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  • Bunny Inc. – Episode 1. Mr. CIO meets Mr. Executive Manager

    - by kellsey.ruppel(at)oracle.com
    To make accurate and timely business decisions, executive managers are constantly in need of valuable information that is often hidden in old-style traditional systems. What can Mr. CIO come up with to help make Mr. Executive Manager's job easier at Bunny Inc.? Take a look and discover how you too can make informed business decisions by combining back-office systems with social media. Bunny Inc. -- Episode 1. Mr. CIO meets Mr. Executive ManagerTechnorati Tags: UXP, collaboration, enterprise 2.0, modern user experience, oracle, portals, webcenter, e20bunnies

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  • Mr Flibble: As Seen Through a Lens, Darkly

    - by Phil Factor
    One of the rewarding things about getting involved with Simple-Talk has been in meeting and working with some pretty daunting talents. I’d like to say that Dom Reed’s talents are at the end of the visible spectrum, but then there is Richard, who pops up on national radio occasionally, presenting intellectual programs, Andrew, master of the ukulele, with his pioneering local history work, and Tony with marathon running and his past as a university lecturer. However, Dom, who is Red Gate’s head of creative design and who did the preliminary design work for Simple-Talk, has taken the art photography to an extreme that was impossible before Photoshop. He’s not the first person to take a photograph of himself every day for two years, but he is definitely the first to weave the results into a frightening narrative that veers from comedy to pathos, using all the arts of Photoshop to create a fictional character, Mr Flibble.   Have a look at some of the Flickr pages. Uncle Spike The B-Men – Woolverine The 2011 BoyZ iN Sink reunion tour turned out to be their last Error 404 – Flibble not found Mr Flibble is not a normal type of alter-ego. We generally prefer to choose bronze age warriors of impossibly magnificent physique and stamina; superheroes who bestride the world, scorning the forces of evil and anarchy in a series noble and righteous quests. Not so Dom, whose Mr Flibble is vulnerable, and laid low by an addiction to toxic substances. His work has gained an international cult following and is used as course material by several courses in photography. Although his work was for a while ignored by the more conventional world of ‘art’ photography they became famous through the internet. His photos have received well over a million views on Flickr. It was definitely time to turn this work into a book, because the whole sequence of images has its maximum effect when seen in sequence. He has a Kickstarter project page, one of the first following the recent UK launch of the crowdfunding platform. The publication of the book should be a major event and the £45 I shall divvy up will be one of the securest investments I shall ever make. The local news in Cambridge picked up on the project and I can quote from the report by the excellent Cabume website , the source of Tech news from the ‘Cambridge cluster’ Put really simply Mr Flibble likes to dress up and take pictures of himself. One of the benefits of a split personality, however is that Mr Flibble is supported in his endeavour by Reed’s top notch photography skills, supreme mastery of Photoshop and unflinching dedication to the cause. The duo have collaborated to take a picture every day for the past 730-plus days. It is not a big surprise that neither Mr Flibble nor Reed watches any TV: In addition to his full-time role at Cambridge software house,Red Gate Software as head of creativity and the two to five hours a day he spends taking the Mr Flibble shots, Reed also helps organise the . And now Reed is using Kickstarter to see if the world is ready for a Mr Flibble coffee table book. Judging by the early response it is. At the time of writing, just a few days after it went live, ‘I Drink Lead Paint: An absurd photography book by Mr Flibble’ had raised £1,545 of the £10,000 target it needs to raise by the Friday 30 November deadline from 37 backers. Following the standard Kickstarter template, Reed is offering a series of rewards based on the amount pledged, ranging from a Mr Flibble desktop wallpaper for pledges of £5 or more to a signed copy of the book for pledges of £45 or more, right up to a starring role in the book for £1,500. Mr Flibble is unquestionably one of the more deranged Kickstarter hopefuls, but don’t think for a second that he doesn’t have a firm grasp on the challenges he faces on the road to immortalisation on 150 gsm stock. Under the section ‘risks and challenges’ on his Kickstarter page his statement begins: “An angry horde of telepathic iguanas discover the world’s last remaining stock of vintage lead paint and hold me to ransom. Gosh how I love to guzzle lead paint. Anyway… faced with such brazen bravado, I cower at the thought of taking on their combined might and die a sad and lonely Flibble deprived of my one and only true liquid love.” At which point, Reed manages to wrestle away the keyboard, giving him the opportunity to present slightly more cogent analysis of the obstacles the project must still overcome. We asked Reed a few questions about Mr Flibble’s Kickstarter adventure and felt that his responses were worth publishing in full: Firstly, how did you manage it – holding down a full time job and also conceiving and executing these ideas on a daily basis? I employed a small team of ferocious gerbils to feed me ideas on a daily basis. Whilst most of their ideas were incomprehensibly rubbish and usually revolved around food, just occasionally they’d give me an idea like my B-Men series. As a backup plan though, I found that the best way to generate ideas was to actually start taking photos. If I were to stand in front of the camera, pull a silly face, place a vegetable on my head or something else equally stupid, the resulting photo of that would typically spark an idea when I came to look at it. Sitting around idly trying to think of an idea was doomed to result in no ideas. I admit that I really struggled with time. I’m proud that I never missed a day, but it was definitely hard when you were late from work, tired or doing something socially on the same day. I don’t watch TV, which I guess really helps, because I’d frequently be spending 2-5 hours taking and processing the photos every day. Are there any overlaps between software development and creative thinking? Software is an inherently creative business and the speed that it moves ensures you always have to find solutions to new things. Everyone in the team needs to be a problem solver. Has it helped me specifically with my photography? Probably. Working within teams that continually need to figure out new stuff keeps the brain feisty I suppose, and I guess I’m continually exposed to a lot of possible sources of inspiration. How specifically will this Kickstarter project allow you to test the commercial appeal of your work and do you plan to get the book into shops? It’s taken a while to be confident saying it, but I know that people like the work that I do. I’ve had well over a million views of my pictures, many humbling comments and I know I’ve garnered some loyal fans out there who anticipate my next photo. For me, this Kickstarter is about seeing if there’s worth to my work beyond just making people smile. In an online world where there’s an abundance of freely available content, can you hope to receive anything from what you do, or would people just move onto the next piece of content if you happen to ask for some support? A book has been the single-most requested thing that people have asked me to produce and it’s something that I feel would showcase my work well. It’s just hard to convince people in the publishing industry just now to take any kind of risk – they’ve been hit hard. If I can show that people would like my work enough to buy a book, then it sends a pretty clear picture that publishers might hear, or it gives me the confidence enough to invest in myself a bit more – hard to do when you’re riddled with self-doubt! I’d love to see my work in the shops, yes. I could see it being the thing that someone flips through idly as they’re Christmas shopping and recognizing that it’d be just the perfect gift for their difficult to buy for friend or relative. That said, working in the software industry means I’m clearly aware of how I could use technology to distribute my work, but I can’t deny that there’s something very appealing to having a physical thing to hold in your hands. If the project is successful is there a chance that it could become a full-time job? At the moment that seems like a distant dream, as should this be successful, there are many more steps I’d need to take to reach any kind of business viability. Kickstarter seems exactly that – a way for people to help kick start me into something that could take off. If people like my work and want me to succeed with it, then taking a look at my Kickstarter page (and hopefully pledging a bit of support) would make my elbows blush considerably. So there is is. An opportunity to open the wallet just a bit to ensure that one of the more unusual talents sees the light in the format it deserves.  

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  • ~/.xsession-errors is 2.7gb big (and growing), on fresh install, caused by gnome-settings-daemon errors

    - by Alex Black
    I've just installed Ubuntu 10.10 x64, activated the recommended Nvidia drivers, and I noticed my hard disk space is disappearing, I narrowed the culprit down to this: alex@alex-home:~$ ls -la .x* -rw------- 1 alex alex 4436076400 2010-11-19 22:35 .xsession-errors -rw------- 1 alex alex 10495 2010-11-19 21:46 .xsession-errors.old Any idea what this file is, why its so big, and why its growing? A few seconds later: alex@alex-home:~$ ls -la .x* -rw------- 1 alex alex 5143604317 2010-11-19 22:36 .xsession-errors -rw------- 1 alex alex 10495 2010-11-19 21:46 .xsession-errors.old tailing it: alex@alex-home:~$ tail .xsession-errors (gnome-settings-daemon:1514): GLib-GObject-CRITICAL **: g_object_unref: assertion `G_IS_OBJECT (object)' failed (gnome-settings-daemon:1514): GLib-GObject-CRITICAL **: g_object_unref: assertion `G_IS_OBJECT (object)' failed (gnome-settings-daemon:1514): GLib-GObject-CRITICAL **: g_object_unref: assertion `G_IS_OBJECT (object)' failed (gnome-settings-daemon:1514): GLib-GObject-CRITICAL **: g_object_unref: assertion `G_IS_OBJECT (object)' failed (gnome-settings-daemon:1514): GLib-GObject-CRITICAL **: g_object_unref: assertion `G_IS_OBJECT (object)' failed Also, the process "gnome-settings" seems to be using 100% cpu: PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 1514 alex 20 0 268m 10m 7044 R 100 0.1 7:06.10 gnome-settings-

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  • QotD: Alex Buckley announcing Java™ SE 8 Early Access Builds with Type Annotation Support

    - by $utils.escapeXML($entry.author)
    I am pleased to announce that binary builds of the JSR 308 Reference Implementation are available at http://jdk8.java.net/type-annotations/.Please see the Type Annotations project page for a link to the JSR 308 Specification. There is also a changelog, which is important to review as there have been significant spec changes in 2012.The builds were generated from the type-annotations/type-annotations forest on 9/9. This forest is regularly updated from jdk8/jdk8 and jdk8/tl.Alex Buckley in a post on the type-annotations-dev mailing list.If you want to play with repeating annotations, check out http://jdk8.java.net/type-annotations/ ... thanks to superior code wrangling by Joel Franck (repeating annotations) and Werner Dietl (type annotations), support for repeating annotations on declarations is included in the build.Alex Buckley in a post on the enhanced-metadata-spec-discuss mailing list.

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  • Programme d'étude sur le C++ bas niveau, un article d'Alex Darby traduit par Bousk

    Nouvelle série d'articles annoncée dans Le programme de rentrée de la rubrique C++. L'objectif de cette série d'article d'Alex Darby sur la programmation "bas-niveau" est de permettre aux développeurs ayant déjà des connaissances de la programmation C++ de mieux comprendre comme vos programmes sont exécutés en pratique. Ce premier article explique l'importance de connaître le fonctionnement bas-niveau et comment récupérer le code assembleur généré par le compilateur et l'interpréter. Programme d'étude sur le C++ bas niveau

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  • Introducing .NET 4.0 with Visual Studio 2010 by Alex Mackey - Book review

    - by Malisa L. Ncube
    Alex (http://simpleisbest.co.uk/) does a very good job in covering the new features of .NET 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010. His focus is on the developers that have experience in development using previous versions of Visual Studio, more specifically Visual Studio 2008.     The following are my views towards his book. 1. Scope / Coverage Even as the book is labeled as introduction, it is covers a broad spectrum of technologies, features and references that are focused into helping a developer quickly decide what to use in the new .NET framework. a. Content The content included covers as much as possible the new additions that are included in the new .NET version 4.0. He shows the Visual Studio 2010 new features and quickly shows how to extend it using Managed Extensibility Framework. Some of my favorites are parallel debugging enhancements. The author delves into JQuery, which Microsoft has decided to support. Some of the very interesting content is on the out-of-band releases including ASP.NET MVC, Windows Azure Silverlight 3 and WCF Data Services. b. What is not included? Windows Phone 7 Series. This was only talked about in the MIX10. The data may not have been available at the time of writing. Microsoft Pinpoint (Microsoft code name "Dallas") Windows Embedded development. c. Table of Contents Chapter 1: Introduction Chapter 2: Visual Studio IDE and MEF Chapter 3: Language and Dynamic Changes Chapter 4: CLR and BCL Changes Chapter 5: Parallelization and Threading Enhancements Chapter 6: Windows Workflow Foundation 4 Chapter 7: Windows Communication Foundation Chapter 8: Entity Framework Chapter 9: WCF Data Services Chapter 10: ASPNET Chapter 11: Microsoft AJAX Library Chapter 12: jQuery Chapter 13: ASPNET MVC Chapter 14: Silverlight Introduction Chapter 15: WPF 4.0 and Silverlight 3.0 Chapter 16: Windows Azure 2. Depth Avoids getting into depth on the topics presented, to present the new concepts in assumption of the developer’s existing knowledge. Code samples are on book and exist mostly as snippets and very easy to follow. There are no downloadable examples. 3. Complexity The book is written in a very simple way and easy to follow. There are no irrelevant intimidating details. So it’s a book that you can grab and never put down until you’ve finished reading the entire book. 4. References The author includes reference links to blogs, Wikis and a lot of online resources including the MSDN documentation, which is a very convenient strategy to avoid flooding the reader with details which may not be of interest to them. Most sites do not use url routing and that is really not nice. There are notes from interviews between the author and people behind the new technologies, in which they explain what some specific areas that need clarifications and what their future views are in relation to the features they are working on. 5. Target The author targets experts that want to make a transition from .NET 3.5 to 4.0. Some obvious 3.5 features have been purposely excluded from the text 6. Overrall It is evident that the author has made extensive research into the breadth of what MS is working on, in relation to .NET and Visual Studio and has also been watching the online community. What I would like to see in the next edition are some details on OData protocol, Expression Blend 4 and Embedded development and Windows Phone development. I should say I’m one of the beneficiaries of this book. Excellent work Alex.   Technorati Tags: .NET,Book-Review,Visual Studio

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  • Red Gate Coder interviews: Alex Davies

    - by Michael Williamson
    Alex Davies has been a software engineer at Red Gate since graduating from university, and is currently busy working on .NET Demon. We talked about tackling parallel programming with his actors framework, a scientific approach to debugging, and how JavaScript is going to affect the programming languages we use in years to come. So, if we start at the start, how did you get started in programming? When I was seven or eight, I was given a BBC Micro for Christmas. I had asked for a Game Boy, but my dad thought it would be better to give me a proper computer. For a year or so, I only played games on it, but then I found the user guide for writing programs in it. I gradually started doing more stuff on it and found it fun. I liked creating. As I went into senior school I continued to write stuff on there, trying to write games that weren’t very good. I got a real computer when I was fourteen and found ways to write BASIC on it. Visual Basic to start with, and then something more interesting than that. How did you learn to program? Was there someone helping you out? Absolutely not! I learnt out of a book, or by experimenting. I remember the first time I found a loop, I was like “Oh my God! I don’t have to write out the same line over and over and over again any more. It’s amazing!” When did you think this might be something that you actually wanted to do as a career? For a long time, I thought it wasn’t something that you would do as a career, because it was too much fun to be a career. I thought I’d do chemistry at university and some kind of career based on chemical engineering. And then I went to a careers fair at school when I was seventeen or eighteen, and it just didn’t interest me whatsoever. I thought “I could be a programmer, and there’s loads of money there, and I’m good at it, and it’s fun”, but also that I shouldn’t spoil my hobby. Now I don’t really program in my spare time any more, which is a bit of a shame, but I program all the rest of the time, so I can live with it. Do you think you learnt much about programming at university? Yes, definitely! I went into university knowing how to make computers do anything I wanted them to do. However, I didn’t have the language to talk about algorithms, so the algorithms course in my first year was massively important. Learning other language paradigms like functional programming was really good for breadth of understanding. Functional programming influences normal programming through design rather than actually using it all the time. I draw inspiration from it to write imperative programs which I think is actually becoming really fashionable now, but I’ve been doing it for ages. I did it first! There were also some courses on really odd programming languages, a bit of Prolog, a little bit of C. Having a little bit of each of those is something that I would have never done on my own, so it was important. And then there are knowledge-based courses which are about not programming itself but things that have been programmed like TCP. Those are really important for examples for how to approach things. Did you do any internships while you were at university? Yeah, I spent both of my summers at the same company. I thought I could code well before I went there. Looking back at the crap that I produced, it was only surpassed in its crappiness by all of the other code already in that company. I’m so much better at writing nice code now than I used to be back then. Was there just not a culture of looking after your code? There was, they just didn’t hire people for their abilities in that area. They hired people for raw IQ. The first indicator of it going wrong was that they didn’t have any computer scientists, which is a bit odd in a programming company. But even beyond that they didn’t have people who learnt architecture from anyone else. Most of them had started straight out of university, so never really had experience or mentors to learn from. There wasn’t the experience to draw from to teach each other. In the second half of my second internship, I was being given tasks like looking at new technologies and teaching people stuff. Interns shouldn’t be teaching people how to do their jobs! All interns are going to have little nuggets of things that you don’t know about, but they shouldn’t consistently be the ones who know the most. It’s not a good environment to learn. I was going to ask how you found working with people who were more experienced than you… When I reached Red Gate, I found some people who were more experienced programmers than me, and that was difficult. I’ve been coding since I was tiny. At university there were people who were cleverer than me, but there weren’t very many who were more experienced programmers than me. During my internship, I didn’t find anyone who I classed as being a noticeably more experienced programmer than me. So, it was a shock to the system to have valid criticisms rather than just formatting criticisms. However, Red Gate’s not so big on the actual code review, at least it wasn’t when I started. We did an entire product release and then somebody looked over all of the UI of that product which I’d written and say what they didn’t like. By that point, it was way too late and I’d disagree with them. Do you think the lack of code reviews was a bad thing? I think if there’s going to be any oversight of new people, then it should be continuous rather than chunky. For me I don’t mind too much, I could go out and get oversight if I wanted it, and in those situations I felt comfortable without it. If I was managing the new person, then maybe I’d be keener on oversight and then the right way to do it is continuously and in very, very small chunks. Have you had any significant projects you’ve worked on outside of a job? When I was a teenager I wrote all sorts of stuff. I used to write games, I derived how to do isomorphic projections myself once. I didn’t know what the word was so I couldn’t Google for it, so I worked it out myself. It was horrifically complicated. But it sort of tailed off when I started at university, and is now basically zero. If I do side-projects now, they tend to be work-related side projects like my actors framework, NAct, which I started in a down tools week. Could you explain a little more about NAct? It is a little C# framework for writing parallel code more easily. Parallel programming is difficult when you need to write to shared data. Sometimes parallel programming is easy because you don’t need to write to shared data. When you do need to access shared data, you could just have your threads pile in and do their work, but then you would screw up the data because the threads would trample on each other’s toes. You could lock, but locks are really dangerous if you’re using more than one of them. You get interactions like deadlocks, and that’s just nasty. Actors instead allows you to say this piece of data belongs to this thread of execution, and nobody else can read it. If you want to read it, then ask that thread of execution for a piece of it by sending a message, and it will send the data back by a message. And that avoids deadlocks as long as you follow some obvious rules about not making your actors sit around waiting for other actors to do something. There are lots of ways to write actors, NAct allows you to do it as if it was method calls on other objects, which means you get all the strong type-safety that C# programmers like. Do you think that this is suitable for the majority of parallel programming, or do you think it’s only suitable for specific cases? It’s suitable for most difficult parallel programming. If you’ve just got a hundred web requests which are all independent of each other, then I wouldn’t bother because it’s easier to just spin them up in separate threads and they can proceed independently of each other. But where you’ve got difficult parallel programming, where you’ve got multiple threads accessing multiple bits of data in multiple ways at different times, then actors is at least as good as all other ways, and is, I reckon, easier to think about. When you’re using actors, you presumably still have to write your code in a different way from you would otherwise using single-threaded code. You can’t use actors with any methods that have return types, because you’re not allowed to call into another actor and wait for it. If you want to get a piece of data out of another actor, then you’ve got to use tasks so that you can use “async” and “await” to await asynchronously for it. But other than that, you can still stick things in classes so it’s not too different really. Rather than having thousands of objects with mutable state, you can use component-orientated design, where there are only a few mutable classes which each have a small number of instances. Then there can be thousands of immutable objects. If you tend to do that anyway, then actors isn’t much of a jump. If I’ve already built my system without any parallelism, how hard is it to add actors to exploit all eight cores on my desktop? Usually pretty easy. If you can identify even one boundary where things look like messages and you have components where some objects live on one side and these other objects live on the other side, then you can have a granddaddy object on one side be an actor and it will parallelise as it goes across that boundary. Not too difficult. If we do get 1000-core desktop PCs, do you think actors will scale up? It’s hard. There are always in the order of twenty to fifty actors in my whole program because I tend to write each component as actors, and I tend to have one instance of each component. So this won’t scale to a thousand cores. What you can do is write data structures out of actors. I use dictionaries all over the place, and if you need a dictionary that is going to be accessed concurrently, then you could build one of those out of actors in no time. You can use queuing to marshal requests between different slices of the dictionary which are living on different threads. So it’s like a distributed hash table but all of the chunks of it are on the same machine. That means that each of these thousand processors has cached one small piece of the dictionary. I reckon it wouldn’t be too big a leap to start doing proper parallelism. Do you think it helps if actors get baked into the language, similarly to Erlang? Erlang is excellent in that it has thread-local garbage collection. C# doesn’t, so there’s a limit to how well C# actors can possibly scale because there’s a single garbage collected heap shared between all of them. When you do a global garbage collection, you’ve got to stop all of the actors, which is seriously expensive, whereas in Erlang garbage collections happen per-actor, so they’re insanely cheap. However, Erlang deviated from all the sensible language design that people have used recently and has just come up with crazy stuff. You can definitely retrofit thread-local garbage collection to .NET, and then it’s quite well-suited to support actors, even if it’s not baked into the language. Speaking of language design, do you have a favourite programming language? I’ll choose a language which I’ve never written before. I like the idea of Scala. It sounds like C#, only with some of the niggles gone. I enjoy writing static types. It means you don’t have to writing tests so much. When you say it doesn’t have some of the niggles? C# doesn’t allow the use of a property as a method group. It doesn’t have Scala case classes, or sum types, where you can do a switch statement and the compiler checks that you’ve checked all the cases, which is really useful in functional-style programming. Pattern-matching, in other words. That’s actually the major niggle. C# is pretty good, and I’m quite happy with C#. And what about going even further with the type system to remove the need for tests to something like Haskell? Or is that a step too far? I’m quite a pragmatist, I don’t think I could deal with trying to write big systems in languages with too few other users, especially when learning how to structure things. I just don’t know anyone who can teach me, and the Internet won’t teach me. That’s the main reason I wouldn’t use it. If I turned up at a company that writes big systems in Haskell, I would have no objection to that, but I wouldn’t instigate it. What about things in C#? For instance, there’s contracts in C#, so you can try to statically verify a bit more about your code. Do you think that’s useful, or just not worthwhile? I’ve not really tried it. My hunch is that it needs to be built into the language and be quite mathematical for it to work in real life, and that doesn’t seem to have ended up true for C# contracts. I don’t think anyone who’s tried them thinks they’re any good. I might be wrong. On a slightly different note, how do you like to debug code? I think I’m quite an odd debugger. I use guesswork extremely rarely, especially if something seems quite difficult to debug. I’ve been bitten spending hours and hours on guesswork and not being scientific about debugging in the past, so now I’m scientific to a fault. What I want is to see the bug happening in the debugger, to step through the bug happening. To watch the program going from a valid state to an invalid state. When there’s a bug and I can’t work out why it’s happening, I try to find some piece of evidence which places the bug in one section of the code. From that experiment, I binary chop on the possible causes of the bug. I suppose that means binary chopping on places in the code, or binary chopping on a stage through a processing cycle. Basically, I’m very stupid about how I debug. I won’t make any guesses, I won’t use any intuition, I will only identify the experiment that’s going to binary chop most effectively and repeat rather than trying to guess anything. I suppose it’s quite top-down. Is most of the time then spent in the debugger? Absolutely, if at all possible I will never debug using print statements or logs. I don’t really hold much stock in outputting logs. If there’s any bug which can be reproduced locally, I’d rather do it in the debugger than outputting logs. And with SmartAssembly error reporting, there’s not a lot that can’t be either observed in an error report and just fixed, or reproduced locally. And in those other situations, maybe I’ll use logs. But I hate using logs. You stare at the log, trying to guess what’s going on, and that’s exactly what I don’t like doing. You have to just look at it and see does this look right or wrong. We’ve covered how you get to grip with bugs. How do you get to grips with an entire codebase? I watch it in the debugger. I find little bugs and then try to fix them, and mostly do it by watching them in the debugger and gradually getting an understanding of how the code works using my process of binary chopping. I have to do a lot of reading and watching code to choose where my slicing-in-half experiment is going to be. The last time I did it was SmartAssembly. The old code was a complete mess, but at least it did things top to bottom. There wasn’t too much of some of the big abstractions where flow of control goes all over the place, into a base class and back again. Code’s really hard to understand when that happens. So I like to choose a little bug and try to fix it, and choose a bigger bug and try to fix it. Definitely learn by doing. I want to always have an aim so that I get a little achievement after every few hours of debugging. Once I’ve learnt the codebase I might be able to fix all the bugs in an hour, but I’d rather be using them as an aim while I’m learning the codebase. If I was a maintainer of a codebase, what should I do to make it as easy as possible for you to understand? Keep distinct concepts in different places. And name your stuff so that it’s obvious which concepts live there. You shouldn’t have some variable that gets set miles up the top of somewhere, and then is read miles down to choose some later behaviour. I’m talking from a very much SmartAssembly point of view because the old SmartAssembly codebase had tons and tons of these things, where it would read some property of the code and then deal with it later. Just thousands of variables in scope. Loads of things to think about. If you can keep concepts separate, then it aids me in my process of fixing bugs one at a time, because each bug is going to more or less be understandable in the one place where it is. And what about tests? Do you think they help at all? I’ve never had the opportunity to learn a codebase which has had tests, I don’t know what it’s like! What about when you’re actually developing? How useful do you find tests in finding bugs or regressions? Finding regressions, absolutely. Running bits of code that would be quite hard to run otherwise, definitely. It doesn’t happen very often that a test finds a bug in the first place. I don’t really buy nebulous promises like tests being a good way to think about the spec of the code. My thinking goes something like “This code works at the moment, great, ship it! Ah, there’s a way that this code doesn’t work. Okay, write a test, demonstrate that it doesn’t work, fix it, use the test to demonstrate that it’s now fixed, and keep the test for future regressions.” The most valuable tests are for bugs that have actually happened at some point, because bugs that have actually happened at some point, despite the fact that you think you’ve fixed them, are way more likely to appear again than new bugs are. Does that mean that when you write your code the first time, there are no tests? Often. The chance of there being a bug in a new feature is relatively unaffected by whether I’ve written a test for that new feature because I’m not good enough at writing tests to think of bugs that I would have written into the code. So not writing regression tests for all of your code hasn’t affected you too badly? There are different kinds of features. Some of them just always work, and are just not flaky, they just continue working whatever you throw at them. Maybe because the type-checker is particularly effective around them. Writing tests for those features which just tend to always work is a waste of time. And because it’s a waste of time I’ll tend to wait until a feature has demonstrated its flakiness by having bugs in it before I start trying to test it. You can get a feel for whether it’s going to be flaky code as you’re writing it. I try to write it to make it not flaky, but there are some things that are just inherently flaky. And very occasionally, I’ll think “this is going to be flaky” as I’m writing, and then maybe do a test, but not most of the time. How do you think your programming style has changed over time? I’ve got clearer about what the right way of doing things is. I used to flip-flop a lot between different ideas. Five years ago I came up with some really good ideas and some really terrible ideas. All of them seemed great when I thought of them, but they were quite diverse ideas, whereas now I have a smaller set of reliable ideas that are actually good for structuring code. So my code is probably more similar to itself than it used to be back in the day, when I was trying stuff out. I’ve got more disciplined about encapsulation, I think. There are operational things like I use actors more now than I used to, and that forces me to use immutability more than I used to. The first code that I wrote in Red Gate was the memory profiler UI, and that was an actor, I just didn’t know the name of it at the time. I don’t really use object-orientation. By object-orientation, I mean having n objects of the same type which are mutable. I want a constant number of objects that are mutable, and they should be different types. I stick stuff in dictionaries and then have one thing that owns the dictionary and puts stuff in and out of it. That’s definitely a pattern that I’ve seen recently. I think maybe I’m doing functional programming. Possibly. It’s plausible. If you had to summarise the essence of programming in a pithy sentence, how would you do it? Programming is the form of art that, without losing any of the beauty of architecture or fine art, allows you to produce things that people love and you make money from. So you think it’s an art rather than a science? It’s a little bit of engineering, a smidgeon of maths, but it’s not science. Like architecture, programming is on that boundary between art and engineering. If you want to do it really nicely, it’s mostly art. You can get away with doing architecture and programming entirely by having a good engineering mind, but you’re not going to produce anything nice. You’re not going to have joy doing it if you’re an engineering mind. Architects who are just engineering minds are not going to enjoy their job. I suppose engineering is the foundation on which you build the art. Exactly. How do you think programming is going to change over the next ten years? There will be an unfortunate shift towards dynamically-typed languages, because of JavaScript. JavaScript has an unfair advantage. JavaScript’s unfair advantage will cause more people to be exposed to dynamically-typed languages, which means other dynamically-typed languages crop up and the best features go into dynamically-typed languages. Then people conflate the good features with the fact that it’s dynamically-typed, and more investment goes into dynamically-typed languages. They end up better, so people use them. What about the idea of compiling other languages, possibly statically-typed, to JavaScript? It’s a reasonable idea. I would like to do it, but I don’t think enough people in the world are going to do it to make it pick up. The hordes of beginners are the lifeblood of a language community. They are what makes there be good tools and what makes there be vibrant community websites. And any particular thing which is the same as JavaScript only with extra stuff added to it, although it might be technically great, is not going to have the hordes of beginners. JavaScript is always to be quickest and easiest way for a beginner to start programming in the browser. And dynamically-typed languages are great for beginners. Compilers are pretty scary and beginners don’t write big code. And having your errors come up in the same place, whether they’re statically checkable errors or not, is quite nice for a beginner. If someone asked me to teach them some programming, I’d teach them JavaScript. If dynamically-typed languages are great for beginners, when do you think the benefits of static typing start to kick in? The value of having a statically typed program is in the tools that rely on the static types to produce a smooth IDE experience rather than actually telling me my compile errors. And only once you’re experienced enough a programmer that having a really smooth IDE experience makes a blind bit of difference, does static typing make a blind bit of difference. So it’s not really about size of codebase. If I go and write up a tiny program, I’m still going to get value out of writing it in C# using ReSharper because I’m experienced with C# and ReSharper enough to be able to write code five times faster if I have that help. Any other visions of the future? Nobody’s going to use actors. Because everyone’s going to be running on single-core VMs connected over network-ready protocols like JSON over HTTP. So, parallelism within one operating system is going to die. But until then, you should use actors. More Red Gater Coder interviews

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  • Professional Custom Logo Design vs. Mr. Right

    John is an ex-marine and ex-employee of general motors. He recently lost his job working as a welder on the assembly lines of one of GM manufacturing plants. John has traveled a lot and knows a lot a... [Author: Emily Matthew - Web Design and Development - March 31, 2010]

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  • Why was Mr. Scott Scottish?

    - by iamjames
    It's a good question:  of all the engineers in the world, why choose a Scottish engineer?  The Gene Roddenberry probably chose a Scottish engineer because of this guy: That's James Watt, the same guy the unit of energy watt is named after.  He was a Scottish inventor and mechancial engineer who built the first made significant improvements to the steam engine.  Made sense in the 60's, however given the past hundred years if they were to make a new Star Trek they might have started with a German engineer (or maybe Japanese), but since World War II had ended barely 20 years earlier the 20-somethings that had survived the war were now 40-somethings and seeing a German engineer probably wouldn't have gone over too well.

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  • Calling Grep inside Java gives incorrect results when calling grep in shell gives correct results.

    - by futureelite7
    I've got a problem where calling grep from inside java gives incorrect results, as compared to the results from calling grep on the same file in the shell. My grep command (called both in Java and in bash. I escaped the slash in Java accordingly): /bin/grep -vP --regexp='^[0-9]+\t.*' /usr/local/apache-tomcat-6.0.18/work/Catalina/localhost/saccitic/237482319867147879_1271411421 The command is supposed to match and discard strings like these: 85295371616 Hi Mr Lee, please be informed that... My input file is this: 85aaa234567 Hi Ms Chan, please be informed that... 85292vx5678 Hi Mrs Ng, please be informed that... 85295371616 Hi Mr Lee, please be informed that... 85aaa234567 Hi Ms Chan, please be informed that... 85292vx5678 Hi Mrs Ng, please be informed that... 85295371616 Hi Mr Lee, please be informed that... 85295371616 Hi Mr Lee, please be informed that... 85295371616 Hi Mr Lee, please be informed that... 85295371616 Hi Mr Lee, please be informed that... 85295371616 Hi Mr Lee, please be informed that... 8~!95371616 Hi Mr Lee, please be informed that... 85295371616 Hi Mr Lee, please be informed that... 852&^*&1616 Hi Mr Lee, please be informed that... 8529537Ax16 Hi Mr Lee, please be informed that... 85====ppq16 Hi Mr Lee, please be informed that... 85291234783 a3283784428349247233834728482984723333 85219299222 The commands works when I call it from inside bash (Results below): 85aaa234567 Hi Ms Chan, please be informed that... 85292vx5678 Hi Mrs Ng, please be informed that... 85aaa234567 Hi Ms Chan, please be informed that... 85292vx5678 Hi Mrs Ng, please be informed that... 8~!95371616 Hi Mr Lee, please be informed that... 852&^*&1616 Hi Mr Lee, please be informed that... 8529537Ax16 Hi Mr Lee, please be informed that... 85====ppq16 Hi Mr Lee, please be informed that... 85219299222 However, when I call grep again inside java, I get the entire file (Results below): 85aaa234567 Hi Ms Chan, please be informed that... 85292vx5678 Hi Mrs Ng, please be informed that... 85295371616 Hi Mr Lee, please be informed that... 85aaa234567 Hi Ms Chan, please be informed that... 85292vx5678 Hi Mrs Ng, please be informed that... 85295371616 Hi Mr Lee, please be informed that... 85295371616 Hi Mr Lee, please be informed that... 85295371616 Hi Mr Lee, please be informed that... 85295371616 Hi Mr Lee, please be informed that... 85295371616 Hi Mr Lee, please be informed that... 8~!95371616 Hi Mr Lee, please be informed that... 85295371616 Hi Mr Lee, please be informed that... 852&^*&1616 Hi Mr Lee, please be informed that... 8529537Ax16 Hi Mr Lee, please be informed that... 85====ppq16 Hi Mr Lee, please be informed that... 85291234783 a3283784428349247233834728482984723333 85219299222 What could be the problem that will cause the grep called by Java to return incorrect results? I tried passing local information via the environment string array in runtime.exec, but nothing seems to change. Am I passing in the locale information incorrectly, or is the problem something else entirely? private String[] localeArray = new String[] { "LANG=", "LC_COLLATE=C", "LC_CTYPE=UTF-8", "LC_MESSAGES=C", "LC_MONETARY=C", "LC_NUMERIC=C", "LC_TIME=C", "LC_ALL=" };

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  • Calling Grep inside Java gives incorrect results while calling grep in shell gives correct results.

    - by futureelite7
    I've got a problem where calling grep from inside java gives incorrect results, as compared to the results from calling grep on the same file in the shell. My grep command (called both in Java and in bash. I escaped the slash in Java accordingly): /bin/grep -vP --regexp='^[0-9]+\t.*' /usr/local/apache-tomcat-6.0.18/work/Catalina/localhost/saccitic/237482319867147879_1271411421 Java Code: String filepath = "/path/to/file"; String options = "P"; String grepparams = "^[0-9]+\\t.*"; String greppath = "/bin/"; String[] localeArray = new String[] { "LANG=", "LC_COLLATE=C", "LC_CTYPE=UTF-8", "LC_MESSAGES=C", "LC_MONETARY=C", "LC_NUMERIC=C", "LC_TIME=C", "LC_ALL=" }; options = "v"+options; //Assign optional params if (options.contains("P")) { grepparams = "\'"+grepparams+"\'"; //Quote the regex expression if -P flag is used } else { options = "E"+options; //equivalent to calling egrep } proc = sysRuntime.exec(greppath+"/grep -"+options+" --regexp="+grepparams+" "+filepath, localeArray); System.out.println(greppath+"/grep -"+options+" --regexp="+grepparams+" "+filepath); inStream = proc.getInputStream(); The command is supposed to match and discard strings like these: 85295371616 Hi Mr Lee, please be informed that... My input file is this: 85aaa234567 Hi Ms Chan, please be informed that... 85292vx5678 Hi Mrs Ng, please be informed that... 85295371616 Hi Mr Lee, please be informed that... 85aaa234567 Hi Ms Chan, please be informed that... 85292vx5678 Hi Mrs Ng, please be informed that... 85295371616 Hi Mr Lee, please be informed that... 85295371616 Hi Mr Lee, please be informed that... 85295371616 Hi Mr Lee, please be informed that... 85295371616 Hi Mr Lee, please be informed that... 85295371616 Hi Mr Lee, please be informed that... 8~!95371616 Hi Mr Lee, please be informed that... 85295371616 Hi Mr Lee, please be informed that... 852&^*&1616 Hi Mr Lee, please be informed that... 8529537Ax16 Hi Mr Lee, please be informed that... 85====ppq16 Hi Mr Lee, please be informed that... 85291234783 a3283784428349247233834728482984723333 85219299222 The commands works when I call it from inside bash (Results below): 85aaa234567 Hi Ms Chan, please be informed that... 85292vx5678 Hi Mrs Ng, please be informed that... 85aaa234567 Hi Ms Chan, please be informed that... 85292vx5678 Hi Mrs Ng, please be informed that... 8~!95371616 Hi Mr Lee, please be informed that... 852&^*&1616 Hi Mr Lee, please be informed that... 8529537Ax16 Hi Mr Lee, please be informed that... 85====ppq16 Hi Mr Lee, please be informed that... 85219299222 However, when I call grep again inside java, I get the entire file (Results below): 85aaa234567 Hi Ms Chan, please be informed that... 85292vx5678 Hi Mrs Ng, please be informed that... 85295371616 Hi Mr Lee, please be informed that... 85aaa234567 Hi Ms Chan, please be informed that... 85292vx5678 Hi Mrs Ng, please be informed that... 85295371616 Hi Mr Lee, please be informed that... 85295371616 Hi Mr Lee, please be informed that... 85295371616 Hi Mr Lee, please be informed that... 85295371616 Hi Mr Lee, please be informed that... 85295371616 Hi Mr Lee, please be informed that... 8~!95371616 Hi Mr Lee, please be informed that... 85295371616 Hi Mr Lee, please be informed that... 852&^*&1616 Hi Mr Lee, please be informed that... 8529537Ax16 Hi Mr Lee, please be informed that... 85====ppq16 Hi Mr Lee, please be informed that... 85291234783 a3283784428349247233834728482984723333 85219299222 What could be the problem that will cause the grep called by Java to return incorrect results? I tried passing local information via the environment string array in runtime.exec, but nothing seems to change. Am I passing in the locale information incorrectly, or is the problem something else entirely?

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  • Unable to run MR on cluster

    - by RAVITEJA SATYAVADA
    I have an Map reduce program that is running successfully in standalone(Ecllipse) mode but while trying to run the same MR by exporting the jar in cluster. It is showing null pointer exception like this, 13/06/26 05:46:22 ERROR mypackage.HHDriver: Error while configuring run method. java.lang.NullPointerException I double checked the run method parameters those are not null and it is running in standalone mode as well..

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  • Exporting makefile from Eclipse CDT

    - by Alex Farber
    I have C++ project in the Ubuntu OS, Eclipse CDT. My final goal is to build the project binaries for FreeBSD OS. The first test. I create simple C++ CDT project with main.cpp file: cout << "OK" << endl; and build it. Then I open Terminal window in Release directory: alex@alex-linux:~/workspace/HelloWorld/Release$ ls HelloWorld main.d main.o makefile objects.mk sources.mk subdir.mk alex@alex-linux:~/workspace/HelloWorld/Release$ rm HelloWorld main.d main.o alex@alex-linux:~/workspace/HelloWorld/Release$ ls makefile objects.mk sources.mk subdir.mk alex@alex-linux:~/workspace/HelloWorld/Release$ make Building file: ../main.cpp Invoking: GCC C++ Compiler g++ -O3 -Wall -c -fmessage-length=0 -MMD -MP -MF"main.d" -MT"main.d" -o"main.o" "../main.cpp" Finished building: ../main.cpp Building target: HelloWorld Invoking: GCC C++ Linker g++ -o"HelloWorld" ./main.o Finished building target: HelloWorld alex@alex-linux:~/workspace/HelloWorld/Release$ ./HelloWorld OK alex@alex-linux:~/workspace/HelloWorld/Release$ So far, so good. Now I copy the whole project tree to FreeBSD and trying to build it: $ cd /home/alex/project $ ls main.cpp release $ cd release $ ls makefile objects.mk sources.mk subdir.mk $ make "makefile", line 5: Need an operator "makefile", line 10: Need an operator "makefile", line 11: Need an operator "makefile", line 12: Need an operator CDT-generated makefile doesn't work. This is makefile beginning: $ Automatically-generated file. Do not edit! -include ../makefile.init RM := rm -rf $ All of the sources participating in the build are defined here -include sources.mk -include subdir.mk -include objects.mk ... Line 5 is -include ../makefile.init. Really, there is no such file. But it works by some way on Ubuntu computer. What is the trick, how can I build this? BTW, manually written makefile works: all: g++ -O0 -g3 -Wall -c -fmessage-length=0 -MMD -MP -MF"main.d" -MT"main.d" -o"main.o" "../main.cpp" g++ -o"HelloWorld" ./main.o Note: $ in makefile is actually #, I replaced it because # creates formatting problems inside of stackoverflow pre block.

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  • Programme d'étude sur le C++ bas niveau n° 2 : les types de données, un article d'Alex Darby traduit par Bousk

    Dans ce deuxième article sur le C++ bas niveau, Alex Darby aborde les types de données et leurs représentations internes. Programme d'étude sur le C++ bas niveau n° 2 : les types de données Quels sont les points les plus importants pour vous à connaître sur les types ? Connaissez-vous d'autres subtilités sur les types de données ? Bonne lecture. Retrouver l'ensemble des articles de cette série sur la

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  • Programme d'étude sur le C++ bas niveau n° 3 : la Pile, un article d'Alex Darby traduit par ram-0000

    L'objectif de cette série d'articles d'Alex Darby sur la programmation « bas-niveau » est de permettre aux développeurs ayant déjà des connaissances de la programmation C++ de mieux comprendre comment ses programmes sont exécutés en pratique. Ce troisième article explique le rôle et le fonctionnement de la Pile, son usage lors de l'appel d'une fonction, la gestion des variables locales ainsi que la gestion de la valeur de retour d'une fonction. Programme d'étude sur le C++ bas niveau n° 3 : la Pile Connaissiez-vous bien le fonctionnement de la Pile et des appels de fonctions ?

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  • Plug-in jQuery RoyalSlider de Dmitry Semenov : tutoriel et révision du code par Alex Young, traduction de vermine

    Je vous propose une traduction d'un tutoriel et d'une révision de code d'Alex Young à propos du plugin jQuery (payant) RoyalSlider de Dmitry Semenov. Ce plugin a reçu beaucoup de retours positifs. Il y a beaucoup de plugins du style des carrousels (slide), et ils ont tous des forces et des faiblesses différentes. Cependant, RoyalSlider est une très bonne galerie d'images jQuery réactive et activable également via les touches du clavier. Cet article montre que ce plugin est bien conçu et qu'il est performant.

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  • Bunny Inc. – Episode 2. Mr. CIO meets Mrs. Sales Manager

    - by kellsey.ruppel(at)oracle.com
    How can you take advantage of a modern customer experience in your sales cycle? What can Mr. CIO come up with to improve customer interaction and satisfaction? See how Enterprise 2.0 solutions can help Bunny Inc. improve business responsiveness to market requests, sell more and simplify post sales support! Bunny Inc. - Episode 2. Mr. CIO meets Mrs. Sales ManagerTechnorati Tags: UXP, collaboration, enterprise 2.0, modern user experience, oracle, portals, webcenter, e20bunnies

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  • what is wrong with this easy script

    - by alex
    what is wrong with this easy script? I just want to write an script which change my directory: A. I put below commands on the file witch its name is pathABC on the /home/alex directory, #!/bin/sh cd /home/alex/Documents/A/B/C echo HelloWorld B. also I did chmod +x pathABC , On the terminal when I am on the /home/alex directory, I run ./pathABC . But the output is just HelloWorld and the current directory remains with no change. I mean my directory remains as /home/alex and not go to the /home/alex/Documents/A/B/C. So where is wrong?

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  • Why doesn't `cd` work in a shell script?

    - by alex
    what is wrong with this easy script? I just want to write an script which change my directory: A. I put below commands on the file witch its name is pathABC on the /home/alex directory, #!/bin/sh cd /home/alex/Documents/A/B/C echo HelloWorld B. also I did chmod +x pathABC , On the terminal when I am on the /home/alex directory, I run ./pathABC . But the output is just HelloWorld and the current directory remains with no change. I mean my directory remains as /home/alex and not go to the /home/alex/Documents/A/B/C. So where is wrong?

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  • Excel help vlookup

    - by user123953
    I need a little help with some excel Employee Locations Hours OT Mr.One Station 1 40 6 Mrs.Seven Station 2 30 6 Mr.Two Station 3 30 4 Mr.Three Station 4 40 4 Mrs.Eight Station 1 32 6 Mr.Four Station 2 32 7 Mrs.Nine Station 3 40 6 Mr.Five Station 4 40 7 Mr.Six Station 1 25 2 Mrs.Ten Station 2 40 3 Mr.Eleven Station 3 60 1 I have spreadsheet with to worksheets one is the data sheet (shown above) on the other sheet is a summary, that has the Locations column as data validation list. I wanna use the data validation list to pull all the people and info from a specific location. I tried using a vlookup put I only know how to use to pull one person at a time not a group of specific to a location.

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  • Packages are not available for installation

    - by Alex Farber
    Changing some Software Update settings I possibly corrupted something, and now I don't see many packages in the list. For example: alex@u120464:~$ sudo apt-get install codeblocks [sudo] password for alex: Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done E: Unable to locate package codeblocks I checked all options in the Software Sources dialog, but packages are still not available. How can I fix this? OS: Ubuntu 12.04, 64 bit. Additional information. alex@u120464:~$ sudo apt-get update [sudo] password for alex: Ign http://extras.ubuntu.com precise InRelease Ign http://security.ubuntu.com precise-security InRelease Ign http://archive.canonical.com precise InRelease Ign http://archive.ubuntu.com precise InRelease Ign http://archive.ubuntu.com precise-updates InRelease ... It looks like most Ubuntu repositories are not searched, how can I restore default update behaviour?

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  • Sorting a string array in C++ no matter of A or a and with å, ä ö?

    - by Chris_45
    How do you sort an array of strings in C++ that will make this happen in this order: mr Anka Mr broWn mr Ceaser mR donK mr ålish Mr Ätt mr önD //following not the way to get that order regardeless upper or lowercase and å, ä, ö //in forloop... string handle; point1 = array1[j].find_first_of(' '); string forename1(array1[j].substr(0, (point1))); string aftername1(array1[j].substr(point1 + 1)); point2 = array1[j+1].find_first_of(' '); string forename2(array1[j+1].substr(0, (point2))); string aftername2(array1[j+1].substr(point2 + 1)); if(aftername1 > aftername2){ handle = array1[j]; array1[j] = array1[j+1]; array1[j+1] = handle;//swapping } if(aftername1 == aftername2){ if(forname1 > forname2){ handle = array1[j]; array1[j] = array1[j+1]; array1[j+1] = handle; } }

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