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  • Develop an classic UI or be bold with a newer design?

    - by DeanMc
    Forgive me if this is the wrong place but I am curious as to how other programmers feel about this topic: I am currently working on my portfolio site, it is being designed and built in silverlight 4. I initially started off with a typical stylised e-folio theme much like a standard website in terms of layout and flow. As I work more in the concept stages something has struck me. Am I trying to shoe-horn yesterday into today? What I am talking about is UI expectations. I'm all for clean user interfaces but that does not mean they should not take advantage of new concepts in presentation right? If you where to develop a site in silverlight as your own portfolio piece would you stick to the tried and tested "website" feel or would you try to come up with a UI that is intuitive and complements the technology? I feel that UI discussions are all the more important now that all forms of web development are allowing better methods to engage the user.

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  • The Implications of Modern Day Software Development Abstractions

    - by Andreas Grech
    I am currently doing a dissertation about the implications or dangers that today's software development practices or teachings may have on the long term effects of programming. Just to make it clear: I am not attacking the use abstractions in programming. Every programmer knows that abstractions are the bases for modularity. What I want to investigate with this dissertation are the positive and negative effects abstractions can have in software development. As regards the positive, I am sure that I can find many sources that can confirm this. But what about the negative effects of abstractions? Do you have any stories to share that talk about when certain abstractions failed on you? The main concern is that many programmers today are programming against abstractions without having the faintest idea of what the abstraction is doing under-the-covers. This may very well lead to bugs and bad design. So, in you're opinion, how important is it that programmers actually know what is going below the abstractions? Taking a simple example from Joel's Back to Basics, C's strcat: void strcat( char* dest, char* src ) { while (*dest) dest++; while (*dest++ = *src++); } The above function hosts the issue that if you are doing string concatenation, the function is always starting from the beginning of the dest pointer to find the null terminator character, whereas if you write the function as follows, you will return a pointer to where the concatenated string is, which in turn allows you to pass this new pointer to the concatenation function as the *dest parameter: char* mystrcat( char* dest, char* src ) { while (*dest) dest++; while (*dest++ = *src++); return --dest; } Now this is obviously a very simple as regards abstractions, but it is the same concept I shall be investigating. Finally, what do you think about the issue that schools are preferring to teach Java instead of C and Lisp ? Can you please give your opinions and your says as regards this subject? Thank you for your time and I appreciate every comment.

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  • How to notice unusual news activity

    - by ??iu
    Suppose you were able keep track of the news mentions of different entities, like say "Steve Jobs" and "Steve Ballmer". What are ways that could you tell whether the amount of mentions per entity per a given time period was unusual relative to their normal degree of frequency of appearance? I imagine that for a more popular person like Steve Jobs an increase of like 50% might be unusual (an increase of 1000 to 1500), while for a relatively unknown CEO an increase of 1000% for a given day could be possible (an increase of 2 to 200). If you didn't have a way of scaling that your unusualness index could be dominated by unheard-ofs getting their 15 minutes of fame.

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  • Do you ever feel confident in your skills?

    - by Gary Willoughby
    As a self taught developer i always find myself questioning my skill and knowledge and always feel like i am falling behind in using new technology. Over a period of nearly 9 years i've studied most mainstream languages (especially C based ones), used lots of different OSes, read and absorbed many books and even written one myself. But i still feel i'm usless! Do professional developers ever get to the stage where they feel confident that they know what they are doing and are confident when submitting solutions/code? When do you know you're good enough?

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  • How should I implement items that are normalized in the Database, in Object Oriented Design?

    - by Jonas
    How should I implement items that are normalized in the Database, in Object Oriented classes? In the database I have a big table of items and a smaller of groups. Each item belong to one group. This is how my database design look like: +----------------------------------------+ | Inventory | +----+------+-------+----------+---------+ | Id | Name | Price | Quantity | GroupId | +----+------+-------+----------+---------+ | 43 | Box | 34.00 | 456 | 4 | | 56 | Ball | 56.50 | 3 | 6 | | 66 | Tin | 23.00 | 14 | 4 | +----+------+-------+----------+---------+ Totally 3000 lines +----------------------+ | Groups | +---------+------+-----+ | GroupId | Name | VAT | +---------+------+-----+ | 4 | Mini | 0.2 | | 6 | Big | 0.3 | +---------+------+-----+ Totally 10 lines I will use the OOP classes in a GUI, where the user can edit Items and Groups in the inventory. It should also be easy to do calculations with a bunch of items. The group information like VAT are needed for the calculations. I will write an Item class, but do I need a Group class? and if I need it, should I keep them in a global location or how do I access it when I need it for Item-calculations? Is there any design pattern for this case?

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  • Shortest distance between a point and a line segment

    - by Eli Courtwright
    I need a basic function to find the shortest distance between a point and a line segment. Feel free to write the solution in any language you want; I can translate it into what I'm using (Javascript). EDIT: My line segment is defined by two endpoints. So my line segment AB is defined by the two points A (x1,y1) and B (x2,y2). I'm trying to find the distance between this line segment and a point C (x3,y3). My geometry skills are rusty, so the examples I've seen are confusing, I'm sorry to admit.

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  • Semantically linking to code snippets

    - by Tim
    What's the most simple and semantic way of presenting code snippets in HTML? Possible XHTML syntax <a href="code_sample.php" type="text/x-php"> Example of widget creation </a> Example of linked file (code_sample.php): // Create a new widget $widget = new widget(); Pros: Semantically uses title to describe the source code being referenced Up to the client to render snippet Having very many custom server-side implementations tells me it should be standardized Browsers can have plug-ins for copy+paste, download, etc Seems to me this is where it belongs (not in Javascript) Degradation: non-compliant browsers receive a link to the associated content Cons: Not semantic enough? Seems wrong to replace hyperlinks with source code for presentation <object> might be better, but wouldn't degrade as nicely. Background I'm trying to create a "personal" XHTML standard for storing notes (wow, this is probably among the nerdiest things I've said). Since notes are just "scratch" it needs to be very lightweight. SO's markdown is very lightweight but not semantic enough for my needs. Plus, now I'm just curious. What's the most ideal syntax for linking to client-rendered code-snippets?

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  • What's the best example of pure show-off code you've seen?

    - by Damovisa
    Let's face it, programmers can be show-offs. I've seen a lot of code that was only done a particular way to prove how smart the person who wrote it was. What's the best example of pure show-off code you've seen (or been responsible for) in your time? For me, it'd have to be the guy who wrote FizzBuzz in one line on a whiteboard during a programming interview. Not really that impressive in the scheme of things, but completely unnecessary and pure, "look-what-I-can-do". I've lost the original code, but I think it was something like this (linebreaks for readability): Enumerable.Range(1,100).ToList().ForEach( n => Console.WriteLine( (n%3==0) ? (n%5==0) ? "FizzBuzz" : "Fizz" : (n%5==0) ? "Buzz" : n ) );

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  • What programming language is this?

    - by Richard M.
    I recently stumbled over a very odd source listing on a rather old programming-related site (lost it somewhere in my browser history as I didn't care about it at first). I think that this is part of a simple (console-based?) snake game. I searched and searched but didn't find a language that looked somwhat like this. This seems like a mix of Python, Ruby and C++. What the hell? What programming-language is the below source listing written in? Maybe you can figure it out? my Snake.hasProps { length parts xDir yDir } & hasMethods { init: length = 0 parts[0].x,y = 5 move: parts[ 0 ].x,y.!add xDir | yDir # Move the head map parts(i,v): parts[ i ] = parts[ i + 1 ] checkBiteSelf checkFeed checkBiteSelf: part } my SnakePart.hasProps { x y } fork SnakePart to !Feed my Game.hasProps { frameTime = 30 } & hasMethods { init: mainloop mainloop: sys.util.sleep frameTime Snake.move Field.getInput -> Snake.xDir | Snake.yDir Field.reDraw with Snake & Feed & Game # For FPS } main.isMethod { game.init }

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  • Is there anyone out there that codes like I do?

    - by Jacob Relkin
    Hi, Some people have told me that my coding style is a lot different than theirs. I think I am somewhat neurotic when it comes to spacing and indenting though. Here's a snippet to show you what I mean: - ( void ) applicationDidFinishLaunching: ( UIApplication *) application { SomeObject *object = [ [ SomeObject alloc ] init ]; int x = 100 / 5; object.someInstanceVariable = ( ( 4 * x ) + rand() ); [ object someMethod ]; } Notice how I space out all of my brackets/parentheses, start curly braces on the same line, "my code has room to breathe", so to speak. So my questions are a) is this normal and b) What's your coding style?

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  • Placement of defensive structures in a game

    - by Martin
    I am working on an AI bot for the game Defcon. The game has cities, with varying populations, and defensive structures with limited range. I'm trying to work out a good algorithm for placing defence towers. Cities with higher populations are more important to defend Losing a defence tower is a blow, so towers should be placed reasonably close together Towers and cities can only be placed on land So, with these three rules, we see that the best kind of placement is towers being placed in a ring around the largest population areas (although I don't want an algorithm just to blindly place a ring around the highest area of population, sometime there might be 2 sets of cities far apart, in which case the algorithm should make 2 circles, each one half my total towers). I'm wondering what kind of algorithms might be used for determining placement of towers?

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  • How do you reproduce bugs that occur sporadically?

    - by furtelwart
    We have a bug in our application that does not occur every time and therefore we don't know its "logic". I don't even get it reproduced in 100 times today. Disclaimer: This bug exists and I've seen it. It's not a pebkac or something similar. What are common hints to reproduce this kind of bug?

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  • How much detail should be in a project plan or spec?

    - by DeanMc
    I have an issue that I feel many programmers can relate to... I have worked on many small scale projects. After my initial paper brain storm I tend to start coding. What I come up with is usually a rough working model of the actual application. I design in a disconnected fashion so I am talking about underlying code libraries, user interfaces are the last thing as the library usually dictates what is needed in the UI. As my projects get bigger I worry that so should my "spec" or design document. The above paragraph, from my investigations, is echoed all across the internet in one fashion or another. When a UI is concerned there is a bit more information but it is UI specific and does not relate to code libraries. What I am beginning to realise is that maybe code is code is code. It seems from my extensive research that there is no 1:1 mapping between a design document and the code. When I need to research a topic I dump information into OneNote and from there I prioritise features into versions and then into related chunks so that development runs in a fairly linear fashion, my tasks tend to look like so: Implement Binary File Reader Implement Binary File Writer Create Object to encapsulate Data for expression to the caller Now any programmer worth his salt is aware that between those three to do items could be a potential wall of code that could expand out to multiple files. I have tried to map the complete code process for each task but I simply don't think it can be done effectively. By the time one mangles pseudo code it is essentially code anyway so the time investment is negated. So my question is this: Am I right in assuming that the best documentation is the code itself. We are all in agreement that a high level overview is needed. How high should this be? Do you design to statement, class or concept level? What works for you?

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  • Calculate date from numeric value

    - by elias
    The number 71867806 represents the present day, with the smallest unit of days. How can I calculate the currente date from it? (or) convert it into an Unix timestamp? Solution shouldn't use language depending features. Thanks!

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  • To what extent should code try to explain fatal exceptions?

    - by Andrzej Doyle
    I suspect that all non-trivial software is likely to experience situations where it hits an external problem it cannot work around and thus needs to fail. This might be due to bad configuration, an external server being down, disk full, etc. In these situations, especially if the software is running in non-interactive mode, I expect that all one can really do is log an error and wait for the admin to read the logs and fix the problem. If someone happens to interact with the software in the meantime, e.g. a request comes in to a server that failed to initialize properly, then perhaps an appropriate hint can be given to check the logs and maybe even the error can be echoed (depending on whether you can tell if they're a technical guy as opposed to a business user). For the moment though let's not think too hard about this part. My question is, to what extent should the software be responsible for trying to explain the meaning of the fatal error? In general, how much competence/knowledge are you allowed to presume on administrators of the software, and how much should you include troubleshooting information and potential resolution steps when logging fatal errors? Of course if there's something that's unique to the runtime context this should definitely be logged; but lets assume your software needs to talk to Active Directory via LDAP and gets back an error "[LDAP: error code 49 - 80090308: LdapErr: DSID-0C090334, comment: AcceptSecurityContext error, data 525, vece]". Is it reasonable to assume that the maintainers will be able to Google the error code and work out what it means, or should the software try to parse the error code and log that this is caused by an incorrect user DN in the LDAP config? I don't know if there is a definitive best-practices answer for this, so I'm keen to hear a variety of views.

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  • Perls Of Wisdom For a .Net Programmer [closed]

    - by DeanMc
    Hi Guys, I like to think that recently I have moved from complete beginner to beginner. It has been a hard road and one on which I took many wrong turns. Very rarely in any profession is there a place where so many rock stars gather, this is something I would like to take advantage of. What I would like to ask is what are your perls of wisdom for a .net programmer. They can be anything you feel of value, a concept, a book, a process that should be followed, anything of that nature, it doesn't have to be .net specific just contextual. Thanks for taking the time to read this and respond.

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  • What features would you like to see added to C++?

    - by George Edison
    Are there any features you would like to see added to C++? Maybe... A programming construct An extra operator A built-in function you think would be useful I realize questions like this are frowned upon, but I think this one is a genuine programming question that can be answered and the answers will spawn valuable discussion. (And it's community wiki.) Here is one of mine: How come C++ has no exponent operator, like Python's **?

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  • Modelling multiple simultaneous states

    - by James P.
    How can you go about modelling an object that can have multiple simultaneous states? For example, you could have a person that's waiting for a bus. That's one state. But they could also be reading a newspaper while waiting for the bus. Furthermore, they could be thinking about something while reading the newspaper. They could also be sniffing their nose because they have a cold. That's a four states in all taking place at the same time. Obviously using booleans would be tedious and unflexible. Also, a conventional state pattern would mean that states are exclusive and can't be simultaneous in nature. The only thing I can think of is a State pattern combined with a Composite. Would this do or is there a way of taking things further?

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