Search Results

Search found 45013 results on 1801 pages for 'example'.

Page 99/1801 | < Previous Page | 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106  | Next Page >

• How do search engines handle hyphenated words?

  - by NinjaKC

  I am not sure my title fully explains what I mean. I thought this might be an interesting question. If I had a set of keywords, broken with a dash or 2, will search engines consider the dashed split keyword as maybe a full keyword? Say I have a site that sort of breaks words down, like the dictionary sites do. So a keyword for that page, might end up in the page, and / or the URL, as broken by dashes. Key-word = keyword Co-op-er-at-ive = cooperative Pho-to-gra-phy = Photography www.example.com/key-word/ www.example.com/co-op-er-at-ive/ www.example.com/pho-to-gra-phy/ I know search engines will consider a dash (at least Google) as a space, and understand it as multiple words. But in the English language, a dash can also break a word down (at least I think it can, can't it?), so will search engines also take this into consideration? I did a 'little' research, I Googled some words and placed random dashes, and it returned the words I searched for, but this could be considered a typo from the user on Google's search end, so really I am wondering if I can purposely put a dash in a keyword, and have the search engine spiders still catch that keyword as the real word without dashes? I've done a little Googling and looking here on Stackoverflow, but everything comes down to dashes for multiple words, not really the specific thing I'm trying to figure out. Hopefully that makes sense, I am not an expert in SEO, yet, but get the basics and have been playing, and this is just really a random question to satisfy my knowledge of playing :P

  Read the article

• Code Measuring and Metrics Tools?

  - by David

  I'm in the process of setting up a build server for personal projects. This server will handle all the normal CI stuff, including running large suites of tests (unit, integration, automated UI). While I'm working out the kinks for including code coverage output with MSTest, it occurs to me that there may be lots of tools out there which give me additional metrics other than just code coverage. FxCop comes to mind as an example. Though I'm sure there are others. Anything that can generate useful reportable data and metrics would be good. Whether it's class dependency charts (looking for Law of Demeter violations, for example), analyses of the uses of classes/functions (looking for a function that isn't used in the system other than just the tests, for example), and so on. I'm not sure the right way to formulate the question, since polling questions or "What's your favorite code analysis tool" aren't very good. But I'm essentially just looking for recommendations on what metrics to gather and the tools that can gather them. The eventual vision for something like this is to have the CI server run a bunch of automated tests and analysis tools and track performance metrics over time. Imagine a dashboard full of graphs plotting these metrics over time. The lines should all relatively be at an equilibrium, and if one starts to stray toward the negative then it's an early indication of problems with the code. In the age old struggle to quantify code quality with management, this sounds like a potentially helpful means of doing just that.

  Read the article

• Webmaster Tools, www and no-www, duplicate content and subdomains

  - by Jay

  I have not come to any conclusive answers on the following after many hours of research on many websites to the specific issue that I am trying to figure out. My company has two websites a main one at www.example.com and one at subdomain.example.com which is a subdomain of the first and is our self hosted blog. The way Google sees these with the www or no-www (called naked for now on) is that each of these actually are different when the www or naked version is used/not used in the front of the domain. I completely understand this. It is also advised that both should be set up in the Google Webmaster Tools, which I have done. Correct me if I am wrong on that in regard to having both set up. Now the way it appears is that we can set a preferred domain up in Webmaster Tools only at the root domain level. The subdomain can not have this and actually says the following "Restricted to root level domains only". So it appears that the domain should follow what the root domain says which on our preferred one says to display the www.example.com. and not the naked version. That is one issue I have in that one displays one way and the other displays another. Is it that we have the wrong redirects in place for the subdomain? Another question is does this have any affect on SEO in regards to duplicate content on the web in how we have set this up?

  Read the article

• What's New in Database Lifecycle Management in Enterprise Manager 12c Release 3

  - by HariSrinivasan

  Enterprise Manager 12c Release 3 includes improvements and enhancements across every area of the product. This blog provides an overview of the new and enhanced features in the Database Lifecycle Management area. I will deep dive into specific features more in depth in subsequent posts. "What's New?"  In this release, we focused on four things: 1. Lifecycle Management Support for new Database12c - Pluggable Databases 2. Management of long running processes, such as a security patch cycle (Change Activity Planner) 3. Management of large number of systems by · Leveraging new framework capabilities for lifecycle operations, such as the new advanced ‘emcli’ script option · Refining features such as configuration search and compliance 4. Minor improvements and quality fixes to existing features · Rollback support for Single instance databases · Improved "OFFLINE" Patching experience · Faster collection of ORACLE_HOME configurations Lifecycle Management Support for new Database 12c - Pluggable Databases Database 12c introduces Pluggable Databases (PDBs), the brand new addition to help you achieve your consolidation goals. Pluggable databases offer unprecedented consolidation at database level and native lifecycle verbs for creating, plugging and unplugging the databases on a container database (CDB). Enterprise Manager can supplement the capabilities of pluggable databases by offering workflows for migrating, provisioning and cloning them using the software library and the deployment procedures. For example, Enterprise Manager can migrate an existing database to a PDB or clone a PDB by storing a versioned copy in the software library. One can also manage the planned downtime related to patching by  migrating the PDBs to a new CDB. While pluggable databases offer these exciting features, it can also pose configuration management and compliance challenges if not managed properly. Enterprise Manager features like inventory management, topology associations and configuration search can mitigate the sprawl of PDBs and also lock them to predefined golden standards using configuration comparison and compliance rules. Learn More ... Management of Long Running datacenter processes - Change Activity Planner (CAP) Currently, customers resort to cumbersome methods to create, execute, track and monitor change activities within their data center. Some customers use traditional tools such as spreadsheets, project planners and in-house custom built solutions. Customers often have weekly sync up meetings across stake holders to collect status and updates. Some of the change activities, for example the quarterly patch set update (PSU) patch rollouts are not single tasks but processes with multiple tasks. Some of those tasks are performed within Enterprise Manager Cloud Control (for example Patch) and some are performed outside of Enterprise Manager Cloud Control. These tasks often run for a longer period of time and involve multiple people or teams. Enterprise Manger Cloud Control supports core data center operations such as configuration management, compliance management, and automation. Enterprise Manager Cloud Control release 12.1.0.3 leverages these capabilities and introduces the Change Activity Planner (CAP). CAP provides the ability to plan, execute, and track change activities in real time. It covers the typical datacenter activities that are spread over a long period of time, across multiple people and multiple targets (even target types). Here are some examples of Change Activity Process in a datacenter: · Patching large environments (PSU/CPU Patching cycles) · Upgrading large number of database environments · Rolling out Compliance Rules · Database Consolidation to Exadata environments CAP provides user flows for Compliance Officers/Managers (incl. lead administrators) and Operators (DBAs and admins). Managers can create change activity plans for various projects, allocate resources, targets, and groups affected. Upon activation of the plan, tasks are created and automatically assigned to individual administrators based on target ownership. Administrators (DBAs) can identify their tasks and understand the context, schedules, and priorities. They can complete tasks using Enterprise Manager Cloud Control automation features such as patch plans (or in some cases outside Enterprise Manager). Upon completion, compliance is evaluated for validations and updates the status of the tasks and the plans. Learn More about CAP ...  Improved Configuration & Compliance Management of a large number of systems Improved Configuration Comparison:  Get to the configuration comparison results faster for simple ad-hoc comparisons. When performing a 1 to 1 comparison, Enterprise Manager will perform the comparison immediately and take the user directly to the results without having to wait for a job to be submitted and executed. Flattened system comparisons reduce comparison setup time and reduce complexity. In addition to the previously existing topological comparison, users now have an option to compare using a “flattened” methodology. Flattening means to remove duplicate target instances within the systems and remove the hierarchy of member targets. The result are much easier to spot differences particularly for specific use cases like comparing patch levels between complex systems like RAC and Fusion Apps. Improved Configuration Search & Advanced EMCLI Script option for Mass Automation Enterprise manager 12c introduces a new framework level capability to be able to script and stitch together multiple tasks using EMCLI. This powerful capability can be leveraged for lifecycle operations, especially when executing a task over a large number of targets. Specific usages of this include, retrieving a qualified list of targets using Configuration Search and then using the resultset for automation. Another example would be executing a patching operation and then re-executing on targets where it may have failed. This is complemented by other enhancements, such as a better usability for designing reusable configuration searches. IN EM 12c Rel 3, a simplified UI makes building adhoc searches even easier. Searching for missing patches is a common use of configuration search. This required the use of the advanced options which are now clearly defined and easy to use. Perform “Configuration Search” using the EMCLI. Users can find and execute Configuration Searches from the EMCLI which can be extremely useful for building sophisticated automation scripts. For an example, Run the Search named “Oracle Databases on Exadata” which finds all Database targets running on top of Exadata. Further filter the results by refining by options like name, host, etc.. emcli get_targets -config_search="Databases on Exadata" –target_name="exa%“ Use this in powerful mass automation operations using the new emcli script option. For example, to solve the use case of – Finding all DBs running on Exadata and housing E-Biz and Patch them. Create a Python script with emcli functions and invoke it in the new EMCLI script option shell. Invoke the script in the new EMCLI with script option directly: $<path to emcli>/emcli @myPSU_Patch.py Richer compliance content:  Now over 50 Oracle Provided Compliance Standards including new standards for Pluggable Database, Fusion Applications, Oracle Identity Manager, Oracle VM and Internet Directory. 9 Oracle provided Real Time Monitoring Standards containing over 900 Compliance Rules across 500 Facets. These new Real time Compliance Standards covers both Exadata Compute nodes and Linux servers. The result is increased Oracle software coverage and faster time to compliance monitoring on Exadata. Enhancements to Patch Management: Overhauled "OFFLINE" Patching experience: Simplified Patch uploads UI to improve the offline experience of patching. There is now a single step process to get the patches into software library. Customers often maintain local repositories of patches, sometimes called software depots, where they host the patches downloaded from My Oracle Support. In the past, you had to move these patches to your desktop then upload them to the Enterprise Manager's Software library through the Enterprise Manager Cloud Control user interface. You can now use the following EMCLI command to upload multiple patches directly from a remote location within the data center: $emcli upload_patches -location <Path to Patch directory> -from_host <HOSTNAME> The upload process filters all of the new patches, automatically selects the relevant metadata files from the location, and uploads the patches to software library. Other Improvements:  Patch rollback for single instance databases, new option in the Patch Plan to rollback the patches added to the patch plans. Upon execution, the procedure would rollback the patch and the SQL applied to the single instance Databases. Improved and faster configuration collection of Oracle Home targets can enable more reliable automation at higher level functions like Provisioning, Patching or Database as a Service. Just to recap, here is a list of database lifecycle management features:  * Red highlights mark – New or Enhanced in the Release 3. • Discovery, inventory tracking and reporting • Database provisioning including o Migration to Pluggable databases o Plugging and unplugging of pluggable databases o Gold image based cloning o Scaling of RAC nodes •Schema and data change management •End-to-end patch management in online and offline modes, including o Patch advisories in online (connected with My Oracle Support) and offline mode o Patch pre-deployment analysis, deployment and rollback (currently only for single instance databases) o Reporting • Upgrade planning and execution of the upgrade process • Configuration management including • Compliance management with out-of-box content • Change Activity Planner for planning, designing and tracking long running processes For more information on Enterprise Manager’s database lifecycle management capabilities, visit http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/oem/lifecycle-mgmt/index.html

  Read the article

• Rendering Text with the HTML5 Canvas

  - by dwahlin

  In a previous post I walked through the fundamentals of rendering shapes such as squares and circles using the HTML5 Canvas API. In this post I’ll provide a simple example of rendering and rotating text. To render text you can use the fillText() or strokeText() functions which take the text to render as well as the x and y coordinates of where to render it. To rotate text you can use the transform functions available with the HTML5 Canvas such as save(), rotate(), and restore(). To run the live demos that follow click the Result tab in the blue bar of each demo.   Rendering Text This example provides a simple look at how text can be rendered using the HTML5 Canvas. It iterates through a loop, updates the text and font size dynamically, measures the width of the text using the measureText() function, and then calls fillText() to render the text with the desired font size to the screen.   Here’s what the code above renders:   Rotating Text This example shows how text can be rendered and even rotated by using transform functions built into the HTML5 Canvas. The code starts by rendering text the standard way using fillText(). It then saves the state of the canvas performs an x,y coordinate transform (moves to 100, 300 respectively) and then rotates the canvas –90 degrees using the rotate() function. After the text is rendered, the canvas is reverted back to it’s existing state (saved by calling the save() function) by calling the restore() function. An additional line of text is then rendered.   Here’s what the code above renders:   If you’re interested in learning more about the HTML5 Canvas and how it can be used in your Web or Windows 8 applications, check out my HTML5 Canvas Fundamentals course from Pluralsight.

  Read the article

• Big GRC: Turning Data into Actionable GRC Intelligence

  - by Jenna Danko

  While it’s no longer headline news that Governments have carried out large scale data-mining programmes aimed at terrorism detection and identifying other patterns of interest across a wide range of digital data sources, the debate over the ethics and justification over this action, will clearly continue for some time to come. What is becoming clear is that these programmes are a framework for the collation and aggregation of massive amounts of unstructured data and from this, the creation of actionable intelligence from analyses that allowed the analysts to explore and extract a variety of patterns and then direct resources. This data included audio and video chats, phone calls, photographs, e-mails, documents, internet searches, social media posts and mobile phone logs and connections. Although Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) professionals are not looking at the implementation of such programmes, there are many similar GRC “Big data” challenges to be faced and potential lessons to be learned from these high profile government programmes that can be applied a lot closer to home. For example, how can GRC professionals collect, manage and analyze an enormous and disparate volume of data to create and manage their own actionable intelligence covering hidden signs and patterns of criminal activity, the early or retrospective, violation of regulations/laws/corporate policies and procedures, emerging risks and weakening controls etc. Not exactly the stuff of James Bond to be sure, but it is certainly more applicable to most GRC professional’s day to day challenges. So what is Big Data and how can it benefit the GRC process? Although it often varies, the definition of Big Data largely refers to the following types of data: Traditional Enterprise Data – includes customer information from CRM systems, transactional ERP data, web store transactions, and general ledger data. Machine-Generated /Sensor Data – includes Call Detail Records (“CDR”), weblogs and trading systems data. Social Data – includes customer feedback streams, micro-blogging sites like Twitter, and social media platforms like Facebook. The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that data volume is growing 40% per year, and will grow 44x between 2009 and 2020. But while it’s often the most visible parameter, volume of data is not the only characteristic that matters. In fact, according to sources such as Forrester there are four key characteristics that define big data: Volume. Machine-generated data is produced in much larger quantities than non-traditional data. This is all the data generated by IT systems that power the enterprise. This includes live data from packaged and custom applications – for example, app servers, Web servers, databases, networks, virtual machines, telecom equipment, and much more. Velocity. Social media data streams – while not as massive as machine-generated data – produce a large influx of opinions and relationships valuable to customer relationship management as well as offering early insight into potential reputational risk issues. Even at 140 characters per tweet, the high velocity (or frequency) of Twitter data ensures large volumes (over 8 TB per day) need to be managed. Variety. Traditional data formats tend to be relatively well defined by a data schema and change slowly. In contrast, non-traditional data formats exhibit a dizzying rate of change. Without question, all GRC professionals work in a dynamic environment and as new services, new products, new business lines are added or new marketing campaigns executed for example, new data types are needed to capture the resultant information.  Value. The economic value of data varies significantly. Typically, there is good information hidden amongst a larger body of non-traditional data that GRC professionals can use to add real value to the organisation; the greater challenge is identifying what is valuable and then transforming and extracting that data for analysis and action. For example, customer service calls and emails have millions of useful data points and have long been a source of information to GRC professionals. Those calls and emails are critical in helping GRC professionals better identify hidden patterns and implement new policies that can reduce the amount of customer complaints.   Now on a scale and depth far beyond those in place today, all that unstructured call and email data can be captured, stored and analyzed to reveal the reasons for the contact, perhaps with the aggregated customer results cross referenced against what is being said about the organization or a similar peer organization on social media. The organization can then take positive actions, communicating to the market in advance of issues reaching the press, strengthening controls, adjusting risk profiles, changing policy and procedures and completely minimizing, if not eliminating, complaints and compensation for that specific reason in the future. In this one example of many similar ones, the GRC team(s) has demonstrated real and tangible business value. Big Challenges - Big Opportunities As pointed out by recent Forrester research, high performing companies (those that are growing 15% or more year-on-year compared to their peers) are taking a selective approach to investing in Big Data.  "Tomorrow's winners understand this, and they are making selective investments aimed at specific opportunities with tangible benefits where big data offers a more economical solution to meet a need." (Forrsights Strategy Spotlight: Business Intelligence and Big Data, Q4 2012) As pointed out earlier, with the ever increasing volume of regulatory demands and fines for getting it wrong, limited resource availability and out of date or inadequate GRC systems all contributing to a higher cost of compliance and/or higher risk profile than desired – a big data investment in GRC clearly falls into this category. However, to make the most of big data organizations must evolve both their business and IT procedures, processes, people and infrastructures to handle these new high-volume, high-velocity, high-variety sources of data and be able integrate them with the pre-existing company data to be analyzed. GRC big data clearly allows the organization access to and management over a huge amount of often very sensitive information that although can help create a more risk intelligent organization, also presents numerous data governance challenges, including regulatory compliance and information security. In addition to client and regulatory demands over better information security and data protection the sheer amount of information organizations deal with the need to quickly access, classify, protect and manage that information can quickly become a key issue  from a legal, as well as technical or operational standpoint. However, by making information governance processes a bigger part of everyday operations, organizations can make sure data remains readily available and protected. The Right GRC & Big Data Partnership Becomes Key  The "getting it right first time" mantra used in so many companies remains essential for any GRC team that is sponsoring, helping kick start, or even overseeing a big data project. To make a big data GRC initiative work and get the desired value, partnerships with companies, who have a long history of success in delivering successful GRC solutions as well as being at the very forefront of technology innovation, becomes key. Clearly solutions can be built in-house more cheaply than through vendor, but as has been proven time and time again, when it comes to self built solutions covering AML and Fraud for example, few have able to scale or adapt appropriately to meet the changing regulations or challenges that the GRC teams face on a daily basis. This has led to the creation of GRC silo’s that are causing so many headaches today. The solutions that stand out and should be explored are the ones that can seamlessly merge the traditional world of well-known data, analytics and visualization with the new world of seemingly innumerable data sources, utilizing Big Data technologies to generate new GRC insights right across the enterprise.Ultimately, Big Data is here to stay, and organizations that embrace its potential and outline a viable strategy, as well as understand and build a solid analytical foundation, will be the ones that are well positioned to make the most of it. A Blueprint and Roadmap Service for Big Data Big data adoption is first and foremost a business decision. As such it is essential that your partner can align your strategies, goals, and objectives with an architecture vision and roadmap to accelerate adoption of big data for your environment, as well as establish practical, effective governance that will maintain a well managed environment going forward. Key Activities: While your initiatives will clearly vary, there are some generic starting points the team and organization will need to complete: Clearly define your drivers, strategies, goals, objectives and requirements as it relates to big data Conduct a big data readiness and Information Architecture maturity assessment Develop future state big data architecture, including views across all relevant architecture domains; business, applications, information, and technology Provide initial guidance on big data candidate selection for migrations or implementation Develop a strategic roadmap and implementation plan that reflects a prioritization of initiatives based on business impact and technology dependency, and an incremental integration approach for evolving your current state to the target future state in a manner that represents the least amount of risk and impact of change on the business Provide recommendations for practical, effective Data Governance, Data Quality Management, and Information Lifecycle Management to maintain a well-managed environment Conduct an executive workshop with recommendations and next steps There is little debate that managing risk and data are the two biggest obstacles encountered by financial institutions.  Big data is here to stay and risk management certainly is not going anywhere, and ultimately financial services industry organizations that embrace its potential and outline a viable strategy, as well as understand and build a solid analytical foundation, will be best positioned to make the most of it. Matthew Long is a Financial Crime Specialist for Oracle Financial Services. He can be reached at matthew.long AT oracle.com.

  Read the article

• unit/integration testing web service proxy client

  - by cori

  I'm rewriting a PHP client/proxy library that provides an interface to a SOAP-based .Net webservice, and in the process I want to add some unit and integration tests so future modifications are less risky. The work the library I'm working on performs is to marshall the calls to the web service and do a little reorganizing of the responses to present a slightly more -object-oriented interface to the underlying service. Since this library is little else than a thin layer on top of web service calls, my basic assumption is that I'll really be writing integration tests more than unit tests - for example, I don't see any reason to mock away the web service - the work that's performed by the code I'm working on is very light; it's almost passing the response from the service right back to its consumer. Most of the calls are basic CRUD operations: CreateRole(), CreateUser(), DeleteUser(), FindUser(), &ct. I'll be starting from a known database state - the system I'm using for these tests is isolated for testing purposes, so the results will be more or less predictable. My question is this: is it natural to use web service calls to confirm the results of operations within the tests and to reset the state of the application within the scope of each test? Here's an example: One test might be createUserReturnsValidUserId() and might go like this: public function createUserReturnsValidUserId() { // we're assuming a global connection to the service $newUserId = $client->CreateUser("user1"); assertNotNull($newUserId); assertNotNull($client->FindUser($newUserId); $client->deleteUser($newUserId); } So I'm creating a user, making sure I get an ID back and that it represents a user in the system, and then cleaning up after myself (so that later tests don't rely on the success or failure of this test w/r/t the number of users in the system, for example). However this still seems pretty fragile - lots of dependencies and opportunities for tests to fail and effect the results of later tests, which I definitely want to avoid. Am I missing some options of ways to decouple these tests from the system under test, or is this really the best I can do? I think this is a fairly general unit/integration testing question, but if it matters I'm using PHPUnit for the testing framework.

  Read the article

• Turn-based tile game dynamic item/skill/command script files

  - by user1542

  I want to create a mechanism that could read text script, for example some kind of custom script such as ".skill" or ".item", which maybe contain some sort of simple script like .item Item.Name = "Strength Gauntlet"; Character.STR += 20; .. .skill Skill.Name = "Poison Attack"; Skill.Description = "Steal HP and inflict poison"; Player.HP += 200; Enemy.HP -= 200; Enemy.Status += Status.POISON; It may be different from this, but just want to give some idea of what I desire. However, I do not know how to dynamically parse these things and translate it into working script. For example, in battle scenerio, I should make my game read one of this ".skill" file and apply it to the current enemy, or the current player. How would I do this? Should I go for String parsing? It is like a script engine, but I prefer C# than creating new language, so how would I parse custom files into appropiate status commands? Another problem is, I have also created a command engine which would read String input and parse it into action such as "MOVE (1,2)" would move character to tile (1,2). Each command belong to separate class, and provide generic parsing method that should be implemented by hand. This is for the reason of custom number/type of arguments per each command. However, I think this is not well designed, because I desire it to automatically parse the parameters according to specify list of types. For example, MOVE command in "MOVE 1 2" would automatically parse the parameters into int, int and put it into X and Y. Now, this form can change, and we should be able to manually specify all type of formats. Any suggestion to this problem? Should I change from string parsing to some hardcode methods/classes?

  Read the article

• Groovy Debugging

  - by Vijay Allen Raj

  Groovy Debugging - An Overview:ADF BC developers may express snippets of business logic (like the following) as embedded groovy expressions: default / calculated attribute valuesvalidation rules / conditionserror message tokensLOV input values (VO) This approach has the advantages that: Groovy has a compact, EL-like syntax for expressing simple logicADF has extended this syntax to provide useful built-insembedded Groovy expressions are customizableGroovy debugging support helps improve maintainability of business logic expressed in Groovy.Following is an example how groovy debugging works.Example:This example shows how a script expression validator can be created and the groovy script debugged. It shows Step over, breakpoint functionalities as well as syntax coloring.Let us create a ADFBC application based on Emp and Dept tables, and add a script expression validator based on the script:  if (Sal >= 5000){ //If EmpSal is greater than a property value set on the custom //properties on the root AM //raise a custom exception else raise a custom warning if (Sal >= source.DBTransaction.rootApplicationModule.propertiesMap.salHigh) { adf.error.raise("ExcGreaterThanApplicationLimit"); } else { adf.error.warn("WarnGreaterThan5000"); } } else if (EmpSal <= 1000) { adf.error.raise("ExcTooLow"); }return true;In the Emp.xml Flat editor, place breakpoints at various locations as shown below:Right click the appmodule and click Debug. Enter a value greater than 5000 and click next. You can see the debugging work as shown below:  The code can be also be stepped over and debugged.

  Read the article

• What's a nice explanation for pointers?

  - by Macneil

  In your own studies (on your own, or for a class) did you have an "ah ha" moment when you finally, really understood pointers? Do you have an explanation you use for beginner programmers that seems particularly effective? For example, when beginners first encounter pointers in C, they might just add &s and *s until it compiles (as I myself once did). Maybe it was a picture, or a really well motivated example, that made pointers "click" for you or your student. What was it, and what did you try before that didn't seem to work? Were any topics prerequisites (e.g. structs, or arrays)? In other words, what was necessary to understand the meaning of &s and *, when you could use them with confidence? Learning the syntax and terminology or the use cases isn't enough, at some point the idea needs to be internalized. Update: I really like the answers so far; please keep them coming. There are a lot of great perspectives here, but I think many are good explanations/slogans for ourselves after we've internalized the concept. I'm looking for the detailed contexts and circumstances when it dawned on you. For example: I only somewhat understood pointers syntactically in C. I heard two of my friends explaining pointers to another friend, who asked why a struct was passed with a pointer. The first friend talked about how it needed to be referenced and modified, but it was just a short comment from the other friend where it hit me: "It's also more efficient." Passing 4 bytes instead of 16 bytes was the final conceptual shift I needed.

  Read the article

• String patterns that can be used to filter and group files

  - by Louis Rhys

  One of our application filters files in certain directory, extract some data from it and export a document from the extracted data. The algorithm for extracting the data depends on the file, and so far we use regex to select the algorithm to be used, for example .*\.txt will be processed by algorithm A, foo[0-5]\.xml will be processed by algo B, etc. However now we need some files to be processed together. For example, in one case we need two files, foo.*\.xml and bar.*\.xml. Part of the information to be extracted exist in the foo file, and the other part in the bar file. Moreover, we need to make sure the wild card is compatible. For example, if there are 6 files foo1.xml foo23.xml bar1.xml bar9.xml bar23.xml foo4.xml I would expect foo1 and bar1 to be identified as a group, and foo23 and bar23 as another group. bar9 and foo4 has no pair, so they will not be treated. Now, since the filter is configured by user, we need to have a pattern that can express the above requirement. I don't think you can express meaning like above in standard regex. (foo|bar).*\.xml will match all 6 file above and we can't identify which file is paired for a particular file. Is there any standard pattern that can express it? Or any idea how to modify regex to support this, that can be implemented easily?

  Read the article

• Modernising settings, packages

  - by Sam Brightman

  The update manager (possibly combined with the janitor) does a reasonable job of bringing packages up to date with a new release, removing ones that are replaced by different projects etc. However, I'm left with the lingering feeling that quite a few settings are lingering from old releases. For example, some packages may be left around that I installed myself whereas now the functionality is provided by default. Another example is that my user doesn't get the new theme, and the panel bar is a mess. I can compare against an inactive user on the same system: everything seems tidier. There are also things like the explosion of System Preferences, user groups (inactive user, more recently created, is in groups that the older, active user isn't). In other areas (e.g. default font) I do seem to get given the new defaults. Another example is Spotlight-equivalent search. I remember Beagle and Tracker, I remember removing tracker when it used all system RAM and swap for 2 entire release cycles, but I don't know what I'm "supposed" to be using now. Is there even a default indexing-search installed and exposed? aptitude install ubuntu-desktop doesn't do anything, so the basics are in place package-wise. Is there any way to update my settings to the modern "Ubuntu way" without reinstalling from scratch? Can I do so selectively i.e. show the differences? Most of the time package management on Linux is an absolute joy compared to the alternatives, but if the desktop gets messed up after only a release or two, we're back to reinstalling just like Windows.

  Read the article

• please help me understand libraries/includes

  - by fiftyeight

  I'm trying to understand how libraries work. for example I downloaded a tarball and extracted it. Now I do "./configure", it searches in pre-defined directories from what I understand for certain library files. What does it do then? it creates a makefile, and the makefile contains the paths to these libraries? than I do "make", it complies the source code and hard-codes the locations of the libraries? am I correct? I do not really understand if libraries are files with pre-defined paths or the OS somehow gives access to the libraries through system calls. another example, I complied something on my computer than moved it to a remote server, the executable needs mysql libraries to work, the server has mysql but for some reason when execute the file it tells me "can't find libmysqlclient.so.16". is there a solution for this? is there a way to know where is tries to locate this file or give it another path? I can't compile it on the server since it has no compiler and I don't have root access to install packages last question is if in the sequence "./configure","make","make install" the "make install" command is the only one that actually puts files outside the directory in which these files reside? if for example the software will be installed in /usr/local/ is the "make install" command the only one that will require "sudo" before it? let me see if I got it correctly: "./configure" creates the Makefile according to the location of various files on your system. "make" compiles the source code according to this makefile. and "make install" moves the files to their appropriate location. I know this has been very long I thank anyone who had the patience to read my question :)

  Read the article

• how a pure functional programming language manage without assignment statements?

  - by Gnijuohz

  When reading the famous SICP,I found the authors seem rather reluctant to introduce the assignment statement to Scheme in Chapter 3.I read the text and kind of understand why they feel so. As Scheme is the first functional programming language I ever know something about,I am kind of surprised that there are some functional programming languages(not Scheme of course) can do without assignments. Let use the example the book offers,the bank account example.If there is no assignment statement,how can this be done?How to change the balance variable?I ask so because I know there are some so-called pure functional languages out there and according to the Turing complete theory,this must can be done too. I learned C,Java,Python and use assignments a lot in every program I wrote.So it's really an eye-opening experience.I really hope someone can briefly explain how assignments are avoided in those functional programming languages and what profound impact(if any) it has on these languages. The example mentioned above is here: (define (make-withdraw balance) (lambda (amount) (if (>= balance amount) (begin (set! balance (- balance amount)) balance) "Insufficient funds"))) This changed the balance by set!.To me it looks a lot like a class method to change the class member balance. As I said,I am not familiar with functional programming languages,so if I said something wrong about them,feel free to point out.

  Read the article

• Game editor integration with the engine?

  - by Daniel

  What I am trying to figure out is what is the best way to integrate the editor(level, effects, model, etc...) in the most effective way? Now the first thing I thought would be to create the game engine(*) extremely modular. For example I took the example of game states. You could have multiple game states that all have their own update() and draw() methods among others. Each game state class would inherit from a base GameState class. This allows for a more modular approach and a useful one at that. Now would the most efficient approach be to implement the editor along with the modular engine, or create two different designs for both the game, and editor? I thought to take the game state example and extend it to window states, and well could be used for a lot more systems. Is there a better implementation of this design(game state) for use in other systems used in the engine? *: Now I know the term game engine is sorta irrelevant, and misused in many situations. What I am referring to as the "game engine" is the combination of the systems that the game must interact with for short. Also this is more of a theory / design question than an implementation. Even though both mix, i'd rather like to have a more general idea on how the editor is built in an efficient way and still using the same engine code as what the game uses. Thanks, Daniel P.S If you need more clarification or extra bits just leave a comment.

  Read the article

• Light mask map and camera for static lights in XNA Platformer

  - by JiminyCricket

  Using the example for some basic light maps found here : http://blog.josack.com/2011/07/xna-2d-dynamic-lighting.html, I've managed to create a lightmap texture using individual lightmaps and display it over a 2D tiled world as in the Platformer example. I'm using the very basic 2D camera example as found here : http://www.david-amador.com/2009/10/xna-camera-2d-with-zoom-and-rotation/, and the problem is that the lightmap texture scrolls with the player sprite. This looks pretty good and would be excellent for lighting the player sprite as it moves. But, I also want to be able to place static lights (or some initial position for the lights) that do not move with the player or camera. When I turn off the camera or give it a static position, it works as a series of static lights so I believe it's probably caused by the camera transformation matrix following the player around. I'm using RenderTarget2Ds, one for the main game screen after all the backgrounds and tiles are rendered, and one for the "lightmap" which consists of a black background and a bunch of lighting textures which are merged with it using additive blending. For now, I'm doing all of this in PlatformerGame.cs where the camera transformation and position is set and the level.Draw() call is made. I can't figure out how to separate the drawing of the lightmap and the camera following the player. I was thinking it would be better to render the shadows and lighting directly in the drawing of the level itself, but I'm not sure how to do that either because this technique requires RenderTarget2Ds and calling SpriteBatch.Begin()/End().

  Read the article

• Is it OK to use dynamic typing to reduce the amount of variables in scope?

  - by missingno

  Often, when I am initializing something I have to use a temporary variable, for example: file_str = "path/to/file" file_file = open(file) or regexp_parts = ['foo', 'bar'] regexp = new RegExp( regexp_parts.join('|') ) However, I like to reduce the scope my variables to the smallest scope possible so there is less places where they can be (mis-)used. For example, I try to use for(var i ...) in C++ so the loop variable is confined to the loop body. In these initialization cases, if I am using a dynamic language, I am then often tempted to reuse the same variable in order to prevent the initial (and now useless) value from being used latter in the function. file = "path/to/file" file = open(file) regexp = ['...', '...'] regexp = new RegExp( regexp.join('|') ) The idea is that by reducing the number of variables in scope I reduce the chances to misuse them. However this sometimes makes the variable names look a little weird, as in the first example, where "file" refers to a "filename". I think perhaps this would be a non issue if I could use non-nested scopes begin scope1 filename = ... begin scope2 file = open(filename) end scope1 //use file here //can't use filename on accident end scope2 but I can't think of any programming language that supports this. What rules of thumb should I use in this situation? When is it best to reuse the variable? When is it best to create an extra variable? What other ways do we solve this scope problem?

  Read the article

• Instructor Insight: Dealing with Columns in Oracle JD Edwards Enterprise One Tools Release 9.1

  - by Breanne Cooley

  Oracle JD Edwards Enterprise One Tools Release  9.1 has many new features that will help end users be more efficient in their daily jobs. For example, hiding grid columns is now as easy as a left-mouse click. In earlier releases, users could click on the ‘Customize Grid’ link but still had to do several more clicks to hide or show a column . The following example shows how easy this new feature is to use. First, right-mouse click on the column you want to hide; for example the ‘Long Address’ column. The column is now hidden. Second, right-mouse over on any of the columns to show the ‘Unhide’ option. After you select ‘Unhide’, the hidden column is shown. You can then select the column to show, or unhide, the column. This new feature and others are covered in the JD Edwards EnterpriseOne System Administration Rel 9.x course, which has been updated to reflect the new release. Hope to see you in class! -Randy Richeson, Senior Principal Instructor, Oracle University

  Read the article

• Rails: Law of Demeter Confusion

  - by user2158382

  I am reading a book called Rails AntiPatterns and they talk about using delegation to to avoid breaking the Law of Demeter. Here is their prime example: They believe that calling something like this in the controller is bad (and I agree) @street = @invoice.customer.address.street Their proposed solution is to do the following: class Customer has_one :address belongs_to :invoice def street address.street end end class Invoice has_one :customer def customer_street customer.street end end @street = @invoice.customer_street They are stating that since you only use one dot, you are not breaking the Law of Demeter here. I think this is incorrect, because you are still going through customer to go through address to get the invoice's street. I primarily got this idea from a blog post I read: http://www.dan-manges.com/blog/37 In the blog post the prime example is class Wallet attr_accessor :cash end class Customer has_one :wallet # attribute delegation def cash @wallet.cash end end class Paperboy def collect_money(customer, due_amount) if customer.cash < due_ammount raise InsufficientFundsError else customer.cash -= due_amount @collected_amount += due_amount end end end The blog post states that although there is only one dot customer.cash instead of customer.wallet.cash, this code still violates the Law of Demeter. Now in the Paperboy collect_money method, we don't have two dots, we just have one in "customer.cash". Has this delegation solved our problem? Not at all. If we look at the behavior, a paperboy is still reaching directly into a customer's wallet to get cash out. EDIT I completely understand and agree that this is still a violation and I need to create a method in Wallet called withdraw that handles the payment for me and that I should call that method inside the Customer class. What I don't get is that according to this process, my first example still violates the Law of Demeter because Invoice is still reaching directly into Customer to get the street. Can somebody help me clear the confusion. I have been searching for the past 2 days trying to let this topic sink in, but it is still confusing.

  Read the article

• Should we choose Java over C# or we should consider using Mono?

  - by A. Karimi

  We are a small team of independent developers with an average experience of 7 years in C#/.NET platform. We almost work on small to average web application projects that allows us to choose our favorite platform. I believe that our current platform (C#/.NET) allows us to be more productive than if we were working in Java but what makes me think about choosing Java over C# is the costs and the community (of the open source). Our projects allow us even work with various frameworks as well as various platforms. For example we can even use Nancy. So we are able to decrease the costs by using Mono which can be deployed on Linux servers. But I'm looking for a complete ecosystem (IDE/Platform/Production Environment) that decreases our costs and makes us feel completely supported by the community. As an example of issues I've experienced with MonoDevelop, I can refer to the poor support of the Razor syntax on MonoDevelop. As another example, We are using "VS 2012 Express for Web" as our IDE to decrease the costs but as you know it doesn't support plugins and I have serious problems with XML comments (I missed GhostDoc). We strongly believe in strongly-typed programming languages so please don't offer the other languages and platforms such as Ruby, PHP, etc. Now I want to choose between: Keep going on C#, buy some products and be hopeful about openness of .NET ecosystem and its open source community. Changing the platform and start using the Java open source ecosystem

  Read the article

• Multiplayer Network Game - Interpolation and Frame Rate

  - by J.C.

  Consider the following scenario: Let's say, for sake of example and simplicity, that you have an authoritative game server that sends state to its clients every 45ms. The clients are interpolating state with an interpolation delay of 100 ms. Finally, the clients are rendering a new frame every 15ms. When state is updated on the client, the client time is set from the incoming state update. Each time a frame renders, we take the render time (client time - interpolation delay) and identify a previous and target state to interpolate from. To calculate the interpolation amount/factor, we take the difference of the render time and previous state time and divide by the difference of the target state and previous state times: var factor = ((renderTime - previousStateTime) / (targetStateTime - previousStateTime)) Problem: In the example above, we are effectively displaying the same interpolated state for 3 frames before we collected the next server update and a new client (render) time is set. The rendering is mostly smooth, but there is a dash of jaggedness to it. Question: Given the example above, I'd like to think that the interpolation amount/factor should increase with each frame render to smooth out the movement. Should this be considered and, if so, what is the best way to achieve this given the information from above?

  Read the article

• Basic Google Analytics Click Tracking and/or Overview

  - by Alan Storm

  This is a really basic Google Analytics question. Apologies in advance if it's not appropriate here, but I've had a lot of luck on Stack Overflow and this seems like the best Stack Exchange site for a question like this. I'm trying to understand how Google Analytics goals work, or if they're the right feature to be using for my situation. Most of the documentation I find online refers to the old version of the UI, not the new one. I have a website, let's call is blog.example.com. This website drives traffic to an ecommerce store, let's call that store.example2.com. I want to get reports on which links from blog.example.com are being clicked through leading to store.example2.com. How do you do this in Google analytics? Are goals the right area to be looking? Do I setup the goals on store.example2.com or blog.example.com? Or both? Is there any canonical user guide (free or paid) that covers how this works? I'm a competent programmer, but it's years since I dealt with conversion tracking on any serious level, and we've progressed well beyond my frozen caveman pixel tracking knowledge. Thanks in advance

  Read the article

• How do you encode Algebraic Data Types in a C#- or Java-like language?

  - by Jörg W Mittag

  There are some problems which are easily solved by Algebraic Data Types, for example a List type can be very succinctly expressed as: data ConsList a = Empty | ConsCell a (ConsList a) consmap f Empty = Empty consmap f (ConsCell a b) = ConsCell (f a) (consmap f b) l = ConsCell 1 (ConsCell 2 (ConsCell 3 Empty)) consmap (+1) l This particular example is in Haskell, but it would be similar in other languages with native support for Algebraic Data Types. It turns out that there is an obvious mapping to OO-style subtyping: the datatype becomes an abstract base class and every data constructor becomes a concrete subclass. Here's an example in Scala: sealed abstract class ConsList[+T] { def map[U](f: T => U): ConsList[U] } object Empty extends ConsList[Nothing] { override def map[U](f: Nothing => U) = this } final class ConsCell[T](first: T, rest: ConsList[T]) extends ConsList[T] { override def map[U](f: T => U) = new ConsCell(f(first), rest.map(f)) } val l = (new ConsCell(1, new ConsCell(2, new ConsCell(3, Empty))) l.map(1+) The only thing needed beyond naive subclassing is a way to seal classes, i.e. a way to make it impossible to add subclasses to a hierarchy. How would you approach this problem in a language like C# or Java? The two stumbling blocks I found when trying to use Algebraic Data Types in C# were: I couldn't figure out what the bottom type is called in C# (i.e. I couldn't figure out what to put into class Empty : ConsList< ??? >) I couldn't figure out a way to seal ConsList so that no subclasses can be added to the hierarchy What would be the most idiomatic way to implement Algebraic Data Types in C# and/or Java? Or, if it isn't possible, what would be the idiomatic replacement?

  Read the article

• I don't understand the definition of side effects

  - by Chris Okyen

  I don't understand the wikipedia article on Side Effects: In computer science, a function or expression is said to have a side effect if, in addition to returning a value, it also 1.) Modifies some state or 2.) Has an observable interaction with calling functions or the outside world. I know an example of the first thing that causes a function or expression to have side effects - modifying a state Function and Expression modifying a state : 1.) foo(int X) { return x = x % x; } a = a + 1; What does 2.) - Has an observable interaction with calling functions or the outside world," mean? - Please give an example. The article continues on to say, "For example, a function might modify a global or static variable, modify one of its arguments, raise an exception, write data to a display or file, read data, or call other side-effecting functions...." Are all these examples, examples of 1.) - Modifiying some state , or are they also part of 2.) - Has an observable interaction with calling functions or the outside world?

  Read the article

• Where to implement storable items

  - by James Hay

  I'm creating a multiplayer online trading game. The things that are traded range from raw items to complex products. For example Steel is a raw item. Mechanical Assembly is a more complex item that requires 2x Steel and maybe 1x Rubber. Then Hydraulics is an item that contains 2x Mechanical Assemblies and 1x Electronics (which is another complex item). So and so forth. These items will be created by me, players can't create their own items, so it doesn't need to be able to handle arbitrary layers of complexity for items. If my example isn't clear, think Minecraft. You have wooden planks, which can be made into sticks. From there the sticks - combined with metals - can be made into tools. My game is nothing to do with minecraft or any sandbox building game, but it uses a similar progressive complexity to creating items that I want to have in my game. My question is basically, how do you store something like this assuming that I will want to add more items in the future? Do you store it in a database or in a seperate library that the game uses? EDIT None of the items actually "do" anything, they are simply there to either sell, purchase, or combine with other items to make a more complex item, which can then be sold, purchased or combined... you get the idea. The items themselves would not have any properties, but the instances of the items would. For example an item that one player has would have a certain "quality" and if they were selling it a certain "price". An instance of that same item that a different player had would need to have a different "quality" and "price" if they were selling it. I think the price part will not be required on an individual item because instead I would have a "sale" object which was for a price and contained certain items.

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106  | Next Page >