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• New Oracle Tutor Class: Create Procedures and Support Documents

  - by [email protected]

  Offered by Oracle University Course Code D66797GC10 July 14-16, 2010 in Chicago, IL This three day Instructor Led class is only US$ 2,250 Oracle® Tutor provides organizations with a powerful pair of applications to develop, deploy, and maintain employee business process documentation. Tutor includes a repository of prewritten process, procedure, and support documents that can be readily modified to reflect your company's unique business processes. The result is a set of job-role specific desk manuals that are easy to update and deploy online. Use Tutor to create content to: Implement new business applications Document for any regulatory compliance initiative Turn every desk into a self service reference center Increase employee productivity The primary challenge for companies faced with documenting policies, processes, and procedures is to realize that they can do this documentation in-house, with existing resources, using Oracle Tutor. Process documentation is a critical success component when implementing or upgrading to a new business application and for supporting corporate governance or other regulatory compliance initiatives. There are over 1000 Oracle Tutor customers worldwide that have used Tutor to create, distribute, and maintain their business procedures. This is easily accomplished because of Tutor's: Ease of use by those who have to write procedures (Microsoft Word based authoring) Ease of company-wide implementation (complex document management activities are centralized) Ease of use by workers who have to follow the procedures (play script format) Ease of access by remote workers (web-enabled) This course is an introduction to the Oracle Tutor suite of products. It focuses on the process documentation feature set of the Tutor applications. Participants will learn about writing procedures and maintaining these particular process document types, all using the Tutor method. Audience Business Analysts End Users Functional Implementer Project Manager Sales Consultants Security Compliance Auditors User Adoption Consultants Prerequisites No Prerequisite Courses strong working knowledge of MS Windows strong working knowledge of MS Word (2007) Objectives • Provide your organization with the next steps to implement the Tutor procedure writing method and system in your organization • Use the Tutor Author application to write employee focused process documents (procedures, instructions, references, process maps) • Use the Tutor Publisher application to create impact analysis reports, Employee Desk Manuals, and Owner Manuals Web site on OU Link to a PDF of the class summary Oracle University Training Centre - Chicago Emily Chorba Product Manager for Oracle Tutor

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• Switching from Java/Java EE career path to C POS path?

  - by Muhammad

  I am a Java/Java EE Developer with about 3 years in this field. I like low-level programming so much... I favor back-end code over front-end. I've a knowledge in C and know little about C++. I got an offer to work with C in Point-of-Sale Payment terminals. I don't know much about how POS works (IDE/toolsets, etc). although I have a payment experience (ISO8583, etc...) I need you own opinion from Switching from the Java's High-level world to POS low-level world Although I love low-level world, but I am afraid from not being found what I seek.. I know programmers are not measured by the tools they use (including prog. langs.) but with their minds. I need your opinions of: Is programming POS terminals in C is an interesting thing, or I'll find myself doing usual code-writing job? (especially I am about to switch my whole career path). I find myself writing an elegant code in Java (like: Sobat http://code.google.com/p/sobat/) a code where I find myself in... So do I'll find the same thing in POS C? or It will all about Libraries that I'll call to finish my work?! Lastly, does this thing worse adventure with my current career (stability, conference, etc.. )? (as I currently don't think to move to a new job) Thanks.

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• Python script won't write data when ran from cron

  - by Ruud

  When I run a python script in a terminal it runs as expected; downloads file and saves it in the desired spot. sudo python script.py I've added the python script to the root crontab, but then it runs as it is supposed to except it does not write the file. $ sudo crontab -l > * * * * * python /home/test/script.py >> /var/log/test.log 2>&1 Below is a simplified script that still has the problem: #!/usr/bin/python scheduleUrl = 'http://test.com/schedule.xml' schedule = '/var/test/schedule.xml' # Download url and save as filename def wget(url, filename): import urllib2 try: response = urllib2.urlopen(url) except Exception: import traceback logging.exception('generic exception: ' + traceback.format_exc()) else: print('writing:'+filename+';') output = open(filename,'wb') output.write(response.read()) output.close() # Download the schedule wget(scheduleUrl, schedule) I do get the message "writing:name of file;" inside the log, to which the cron entry outputs. But the actual file is nowhere to be found... The dir /var/test is chmodded to 777 and using whatever user, I am allowed to add and change files as I please.

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• release management system - architectural question

  - by Sonic Soul

  Every place i've worked created their own release process, and all of them worked pretty well, however it took pretty good effort (and often a dedicated team) to manage releases. I am currently at a new place, and about to design such a system, however this time the team is very lean and we won't have dedicated resources to releasing. It will be up to development manager until the system is proofed enough for other developers to use. we're using Subversion as code repository, Team City as the build server, Jira issue tracker, Oracle db. I was thinking about writing a basic workflow app, that will let developers create a new manifest which will specify the following items. release details (who, jira issues etc) workflow step (dev, test, uat, prod approved, prod released) source files that last item is where it can get hairy. especially with database scripts. Figured I'd ask if there is a good pattern, or off the shelf product that could help with the database part, or perhaps the whole process. I briefly tested Red Gate Oracle deployment tool, but it didn't work out as well as I had hoped (from 1 day of testing at least) Questions: I think I could get around releasing of our code with something like Octopus Deploy straight from Team City. I am not clear however, how I could create a simple database deployment part, that will track which version of which script (from subversion) has been deployed where. Is there already some utility I could utilize for navigating subversion to choose which scripts should be released, instead of writing one from scratch. I'd just need it to produce some manifest of paths + versions.

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• Encrypting a non-linux partition with LUKS.

  - by linuxn00b

  I have a non-Linux partition I want to encrypt with LUKS. The goal is to be able to store it by itself on a device without Linux and access it from the device when needed with an Ubuntu Live CD. I know LUKS can't encrypt partitions in place, so I created another, unformatted partition of the EXACT same size (using GParted's "Round to MiB" option) and ran this command: sudo cryptsetup luksFormat /dev/xxx Where xxx is the partition's device name. Then I typed in my new passphrase and confirmed it. Oddly, the command exited immediately after, so I guess it doesn't encrypt the entire partition right away? Anyway, then I ran this command: sudo cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/xxx xxx Then I tried copying the contents of the existing partition (call it yyy) to the encrypted one like this: sudo dd if=/dev/yyy of=/dev/mapper/xxx bs=1MB and it ran for a while, but exited with this: dd: writing `/dev/mapper/xxx': No space left on device just before writing the last MB. I take this to mean the contents of yyy was truncated when it was copied to xxx, because I have dd'd it before, and whenever I have dd'd to a partition of the exact same size, I never get that error. (and fdisk reports they are the same size in blocks). After a little Googling I discovered all luksFormat'ted partitions have a custom header followed by the encrypted contents. So it appears I need to create a partition exactly the size of the old one + however many bytes a LUKS header is. What size should the destination partition be, no. 1, and no. 2, am I even on the right track here? UPDATE I found this in the LUKS FAQ: I think this is overly complicated. Is there an alternative? Yes, you can use plain dm-crypt. It does not allow multiple passphrases, but on the plus side, it has zero on disk description and if you overwrite some part of a plain dm-crypt partition, exactly the overwritten parts are lost (rounded up to sector borders). So perhaps I shouldn't be using LUKS at all?

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• Integrating Twitter Into An ASP.NET Website

  Twitter is a popular social networking web service for writing and sharing short messages. These tidy text messages are referred to as tweets and are limited to 140 characters. Users can leave tweets and follow other users directly from Twitter's website or by using the Twitter API. Twitter's API makes it possible to integrate Twitter with external applications. For example, you can use the Twitter API to display your latest tweets on your blog. A mom and pop online store could integrate Twitter such that a new tweet was added each time a customer completed an order. And ELMAH, a popular open-source error logging library, can be configured to send error notifications to Twitter. Twitter's API is implemented over HTTP using the design principles of Representational State Transfer (REST). In a nutshell, inter-operating with the Twitter API involves a client - your application - sending an XML-formatted message over HTTP to the server - Twitter's website. The server responds with an XML-formatted message that contains status information and data. While you can certainly interface with this API by writing your own code to communicate with the Twitter API over HTTP along with the code that creates and parses the XML payloads exchanged between the client and server, such work is unnecessary since there are many community-created Twitter API libraries for a variety of programming frameworks. This article shows how to integrate Twitter with an ASP.NET website using the Twitterizer library, which is a free, open-source .NET library for working with the Twitter API. Specifically, this article shows how to retrieve your latest tweets and how to post a tweet using Twitterizer. Read on to learn more! Read More >

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• Logs are written to *.log.1 instead of *.log

  - by funkadelic

  For some reason my log files are writing to the *.log.1 files instead of the *.log files, e.g. for my Postfix log files it is writing to /var/log/mail.log.1 and not /var/log/mail.log as expected. Same goes for mail.err. It looks like it's also doing it for auth.log and syslog. Here is a ls -lt snippet of my /var/log directory, showing the more recently touched log files in reverse chronological order -rw-r----- 1 syslog adm 4608882 Dec 18 12:12 auth.log.1 -rw-r----- 1 syslog adm 4445258 Dec 18 12:12 syslog.1 -rw-r----- 1 syslog adm 2687708 Dec 18 12:11 mail.log.1 -rw-r----- 1 root adm 223033 Dec 18 12:04 denyhosts -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 56631 Dec 18 11:40 dpkg.log -rw-rw-r-- 1 root utmp 292584 Dec 18 11:39 lastlog -rw-rw-r-- 1 root utmp 9216 Dec 18 11:39 wtmp ... And ls -l mail.log*: -rw-r----- 1 syslog adm 0 Dec 16 06:31 mail.log -rw-r----- 1 syslog adm 2699809 Dec 18 12:28 mail.log.1 -rw-r----- 1 syslog adm 331704 Dec 9 06:45 mail.log.2.gz -rw-r----- 1 syslog adm 235751 Dec 2 06:40 mail.log.3.gz Is there something that is misconfigured? I tried restarting postfix and it still wrote to mail.log.1 afterwards (same with a postix stop; postfix start, too).

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• Designing javascript chart library

  - by coolscitist

  I started coding a chart library on top of d3js: My chart library. I read Javascript API reusability and Towards reusable charts. However, I am NOT really following the suggestions because I am not really convinced about them. This is how my library can be used to create a bubble chart: var chart = new XYBubbleChart(); chart.data = [{"xValue":200,"yValue":300},{"xValue":400,"yValue":200},{"xValue":100,"yValue":310}]; //set data chart.dataKey.x = "xValue"; chart.dataKey.y = "yValue"; chart.elementId = "#chart"; chart.createChart(); Here are my questions: It does not use chaining. Is it a big issue? Every property and function is exposed publicly. (Example: width, height are exposed in Chart.js). OOP is all about abstraction and hiding, but I don't really see the point right now. I think exposing everything gives flexibility to change property and functionality inside subclasses and objects without writing a lot of code. What could be pitfalls of such exposure? I have implemented functions like: zooming, "showing info boxes when data point is clicked" as "abilities". (example: XYZoomingAbility.js). Basically, such "abilities" accept "chart" object, play around with public variables of "chart" to add functionality. What this allows me to do is to add an ability by writing: activateZoomAbility(chartObject); My goal is to separate "visualization" from "interactivity". I want "interactivity" like: zooming to be plugged into the chart rather than built inside the chart. Like, I don't want my bubble chart to know anything about "zooming". However, I do want zoomable bubble chart. What is the best way to do this? How to test and what to test? I have written mixed tests: jasmine and actual html files so that I can test manually on browser.

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• Cross-platform desktop programming: C++ vs. Python

  - by John Wells

  Alright, to start off, I have experience as an amateur Obj-C/Cocoa and Ruby w/Rails programmer. These are great, but they aren't really helpful for writing cross-platform applications (hopefully GNUStep will one day be complete enough for the first to be multi platform, but that day is not today). C++, from what I can gather, is extremely powerful but also a huge, ugly behemoth that can take half a decade or more to master. I've also read that you can very easily not only shoot yourself in the foot, but blow your entire leg off with it since memory management is all manual. Obviously, this is all quite intimidating. Is it correct? Python seems to provide most of the power of C++ and is much easier to pick up at the cost of speed. How big is this sacrifice? Is it meaningful or can it be ignored? Which will have me writing fast, stable, highly reliable applications in a reasonable amount of time? Also, is it better to use Qt for your UI or instead maintain separate, native front ends for each platform? EDIT: For extra clarity, there are two types applications I want to write: one is an extremely friendly and convenient database frontend and the other, which no doubt will come much later on, is a 3D world editor.

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• Duck checker in Python: does one exist?

  - by elliot42

  Python uses duck-typing, rather than static type checking. But many of the same concerns ultimately apply: does an object have the desired methods and attributes? Do those attributes have valid, in-range values? Whether you're writing constraints in code, or writing test cases, or validating user input, or just debugging, inevitably somewhere you'll need to verify that an object is still in a proper state--that it still "looks like a duck" and "quacks like a duck." In statically typed languages you can simply declare "int x", and anytime you create or mutate x, it will always be a valid int. It seems feasible to decorate a Python object to ensure that it is valid under certain constraints, and that every time that object is mutated it is still valid under those constraints. Ideally there would be a simple declarative syntax to express "hasattr length and length is non-negative" (not in those words. Not unlike Rails validators, but less human-language and more programming-language). You could think of this as ad-hoc interface/type system, or you could think of it as an ever-present object-level unit test. Does such a library exist to declare and validate constraint/duck-checking on Python-objects? Is this an unreasonable tool to want? :) (Thanks!) Contrived example: rectangle = {'length': 5, 'width': 10} # We live in a fictional universe where multiplication is super expensive. # Therefore any time we multiply, we need to cache the results. def area(rect): if 'area' in rect: return rect['area'] rect['area'] = rect['length'] * rect['width'] return rect['area'] print area(rectangle) rectangle['length'] = 15 print area(rectangle) # compare expected vs. actual output! # imagine the same thing with object attributes rather than dictionary keys.

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• Oracle Tutor: Learn Tutor in the comfort of your own home or office

  - by emily.chorba(at)oracle.com

  The primary challenge for companies faced with documenting policies and procedures is to realize that they can do this documentation in-house, with existing resources, using Oracle Tutor. Procedure documentation is a critical success component for supporting corporate governance or other regulatory compliance initiatives and when implementing or upgrading to a new business application. There are over 1000 Oracle Tutor customers worldwide that have used Tutor to create, distribute, and maintain their business procedures. This is easily accomplished because of Tutor's: Ease of use by those who have to write procedures (Microsoft Word based authoring) Ease of company-wide implementation (complex document management activities are centralized) Ease of use by workers who have to follow the procedures (play script format)Ease of access by remote workers (web-enabled) Oracle University is offering Live Virtual Tutor classes! The class lasts four days, starts on Tuesday and finishes on Friday. This course is an introduction to the Oracle Tutor suite of products. It focuses on the Policy and Procedure writing feature set of the Tutor applications. Participants will learn about writing procedures and maintaining these particular process document types, all using the Tutor method. The next three classes are scheduled for: April 19 - 22 May 31 - June 3 July 5 - 8 You will learn to: Write procedures Create procedure Flowcharts Write support documents Create Impact Analysis Reports Create Role-base Employee Manuals Deploy online Employee Manuals on an Intranet Enjoy learning Tutor in your local environment. Start the sign up process from this link Learn More For more information about Tutor, visit Oracle.com or the Tutor Blog. Post your questions at the Tutor Forum. Emily Chorba Principle Product Manager Oracle Tutor & BPM

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• How to set acpi=off for installation?

  - by Johan Helgø

  I'm trying to install Ubuntu 12.04 LTS 64bit from a USB created in Windows using the recommended software from pendrivelinux. The USB is tested on two laptops and works fine. The install does not work on my desktop PC, it either hangs with lots of text on the screen, or it just gives me a screen with garbled colors. Right now it hangs on "[3.925311] Initializing USB Mass Storage driver...", but it hangs on different spots every time I try. I know that acpi=off will fix this. On older versions, there used to be a pink screen with the icon of a keyboard, at that screen I could press ESC, and I would then get a long list of languages, I could choose English, and then I would get options for setting acpi=off, then install without any problems. This new install menu does not have those options. The (now black and white) "Installer boot menu"'s advanced options is blank. There simply are no advanced options. If I go to help, then press F6, I get to a help screen describing the different boot parameters. I see examples of writing "Install acpi=off" However, writing "install acpi=off" it gives an error saying "could not find kernel image: install". How can I install Ubuntu 12.04 with acpi=off? (Oh, btw, nothing happens if I press F6 in the "Installer boot menu")

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• Choosing the right language for the job

  - by Ampt

  I'm currently working for a company on the engineering team of about 5-6 people and have been given the job of heading up the redesign of an embedded system tester. We've decided the general requirements and attributes that would be desirable in the system, and now I have to decide on a language to use for the system, or at the very least come up with a list of languages with pros and cons to present to the team. The general idea of the project is that we currently have a tester written in c++, which was never designed to be a tester, but instead has evolved to be such over the course of 3-4 years due to need. Writing tests for a new product requires modifying the 'framework' and writing code that is completely non-human readable or intuitive due to the way the system was originally designed. Now, we've decided that the time to modify this tester for each new product that we want to test has become too high and want to partially re-write the system so that we can program the actual tests in a scripting language that would then use the modified c++ framework on the back end to test the actual systems. The c++ framework would be responsible for doing all the actual work and the scripting language would just integrate with that to tell the framework what to do. Never having programmed in a scripting language (we program embedded systems), I've run into a wall where I have no experience with any of the languages that we could possibly use, but must somehow give pros and cons of each language so that we can choose the best one for the job. Currently my short list of possibilities includes: Python TCL Lua Perl My question is this: How can a person evaluate a language that he/she has never used before? What criteria are good indicators for a languages potential usability on a project? While helpful suggestions for my particular case are appreciated, I feel that this is a good skill to possess and would like to be able to apply this to many different projects if at all possible

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• Should we write detailed architecture design or just an outline when designing a program?

  - by EpsilonVector

  When I'm doing design for a task, I keep fighting this nagging feeling that aside from being a general outline it's going to be more or less ignored in the end. I'll give you an example: I was writing a frontend for a device that has read/write operations. It made perfect sense in the class diagram to give it a read and a write function. Yet when it came down to actually writing them I realized they were literally the same function with just one line of code changed (read vs write function call), so to avoid code duplication I ended up implementing a do_io function with a parameter that distinguishes between operations. Goodbye original design. This is not a terribly disruptive change, but it happens often and can happen in more critical parts of the program as well, so I can't help but wondering if there's a point to design more detail than a general outline, at least when it comes to the program's architecture (obviously when you are specifying an API you have to spell everything out). This might be just the result of my inexperience in doing design, but on the other hand we have agile methodologies which sort of say "we give up on planning far ahead, everything is going to change in a few days anyway", which is often how I feel. So, how exactly should I "use" design?

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• Screwed up terminal after modifying bashrc

  - by omgzor

  I ended up screwing up my terminal, while setting up Sbt for the Coursera Scala course. I can't summon gedit (or anything else) anymore. I get the following error: Command 'gedit' is available in '/usr/bin/gedit' The command could not be located because '/usr/bin' is not included in the PATH environment variable. Also, each new instance of Terminal writes these messages before any command is written: -bash: :/home/antonio/jdk7/jdk1.7.0_07/bin: No such file or directory -bash: export: `/home/antonio/Desktop/Scala/install/sbt/bin:/home/antonio/jdk7/jdk1.7.0_07/bin': not a valid identifier I recently did a manual installation of the jdk 7, which apparently works: java -version java version "1.7.0_07" Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.7.0_07-b10) Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 23.3-b01, mixed mode) While setting up Sbt, I made the mistake of editing bashrc by writing gedit ~/.bashrc on my terminal instead of writing gedit .bashrc, I wrote the following lines at the end of the bashrc file that opened: export PATH=/PATH/TO/YOUR/jdk1.7.0-VERSION/bin:$PATH export PATH=/home/antonio/jdk7/jdk1.7.0_07/bin:$PATH What is wrong here? How can I access my bashrc file and modify it again?

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• WPF and Composite Application Library &ndash; Missing The Point

  - by David Totzke

  I have a headache and it’s not even 9AM yet.  Well, ok, it’s nearly ten here now in GMT –5 but it’s before nine somewhere still. Sometimes people will miss the point of something so utterly and completely that one is left wondering how such a person can even dress themselves. Writing an application using WPF and the Composite Application Library (Prism) means that one must learn the various programming idioms common to these frameworks.  The Windows Forms event driven model simply will not suffice.  You need to come to grips with the idea of a very loosely coupled application.  Concepts that must be absorbed and internalized include Data Binding, Control and Data Templates, Commands, Dependency Injection, and Inversion of Control, as well as the Supervising Controller, Presentation Model and Model-View-View-Model patterns. It is as simple as that.  Not to embrace these concepts is to invite pain.  It is to invite noodles; and not the holy kind. Someone actually said to me that “just because it’s not WPF, doesn’t mean it’s wrong.”  And he’s right.  Unless, of course, you are writing a WPF application and especially if you are using the Composite Application Library. In simple terms then; YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG!   Dave Just because I can…

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• Style bits vs. Separate bool's

  - by peterchen

  My main platform (WinAPI) still heavily uses bits for control styles etc. (example). When introducing custom controls, I'm permanently wondering whether to follow that style or rather use individual bool's. Let's pit them against each other: enum EMyCtrlStyles { mcsUseFileIcon = 1, mcsTruncateFileName = 2, mcsUseShellContextMenu = 4, }; void SetStyle(DWORD mcsStyle); void ModifyStyle(DWORD mcsRemove, DWORD mcsAdd); DWORD GetStyle() const; ... ctrl.SetStyle(mcsUseFileIcon | mcsUseShellContextMenu); vs. CMyCtrl & SetUseFileIcon(bool enable = true); bool GetUseFileIcon() const; CMyCtrl & SetTruncteFileName(bool enable = true); bool GetTruncteFileName() const; CMyCtrl & SetUseShellContextMenu(bool enable = true); bool GetUseShellContextMenu() const; ctrl.SetUseFileIcon().SetUseShellContextMenu(); As I see it, Pro Style Bits Consistent with platform less library code (without gaining complexity), less places to modify for adding a new style less caller code (without losing notable readability) easier to use in some scenarios (e.g. remembering / transferring settings) Binary API remains stable if new style bits are introduced Now, the first and the last are minor in most cases. Pro Individual booleans Intellisense and refactoring tools reduce the "less typing" effort Single Purpose Entities more literate code (as in "flows more like a sentence") No change of paradim for non-bool properties These sound more modern, but also "soft" advantages. I must admit the "platform consistency" is much more enticing than I could justify, the less code without losing much quality is a nice bonus. 1. What do you prefer? Subjectively, for writing the library, or for writing client code? 2. Any (semi-) objective statements, studies, etc.?

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• TDD - Outside In vs Inside Out

  - by Songo

  What is the difference between building an application Outside In vs building it Inside Out using TDD? These are the books I read about TDD and unit testing: Test Driven Development: By Example Test-Driven Development: A Practical Guide: A Practical Guide Real-World Solutions for Developing High-Quality PHP Frameworks and Applications Test-Driven Development in Microsoft .NET xUnit Test Patterns: Refactoring Test Code The Art of Unit Testing: With Examples in .Net Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests---This one was really hard to understand since JAVA isn't my primary language :) Almost all of them explained TDD basics and unit testing in general, but with little mention of the different ways the application can be constructed. Another thing I noticed is that most of these books (if not all) ignore the design phase when writing the application. They focus more on writing the test cases quickly and letting the design emerge by itself. However, I came across a paragraph in xUnit Test Patterns that discussed the ways people approach TDD. There are 2 schools out there Outside In vs Inside Out. Sadly the book doesn't elaborate more on this point. I wish to know what is the main difference between these 2 cases. When should I use each one of them? To a TDD beginner which one is easier to grasp? What is the drawbacks of each method? Is there any materials out there that discuss this topic specifically?

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• Bot strategy in an arena

  - by joulesm

  I am writing the player's behavior for an arena game, and I'm wondering if you could offer some strategies. I'm writing it in Python, but I'm just interested in the high level game play. Here are the game aspects: Arena is a circle of a given size. The arena's size shrinks every round to help break any ties. Players are much smaller circles, and can be on teams of 1 or 2 players. Players attack by colliding with other players, and based on the physics of the collision (speed of both players, angle), one could force another player out of the arena. Once a player is out of the arena, they are out of the game (for that round). The goal is to be on the only team with players left in the arena. All other players have been pushed (through collisions or mistakes) out of the arena. It is possible for there to be no winner if the last two players exit the arena at the same time. Once the player has been programmed, the game just runs. There is no human intervention in the game. I'm thinking it's easiest to implement a few simple programmatic rules for my player to follow. For example, stay close to center of the arena, attack opponents from the inner side of the arena, etc. Are there any good simple game strategies? Would adding a random aspect to the game help? For example, to avoid predictability by the other team or something. Thanks in advance.

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• What is the correct UI interface to learn for creating Windows phone 8 apps? [closed]

  - by Robert Oschler

  I am a veteran Delphi 6 programmer transitioning to C# development. My first project is a open source library that will have a minimal user interface since it is meant to be used as a Component primarily on desktop PCs running Visual Studio. My next project is going to be a Windows 8 phone app and I intend for that platform to be my primary focus for future C# development, not the desktop. My concern is that I waste as little time as possible learning a presentation framework that will benefit or distract me from writing Windows 8 phone apps. The plethora of framework names I have already encountered include, WinForms, WPF (Windows Presentation Framework), Silverlight, Silverlight Mobile, Metro and there may be others. Given my goal outlined in the first paragraph above, I have a few questions: 1) Which of the frameworks should I use for the small amount of UI work I will do with the desktop Component project that will help me the most, or hurt me the least, when I move to Windows 8 phone app development? 2) Which is the correct framework to study for developing Windows 8 phone apps? 3) Any awesome tutorials, resources or books you have run into targeted towards veteran programmers from other platforms? I read about the Portable Library Tools on this Stack Overflow thread: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5522355/windows-phone-7-wpf-sharing-a-codebase But the reply by Simon Guindon seemed to indicate to me that it's not the best solution for writing a competitive Windows 8 phone app.

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• Should I be using Lua for game logic on mobile devices?

  - by Rob Ashton

  As above really, I'm writing an android based game in my spare time (android because it's free and I've no real aspirations to do anything commercial). The game logic comes from a very typical component based model whereby entities exist and have components attached to them and messages are sent to and fro in order to make things happen. Obviously the layer for actually performing that is thin, and if I were to write an iPhone version of this app, I'd have to re-write the renderer and core driver (of this component based system) in Objective C. The entities are just flat files determining the names of the components to be added, and the components themselves are simple, single-purpose objects containing the logic for the entity. Now, if I write all the logic for those components in Java, then I'd have to re-write them on Objective C if I decided to do an iPhone port. As the bulk of the application logic is contained within these components, they would, in an ideal world, be written in some platform-agnostic language/script/DSL which could then just be loaded into the app on whatever platform. I've been led to believe however that this is not an ideal world though, and that Lua performance etc on mobile devices still isn't up to scratch, that the overhead is too much and that I'd run into troubles later if I went down that route? Is this actually the case? Obviously this is just a hypothetical question, I'm happy writing them all in Java as it's simple and easy get things off the ground, but say I actually enjoy making this game (unlikely, given how much I'm currently disliking having to deal with all those different mobile devices) and I wanted to make a commercially viable game - would I use Lua or would I just take the hit when it came to porting and just re-write all the code?

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• Is this kind of Design by Contract useless?

  - by Charlie Pigarelli

  I've just started informatics university and I'm attending a programming course about C(++). The programming professor prefers to teach very few things (in 3 month we have just reached the functions topic) and connect every topic with a type of programming design that somehow is similar to the Design by Contract design. Basically what he ask us to do is to write every exercise with comments Pre-conditions, Post-conditions and Invariants that should prove the correctness of each program we write. But this doesn't make any sense to me. I mean, ok: maybe writing down your thoughts prevent you from doing some mistakes, but if this is all an abstract thing, then if your program intuition is wrong you'll write your program wrong and then you'll also write pre and post conditions wrong probably auto convincing your self about its correctness. Most of the time, both me and other students have written programs that seemed ok and that had correct pre and post condition too. But at the moment of testing it was just completely wrong. I had some experience before this course of programming and I had written a lot of line of code before and I found myself comfortably with just writing a program and unit test it. It take less time to accomplish and is less "abstract" than just thinking about what every single piece of your program should do in every case (which is kinda like mentally testing it). Finally, all this pre and post conditions takes me like 80% of the total time of the exercise. It's harder to think about putting down this pre and post correct than to write the program itself. Since we are like the only course of the only university probably in the entire world that makes this things, could someone please tell me how should I manage this thing? Am I right thinking that this doesn't worth anything? Should I change university? (there are like double of the people attending that course and it seems that usually very few people passes the exam the first year). Should I convince myself it's method is right?

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• My Latest Books &ndash; Professional C# 2010 and Professional ASP.NET 4

  - by Bill Evjen

  My two latest books are out! Professional ASP.NET 4 in C# and VB Professional C# 4 and .NET 4 From the back covers: Take your web development to the next level using ASP.NET 4 ASP.NET is about making you as productive as possible when building fast and secure web applications. Each release of ASP.NET gets better and removes a lot of the tedious code that you previously needed to put in place, making common ASP.NET tasks easier. With this book, an unparalleled team of authors walks you through the full breadth of ASP.NET and the new and exciting capabilities of ASP.NET 4. The authors also show you how to maximize the abundance of features that ASP.NET offers to make your development process smoother and more efficient. Professional ASP.NET 4: Demonstrates ASP.NET built-in systems such as the membership and role management systems Covers everything you need to know about working with and manipulating data Discusses the plethora of server controls that are at your disposal Explores new ways to build ASP.NET, such as working with ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET AJAX Examines the full life cycle of ASP.NET, including debugging and error handling, HTTP modules, the provider model, and more Features both printed and downloadable C# and VB code examples Start using the new features of C# 4 and .NET 4 right away The new C# 4 language version is indispensable for writing code in Visual Studio 2010. This essential guide emphasizes that C# is the language of choice for your .NET 4 applications. The unparalleled author team of experts begins with a refresher of C# basics and quickly moves on to provide detailed coverage of all the recently added language and Framework features so that you can start writing Windows applications and ASP.NET web applications immediately. Reviews the .NET architecture, objects, generics, inheritance, arrays, operators, casts, delegates, events, Lambda expressions, and more Details integration with dynamic objects in C#, named and optional parameters, COM-specific interop features, and type-safe variance Provides coverage of new features of .NET 4, Workflow Foundation 4, ADO.NET Data Services, MEF, the Parallel Task Library, and PLINQ Has deep coverage of great technologies including LINQ, WCF, WPF, flow and fixed documents, and Silverlight Reviews ASP.NET programming and goes into new features such as ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET Dynamic Data Discusses communication with WCF, MSMQ, peer-to-peer, and syndication

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• BDD/TDD vs JAD?

  - by Jonathan Conway

  I've been proposing that my workplace implement Behavior-Driven-Development, by writing high-level specifications in a scenario format, and in such a way that one could imagine writing a test for it. I do know that working against testable specifications tends to increase developer productivity. And I can already think of several examples where this would be the case on our own project. However it's difficult to demonstrate the value of this to the business. This is because we already have a Joint Application Development (JAD) process in place, in which developers, management, user-experience and testers all get together to agree on a common set of requirements. So, they ask, why should developers work against the test-cases created by testers? These are for verification and are based on the higher-level specs created by the UX team, which the developers currently work off. This, they say, is sufficient for developers and there's no need to change how the specs are written. They seem to have a point. What is the actual benefit of BDD/TDD, if you already have a test-team who's test cases are fully compatible with the higher-level specs currently given to the developers?

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• Low hanging fruit where "a sufficiently smart compiler" is needed to get us back to Moore's Law?

  - by jamie

  Paul Graham argues that: It would be great if a startup could give us something of the old Moore's Law back, by writing software that could make a large number of CPUs look to the developer like one very fast CPU. ... The most ambitious is to try to do it automatically: to write a compiler that will parallelize our code for us. There's a name for this compiler, the sufficiently smart compiler, and it is a byword for impossibility. But is it really impossible? Can someone provide a concrete example where a paralellizing compiler would solve a pain point? Web-apps don't appear to be a problem: just run a bunch of Node processes. Real-time raytracing isn't a problem: the programmers are writing multi-threaded, SIMD assembly language quite happily (indeed, some might complain if we make it easier!). The holy grail is to be able to accelerate any program, be it MySQL, Garage Band, or Quicken. I'm looking for a middle ground: is there a real-world problem that you have experienced where a "smart-enough" compiler would have provided a real benefit, i.e that someone would pay for?

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