughout the level (textures and physics collision shapes). You can clearly see the boundaries of the level tiles in the screenshot below. These are generated just before they move into camera view. For inspiration I looked at PixelJunk Shooter 2. These levels are obviously not generated, but some of the levels have movement. How do you guys think they implemented it? My guess is that the level and other objects in the game are actually flat 3d models, but I am not sure..

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• Separating physics and game logic from UI code

  - by futlib

  I'm working on a simple block-based puzzle game. The game play consists pretty much of moving blocks around in the game area, so it's a trivial physics simulation. My implementation, however, is in my opinion far from ideal and I'm wondering if you can give me any pointers on how to do it better. I've split the code up into two areas: Game logic and UI, as I did with a lot of puzzle games: The game logic is responsible for the general rules of the game (e.g. the formal rule system in chess) The UI displays the game area and pieces (e.g. chess board and pieces) and is responsible for animations (e.g. animated movement of chess pieces) The game logic represents the game state as a logical grid, where each unit is one cell's width/height on the grid. So for a grid of width 6, you can move a block of width 2 four times until it collides with the boundary. The UI takes this grid, and draws it by converting logical sizes into pixel sizes (that is, multiplies it by a constant). However, since the game has hardly any game logic, my game logic layer [1] doesn't have much to do except collision detection. Here's how it works: Player starts to drag a piece UI asks game logic for the legal movement area of that piece and lets the player drag it within that area Player lets go of a piece UI snaps the piece to the grid (so that it is at a valid logical position) UI tells game logic the new logical position (via mutator methods, which I'd rather avoid) I'm not quite happy with that: I'm writing unit tests for my game logic layer, but not the UI, and it turned out all the tricky code is in the UI: Stopping the piece from colliding with others or the boundary and snapping it to the grid. I don't like the fact that the UI tells the game logic about the new state, I would rather have it call a movePieceLeft() method or something like that, as in my other games, but I didn't get far with that approach, because the game logic knows nothing about the dragging and snapping that's possible in the UI. I think the best thing to do would be to get rid of my game logic layer and implement a physics layer instead. I've got a few questions regarding that: Is such a physics layer common, or is it more typical to have the game logic layer do this? Would the snapping to grid and piece dragging code belong to the UI or the physics layer? Would such a physics layer typically work with pixel sizes or with some kind of logical unit, like my game logic layer? I've seen event-based collision detection in a game's code base once, that is, the player would just drag the piece, the UI would render that obediently and notify the physics system, and the physics system would call a onCollision() method on the piece once a collision is detected. What is more common? This approach or asking for the legal movement area first? [1] layer is probably not the right word for what I mean, but subsystem sounds overblown and class is misguiding, because each layer can consist of several classes.

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• Networking gampeplay - Sending controller inputs vs. sending game actions

  - by liortal

  I'm reading about techniques for implementing game networking. Some of the resources i've read state that it is a common practice (at least for some games) to send the actual controller input across the network, to be fed into the remote game's loop for processing. This seems a bit odd to me and i'd like to know what are the benefits of using such a method? To me, it seems that controller input is merely a way to gather data to be fed into the game, which in turn determines how to translate these into specific game actions. Why would i want to send the control data and not the game actions themselves?

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• Logging library for (c++) games

  - by Klaim

  I know a lot of logging libraries but didn't test a lot of them. (GoogleLog, Pantheios, the coming boost::log library...) In games, especially in remote multiplayer and multithreaded games, logging is vital to debugging, even if you remove all logs in the end. Let's say I'm making a PC game (not console) that needs logs (multiplayer and multithreaded and/or multiprocess) and I have good reasons for looking for a library for logging (like, I don't have time or I'm not confident in my ability to write one correctly for my case). Assuming that I need : performance ease of use (allow streaming or formating or something like that) reliable (don't leak or crash!) cross-platform (at least Windows, MacOSX, Linux/Ubuntu) Wich logging library would you recommand? Currently, I think that boost::log is the most flexible one (you can even log to remotely!), but have not good performance update: is for high performance, but isn't released yet. Pantheios is often cited but I don't have comparison points on performance and usage. I've used my own lib for a long time but I know it don't manage multithreading so it's a big problem, even if it's fast enough. Google Log seems interesting, I just need to test it but if you already have compared those libs and more, your advice might be of good use. Games are often performance demanding while complex to debug so it would be good to know logging libraries that, in our specific case, have clear advantages.

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• Is there a language where collections can be used as objects without altering the behavior?

  - by Dokkat

  Is there a language where collections can be used as objects without altering the behavior? As an example, first, imagine those functions work: function capitalize(str) //suppose this *modifies* a string object capitalizing it function greet(person): print("Hello, " + person) capitalize("pedro") >> "Pedro" greet("Pedro") >> "Hello, Pedro" Now, suppose we define a standard collection with some strings: people = ["ed","steve","john"] Then, this will call toUpper() on each object on that list people.toUpper() >> ["Ed","Steve","John"] And this will call greet once for EACH people on the list, instead of sending the list as argument greet(people) >> "Hello, Ed" >> "Hello, Steve" >> "Hello, John"

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• What is the advantage of currying?

  - by Mad Scientist

  I just learned about currying, and while I think I understand the concept, I'm not seeing any big advantage in using it. As a trivial example I use a function that adds two values (written in ML). The version without currying would be fun add(x, y) = x + y and would be called as add(3, 5) while the curried version is fun add x y = x + y (* short for val add = fn x => fn y=> x + y *) and would be called as add 3 5 It seems to me to be just syntactic sugar that removes one set of parentheses from defining and calling the function. I've seen currying listed as one of the important features of a functional languages, and I'm a bit underwhelmed by it at the moment. The concept of creating a chain of functions that consume each a single parameter, instead of a function that takes a tuple seems rather complicated to use for a simple change of syntax. Is the slightly simpler syntax the only motivation for currying, or am I missing some other advantages that are not obvious in my very simple example? Is currying just syntactic sugar?

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• Correct For Loop Design

  - by Yttrill

  What is the correct design for a for loop? Felix currently uses if len a > 0 do for var i in 0 upto len a - 1 do println a.[i]; done done which is inclusive of the upper bound. This is necessary to support the full range of values of a typical integer type. However the for loop shown does not support zero length arrays, hence the special test, nor will the subtraction of 1 work convincingly if the length of the array is equal to the number of integers. (I say convincingly because it may be that 0 - 1 = maxval: this is true in C for unsigned int, but are you sure it is true for unsigned char without thinking carefully about integral promotions?) The actual implementation of the for loop by my compiler does correctly handle 0 but this requires two tests to implement the loop: continue: if not (i <= bound) goto break body if i == bound goto break ++i goto continue break: Throw in the hand coded zero check in the array example and three tests are needed. If the loop were exclusive it would handle zero properly, avoiding the special test, but there'd be no way to express the upper bound of an array with maximum size. Note the C way of doing this: for(i=0; predicate(i); increment(i)) has the same problem. The predicate is tested after the increment, but the terminating increment is not universally valid! There is a general argument that a simple exclusive loop is enough: promote the index to a large type to prevent overflow, and assume no one will ever loop to the maximum value of this type.. but I'm not entirely convinced: if you promoted to C's size_t and looped from the second largest value to the largest you'd get an infinite loop!

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• Does TDD really work for complex projects?

  - by Amir Rezaei

  I’m asking this question regarding problems I have experienced during TDD projects. I have noticed the following challenges when creating unit tests. Generating and maintaining mock data It’s hard and unrealistic to maintain large mock data. It’s is even harder when database structure undergoes changes. Testing GUI Even with MVVM and ability to test GUI, it takes a lot of code to reproduce the GUI scenario. Testing the business I have experience that TDD works well if you limit it to simple business logic. However complex business logic is hard to test since the number of combinations of tests (test space) is very large. Contradiction in requirements In reality it’s hard to capture all requirements under analysis and design. Many times one note requirements lead to contradiction because the project is complex. The contradiction is found late under implementation phase. TDD requires that requirements are 100% correct. In such cases one could expect that conflicting requirements would be captured during creating of tests. But the problem is that this isn’t the case in complex scenarios. I have read this question: Why does TDD work? Does TDD really work for complex enterprise projects, or is it practically limit to project type?

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• Low coupling processing big quantities of data

  - by vitalik

  Usually I achieve low coupling by creating classes that exchange lists, sets, and maps between them. Now I am developing a batch application and I can't put all the data inside a data structure because there isn't enough memory. I have to read and process one chunk of data and then going to the next one. So having low coupling is much more difficult because I have to check somewhere if there is still data to read, etc. What I am using now is: Source - Process - Persist The classes that process have to ask to the Source classes if there are more rows to read. What are the best practices and or useful patterns in such situations? I hope I am explaining myself, if not tell me.

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• Standard way of allowing general XML data

  - by Greg Jackson

  I'm writing a data gathering and reporting application that takes XML files as input, which will then be read, processed, and stored in a strongly-typed database. For example, an XML file for a "Job" might look like this: <Data type="Job"> <ID>12345</ID> <JobName>MyJob</JobName> <StartDate>04/07/2012 10:45:00 AM</StartDate> <Files> <File name="a.jpeg" path="images\" /> <File name="b.mp3" path="music\mp3\" /> </Files> </Data> I'd like to use a schema to have a standard format for these input files (depending on what type of data is being used, for example "Job", "User", "View"), but I'd also like to not fail validation if there is extra data provided. For example, perhaps a Job has additional properties such as "IsAutomated", "Requester", "EndDate", and so on. I don't particularly care about these extra properties. If they are included in the XML, I'll simply ignore them when I'm processing the XML file, and I'd like validation to do the same, without having to include in the schema every single possible property that a customer might provide me with. Is there a standard way of providing such a schema, or of allowing such a general XML file that can still be validated without resorting to something as naïve (and potentially difficult to deal with) as the below? <Data type="Job"> <Data name="ID">12345</Data> . . . <Data name="Files"> <Data name="File"> <Data name="Filename">a.jpeg</Data> <Data name="path">images</Data> . . . </Data> </Data>

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• How To Attach Visual Studio 2010 To IIS Process Running On Windows 7

  - by Gopinath

  Debugging ASP.NET application hosted on IIS 7 running of Windows 7 using Visual Studio 2010 is a bit different from debugging applications hosted on IIS running on Windows XP. The key differences are Visual Studio 2010 demands for administrator mode and IIS runs under the process name w3wp.exe instead of aspnet_wp.exe. Here are the detailed steps to attach Visual Studio 2010 debugger to IIS 7 on Windows 7. 1. Launch Visual Studio 2010 in Administrator mode(right click on Visual Studio Icon and choose the option Run as Administrator) 2. Open source code the site you want to debug 3. Go to Tools -> Attach to Process.; Opens up Attach to Process.  4.  In Attach to Process dialog box, check the option Show process in all sessions. 5. Search for the process w3wp.exe, and click on Attach button. 6. Accept the warning messages. That’s is you are done. Visual Studio is now attached with IIS for debugging. Happy coding. This article titled,How To Attach Visual Studio 2010 To IIS Process Running On Windows 7, was originally published at Tech Dreams. Grab our rss feed or fan us on Facebook to get updates from us.

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• How and when to use UNIT testing properly

  - by Zebs

  I am an iOS developer. I have read about unit testing and how it is used to test specific pieces of your code. A very quick example has to do with processing JSON data onto a database. The unit test reads a file from the project bundle and executes the method that is in charge of processing JSON data. But I dont get how this is different from actually running the app and testing with the server. So my question might be a bit general, but I honestly dont understand the proper use of unit testing, or even how it is useful; I hope the experienced programmers that surf around StackOverflow can help me. Any help is very much appreciated!

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• How to concentrate on one project at a time. Divide and Conquer doesn't work for me [closed]

  - by refhat

  Possible Duplicate: Tips for staying focused and motivated on a project I have serious issues on concentrating on one project at a time. I cant even follow the Divide and Conquer Approach. Once I start a project, I try to get the things done as neatly as possible but very soon I end up messing so many components of it. I try to do divide and conquer, but my approach doesn't work smoothly, and then I then wonder here and there in other projects. Sometimes I try spending so many hours for some trivial issues, which in-fact are not even issues. How do I avoid this jargon and be a smooth developer and have a nice workflow around my projects. I tend to loose my concentration on the current project and wonder in another project.

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• A deque based on binary trees

  - by Greg Ros

  This is a simple immutable deque based on binary trees. What do you think about it? Does this kind of data structure, or possibly an improvement thereof, seem useful? How could I improve it, preferably without getting rid of its strengths? (Not in the sense of more operations, in the sense of different design) Does this sort of thing have a name? Red nodes are newly instantiated; blue ones are reused. Nodes aren't actually red or anything, it's just for emphasis.

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• How are Programing Language Designed?

  - by Anteater7171

  After doing a bit of programing, I've become quite curious on language design itself. I'm still a novice (I've been doing it for about a year), so the majority of my code pertains to only two fields (GUI design in Python and basic algorithms in C/C++). I have become intrigued with how the actual languages themselves are written. I mean this in both senses. Such as how it was literally written (ie, what language the language was written in). As well as various features like white spacing (Python) or object orientation (C++ and Python). Where would one start learning how to write a language? What are some of the fundamentals of language design, things that would make it a "complete" language?

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• Returning a mock object from a mock object

  - by Songo

  I'm trying to return an object when mocking a parser class. This is the test code using PHPUnit 3.7 //set up the result object that I want to be returned from the call to parse method $parserResult= new ParserResult(); $parserResult->setSegment('some string'); //set up the stub Parser object $stubParser=$this->getMock('Parser'); $stubParser->expects($this->any()) ->method('parse') ->will($this->returnValue($parserResult)); //injecting the stub to my client class $fileHeaderParser= new FileWriter($stubParser); $output=$fileParser->writeStringToFile(); Inside my writeStringToFile() method I'm using $parserResult like this: writeStringToFile(){ //Some code... $parserResult=$parser->parse(); $segment=$parserResult->getSegment();//that's why I set the segment in the test. } Should I mock ParserResult in the first place, so that the mock returns a mock? Is it good design for mocks to return mocks? Is there a better approach to do this all?!

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• When do you call yourself a programmer

  - by benhowdle89

  "A programmer, computer programmer or coder is someone who writes computer software" from Wikipedia If you do frontend development using jQuery/CSS/HTML do you call yourself a programmer? If you develop PHP applications that deal with databases, do you call yourself a programmer? Are you only a programmer if you write applications for desktops and mobiles? Is the web a place where the line between developer and programmer stops?

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• Critique of the IO monad being viewed as a state monad operating on the world

  - by Petr Pudlák

  The IO monad in Haskell is often explained as a state monad where the state is the world. So a value of type IO a monad is viewed as something like worldState -> (a, worldState). Some time ago I read an article (or a blog/mailing list post) that criticized this view and gave several reasons why it's not correct. But I cannot remember neither the article nor the reasons. Anybody knows? Edit: The article seems lost, so let's start gathering various arguments here. I'm starting a bounty to make things more interesting.

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• How can I become more agile?

  - by dough

  The definition of an agile approach I've adopted is: working to reduce feedback loops, everywhere. I'd describe my Personal Development Process (PDP) as "not very agile" or "not agile enough"! I've adopted TDD, automated building, and time-boxing (using the Pomodoro Technique) as part of my PDP. I find these practices really help me get feedback, review my direction, and catch yak shaving earlier! However, what still escapes me is the ability to reduce feedback time in the ultimate feedback loop; regularly getting working software in front of the end user. Aside from team-oriented practices, what can I do to personally become more agile?

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• Shader inputs in a general purpose engine

  - by dreta

  I'm not familiar with SDKs like Unity or UDK that much, so i can't check this offhand. Do general purpose engines allow users to create custom uniform variables? The way i see it, and the way i have implemented it in an engine i'm writing to learn 3D, is that there is a "set" of uniforms provided by the engine and if you want to write a custom shader then you utilize uniforms you need to create a wanted effect. Now, the thing is, first of all i'm not an artist, second of all, i didn't have a chance to create complex scenes yet. So my question is, is it common practice to define variables that the engine provides and only allow the user to work with what they're given? Allowing users to add custom programs and use them where they want is not hard, but i have issues imagining how you'd go about doing the same for uniforms.

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• symlink for dbus headers

  - by DarenW

  Source code for something that won't compile has the line #include but in real life that header file is in /usr/include/dbus-1.0/ Similarsituation exists for the dbus-c++ package. Why doesn't Ubuntu provide a symlink /usr/include/dbus pointing to the dbus-1.0 directory? Is this an bug in the dbus package? If intended, what it the purpose? Is it a proper fix to add a symlink myself? (Changing the source is not practical - there are many files, and they need to match what other people have.) update: ok, I totally misunderstood the situation, though it still comes down to a problem I think should be solved by a symlink. The dbus directory referred to in the #include statement is a deeper level directory under /usr/include/dbus-1.0/. The real problem is that the file dbus-arch-deps.h appears to be missing, but is actually stored in the weird location /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/dbus-1.0/include/dbus/ so now - why doesn't ubuntu provide a symlink to this in /usr/include/dbus-1.0/dbus, or actually store it there?

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