Search Results

Search found 13604 results on 545 pages for 'programming agnostic'.

facebook twitter digg google delicious technorati stumbleupon myspace wordpress linkedin gmail igoogle windows live tumblr viadeo yahoo buzz yahoo mail yahoo bookmarks favorites email print

Page 95/545 | < Previous Page | 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102  | Next Page >

  • When I'm iterating over two arrays at once, which one do I use as the limit?

    - by Martijn Courteaux
    Hi, I'm always struggling with something like the following Java example: String breads[] = {"Brown", "White", "Sandwich"}; int count[] = new int[breads.length]; for (int i = 0; i < ****; i++) { // Prompt the number of breads } ****: which array.length should I choose? I can choose between breads.length and count.length I know it would be the same result, but I don't know which one I shoud choose. There are many other examples where I get the same problem. I'm sure that you have encountered this problem as well in the past. What should you choose? Are there general agreements? Thanks

    Read the article

  • 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.

    Read the article

  • In what situations is octal base used?

    - by Bob
    I've seen binary and hex used quite often but never octal. Yet octal has it's own convention for being used in some languages (ie, a leading 0 indicating octal base). When is octal used? What are some typical situations when one would use octal or octal would be easier to reason about? Or is it merely a matter of taste?

    Read the article

  • Throwing cats out of windows

    - by AndrewF
    Imagine you're in a tall building with a cat. The cat can survive a fall out of a low story window, but will die if thrown from a high floor. How can you figure out the longest drop that the cat can survive, using the least number of attempts? Obviously, if you only have one cat, then you can only search linearly. First throw the cat from the first floor. If it survives, throw it from the second. Eventually, after being thrown from floor f, the cat will die. You then know that floor f-1 was the maximal safe floor. But what if you have more than one cat? You can now try some sort of logarithmic search. Let's say that the build has 100 floors and you have two identical cats. If you throw the first cat out of the 50th floor and it dies, then you only have to search 50 floors linearly. You can do even better if you choose a lower floor for your first attempt. Let's say that you choose to tackle the problem 20 floors at a time and that the first fatal floor is #50. In that case, your first cat will survive flights from floors 20 and 40 before dying from floor 60. You just have to check floors 41 through 49 individually. That's a total of 12 attempts, which is much better than the 50 you would need had you attempted to use binary elimination. In general, what's the best strategy and it's worst-case complexity for an n-storied building with 2 cats? What about for n floors and m cats? Assume that all cats are equivalent: they will all survive or die from a fall from a given window. Also, every attempt is independent: if a cat survives a fall, it is completely unharmed. This isn't homework, although I may have solved it for school assignment once. It's just a whimsical problem that popped into my head today and I don't remember the solution. Bonus points if anyone knows the name of this problem or of the solution algorithm.

    Read the article

  • What is recursion? -- In plain english.

    - by Christopher Altman
    I hear this word everyday, but cannot give a meaningful, concise, or plain-english answer to what it is. Recursion is defined by the bastian of knowledge as: Recursion in computer science is a method where the solution to a problem depends on solutions to smaller instances of the same problem.1 The approach can be applied to many types of problems, and is one of the central ideas of computer science.[2] Source Is recursion simply something that repeats itself to get a solution? I am looking for a "Recursion for Dummies" definition, and maybe simple examples. My goal is to be able to understand and explain recursion in my own words. I do not like simply thinking I know the meaning of something because I hear it referenced daily, but have not paused to form my own understanding.

    Read the article

  • Is there a way to programatically check dependencies of an EXE?

    - by Mason Wheeler
    I've got a certain project that I build and distribute to users. I have two build configurations, Debug and Release. Debug, obviously, is for my use in debugging, but there's an additional wrinkle: the Debug configuration uses a special debugging memory manager, with a dependency on an external DLL. There's been a few times when I've accidentally built and distributed an installer package with the Debug configuration, and it's then failed to run once installed because the users don't have the special DLL. I'd like to be able to keep that from happening in the future. I know I can get the dependencies in a program by running Dependency Walker, but I'm looking for a way to do it programatically. Specifically, I have a way to run scripts while creating the installer, and I want something I can put in the installer script to check the program and see if it has a dependency on this DLL, and if so, cause the installer-creation process to fail with an error. I know how to create a simple CLI program that would take two filenames as parameters, and could run a DependsOn function and create output based on the result of it, but I don't know what to put in the DependsOn function. Does anyone know how I'd go about writing it?

    Read the article

  • Dummy SMTP Server for testing apps that send email

    - by Patrick McElhaney
    I have a lot of apps that send email. Sometimes it's one or two messages at a time. Sometimes it's thousands of messages. In development, I usually test by substituting my own address for any recipient addresses. I'm sure that's what everybody else does, until they get fed up with it and find a better solution. I was thinking about creating a dummy SMTP server that just catches the messages and dumps them in a SQLLite database, or an mbox file, or whatever. But surely such a tool already exists? How do you test sending email?

    Read the article

  • How could it happen that version control software emerged so lately?

    - by sharptooth
    According to Wikipedia (the table at the page bottom), the earliest known version control systems were CVS and TeamWare both known from year 1990. How can it be? Software development has been here from at most 1960's and I honestly can't imagine working with codebase without version control. How could it happen that version control software emerged so lately compared to software development?

    Read the article

  • Is there any self-improving compiler around?

    - by JohnIdol
    I am not aware of any self-improving compiler, but then again I am not much of a compiler-guy. Is there ANY self-improving compiler out there? Please note that I am talking about a compiler that improves itself - not a compiler that improves the code it compiles. Any pointers appreciated! Side-note: in case you're wondering why I am asking have a look at this post. Even if I agree with most of the arguments I am not too sure about the following: We have programs that can improve their code without human input now — they’re called compilers. ... hence my question.

    Read the article

  • What turns away users/prospective users?

    - by Zach Johnson
    In your experience, what kinds of things have turned away users and prospective users from using your programs? Also, what kinds of things turn you away from using someone else's programs? For example, one thing that really bugs me is when someone provides free software, but requires you to enter your name and email address before you download it. Why do they need my name and email address? I just want to use the program! I understand that the developer(s) may want to get a feel for how many users they have, etc, but the extra work I have to do really makes me think twice about downloading their software, even if it does really great things.

    Read the article

  • Plotting an Arc in Discrete Steps

    - by phobos51594
    Good afternoon, Background My question relates to the plotting of an arbitrary arc in space using discrete steps. It is unique, however, in that I am not drawing to a canvas in the typical sense. The firmware I am designing is for a gcode interpreter for a CNC mill that will translate commands into stepper motor movements. Now, I have already found a similar question on this very site, but the methodology suggested (Bresenham's Algorithm) appears to be incompatable for moving an object in space, as it only relies on the calculation of one octant of a circle which is then mirrored about the remaining axes of symmetry. Furthermore, the prescribed method of calculation an arc between two arbitrary angles relies on trigonometry (I am implementing on a microcontroller and would like to avoid costly trig functions, if possible) and simply not taking the steps that are out of the range. Finally, the algorithm only is designed to work in one rotational direction (e.g. counterclockwise). Question So, on to the actual question: Does anyone know of a general-purpose algorithm that can be used to "draw" an arbitrary arc in discrete steps while still giving respect to angular direction (CW / CCW)? The final implementation will be done in C, but the language for the purpose of the question is irrelevant. Thank you in advance. References S.O post on drawing a simple circle using Bresenham's Algorithm: "Drawing" an arc in discrete x-y steps Wiki page describing Bresenham's Algorithm for a circle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midpoint_circle_algorithm Gcode instructions to be implemented (see. G2 and G3) http://linuxcnc.org/docs/html/gcode.html

    Read the article

  • Why are compilers so stupid?

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

    Read the article

  • Why should GoTos be bad?

    - by lisn
    I'm using gotos and a lot of them. C++, PHP or COBOL - I use them on nearly all occasions where everybody else would use functions or even classes. Yet my code is Clear Maintainable Bug-free Fast So why does everybody I meet tell me about how bad gotos are? Are there any facts that show that they are "bad"?

    Read the article

  • How does Amazon's Statistically Improbable Phrases work?

    - by ??iu
    How does something like Statistically Improbable Phrases work? According to amazon: Amazon.com's Statistically Improbable Phrases, or "SIPs", are the most distinctive phrases in the text of books in the Search Inside!™ program. To identify SIPs, our computers scan the text of all books in the Search Inside! program. If they find a phrase that occurs a large number of times in a particular book relative to all Search Inside! books, that phrase is a SIP in that book. SIPs are not necessarily improbable within a particular book, but they are improbable relative to all books in Search Inside!. For example, most SIPs for a book on taxes are tax related. But because we display SIPs in order of their improbability score, the first SIPs will be on tax topics that this book mentions more often than other tax books. For works of fiction, SIPs tend to be distinctive word combinations that often hint at important plot elements. For instance, for Joel's first book, the SIPs are: leaky abstractions, antialiased text, own dog food, bug count, daily builds, bug database, software schedules One interesting complication is that these are phrases of either 2 or 3 words. This makes things a little more interesting because these phrases can overlap with or contain each other.

    Read the article

  • Opinions on collision detection objects with a moving scene

    - by Evan Teran
    So my question is simple, and I guess it boils down to how anal you want to be about collision detection. To keep things simple, lets assume we're talking about 2D sprites defined by a bounding box. In addition, let's assume that my sprite object has a function to detect collisions like this: S.collidesWith(other); Finally the scene is moving and "walls" in the scene can move, an object may not touch a wall. So a simple implementation might look like this (psuedo code): moveWalls(); moveSprite(); foreach(wall as w) { if(s.collidesWith(w)) { gameover(); } } The problem with this is that if the sprite and wall move towards each other, depending on the circumstances (such as diagonal moment). They may pass though each other (unlikely but could happen). So I may do this instead. moveWalls(); foreach(wall as w) { if(s.collidesWith(w)) { gameover(); } } moveSprite(); foreach(wall as w) { if(s.collidesWith(w)) { gameover(); } } This takes care of the passing through each other issue, but another rare issue comes up. If they are adjacent to each other (literally the next pixel) and both the wall and the sprite are moving left, then I will get an invalid collision since the wall moves, checks for collision (hit) then the sprite is moved. Which seems unfair. In addition, to that, the redundant collision detection feels very inefficient. I could give the player movement priority alleviating the first issue but it is still checking twice. moveSprite(); foreach(wall as w) { if(s.collidesWith(w)) { gameover(); } } moveWalls(); foreach(wall as w) { if(s.collidesWith(w)) { gameover(); } } Am I simply over thinking this issue, should this just be chalked up to "it'll happen rare enough that no one will care"? Certainly looking at old sprite based games, I often find situations where the collision detection has subtle flaws, but I figure by now we can do better :-P. What are people's thoughts?

    Read the article

  • Can this rectangle to rectangle intersection code still work?

    - by Jeremy Rudd
    I was looking for a fast performing code to test if 2 rectangles are intersecting. A search on the internet came up with this one-liner (WOOT!), but I don't understand how to write it in Javascript, it seems to be written in an ancient form of C++. Can this thing still work? Can you make it work? struct { LONG left; LONG top; LONG right; LONG bottom; } RECT; bool IntersectRect(const RECT * r1, const RECT * r2) { return ! ( r2->left > r1->right || r2->right left || r2->top > r1->bottom || r2->bottom top ); }

    Read the article

  • Deal with undefined values in code or in the template?

    - by David
    I'm writing a web application (in Python, not that it matters). One of the features is that people can leave comments on things. I have a class for comments, basically like so: class Comment: user = ... # other stuff where user is an instance of another class, class User: name = ... # other stuff And of course in my template, I have <div>${comment.user.name}</div> Problem: Let's say I allow people to post comments anonymously. In that case comment.user is None (undefined), and of course accessing comment.user.name is going to raise an error. What's the best way to deal with that? I see three possibilities: Use a conditional in the template to test for that case and display something different. This is the most versatile solution, since I can change the way anonymous comments are displayed to, say, "Posted anonymously" (instead of "Posted by ..."), but I've often been told that templates should be mindless display machines and not include logic like that. Also, other people might wind up writing alternate templates for the same application, and I feel like I should be making things as easy as possible for the template writer. Implement an accessor method for the user property of a Comment that returns a dummy user object when the real user is undefined. This dummy object would have user.name = 'Anonymous' or something like that and so the template could access it and print its name with no error. Put an actual record in my database corresponding to a user with user.name = Anonymous (or something like that), and just assign that user to any comment posted when nobody's logged in. I know I've seen some real-world systems that operate this way. (phpBB?) Is there a prevailing wisdom among people who write these sorts of systems about which of these (or some other solution) is the best? Any pitfalls I should watch out for if I go one way vs. another? Whoever gives the best explanation gets the checkmark.

    Read the article

  • What resources will help me understand the fundamentals of Relational Database Design.

    - by Rachel
    This are few of the fundamental database questions which has always given me trouble. I have tried using google and wiki but I somehow I miss out on understanding the functionality rather than terminology. If possible would really appreciate if someone can share more insights on this questions using some visual representative examples. What is a key? A candidate key? A primary key? An alternate key? A foreign key? What is an index and how does it help your database? What are the data types available and when to use which ones?

    Read the article

  • Constructing colours for maximum contrast

    - by Martin
    I want to draw some items on screen, each item is in one of N sets. The number of sets changes all the time, so I need to calculate N different colours which are as different as possible (to make it easy to identify what is in which set). So, for example with N = 2 my results would be black and white. With three I guess I would get all red, all green, all blue. For all four, it's less obvious what the correct answer is, and this is where I'm having trouble.

    Read the article

facebook twitter digg google delicious technorati stumbleupon myspace wordpress linkedin gmail igoogle windows live tumblr viadeo yahoo buzz yahoo mail yahoo bookmarks favorites email print

< Previous Page | 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102  | Next Page >