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  • My mental block - struggling to learn Objective C

    - by iqessar
    Hello people, this would be my first question after signing up! Anyway heres my question, I did Java at university and I was always told I am a good programmer. However I never pursued it as a career - I went into support and management instead. Im pretty much bored with my job, I have therefore started to learn Objective C so that I can develop apps for the iphone. I am currently watching several different Videos / Books. My problem is that when I go through the Apple documentation, although I understand most of it, sometimes I stumble. I believe that because you/we have the Apple documentation (i.e. Framework references) , everything should be clear, and therefore you should have no need to refer to a book or video (in order to learn how to use a particular class). But I alway do refer to a book and video and subsequently feel guilty as I believe the framework reference should be enough. (I therefore feel I am not up to being a programmer) I also believe that you shouldn't need example code in order to learn how to use a particular class because Apple provides documentation for each class, but AGAIN I find my self googling example code and I find my answer like that - again I feel guilty for doing this. Am I right in saying that Apple documentation is simply not clear? and that its ok to refer to a video/book or google? or forums for that matter? I have proffesional programmers who tell me that I am worrying too much and that I should get on with it and use all the resources that I have. I just cant seem to get round this mental block that I have in my head. When I start a programming project I am able to use the excellent search skills that I have to find the code I need, copy and paste it (yes I do understand it) BUT then I feel guilty telling myself that why didn't you think up the code yourself???? Therefore your not a real programmer, your just good at googling. Currently I am going through 20+ books so that I can learn most of the frameworks, syntax etc to develop iphone apps. I believe if I do this, then when I think of a project I can make it quickly. Should I read a few books, like 2-3 and then just start a project /app , and if I get stuck just google it and get the code I need? Can anybody please answer my questions?

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  • K&R Exercise 1-21 - Mental incomprehension.

    - by asdfg
    The "impossible" K&R exercise. "Write a program entab that replaces strings of blanks by the minimum number of tabs and blanks to achieve the same spacing. Use the same tab stops, say every n columns. Should n be a variable or a symbolic parameter?" The problem I'm having is, I'm unsure about how to even do this correctly. I know it's not very explanatory, but that's pretty much the problem here. Most of the examples I've seen have counted a number of blanks, and replaced those series with a tab, but this isn't what its asking, I reckon I understand what its asking, but currently feel unable to do this. Could anyone help :)

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  • Lua Tables w/ Changing Variables - Mental Block

    - by bottles
    I always assumed that changing the value of k from "x" to 20 would eliminate "x". So why then in this example are we able to go back and reference "x"? a = {} k = "x" a[k] = 10 print(a[k]) ---> Returns 10 print(a["x"]) ---> Returns 10 a[20] = "great" k = 20 print(a[k]) ---> "great" a["x"] = a["x"] + 1 print(a["x"]) --> 11 Why does that last print command work, and return 11? I thought we set k = 20. Why is "x" even in the picture?

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  • Chemical alternatives to caffeine / coffee for mental clarity and alertness? [on hold]

    - by einsteinx2
    Currently I drink about 2 cups of coffee or tea a day (one in the morning and one in the afternoon usually). However I'm very sensitive to stimulants and drinking caffeine regularly keeps my resting heart rate really high, causes occasional heart palpitations, and sometimes trouble sleeping. I've tried going without coffee, and while I can do it, I have trouble concentrating at work and even just enjoying my work. I'm borderline ADD (or possibly full on ADD, but haven't been checked). And I tend to lose focus easily if I don't have some coffee or tea in me. For health reasons, I'd like to cut it out completely, but when I do my work performance seriously suffers. I already work out (cardio and/or weight lifting) 5 - 6 days a week, and get an average of about 8 hours of sleep, but I still can't focus throughout the day without caffeine. Are there any over the counter chemical or supplement alternatives for mental clarity that you've used with success don't cause the additional unwanted physical side effects that come with regular stimulants like caffeine?

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  • Developer Burnout Stories

    - by Jeff V
    In question: "What causes developer burnout?" I told of a co-worker who got burned out and ended up leaving the profession. Have you seen developer burnout? Tell the story here. Whether it is funny or just plain sad and touching I'm sure it will tell us something about our profession. This will give us a sense of how common it is as well.

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  • Programmer’s block

    - by Kev
    Any one suffer from programmer’s block, if so how do you kick start your brain again? I’ve been working on a project since I returned from two weeks holiday, it’s a piece of cake to finish but I’ve done everything but pull my finger out and finish the damn thing.

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  • How do I tell the difference between a success that is preceded by a momentary failure and failure?

    - by user128807
    When I'm trying out a new technology, I often fail. Sometimes I succeed, sometimes I continue to fail. So, in the first few moments after I try a new technology and experience failure, I cannot tell if I am on the path to success and have just experienced a momentary failure or if I am going to fail. I am wondering if anyone has a way to tell the difference between these two scenarios.

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  • What are some "mental steps" a developer must take to begin moving from SQL to NO-SQL (CouchDB, Fath

    - by Byron Sommardahl
    I have my mind firmly wrapped around relational databases and how to code efficiently against them. Most of my experience is with MySQL and SQL. I like many of the things I'm hearing about document-based databases, especially when someone in a recent podcast mentioned huge performance benefits. So, if I'm going to go down that road, what are some of the mental steps I must take to shift from SQL to NO-SQL? If it makes any difference in your answer, I'm a C# developer primarily (today, anyhow). I'm used to ORM's like EF and Linq to SQL. Before ORMs, I rolled my own objects with generics and datareaders. Maybe that matters, maybe it doesn't. Here are some more specific: How do I need to think about joins? How will I query without a SELECT statement? What happens to my existing stored objects when I add a property in my code? (feel free to add questions of your own here)

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  • How do people deal with mental plateaus in programming?

    - by ggfan
    Please excuse if this isn't the right type of question to ask here on SO. For the past few days, I just can't seem to get any quality programming done. I feel in the slumps when doing work and just can't concentrate. I also do happen to be learning a new skill(PHP framework) and I think that is the main reason why I feel I can't do anything. Are there anything you all do to "recharge" the brain and get back on track? Possible activites: 1. get away from the PC for a few days

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  • What Counts For a DBA: Fitness

    - by Louis Davidson
    If you know me, you can probably guess that physical exercise is not really my thing. There was a time in my past when it a larger part of my life, but even then never in the same sort of passionate way as a number of our SQL friends.  For me, I find that mental exercise satisfies what I believe to be the same inner need that drives people to run farther than I like to drive on most Saturday mornings, and it is certainly just as addictive. Mental fitness shares many common traits with physical fitness, especially the need to attain it through repetitive training. I only wish that mental training burned off a bacon cheeseburger in the same manner as does jogging around a dewy park on Saturday morning. In physical training, there are at least two goals, the first of which is to be physically able to do a task. The second is to train the brain to perform the task without thinking too hard about it. No matter how long it has been since you last rode a bike, you will be almost certainly be able to hop on and start riding without thinking about the process of pedaling or balancing. If you’ve never ridden a bike, you could be a physics professor /Olympic athlete and still crash the first few times you try, even though you are as strong as an ox and your knowledge of the physics of bicycle riding makes the concept child’s play. For programming tasks, the process is very similar. As a DBA, you will come to know intuitively how to backup, optimize, and secure database systems. As a data programmer, you will work to instinctively use the clauses of Transact-SQL DML so that, when you need to group data three ways (and not four), you will know to use the GROUP BY clause with GROUPING SETS without resorting to a search engine.  You have the skill. Making it naturally then requires repetition and experience is the primary requirement, not just simply learning about a topic. The hardest part of being really good at something is this difference between knowledge and skill. I have recently taken several informative training classes with Kimball University on data warehousing and ETL. Now I have a lot more knowledge about designing data warehouses than before. I have also done a good bit of data warehouse designing of late and have started to improve to some level of proficiency with the theory. Yet, for all of this head knowledge, it is still a struggle to take what I have learned and apply it to the designs I am working on.  Data warehousing is still a task that is not yet deeply ingrained in my brain muscle memory. On the other hand, relational database design is something that no matter how much or how little I may get to do it, I am comfortable doing it. I have done it as a profession now for well over a decade, I teach classes on it, and I also have done (and continue to do) a lot of mental training beyond the work day. Sometimes the training is just basic education, some reading blogs and attending sessions at PASS events.  My best training comes from spending time working on other people’s design issues in forums (though not nearly as much as I would like to lately). Working through other people’s problems is a great way to exercise your brain on problems with which you’re not immediately familiar. The final bit of exercise I find useful for cultivating mental fitness for a data professional is also probably the nerdiest thing that I will ever suggest you do.  Akin to running in place, the idea is to work through designs in your head. I have designed more than one database system that would revolutionize grocery store operations, sales at my local Target store, the ordering process at Amazon, and ways to improve Disney World operations to get me through a line faster (some of which they are starting to implement without any of my help.) Never are the designs truly fleshed out, but enough to work through structures and processes.  On “paper”, I have designed database systems to catalog things as trivial as my Lego creations, rental car companies and my audio and video collections. Once I get the database designed mentally, sometimes I will create the database, add some data (often using Red-Gate’s Data Generator), and write a few queries to see if a concept was realistic, but I will rarely fully flesh out the database since I have no desire to do any user interface programming anymore.  The mental training allows me to keep in practice for when the time comes to do the work I love the most for real…even if I have been spending most of my work time lately building data warehouses.  If you are really strong of mind and body, perhaps you can mix a mental run with a physical run; though don’t run off of a cliff while contemplating how you might design a database to catalog the trees on a mountain…that would be contradictory to the purpose of both types of exercise.

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  • Looking for a recommendation for an OS X Bash manual

    - by Mental Sticks
    I've just begun to use the Terminal in Mac OS X and I've found the man command very useful, although very often the explanations are too compact or complicated for me. I am looking for a very basic reference guide – like O'Reilly makes, for example. But in there I didn't find an entry for basic commands like ls or ln and a layman's explanation of all the flags and options. Could anybody recommend me something?

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  • (Mac Terminal) Looking for a recommendation for a BASH manual

    - by Mental Sticks
    Hi, I've just begun to use the Terminal in Mac OS X and I've found the 'man' command very useful, although very often the explanations are too compact or complicated for me. I am looking for a very basic reference guide – like O'Reilly makes, for example. But in there I didn't find an entry for basic commands like ls or ln and a layman's explanation of all the flags and options. Could anybody recommend me something? Thansk a bunch in advance

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  • Is T R O L L O L O G Y a good term for studies of cyber spying, cyber stalking and cyber mobbing ? [closed]

    - by e-mental
    To fight spam and to free speech is necessary for produtive online communication. But this field is plenty of problems and there are many questions not yet put together. The last problem of constituting an interdisciplinary forum and theoretical frame for such studies of cyber spying & stalking & mobbing is the best name for it. But I would like to ask, whether trollology is a good idea - or if You have betters. Thanx a lot.

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  • Is using MultiMaps code smell? If so what alternative data structures fit my needs?

    - by Pureferret
    I'm trying to model nWoD characters for a roleplaying game in a character builder program. The crux is I want to support saving too and loading from yaml documents. One aspect of the character's is their set of skills. Skills are split between exactly three 'types': Mental, Physical, and Social. Each type has a list of skills under if. My Yaml looks like this: PHYSICAL: Athletics: 0 Brawl: 3 MENTAL: Academics: 2 Computers My initial thought was to use a Multimap of some sort, and have the skill type as an Enum, and key to my map. Each Skill is an element in the collection that backs the multimap. However, I've been struggling to get the yaml to work. On explaining this to a colleague outside of work they said this was probably a sign of code smell, and he's never seen it used 'well'. Are multiMaps really code smell? If so what alternate data structures would suit my goals?

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  • Did Blowing Into Nintendo Cartridges Really Help?

    - by Jason Fitzpatrick
    Anyone old enough to remember playing cartridge-based games like those that came with the Nintendo Entertainment System or its successors certainly remembers how blowing across the cartridge opening always seemed to help a stubborn game load–but did blowing on them really help? Mental Floss shares the results of their fact finding mission, a mission that included researching the connection mechanism in the NES, talking to Frank Viturello (who conducted an informal study on the effects of moisture on cartridge connectors), and otherwise delving into the history of the phenomenon. The most interesting part of the analysis, by far, is their explanation of how blowing on the cartridge didn’t do anything but the ritual of removing the cartridge to blow on it did. Hit up the link below for the full story. Did Blowing into Nintendo Cartridges Really Help? [Mental Floss] How Hackers Can Disguise Malicious Programs With Fake File Extensions Can Dust Actually Damage My Computer? What To Do If You Get a Virus on Your Computer

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  • Harnessing Business Events for Predictive Decision Making - part 1 / 3

    - by Sanjeev Sharma
    Businesses have long relied on data mining to elicit patterns and forecast future demand and supply trends. Improvements in computing hardware, specifically storage and compute capacity, have significantly enhanced the ability to store and analyze mountains of data in ever shrinking time-frames. Nevertheless, the reality is that data growth is outpacing storage capacity by a factor of two and computing power is still very much bounded by Moore's Law, doubling only every 18 months.Faced with this data explosion, businesses are exploring means to develop human brain-like capabilities in their decision systems (including BI and Analytics) to make sense of the data storm, in other words business events, in real-time and respond pro-actively rather than re-actively. It is more like having a little bit of the right information just a little bit before hand than having all of the right information after the fact. To appreciate this thought better let's first understand the workings of the human brain.Neuroscience research has revealed that the human brain is predictive in nature and that talent is nothing more than exceptional predictive ability. The cerebral-cortex, part of the human brain responsible for cognition, thought, language etc., comprises of five layers. The lowest layer in the hierarchy is responsible for sensory perception i.e. discrete, detail-oriented tasks whereas each of the above layers increasingly focused on assembling higher-order conceptual models. Information flows both up and down the layered memory hierarchy. This allows the conceptual mental-models to be refined over-time through experience and repetition. Secondly, and more importantly, the top-layers are able to prime the lower layers to anticipate certain events based on the existing mental-models thereby giving the brain a predictive ability. In a way the human brain develops a "memory of the future", some sort of an anticipatory thinking which let's it predict based on occurrence of events in real-time. A higher order of predictive ability stems from being able to recognize the lack of certain events. For instance, it is one thing to recognize the beats in a music track and another to detect beats that were missed, which involves a higher order predictive ability.Existing decision systems analyze historical data to identify patterns and use statistical forecasting techniques to drive planning. They are similar to the human-brain in that they employ business rules very much like mental-models to chunk and classify information. However unlike the human brain existing decision systems are unable to evolve these rules automatically (AI still best suited for highly specific tasks) and  predict the future based on real-time business events. Mistake me not,  existing decision systems remain vital to driving long-term and broader business planning. For instance, a telco will still rely on BI and Analytics software to plan promotions and optimize inventory but tap into business events enabled predictive insight to identify specifically which customers are likely to churn and engage with them pro-actively. In the next post, i will depict the technology components that enable businesses to harness real-time events and drive predictive decision making.

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  • Mechanics of reasoning during programming interviews

    - by user129506
    This is not the usual "I don't want to write code during an interview", in this question the assumption is that I need to write code during an interview (think about the level of rewriting the quicksort or mergesort from scratch) I know how the algorithm work or I have a basic idea of how I should start working from there, i.e. I don't remember the algorithm by heart I noticed that even on a whiteboard, I always end up writing bugged code or code that doesn't compile. If there's a typo, whatever I usually live with that.. but when there's a crash due to some uncaught particular case I end up losing confidence in my skills. I realize that perhaps interviewers might want to look at how I write code and/or how I solve problems rather than proof-compiling my whiteboard code, but I'd like to ask how should I approach the above problem in mental terms, i.e. what mental steps should I follow when writing code for an interview with the two bullet points above. There must be a unique and agreed series of steps I should follow to avoid getting stuck/caught into particular exception cases (limit cases) that might end up wasting my time and my energies rather than focusing on the overall algorithm for the general case. I hope I made my point clear

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  • How does a programmer think?

    - by Gordon Potter
    This may be a hopelessly vague question. But I am interested to hear whatever logical thought processes people go through when learning a new concept or trying to get their brain around code they might not have ever seen before. Basically, what general steps does one take to to break down problems and what does it take to "get it"? If you were to diagram a flowchart of how your mental process works when you look at code or try to solve a problem what might it look like? What common references, tips, and mental assumptions do you find useful in problem solving? How is this different between different domains? For example in what ways is a web programmer's thought process similar or different from a traditional desktop app developer's process?

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  • Sybase ASE

    - by Linchi Shea
    I sat in a Sybase ASE class last week for five days. Although it didn't cover the more advanced features introduced in the more recent versions of Sybase ASE, the class did touch all the basics of administering Sybase ASE. While I was successful in suppressing any urge to openly compare Sybase ASE with Microsoft SQL Server in the class, I could not help making mental notes on the differences between the two database platforms. It's always interesting to look at how two DBMS platforms that share the...(read more)

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  • Do any languages other than haskell/agda have a hindley-milner type system and type classes?

    - by Jimmy Hoffa
    In pondering what gives Haskell such a layer of mental pain in becoming proficient the main thing I can think of are the Monads, Applicatives, Functors, and gaining an intuition to know how a list or maybe will behave in regards to sequence or alternate or bind etc. But why haven't other languages presented these same concepts given the usefulness of monads/applicatives/etc? It occurs to me, type classes are the key, so the question is: Have any languages other than Haskell/Agda actually implemented type classes in the same or similar way?

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  • How To Safely Eject Your USB Devices From the Desktop Context Menu

    - by Taylor Gibb
    If you are one of those people who don’t safely remove their USB Devices just because you’re lazy, here’s a neat trick to do it from the context menu on your desktop. Even if you are not lazy and just forget, the icon will serve as a mental reminder. So let’s take a look. How to Run Android Apps on Your Desktop the Easy Way HTG Explains: Do You Really Need to Defrag Your PC? Use Amazon’s Barcode Scanner to Easily Buy Anything from Your Phone

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  • What do you do when working with multiple languages with different capitalization schemes?

    - by dvcolgan
    I'm making a webapp using Django. The Python convention for naming variables is lowercase_with_underscores, but the Javascript convention is camelCase. In addition, I've seen many people use lowercase-with-hyphens for CSS identifiers. Would you suggest using all three naming conventions where appropriate, or picking one and using it, even if the other two recommend something else? Switching back and forth isn't a huge problem, but it can still be mental overhead.

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