nielsm posted:

It might be that someone is thoroughly confused about how computers work and they just meant to write that the data must be written as binary. (Although it would be a good idea to specify endianness too.)
"It appears as hexadecimal when I inspect it with my hex editor."

pokeyman posted:

Maybe I'm missing something but isn't the only difference between the three the filter you're using to look at the data?

Strong Sauce posted:

I have a word or phrase that I'd like to draw in an area wxh in size by maximizing the amount of space used and using as large of a font-size as possible. We can assume the height remains constant given a specific font-size but that the font is not fixed-width so the width of the word will have to be requested each time you try a new set of linebreaks for the phrase.

pokeyman posted:

Any Octave folk here?

shrughes posted:

For any font size you can see if the phrase will fit in the box very easily (using greedy word wrapping). Then binary search to find the largest font size (up to your limitations of precision) for which the phrase will fit in the box.

Strong Sauce posted:

Thanks. Since I want the font as large as possible, would it be better to just do a regular binary search or just sort from largest font to smallest font and then use a one-sided binary search to get the result?

pokeyman posted:

Any Octave folk here? (Matlab probably works too.) Is there no way to call a function with arguments formed by destructuring a matrix into its columns?

For example, hypot takes a variable number of arguments and calculates the squared sums between the columns. So if I wanted to find the distance between two sets of points, I might do

code:

X1 = [bunch of 2-dimensional points];
X2 = [same number of 2D points];
diffs = X1 - X2;
distances = hypot(diffs(:, 1), diffs(:, 2));

Can I generalize this somehow, by calling hypot with however many columns I might have? e.g. in Python I might do

code:

distances = hypot(*diffs);

Flaggy posted:

What program/website do people use to make the banner ads on here. I would like to make one but not a programmer. Any recommendations? Didn't know where else to ask, figured this would be a good place. Thanks.

the talent deficit posted:

If I want to release a library for non-commercial use only, what are my options? I thought the Sleepycat license was what I wanted, but upon reading, it turns out I'm wrong.

ShoulderDaemon posted:

Creative Commons Non-Commercial is probably your best bet, although it's not a software-specific license. Note that the open source community won't touch it, either, so you are likely to have very few users. A fairly significant portion of the open source community feels very strongly that software should not have licenses that restrict use in any way whatsoever.

the talent deficit posted:

I've seen a few libraries licensed under CC-NC, but nothing with enough of a profile that I was confident it's actually sensible for software.

We already have hundreds of commercial users of our SDK who pay for the right to use it. We want to release a free version (that isn't crippled) as cheap advertising. We're not really concerned with open source idealists, more just increased openness and exposure without hindering our ability to operate as a for profit business.

Mr. Crow posted:

Doesn't GPL require you to open up your software source code to any and all? Honestly you probably should ask a lawyer, in an official capacity or otherwise if its for a company.

mobby_6kl posted:

Is it possible to stick some javascript into HTML emails to be used in Outlook? Clearly having JS at all isn't a very good security-wise, but if this is supported, I'd gladly exploit this to make a report that will be sent out more palatable...

Lord_Of_Pancake posted:

Can anyone recommend me a good book or resource on raycasting? I've just been doing some basic 3d rendering stuff for a university paper (a pretty simple 3D rendering pipeline with just triangular polygons) and was hoping to delve a little deeper.

piratepilates posted:

This is about 1200 pages of everything to do with raycasting, raytracing, path tracing and everything else you can shake a stick at. with diagrams, pictures, equations and code for everything.

72o posted:

I have little to no programming experience, outside of having briefly looked at a few starter Visual C tutorials (and trying to keep up). My goal is to create a specific tool for work, a simple text template database tool designed for easy retrieval of these via categorised lists, including text strings retrieved via simple macros (for instance, typing .asd would bring up a sentence). Other similar tools we have are updated automatically every time they are run via our network and is of course something I'd want, but I really don't know what goes into making that work.

Would anyone be so kind to steer me in the right direction to start working on something like this? Are there any starter project packages out there that can be modified without having years of know-how? As I mentioned I have a vague familiarity with Visual C, but I don't have a clue whether this is ideal - of course I'd want to use any skills I learn from this to make more tools in the future and probably stick to one language, but I'd take all the advice I can get.

GrumpyDoctor posted:

I have a collection that includes points, lines, and planes (in 3-dimensional space). If I want to do neighbor queries on points (nearest neighbor, nearest k neighbors, whatever) I can use a k-d tree. Is there any technique for if I want to include the lines and the planes in the queries as well? i.e. "find me all the points, lines, and planes within an epsilon of this given point"

72o posted:

I have little to no programming experience, outside of having briefly looked at a few starter Visual C tutorials (and trying to keep up). My goal is to create a specific tool for work, a simple text template database tool designed for easy retrieval of these via categorised lists, including text strings retrieved via simple macros (for instance, typing .asd would bring up a sentence). Other similar tools we have are updated automatically every time they are run via our network and is of course something I'd want, but I really don't know what goes into making that work.

Hammerite posted:

If you have a point p and a line l then there is a unique point p2 on l that is closest to p. You could just calculate the distance between p and p2, which is then the same as the distance between p and l. The analogous statement also holds for a point and a plane.

In the case where you have a point p and a plane q you calculate the normal l to q passing through p; the point p2 is the intersection of l with q.

In the case where you have a point p and a line l, you express the line in terms of a parameter (t, say), and then express the square-distance s from p to a point on l in terms of t. Then you find the minimum value of ds/dt and calculate its square root to get the distance from p to l (you can also calculate the point p2 at this point, but you don't actually need to).

If this is too inefficient an approach or otherwise impractical then don't mind me, I'm a programming novice.

TasteMyHouse posted:

Suspicious Dish posted:

72o posted:

- Do you want to be able to type .asd in any text widget on the system and have something expanded for you?
- What do you want to use these sentences for? in what context?
- Just one specific application?

The macros I want to use for other chat applications, and making general notes on a various items in other applications for whatever I did, etc.

The templates are pre-written responses in a searchable list for e-mail responses and such, copied to the clipboard. Further on I'd want to make combinable templates, to prevent having to remove and add paragraphs in an e-mail template manually, for instance. As a general example, ticking boxes for what information will be in the template and copied to the clipboard.

- Are you on Windows? OS X? Linux?

Windows.


I have seen colleagues use AutoHotkey for simple applications, but not something I'd want any user to have to use for this. Is C# the best option, then?

Thermopyle posted:

Personally, I'd use AutoIT. It's pretty much perfect for these sorts of things. It's like AHK, but easier to use. You can make fine looking and easy to use applications with either of those languages if you put in the work.

Hammerite posted:

If you have a point p and a line l then there is a unique point p2 on l that is closest to p. You could just calculate the distance between p and p2, which is then the same as the distance between p and l. The analogous statement also holds for a point and a plane.

In the case where you have a point p and a plane q you calculate the normal l to q passing through p; the point p2 is the intersection of l with q.

In the case where you have a point p and a line l, you express the line in terms of a parameter (t, say), and then express the square-distance s from p to a point on l in terms of t. Then you find the minimum value of ds/dt and calculate its square root to get the distance from p to l (you can also calculate the point p2 at this point, but you don't actually need to).

If this is too inefficient an approach or otherwise impractical then don't mind me, I'm a programming novice.

ultrafilter posted:

As long as you're not constrained by memory, this is the right way to go. What you're talking about is a projection, and it's easy to compute by matrix multiplication.

GrumpyDoctor posted:

I wasn't clear. I know how to do this; I need to know how to do it more efficiently than a brute-force check against every line or plane in the search space.

GrumpyDoctor posted:

I wasn't clear. I know how to do this; I need to know how to do it more efficiently than a brute-force check against every line or plane in the search space.

nielsm posted:

Have you looked into BSP? Or maybe an octree.
I don't know if they are really applicable to your problem... not really an expert on 3D geometry.

ultrafilter posted:

The idea is that for each point/line pair, you store the projection of that point onto the line. Then you can just query it like any other point.