Ask General Programming Questions Not Worth Their Own Thread

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tef: May 30, 2004; -> some l-system crap ->

Hammerite posted:

In the current version of my web app, users can select a set of pronouns they would like to be referred to by.

This doesn't work across languages.

quote:

They can elect to be referred to by "he", "she", or "it".

This doesn't cover all pronouns

quote:

I'm considering whether to maintain this in a future iteration of the app.

don't

quote:

I was considering adding the option of being referred to by "they". But I also allow translation into other languages, and other languages might have totally different sets of pronouns and so it might be impossible to translate the connotations behind one or more sets of pronouns, resulting in inferior translation.

or they might avoid pronouns altogether :eng101:

quote:

I'm not sure whether to just drop the option to select a set of pronouns entirely, and have everybody just referred to as "they" where necessary. I guess this is what most people would do?

Websites generally refer to people in the first person. '$name did $thing'

quote:

Obviously this is an aesthetic consideration and difficult to justify spending much time on.

It's a giant can of worms and a lack of knowledge about how people refer to themselves within the language you speak and the languages you don't speak.

# ? Jun 2, 2012 02:47

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# ? May 18, 2024 04:59

tef: May 30, 2004; -> some l-system crap ->

Hammerite posted:

The way I see it it's a nice thing to do to let people select the way they would like to be referred to.
I'm happy to tell them to go screw themselves.

I like the way you plan to cater to peoples preferred way, from a choice of what you think they can call themselves. I want to cater to their choice, well, I mean my choice, well gently caress them.

Hammerite posted:

code:

                |  Connotation       |  English                                |  Translated form
----------------+--------------------+-----------------------------------------+-----------------
[radio button]  |  Gender-Neutral    |  they, them, themselves, their, theirs  |  (translation)
[radio button]  |  Masculine         |  he, him, himself, his, his             |  (translation)
[radio button]  |  Feminine          |  she, her, herself, her, hers           |  (translation)
[radio button]  |  Inanimate object  |  it, it, itself, its, its               |  (translation)

Oh you mean your genders/pronouns don't work like I think they should in english, gently caress you!?

next up: Well I'd like people to be able to set their own name, from this drop down list, of names, that I approve, and I want to make it portable across languages. What do you mean it isn't ascii!!?

tef fucked around with this message at 02:53 on Jun 2, 2012

# ? Jun 2, 2012 02:50

shrughes: Oct 11, 2008; (call/cc call/cc)

Actually Hammerite you forgot a gender.

code:

                |  Connotation       |  English                                |  Translated form
----------------+--------------------+-----------------------------------------+-----------------
[radio button]  |  Gender-Neutral    |  they, them, themselves, their, theirs  |  (translation)
[radio button]  |  Masculine         |  he, him, himself, his, his             |  (translation)
[radio button]  |  Feminine          |  she, her, herself, her, hers           |  (translation)
[radio button]  |  Inanimate object  |  it, it, itself, its, its               |  (translation)
[radio button]  |  Porpoise          |  pii, pwm, pwmself, pawr, pawrse        |  (translation)

# ? Jun 2, 2012 03:08

Sinestro: Oct 31, 2010; The perfect day needs the perfect set of wheels.

Not everything needs to be fully gender-neutral and globally aware.

# ? Jun 2, 2012 04:43

Opinion Haver: Apr 9, 2007

tef posted:

Websites generally refer to people in the first person. '$name did $thing'

That's third-person, as is "She did $thing." First-person would be "I did $thing" which obviously makes no sense.
So what do you do for cases like 'John Smith updated John Smith's profile. Reconnect with John Smith today!'? That looks ridiculous if you keep using their name each time.

I'd recommend sticking with masculine, feminine, and neutral/unspecified if you can swing it in whatever set of languages you support it. If you don't want to deal with making your users think about pronouns, just have them set their gender as male/female/unspecified and pick pronouns based on that.

# ? Jun 2, 2012 07:03

Rocko Bonaparte: Mar 12, 2002; Every day is Friday!

rjmccall posted:

In Unix, this general topic is called "line discipline", and you should read the general manual about terminals, man 4 tty. I don't know the fundamental concepts in Windows, but I believe kbhit still exists. In either case, user code that takes this over is not supposed to ever use the streaming interfaces for that device, which basically automatically handle/ignore all the special editing keystrokes.

kbhit was what I found. There's an msvcrt Python module that exposes that. I didn't know about that term "line discipline." I looked that up and it looks like that's considered an OS-level responsibility. I'm basically taking over with raw I/O so I guess now it's my problem in the application level. I might go see what else is hiding in the module in case there's something else to use, but I'm right now starting to ponder having to handle the basic keys.

# ? Jun 2, 2012 07:23

cr0y: Mar 24, 2005

Can someone recommend a good free/opensource calculator that can work with giant numbers? I have been getting really interested in the math of encryption and I realize I need to be able to do simple operations on random numbers and primes that are a gently caress ton of digits long.

and yes i am a total nerd.

# ? Jun 2, 2012 08:04

Suspicious Dish: Sep 24, 2011; 2020 is the year of linux on the desktop, bro; Fun Shoe

cr0y posted:

Can someone recommend a good free/opensource calculator that can work with giant numbers? I have been getting really interested in the math of encryption and I realize I need to be able to do simple operations on random numbers and primes that are a gently caress ton of digits long.

A program or a library? bc for the former, gmp for the latter.

# ? Jun 2, 2012 08:07

tef: May 30, 2004; -> some l-system crap ->

yaoi prophet posted:

That's third-person, as is "She did $thing." First-person would be "I did $thing" which obviously makes no sense.

It was late. I was tired.

# ? Jun 2, 2012 10:14

Hammerite: Mar 9, 2007; And you don't remember what I said here, either, but it was pompous and stupid.; Jade Ear Joe

yaoi prophet posted:

That's third-person, as is "She did $thing." First-person would be "I did $thing" which obviously makes no sense.

So what do you do for cases like 'John Smith updated John Smith's profile. Reconnect with John Smith today!'? That looks ridiculous if you keep using their name each time.

I'd recommend sticking with masculine, feminine, and neutral/unspecified if you can swing it in whatever set of languages you support it. If you don't want to deal with making your users think about pronouns, just have them set their gender as male/female/unspecified and pick pronouns based on that.

I figure asking them "what sex/what gender are you?" would be a far worse can of worms than merely asking them how they would like to be referred to. Not to mention people are more likely (I would assume) to see asking them "are you male or female" as a request for irrelevant information and so impertinent.

Don't get me wrong, I do see that some languages might have arbitrarily different pronoun conventions than European languages. For languages where the "them, he, she, it" model is insufficient, it can fall back to use of gender-neutral text everywhere.

That has the problem that users using those languages might not see the need to provide information that doesn't apply to how they view the website anyhow. So it should default to the "they" option.

At the end of the day it is a primarily English-language web app by necessity because I am running it and I am English-speaking. Various issues might arise when attempt to facilitate translation, I'm not convinced that that's a reason to avoid offering features. When a given feature just isn't compatible with a certain language, shouldn't the thing "gracefully degrade"? That's a popular notion iirc.

But all this said, I'm not really convinced it isn't all too much work to be worth it.

# ? Jun 2, 2012 11:00

rolleyes: Nov 16, 2006; Sometimes you have to roll the hard... two?

Speaking as someone working for a company which offers our UIs in multiple languages (including non-latin ones) you really don't want to get into this if you don't have the resources to do a good job of it. We send our text to external translation companies and even they don't always get it exactly right, especially when going to logographic languages like Kanji which can be extremely subjective and context sensitive.

If you really are going to do this then the hard and fast rule you must stick to is "thou shalt use complete sentences only." Seriously, attempting to translate sentence fragments raises the error rate exponentially and sometimes is literally impossible to achieve because in another language part of the second fragment might need to be in the first fragment.

What I'm getting at is that some people might think you could get away with something like this to save translation resources:
Fragment 1 with replaceable pronoun: [<She> last updated] (can be reused for multiple types of update)
Fragment 2 with replaceable pronoun: [<her> account on:] <date>

That doesn't work for a variety of reasons: pronoun structure differs in various languages (i.e. you might not just be able to replace the pronoun as it can depend on words around it), sentence order differs in various languages (i.e. there's no guarantee that 'she' and 'her' would remain in the same place relative to the fragmentation), and just about every western language other than English has some situations where parts of the sentence structure and/or actual words change depending on the gender context.

The only really safe way to achieve that translation is simply:
"She last updated her account on:" <date>
"He last updated his account on:" <date>
"They last updated their account on:" <date>
"It last updated its account on:" <date>

And even that might not work as in some contexts the location of the date might have to move.

In short, while it's great and helpful to your users to want to offer localisation it's also a gigantic :can:

which leads to you maintaining a huge database of every drat string in your application multiplied the number of pronouns you want to support multiplied by however many languages you want to support. We keep all of our application text gender neutral for exactly this reason.

rolleyes fucked around with this message at 11:30 on Jun 2, 2012

# ? Jun 2, 2012 11:24

Hammerite: Mar 9, 2007; And you don't remember what I said here, either, but it was pompous and stupid.; Jade Ear Joe

rolleyes posted:

Speaking as someone working for a company which offers our UIs in multiple languages (including non-latin ones) you really don't want to get into this if you don't have the resources to do a good job of it. We send our text to external translation companies and even they don't always get it exactly right, especially when going to logographic languages like Kanji which can be extremely subjective and context sensitive.

If you really are going to do this then the hard and fast rule you must stick to is "thou shalt use complete sentences only." Seriously, attempting to translate sentence fragments raises the error rate exponentially and sometimes is literally impossible to achieve because in another language part of the second fragment might need to be in the first fragment.

What I'm getting at is that some people might think you could get away with something like this to save translation resources:
Fragment 1 with replaceable pronoun: [<She> last updated] (can be reused for multiple types of update)
Fragment 2 with replaceable pronoun: [<her> account on:] <date>

That doesn't work for a variety of reasons: pronoun structure differs in various languages (i.e. you might not just be able to replace the pronoun as it can depend on words around it), sentence order differs in various languages (i.e. there's no guarantee that 'she' and 'her' would remain in the same place relative to the fragmentation), and just about every western language other than English has some situations where parts of the sentence structure and/or actual words change depending on the gender context.

The only really safe way to achieve that translation is simply:
"She last updated her account on:" <date>
"He last updated his account on:" <date>
"They last updated their account on:" <date>
"It last updated its account on:" <date>

And even that might not work as in some contexts the location of the date might have to move.

In short, while it's great and helpful to your users to want to offer localisation it's also a gigantic which leads to you maintaining a huge database of every drat string in your application multiplied the number of pronouns you want to support multiplied by however many languages you want to support. We keep all of our application text gender neutral for exactly this reason.

My current implementation does take a "whole sentence" approach as you suggest. Does it ever work to write something like:

":subject-pronoun: updated :possessive-pronoun: account on:"

I am aware, before you say anything, that in many languages a possessive pronoun (say) has to agree with the noun. So there might be different pronouns for masculine, feminine and neuter nouns and they might also vary according to whether the noun is pluralised. So in some language it might look more like

":subject-pronoun: updated :possessive-pronoun-masculine-singular: account on:"

On the other hand, if a language isn't supported to that extent because it's just so alien OMG then it might end up as a sentence with no :...: placeholders at all, because there are no parameters to change.

# ? Jun 2, 2012 12:12

nielsm: Jun 1, 2009

Hammerite posted:

My current implementation does take a "whole sentence" approach as you suggest. Does it ever work to write something like:

":subject-pronoun: updated :possessive-pronoun: account on:"

I am aware, before you say anything, that in many languages a possessive pronoun (say) has to agree with the noun. So there might be different pronouns for masculine, feminine and neuter nouns and they might also vary according to whether the noun is pluralised. So in some language it might look more like

":subject-pronoun: updated :possessive-pronoun-masculine-singular: account on:"

On the other hand, if a language isn't supported to that extent because it's just so alien OMG then it might end up as a sentence with no :...: placeholders at all, because there are no parameters to change.

In some languages the verb also has to agree with the subject and/or object. You can't be sure it's possible to just insert a pronoun in front of a verb and have it work, the verb might depend on the pronoun.
("He writes", "She writes", "It writes"... "They writes"?)

# ? Jun 2, 2012 12:47

rolleyes: Nov 16, 2006; Sometimes you have to roll the hard... two?

Placeholders become almost meaningless if you want to translate into something like Mandarin. Also, as I touched on briefly above, literal translation is not usually the best translation so you can't necessarily guarantee the sentence structure will be constant or even that the use of pronouns will be the same - unfortunately translation is not an exact science. For an example of why literal translation is often not great, think about how we tend to find 'Engrish' amusing. If you plug an English phrase into google translate and convert it to Mandarin, chances are it's equally amusing to anyone who can understand it. Adding variables to the translation process just makes an already difficult process harder.

I should point out that I'm far from an expert on this as I don't actually work on this part of our software, I'm just aware of the restrictions it places on sentence construction.

# ? Jun 2, 2012 12:48

Hammerite: Mar 9, 2007; And you don't remember what I said here, either, but it was pompous and stupid.; Jade Ear Joe

Well, it's been useful to explore the idea. I think I've heard enough to convince me to drop the feature and use uniformly gender-neutral phrasing for now. It's not like I couldn't add the feature in at a future date, defaulting to "they" for users already existing at that time.

Incidentally, has there ever been a thread in CoC regarding internationalisation/localisation topics?

# ? Jun 2, 2012 13:41

Scaevolus: Apr 16, 2007

cr0y posted:

Can someone recommend a good free/opensource calculator that can work with giant numbers? I have been getting really interested in the math of encryption and I realize I need to be able to do simple operations on random numbers and primes that are a gently caress ton of digits long.

and yes i am a total nerd.

Try Sage, it has builtin crypto libraries. Sage Cryptography.

Scaevolus fucked around with this message at 21:51 on Jun 2, 2012

# ? Jun 2, 2012 20:22

Sil: Jan 4, 2007

Is there any way to create a program that acts as a permanent overlay for a mac and/or windows computer? Basically just change how the display looks(ie. make everything a certain color, or blur the image or whatever) but keep the functionality the same.

I'm not being very clear since I don't exactly know what this would involve. I'm not looking for something that just involves changing the color settings of the system, I'd like to be able to do more than that(for instance, if I wanted, have a black square always display in some area of the screen). Basically an overlay that is permanent, for all applications, and modifies what displays in some arbitrary manner. I'm not even sure this is possible, but hey no harm asking more knowledgeable people.

# ? Jun 4, 2012 04:45

Suspicious Dish: Sep 24, 2011; 2020 is the year of linux on the desktop, bro; Fun Shoe

That's way too generic of a question to answer well. Do you have one goal for this overlay? A notification system? Tint the screen green to make it cool?

# ? Jun 4, 2012 05:08

Jewel: May 2, 2009

Suspicious Dish posted:

That's way too generic of a question to answer well. Do you have one goal for this overlay? A notification system? Tint the screen green to make it cool?

I'm thinking of something like rainmeter or rocketdock, that displays a transparent window that's not really a window on the screen at all times. They do stuff like blur the BG behind the app.

# ? Jun 4, 2012 06:26

Jabor: Jul 16, 2010; #1 Loser at SpaceChem

On windows, the WS_EX_LAYERED or WS_EX_TRANSPARENT styles are a couple of options, depending on what exactly you want to do.

# ? Jun 4, 2012 06:39

Suspicious Dish: Sep 24, 2011; 2020 is the year of linux on the desktop, bro; Fun Shoe

The blur in rainmeter is an illusion, and has nothing to do with transparency. They simply "take a screenshot" and blur it (on the GPU when possible, which also prevents a copy; otherwise on the CPU), and then composite their graphics on top.

# ? Jun 4, 2012 06:40

Sil: Jan 4, 2007

Suspicious Dish posted:

That's way too generic of a question to answer well. Do you have one goal for this overlay? A notification system? Tint the screen green to make it cool?

Yeah basically just make the screen look funky in various ways. I know it's generic, I'm also not sure how I would get in between the OS and the screen to do this.

# ? Jun 4, 2012 07:06

Suspicious Dish: Sep 24, 2011; 2020 is the year of linux on the desktop, bro; Fun Shoe

Windows doesn't have a way for security reasons. I don't know about OS X.

Your graphics driver might have a way to run a DirectX pixel shader or OpenGL fragment shader to postprocess the contents on the screen.

# ? Jun 4, 2012 07:10

Jabor: Jul 16, 2010; #1 Loser at SpaceChem

Suspicious Dish posted:

Windows doesn't have a way for security reasons. I don't know about OS X.

Your graphics driver might have a way to run a DirectX pixel shader or OpenGL fragment shader to postprocess the contents on the screen.

You probably can by making a fullscreen window with WS_EX_TRANSPARENT and WS_EX_TOPMOST. And your painting would consist of grabbing the existing output buffer and playing around with it.

Of course this doesn't quite work if anyone other topmost windows show up, but that's something you'd just have to accept.

# ? Jun 4, 2012 07:37

BART IM PISS: Aug 4, 2010; Can't post for 11 years!

What the command to show the GNU in console on Linux?

Its an ASCI Gnu and some text as far as I remember

# ? Jun 4, 2012 13:02

Munkeymon: Aug 14, 2003; Motherfucker's got an
armor-piercing crowbar! Rigoddamndicu𝜆ous.

Scaramouche posted:

I've got no idea about Smith-Waterman but one thing you might want to consider as well is idiosyncratic pluralization (e.g. pants, gauntlets, tooth/teeth, etc.) which I've used the Porter Stemming algorithm in the past:
http://tartarus.org/martin/PorterStemmer/

Depending on the size of your dataset/what you're trying to accomplish you also might want to look into a search platform. We've used SOLR/Lucene to great effect in the past for site search/keyword analysis (though there's some runup if you're not familiar with it):
http://lucene.apache.org/solr/

I'm not looking to normalize the user input - just search it. I think that disqualifies the Porter Stemmer.

It doesn't seem reasonable to use something like SOLR to index strings that might be 1k at the outside, do a few searches in that and then throw it all away. That'd be my use case because I want to fuzzy match a smallish set of short known substrings against a stream of crap that often looks like the sample blurb about the boat.

# ? Jun 4, 2012 14:31

peepsalot: Apr 24, 2007; ��PEEP THIS...
��BITCH!

Beef Darts posted:

What the command to show the GNU in console on Linux?

Its an ASCI Gnu and some text as far as I remember

"fortune | cowsay -f gnu" maybe

e: what's with all the linux questions unrelated to programming lately. There's a general linux question thread.

# ? Jun 4, 2012 18:20

JawnV6: Jul 4, 2004; So hot ...

peepsalot posted:

e: what's with all the linux questions unrelated to programming lately. There's a general linux question thread.

School's out for summer, "Programming" is the next visible abstraction for "kid who's good w/ computers"

# ? Jun 4, 2012 18:46

TheWevel: Apr 14, 2002; Send Help; Trapped in Stupid Factory

I need some help with Apple's Quartz Composer and I think the answer would actually be some JavaScript.

Here's some background--
I have a quartz composition that overlays people's tweets (based on a single username or hashtag) over currently playing music videos. What I would like to do is input a number of usernames (I will specify them, could be 1 could be 5) and have those rotate over a specified length of time. I have about 80% of this accomplished through the basic quartz composer tools.

Here's what I need help on--
I have put a patch in the chain that separates out the list of usernames and assigns them a number, 0 through however many usernames are input (variable1). If I put 4 user names in there, it will assign each username a number, 0-3. I also have a patch that determines how many usernames there are. So if there are 4 user names the patch outputs "4" (variable2). I need a timer that will spit out an assigned number every 60 seconds and the assigned number can't be greater than the number of patch outputs (result).

I have not been able to figure out how to do this with quartz composer's built in patches. I think this can be done with some simple JavaScripting which thankfully I can import into quartz composer. Any help on this would make some DJs very happy.

# ? Jun 5, 2012 17:14

coaxmetal: Oct 21, 2010; I flamed me own dad

as a non idea-haver, does anyone have any suggestions as to what sort of small projects I can do to flesh out my github? Maybe just finding some existing project that looks cool and forking/contributing will work. idk.

Beyond the fact that doing projects is satisfying, this is mostly to have something to show employers.

# ? Jun 5, 2012 21:58

Doctor w-rw-rw-: Jun 24, 2008

Ronald Raiden posted:

as a non idea-haver, does anyone have any suggestions as to what sort of small projects I can do to flesh out my github? Maybe just finding some existing project that looks cool and forking/contributing will work. idk.

Beyond the fact that doing projects is satisfying, this is mostly to have something to show employers.

Here's what I'm doing -

Learning Scala
Playing with Twitter's Finagle
Building blog software from scratch
Trying a new database (right now, neo4j, which is a graph database)

# ? Jun 5, 2012 23:09

Farchanter: Jun 15, 2008

I'm exploring the use of of Google Apps Script stuff, and I'm trying to write a script that, when an email is received, an automatic response is generated that says how many times that particular email address has sent an email to me.

I think I'm comfortable enough to do that, I'm just missing one thing: I'm not sure how to send an automatic response. I found a tutorial that says how to send an automatic response when a form is filled out, but I'm struggling to find a way to respond automatically when an email is received. Does anyone have any ideas? Or, failing that, an alternate approach to the problem?

Thanks in advance.

# ? Jun 6, 2012 07:59

Bondage: Jun 9, 2008; by Ralp

Was gonna ask in the Book Barn, but I think I'll get better answers here:

Any book recommendations in a similar vein to Godel, Escher, Bach and Engines of Logic? Related to the history of, philosophy of, and whatnot of computer science and programming.

Turing's Cathedral and Code: The Hidden... is next on my list, I am just making sure I'm not missing anything.

Bondage fucked around with this message at 16:47 on Jun 7, 2012

# ? Jun 7, 2012 16:45

Dijkstracula: Mar 18, 2003; You can't spell 'vector field' without me, Professor!

If you want something geared in particular to computer science, The New Turing Omnibus is fun; it's a collection of pretty readable essays on stuff ranging from fractals to Godel's Incompleteness Theorem. It's not as broad in scope as GEB, of course. It's also worth mentioning that Hofstadter has written other books, if you want to read more of him in particular. I've read parts of the former but the latter's been on my ready-to-read list for years.

# ? Jun 7, 2012 23:27

salted hash browns: Mar 26, 2007; ykrop

I am writing a web application. Currently I have a php script that generates a page. Upon loading this page, I have a function that makea a few other intensive queries in the background. It looks something like this:

PHP code:

<?php
...
doIntensiveBackgroundFunction($args); //Takes a long time
...
?>

What I could like to turn this into is a cURL call or something that I can have a seperate service perform it asynchronously in the background. Something like this if you will:

PHP code:

<?php
...
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "http://www.example.com/doIntensiveBackgroundFunction?args=args");
curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch); //Takes ~1s
...
?>

Where upon calling the webservice it just goes "okay", closes the connection, and starts cranking in the background.

What are my options for doing something like this? Normally I would feel like writing a java web service that could do this, but I want to know if there are any new alternatives to doing something like that. the "intensiveBackgroundFunction" in question makes various database and other web calls, so it would be nice to do it in an environment where I can centrally manage this outgoing connections. Are there any better alternatives to writing a java web service for this?

# ? Jun 8, 2012 00:16

nielsm: Jun 1, 2009

If you don't need to run on a cheap shared hosting, I would suggest writing a non-webservice. A plain program that takes the requests through some other method.
Some ideas could be: Simply launching a new process that does the work. Dumping a file describing the job in some directory monitored by a background service. Adding something to a database monitored by a background service. Some other network protocol. Or well, you could do it with some (internal) web service thing that only listens on localhost.

# ? Jun 8, 2012 01:48

Doctor w-rw-rw-: Jun 24, 2008

iamthexander posted:

What are my options for doing something like this? Normally I would feel like writing a java web service that could do this, but I want to know if there are any new alternatives to doing something like that. the "intensiveBackgroundFunction" in question makes various database and other web calls, so it would be nice to do it in an environment where I can centrally manage this outgoing connections. Are there any better alternatives to writing a java web service for this?

What you're looking for is what's called a job queue. If you're looking at Java, Quartz Scheduler is suprisingly easy to use, but it's by far not the only option. Search StackOverflow for job queue and you should get a lot of interesting answers such as this possibly helpful (PHP-relevant) one.

# ? Jun 8, 2012 03:20

salted hash browns: Mar 26, 2007; ykrop

Doctor w-rw-rw- posted:

What you're looking for is what's called a job queue. If you're looking at Java, Quartz Scheduler is suprisingly easy to use, but it's by far not the only option. Search StackOverflow for job queue and you should get a lot of interesting answers such as this possibly helpful (PHP-relevant) one.

Thanks for the info, I think I'm going to use beanstalkd to manage the jobs because it looks simple and easy. I can serialize my objects into JSON and pass them to beanstalk, then have the app on the other end deserialize them for usage. Thanks!

# ? Jun 8, 2012 16:29

Das MicroKorg: Sep 18, 2005; Vintage Analog Synthesizer

TheWevel posted:

I need some help with Apple's Quartz Composer and I think the answer would actually be some JavaScript.

Here's some background--
I have a quartz composition that overlays people's tweets (based on a single username or hashtag) over currently playing music videos. What I would like to do is input a number of usernames (I will specify them, could be 1 could be 5) and have those rotate over a specified length of time. I have about 80% of this accomplished through the basic quartz composer tools.

Here's what I need help on--
I have put a patch in the chain that separates out the list of usernames and assigns them a number, 0 through however many usernames are input (variable1). If I put 4 user names in there, it will assign each username a number, 0-3. I also have a patch that determines how many usernames there are. So if there are 4 user names the patch outputs "4" (variable2). I need a timer that will spit out an assigned number every 60 seconds and the assigned number can't be greater than the number of patch outputs (result).

I have not been able to figure out how to do this with quartz composer's built in patches. I think this can be done with some simple JavaScripting which thankfully I can import into quartz composer. Any help on this would make some DJs very happy.

I just started out with Quartz Composer, so I thought I'd try this as a challenge. If I understand you correctly, you want to rotate through a defined range of values (here 0 to 3) with a value change occurring every 60 (or whatever) seconds.

I hacked the following patch together. Let me know if it helps or even solves your problem: http://db.tt/yzihm4fs

EDIT: Had to make a small change and documented the patch better. Let it run for 60 seconds to see the first value change in the viewer (or decrease the interval).

EDIT 2: You can also add a "Watcher", "Random" and "Sample and hold" node in there to randomly choose a number from that range every X seconds. I haven't figured out a way to eliminate the situation where the same number comes up twice in a row though.

EDIT 3: Well, screw all that :haw:

I just learned that the interpolation node does everything and more what my patch above does. I guess it was a good exercise though. v :shobon:

Das MicroKorg fucked around with this message at 22:33 on Jun 8, 2012

# ? Jun 8, 2012 18:26

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oRenj9: Aug 3, 2004; Who loves oRenj soda?!?; College Slice

Edit: I fixed my silly issue.

oRenj9 fucked around with this message at 18:58 on Jun 8, 2012

# ? Jun 8, 2012 18:51

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Cavern of COBOL > Ask General Programming Questions Not Worth Their Own Thread

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