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  • How do I fix a super slow MacBook?

    - by MakingScienceFictionFact
    I'm running a black MacBook 4.1. Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.4 GHz, 2 GB RAM, 250 GB hard disk drive, bus speed is 800 MHz. It's about three years old in excellent shape externally. I treat this thing like a baby. It used to run awesome, but now it's super slow at everything. I get the spinning pizza of death constantly. It takes a long time to boot up or load any program, even Safari and iTunes. iPhoto is terribly slow. The Internet doesn't work properly and it reminds me of a buggy PC. I've formatted it and re-installed Mac OS X 10.6 (with all updates), and I've done the disk repairs process. As an iOS developer this is driving me crazy, but luckily I have an iMac to work on in the day which is fast. I'm ready to format it again, but that didn't work last time. After the last format, I copied back files from an external drive so maybe the offending files were hidden in there somewhere. Here are the hard disk drive and RAM specifications. It is upgrade-able to 4 GB of RAM. Hard disk drive: The Fujitsu Mobile MHY2250BH is a 250 GB, standard hard disk drive. Its burst transfer rate is 150 Mbyte/s. This is a 5400 RPM drive and comes with an 8 MB buffer. RAM: two sticks of 1 GB DDR2 SDRAM, speed: 667 MHz.

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  • Motherboard running rather hot while gaming

    - by I take Drukqs
    Case: Antec 1200 Mobo: Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R CPU: Intel i7 950 (stock cooler) GPU: EVGA GeForce 570 GTX RAM: 2x 2 GB (4 GB total) DDR3 dual-channel Corsair OS: Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit This is my first build and it's brand new. I had no problems putting it all together in a few hours one evening and I consider myself to be pretty good with computers. Not to brag or anything like that! Just saying I've been fiddling with them since I was in diapers and I have a good amount of experience under my belt, just not with certain things yet. Recently while playing many of the latest games maxed out without a hitch my motherboard has been running hot and like anyone who's ever built a computer it scares the life out of me. I checked HWMonitor and saw that my motherboard sometimes reached temperatures of around 52 - 78c (the number 78 obviously being what's scaring me). I was wondering if such a temperature is normal and if not what the problem could be. Air flow in my case is phenomenal and besides having to ship back a faulty GPU and reseat my CPU my first build has been a very large success which I am enjoying tremendously. There is literally almost no dust in my case due to it being very new as previously mentioned and my RAM sticks are in the correct slots for dual-channel mode. My cable management is pretty great in my opinion with only cables from my PSU lingering in the bottom of the case. At any given opportunity I ran my cables behind my mobo. Air flow should definitely not be a problem because my CPU only goes up to about 60c and my GPU only goes up to about 80c. Thank you very much in advance.

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  • why does my computer crash?

    - by chobo2
    Hi my computer keeps crashing and I don't know why. At first I thought because I had my cpu over clocked that it all of sudden was crashing. So I set my cpu back to regular speed. This did not help. I then thought it was because 2 sticks of my memory where from a computer that suffered from a power surge. However I just ran the windows memory diagnostic tool( extended) and after like 6 hours of testing my memory it found no errors. So now the only thing that is left is windows 7 64bit. I first over clocked my cpu for a couple months while running XP. Never had a problem. I installed the memory and windows 7 at the same time. But I not sure if it is my memory now since it passed the diagnostic tests. However I am not sure if it is windows 7 either has I installed it twice in the last year. I really don't want to go back to XP to find out if this is the case. So here are my blue screens of deaths(from bluescreen). https://sites.google.com/site/myerrorswin7/errors (I hope you enjoy my great site lol) As you can see most of them are different NTFS_FILE_SYSTEM KMODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED BAD_POOL_HEADER IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL SYSTEM_THREAD_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED SYSTEM_SERVICE_EXCEPTION

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  • Computer always freezing after random periods of time. No errors listed.

    - by Wesley
    Hi, all. Here are my specs beforehand: AMD Athlon XP 2400+ @ 2.00 GHz, 160GB IDE HDD, 128MB GeForce 6200 AGP, 2 x 512MB PC3200 DDR RAM, CoolMax 350W PSU, 1 x CD-RW Drive, 1 x DVD-ROM Drive, FIC AM37 Mobo, Windows XP Pro SP3 My desktop freezes after random periods of time but there are no errors listed in the Event Viewer after a forced shutdown and restart. A couple months ago, I found that when it froze, the floppy was being accessed at the same time. So, I disconnected the floppy (since I never used it anyways) from the power supply and motherboard. Everything was working fine and the computer never froze. This past Christmas break, I left for a Conference and when I got home, the computer kept freezing again. So, this time, I just disconnected the DVD reader (from mobo and power) and started it up. Still, it froze almost right away. Then I found some older sticks of RAM (2 x 256MB PC2100 DDR) and swapped them in. Everything worked fine again after that. I even swapped the 2 x 512MB PC3200 DDR RAM back in and everything worked okay. Then it started freezing again, and I tried all possible RAM combos, still freezing within 5-10 minutes of startup. One thing I've realized is that the floppy drive is still listed in My Computer and I uninstalled it from my Device Manager already. There were no software errors, and I uninstalled the most recent software, with no effect. Still, I have no idea what is wrong because everything ran fine before that. Any suggestions? EDIT: Still have yet to buy some blank CD media to use Memtest86+. However, would a lack of virtual memory cause the computer to freeze? EDIT2: So after a long time, I ran Memtest86+ and all is well. Turns out though, after removing my original DVD reader and replacing it with a DVD-ROM drive, there is no freezing whatsoever! Thanks for all your suggestions!

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  • Computer does not boot, often

    - by tam
    I've ran into a issue with my computer that it does no longer reach POST, but simply powers on for a fraction of a second and powers off. But this is not always, some times it boots just normally and it works as it should, no issues with not enough power or anything. But as soon as I turn it of, I can not turn it back on, but then again at some random point it just powers up again, and resumes normal operation. If I disconnect the 8pin ATX connector from the motherboard, it powers up, fans and disks spinning normally until I power it off again. So this problem only happens when ATX is connected, which seems odd, I normally always saw this kind of an error if ATX was not connected, but here it's the exact opposite. It also does not emit any sound on the buzzer, except the normal beep, when it powers up normally. I have already tried: Remove graphics card Remove one and/or all RAM sticks Disconnect everything non-essential, even hard drives Clear CMOS I have not yet tried to remove all components and tried to boot everything outside of the case, because I did not have the time to disassemble and bleed the water loop. However, I can confirm that nothing is stuck underneath the motherboard, not is any of those brass raisers touching the board where it should not. Specs: Gigabyte GA-970A-UD3 AMD FX6300 ATI HD7850 I think this should be enough for this issue.

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  • I think my laptop just died

    - by Joel Coehoorn
    I have a Dell 1330M that as of about 15 minutes ago will no longer POST. What happened was I was working, stepped away for a moment, and when I came back it was turned off. I thought that was odd, but turned it on and things seemed fine. About 1/2 hour later it crashed and restarted, but came up fine again. It did this once more. At this point I was starting to get worried, but I hadn't had any problems with the laptop before and every crash was after doing some work in a virtual machine that I don't often use, so I at put the blame there. It didn't feel like it was overheating anywhere and there's no ozone smell of overheated electronics. Then it crashed a final time and now when I turn it on all I see is a bright screen with a bunch of vertical lines (noise). I've tried removing the memory sticks one at a time, but I get the same result with either memory stick in either slot. With no memory at all it stops earlier in the POST process and the screen is completely blank (black, no backlight). As I type this, I hear a double beep from the system about once every 10 minutes. I'm pretty sure the hard drive is fine because it fails during post, before anything off the drive is needed. The power supply seems good because the screen is nice and bright. It's not the RAM because swapping that around made no difference. The leaves motherboard (which I doubt and can replace) and CPU (which just might be changable). Any ideas? Is there any hope for this laptop? I'm rather fond of it and I'd have a hard time replacing it with anything near as nice.

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  • Windows 7 hangs with 100% disk activity but only when online

    - by jeremy
    I have the same problem as seemingly many other people here, and I think we might all be experiencing the same issue: a compatibility issue in Windows 7 between hard drive and network controller or drivers. I've tried firmware updates of my entire board, wiping my drive and reinstalling from scratch. And yet the problem persists, which suggests it is an operating system error, as the hard drive checks out 100% physically. Additionally, the only time it does not occur is when in safe mode WITHOUT networking. With networking, there are spikes in disc access every so often and a huge flow of processes accessing the disc simultaneously that literally "stick" the disc, and physically jolting my computer unsticks it. Again, this has been tested for hours in a professional service environment, and without network access on, things are fine. As soon as there's network access available, the disc access occasionally cranks up to 100% and sticks everything. I'm using Microsoft Security Essentials, but this also happened under Norton, then McAfee. Again, this happened again after a complete wipe, so the likelihood of malware causing it seems low. I don't visit unsecure sites anyway, as far as I know. This, to me, narrows it down to a Windows 7 process that is somehow repeatedly corrupted, perhaps a corrupt .dll or driver, causing a conflict at the operating system level and temporary hard drive failure. I would encourage anyone who knows more about this stuff (which is probably most people!) to take a shot at this one, and I would encourage anyone else with a sticking hard drive in windows 7 64-bit to check on whether it occurs during safe mode without networking.

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  • Windows won't boot after moving house. How do I solve this?

    - by James
    Ive just moved house and tried to set up my desktop after packing it away and now when I power it on, the BIOS boots up and no errors are found but when my computer tires to boot into Windows 7 a continuous fast beeping sound is made and a black screen is displayed. What I've done so far: Reset to UEFI defauts Played about with RAM, I had 4*4 GB sticks, I took all of them out to test for a mobo error which I have and now im only using 1 stick of 4 GB. Changed my GPU, I tok my gtx580 out and now im using the onboard Intel 3000 graphics driver, the BIOS and uefi are correctly displaying so I no longer think its a GPU based error. Ive check all of the connections and nothing seems to be loose. My HDD setup is: 2 128 GB SSD's in Raid 0 as my main C drive (possibly cause of error?) 1 1 TB Games drive 1 2 TB Data Drive Ive also got a blueray drive connected. After searching the internet im pretty much out of suggestions but im currently downloading a live CD to see if it will boot and if I can access some files on my HDD.

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  • Multi-partition USB stick

    - by nightcracker
    In my freelance job as "the dude that fixes your computer" I have an extremely handy tool, a bootable USB stick with Ubuntu LiveCD that allows me to recover and investigate in a known, working environment. Now, I want to reformat this USB stick and reinstall with Casper-RW persistance. I did this a few times before with a FAT-formatted USB stick. It was a horror. The USB drive corrupted constantly, by people accidently removing the USB stick, the computer not properly shutting down, ETC. Now what I want to create a multi-partition USB stick so I can put Ubuntu on a ext partition, but still be able to store some Windows stuff in it, by having a secondary FAT partition. However I read somewhere that Windows will only check the first partition on USB sticks, giving a problem with the first bootable linux partition. Is this possible on some way? EDIT Perhaps it wasn't clear what the problem is. The problem is that I read somewhere that Windows will only recognize the first partition on a USB stick. But I want two partitions, a ext partition and a FAT partition. No issues so far, but in order to be bootable the ext partition must be the first one!

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  • Windows Displays Double the Actual Installed Physical Memory

    - by Andrew Barber
    I have a server I've installed Windows Web 2008 R2 on, which is reporting that I have double the physical memory installed as is actually the case. In msinfo32 "Installed Physical Memory" shows as 2x what ever the actual installed amount is, though "Total Physical Memory" shows the correct amount. The "System" info window shows installed memory as 2x, with the correct amount in parenthesis listed as the "usable" amount). This server mistakenly had Windows Web 2008 (32-bit) installed on it just previously, and that OS also reported the same faulty information as Win2K8R2 is reporting. BIOS reports the correct amount, memtest was run on this server before installation, and a previous Windows 2000 instance installed on this system also reported the correct amount, as I recall. Server operation seems to be fine as well (it's only trying to use the correct amount of memory). The server is a generic pizzabox running on a SuperMicro X6DVL-EG with dual Xeon-3.2's. Memory installed are 4 matching mt18vddf12872g-335c3 sticks (1GB pc2700 DDR ECC REG cl2.5) This behavior occurs whether two or all four are installed. So, has anyone seen something like this before? Have any idea about what's causing it, and how I should be concerned about it? Everything else seems good so far, and I'll be upgrading the memory before putting the server into service, but I don't want to spend too much time/money/effort on the server if it's got something odd going wrong here. UPDATE: There was a question I ran into regarding memory sparing in the BIOS and a possible (buggy) effect thereof; however, flipping that bit back and forth in the BIOS revealed that isn't the issue. Still flummoxed a bit about this one, though I still have seen no negative impacts. Post-Answer Update (January 13, 2011): Upgrading the system with new, larger memory has fixed this issue.

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  • USB Hub vs. Dockinstation USB vs. Laptop USB

    - by Will
    I recently had thougts about my current setup in my office, especially about the UBS ports distribution. Here's my setup: I have a Lenovo T410 docked to a Lenovo Dockingstation Series 3, that providey me with 6 USB ports, which I use all (3 ext. drives, mouse, keyboard, USB Hub of monitor). The USB hub on my ext. monitor (most probably powered by the ext. monitor's power supply) provides me with 2 USB ports, where I use one for my webcam and another for USB sticks. On my T410 itself I have 4 USB slots, that are usually not used, as don't want to mess with USB plugs when undocking my laptop, now and then I plug my printer on one of these, just because I don't have any UBS ports left. Now I'm wondering how fast each of these slots are: I assume that all the 6 USB ports from the dockinstation somehow go through the docking connector on the bottom of my laptop. Does this connector has such a big bandwidth for all these 6 USB ports to perform like if they were dedicated ports as the 4 ones on my laptop? Also how is generally the performance of USB hubs (like the one on my ext. monitor?)?

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  • HAProxy appsession vs cookie precedence

    - by user1139473
    I am trying to find the best solution for balancing and keeping persistence on our application behind HAProxy. Here is our basic configuration: https://gist.github.com/endzyme/1804046b23c37beba520 After playing around with taking members down and up and also reloading the haproxy (with -sf) I have noticed that appsession isn't 100% effective, it would appear that sometimes it doesn't always 'request-learn'. I also tried to add a cookie JSESSION prefix to balance in case request-learn didn't take. Unfortunately it would present scenarios where the prefix would list svr2 but it was balanced to a different server. I am assuming it's because the appsession table takes first then sticks on that before using the cookie parameter. I have not tested with using cookie as an inserted option (not prefix on existing cookie) but I am thinking it would yield similar results. My question is: Which one is checked first, appsession or cookie, and is it an immediate catch after it reads the first one, or a fall through? Also as a follow up - is it not recommended to use both in the same backend? Cookie as I understand takes less memory resources, is agnostic to reloads and has way better reliability of persistence. Appsession I assume takes less cpu resource, since it's reading not writing. (Bonus Question: is there a way to inspect appsession/cookie table map? socket show table doesn't show anything except stick-tables) Many thanks in advance, -Nick

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  • Computer makes odd noise. Replace almost every component. Computer still makes odd noise.

    - by ShimmerGeek
    My PC was getting pretty old, 5 years or so, and over the course of it's life I replaced the graphics card, HDD and a couple of sticks of RAM; but the PSU, processor, motherboard, fans etc. were all original. A few weeks ago, I started hearing an odd noise. I struggle to describe it, it sounded sortof like the 'click of death' you hear when a HDD may fail, but not quite... (And it was far less irregular) Also, I was sure I heard it once or twice a minute or two after I shut down the PC. This was going on very irregularly for a couple weeks. Some days I would hear no noise at all, others I would hear it often, maybe once every 30 seconds or so. I could find no common denominator - i.e. it did not happen more during gaming or any other intensive use. Anyway, I need my PC to sit some classes over the summer, so I put it in for them to run a HDD stress test and to replace a bunch of the components. I ended up replacing almost everything - the only elements I still have are my blu-ray drive and graphics card. They said when they started to run the HDD stress test it failed instantly (They started the test and it immediately said 'Test Complete' so they assumed it was at fault, and put a new HDD in since I was still under warranty with them.) I took it home a few hours ago, and I am still hearing the noise!!! Do you guys have any theories? I'm getting a little worried, I can't afford for my PC to suddenly fail during the next month - I have a lot of coursework to do. Any thoughts? Is it possible it could be the fan on the graphics card? I'm confused because it's so irregular. Any help would be much appreciated.

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  • Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship – book review

    - by DigiMortal
       Writing code that is easy read and test is not something that is easy to achieve. Unfortunately there are still way too much programming students who write awful spaghetti after graduating. But there is one really good book that helps you raise your code to new level – your code will be also communication tool for you and your fellow programmers. “Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship” by Robert C. Martin is excellent book that helps you start writing the easily readable code. Of course, you are the one who has to learn and practice but using this book you have very good guide that keeps you going to right direction. You can start writing better code while you read this book and you can do it right in your current projects – you don’t have to create new guestbook or some other simple application to start practicing. Take the project you are working on and start making it better! My special thanks to Robert C. Martin I want to say my special thanks to Robert C. Martin for this book. There are many books that teach you different stuff and usually you have markable learning curve to go before you start getting results. There are many books that show you the direction to go and then leave you alone figuring out how to achieve all that stuff you just read about. Clean Code gives you a lot more – the mental tools to use so you can go your way to clean code being sure you will be soon there. I am reading books as much as I have time for it. Clean Code is top-level book for developers who have to write working code. Before anything else take Clean Code and read it. You will never regret your decision. I promise. Fragment of editorial review “Even bad code can function. But if code isn’t clean, it can bring a development organization to its knees. Every year, countless hours and significant resources are lost because of poorly written code. But it doesn’t have to be that way. What kind of work will you be doing? You’ll be reading code—lots of code. And you will be challenged to think about what’s right about that code, and what’s wrong with it. More importantly, you will be challenged to reassess your professional values and your commitment to your craft. Readers will come away from this book understanding How to tell the difference between good and bad code How to write good code and how to transform bad code into good code How to create good names, good functions, good objects, and good classes How to format code for maximum readability How to implement complete error handling without obscuring code logic How to unit test and practice test-driven development This book is a must for any developer, software engineer, project manager, team lead, or systems analyst with an interest in producing better code.” Table of contents Clean code Meaningful names Functions Comments Formatting Objects and data structures Error handling Boundaries Unit tests Classes Systems Emergence Concurrency Successive refinement JUnit internals Refactoring SerialDate Smells and heuristics A Concurrency II org.jfree.date.SerialDate Cross references of heuristics Epilogue Index

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  • My ASP.NET news sources

    - by Jon Galloway
    I just posted about the ASP.NET Daily Community Spotlight. I was going to list a bunch of my news sources at the end, but figured this deserves a separate post. I've been following a lot of development blogs for a long time - for a while I subscribed to over 1500 feeds and read them all. That doesn't scale very well, though, and it's really time consuming. Since the community spotlight requires an interesting ASP.NET post every day of the year, I've come up with a few sources of ASP.NET news. Top Link Blogs Chris Alcock's The Morning Brew is a must-read blog which highlights each day's best blog posts across the .NET community. He covers the entire Microsoft development, but generally any of the top ASP.NET posts I see either have already been listed on The Morning Brew or will be there soon. Elijah Manor posts a lot of great content, which is available in his Twitter feed at @elijahmanor, on his Delicious feed, and on a dedicated website - Web Dev Tweets. While not 100% ASP.NET focused, I've been appreciating Joe Stagner's Weekly Links series, partly since he includes a lot of links that don't show up on my other lists. Twitter Over the past few years, I've been getting more and more of my information from my Twitter network (as opposed to RSS or other means). Twitter is as good as your network, so if getting good information off Twitter sounds crazy, you're probably not following the right people. I already mentioned Elijah Manor (@elijahmanor). I follow over a thousand people on Twitter, so I'm not going to try to pick and choose a list, but one good way to get started building out a Twitter network is to follow active Twitter users on the ASP.NET team at Microsoft: @scottgu (well, not on the ASP.NET team, but their great grand boss, and always a great source of ASP.NET info) @shanselman @haacked @bradwilson @davidfowl @InfinitiesLoop @davidebbo @marcind @DamianEdwards @stevensanderson @bleroy @humancompiler @osbornm @anurse I'm sure I'm missing a few, and I'll update the list. Building a Twitter network that follows topics you're interested in allows you to use other tools like Cadmus to automatically summarize top content by leveraging the collective input of many users. Twitter Search with Topsy You can search Twitter for hashtags (like #aspnet, #aspnetmvc, and #webmatrix) to get a raw view of what people are talking about on Twitter. Twitter's search is pretty poor; I prefer Topsy. Here's an example search for the #aspnetmvc hashtag: http://topsy.com/s?q=%23aspnetmvc You can also do combined queries for several tags: http://topsy.com/s?q=%23aspnetmvc+OR+%23aspnet+OR+%23webmatrix Paper.li Paper.li is a handy service that builds a custom daily newspaper based on your social network. They've turned a lot of people off by automatically tweeting "The SuperDevFoo Daily is out!!!" messages (which can be turned off), but if you're ignoring them because of those message, you're missing out on a handy, free service. My paper.li page includes content across a lot of interests, including ASP.NET: http://paper.li/jongalloway When I want to drill into a specific tag, though, I'll just look at the Paper.li post for that hashtag. For example, here's the #aspnetmvc paper.li page: http://paper.li/tag/aspnetmvc Delicious I mentioned previously that I use Delicious for managing site links. I also use their network and search features. The tag based search is pretty good: Even better, though, is that I can see who's bookmarked these links, and add them to my Delicious network. After having built out a network, I can optimize by doing less searching and more leaching leveraging of collective intelligence. Community Sites I scan DotNetKicks, the weblogs.asp.net combined feed, and the ASP.NET Community page, CodeBetter, Los Techies,  CodeProject,  and DotNetSlackers from time to time. They're hit and miss, but they do offer more of an opportunity for finding original content which others may have missed. Terms of Enrampagement When someone's on a tear, I just manually check their sites more often. I could use RSS for that, but it changes pretty often. I just keep a mental note of people who are cranking out a lot of good content and check their sites more often. What works for you?

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  • Pie Charts Just Don't Work When Comparing Data - Number 10 of Top 10 Reasons to Never Ever Use a Pie

    - by Tony Wolfram
    When comparing data, which is what a pie chart is for, people have a hard time judging the angles and areas of the multiple pie slices in order to calculate how much bigger one slice is than the others. Pie Charts Don't Work A slice of pie is good for serving up a portion of desert. It's not good for making a judgement about how big the slice is, what percentage of 100 it is, or how it compares to other slices. People have trouble comparing angles and areas to each other. Controlled studies show that people will overestimate the percentage that a pie slice area represents. This is because we have trouble calculating the area based on the space between the two angles that define the slice. This picture shows how a pie chart is useless in determing the largest value when you have to compare pie slices.   You can't compare angles and slice areas to each other. Human perception and cognition is poor when viewing angles and areas and trying to make a mental comparison. Pie charts overload the working memory, forcing the person to make complicated calculations, and at the same time make a decision based on those comparisons. What's the point of showing a pie chart when you want to compare data, except to say, "well, the slices are almost the same, but I'm not really sure which one is bigger, or by how much, or what order they are from largest to smallest. But the colors sure are pretty. Plus, I like round things. Oh,was I suppose to make some important business decision? Sorry." Bad Choices and Bad Decisions Interaction Designers, Graphic Artists, Report Builders, Software Developers, and Executives have all made the decision to use pie charts in their reports, software applications, and dashboards. It was a bad decision. It was a poor choice. There are always better options and choices, yet the designer still made the decision to use a pie chart. I'll expore why people make such poor choices in my upcoming blog entires. (Hint: It has more to do with emotions than with analytical thinking.) I've outlined my opinions and arguments about the evils of using pie charts in "Countdown of Top 10 Reasons to Never Ever Use a Pie Chart." Each of my next 10 blog entries will support these arguments with illustrations, examples, and references to studies. But my goal is not to continuously and endlessly rage against the evils of using pie charts. This blog is not about pie charts. This blog is about understanding why designers choose to use a pie chart. Why, when give better alternatives, and acknowledging the shortcomings of pie charts, do designers over and over again still freely choose to place a pie chart in a report? As an extra treat and parting shot, check out the nice pie chart that Wikipedia uses to illustrate the United States population by state.   Remember, somebody chose to use this pie chart, with all its glorious colors, and post it on Wikipedia for all the world to see. My next blog will give you a better alternative for displaying comparable data - the sorted bar chart.

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  • Code is not the best way to draw

    - by Bertrand Le Roy
    It should be quite obvious: drawing requires constant visual feedback. Why is it then that we still draw with code in so many situations? Of course it’s because the low-level APIs always come first, and design tools are built after and on top of those. Existing design tools also don’t typically include complex UI elements such as buttons. When we launched our Touch Display module for Netduino Go!, we naturally built APIs that made it easy to draw on the screen from code, but very soon, we felt the limitations and tedium of drawing in code. In particular, any modification requires a modification of the code, followed by compilation and deployment. When trying to set-up buttons at pixel precision, the process is not optimal. On the other hand, code is irreplaceable as a way to automate repetitive tasks. While tools like Illustrator have ways to repeat graphical elements, they do so in a way that is a little alien and counter-intuitive to my developer mind. From these reflections, I knew that I wanted a design tool that would be structurally code-centric but that would still enable immediate feedback and mouse adjustments. While thinking about the best way to achieve this goal, I saw this fantastic video by Bret Victor: The key to the magic in all these demos is permanent execution of the code being edited. Whenever a parameter is being modified, everything is re-executed immediately so that the impact of the modification is instantaneously visible. If you do this all the time, the code and the result of its execution fuse in the mind of the user into dual representations of a single object. All mental barriers disappear. It’s like magic. The tool I built, Nutshell, is just another implementation of this principle. It manipulates a list of graphical operations on the screen. Each operation has a nice editor, and translates into a bit of code. Any modification to the parameters of the operation will modify the bit of generated code and trigger a re-execution of the whole program. This happens so fast that it feels like the drawing reacts instantaneously to all changes. The order of the operations is also the order in which the code gets executed. So if you want to bring objects to the front, move them down in the list, and up if you want to move them to the back: But where it gets really fun is when you start applying code constructs such as loops to the design tool. The elements that you put inside of a loop can use the loop counter in expressions, enabling crazy scenarios while retaining the real-time edition features. When you’re done building, you can just deploy the code to the device and see it run in its native environment: This works thanks to two code generators. The first code generator is building JavaScript that is executed in the browser to build the canvas view in the web page hosting the tool. The second code generator is building the C# code that will run on the Netduino Go! microcontroller and that will drive the display module. The possibilities are fascinating, even if you don’t care about driving small touch screens from microcontrollers: it is now possible, within a reasonable budget, to build specialized design tools for very vertical applications. Direct feedback is a powerful ally in many domains. Code generation driven by visual designers has become more approachable than ever thanks to extraordinary JavaScript libraries and to the powerful development platform that modern browsers provide. I encourage you to tinker with Nutshell and let it open your eyes to new possibilities that you may not have considered before. It’s open source. And of course, my company, Nwazet, can help you develop your own custom browser-based direct feedback design tools. This is real visual programming…

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  • Gamify your Web

    - by Isabel F. Peñuelas
    Yesterday Valencia welcomed the Gamification World Congress that I follow virtually through #GWC2012. BBVA, Iberia, Ligeresa, Axe, Wayra, ESADE, GlaxoSmithKline, Macmillan, Gamisfaction, Nomaders, Blaffin were among the companies presenting success stories on gaming. It has been proved that people remember things easily when an emotion is created. The marketing expectations around Gamification techniques have a lot to do with Neuromarketing theories. There are a lot of expectations on internal enterprise Gamification. In the public Web some sectors are taking the lead on following the trend. The Gartner Analyst Brian Burke opened another Gamification recent event in Madrid remembering that “Gamification is mostly about Engagement”, and this can be applied both to customers or employees. Gamification and Banking The experience of the Spanish Financial Group BBVA that just launched BBVA Game was also presented a week ago at the BBVA Innovation Centre during the event “Gamification & Banking: a fad or a serious business?” . One of the objectives of the BBVA Game was to double the name of registered users. “People like the efficiency of the online channel want to keep a one-to-one contact with the brand”-explained Bernardo Crespo. Another interested data coming out the BBVA presentation was that “only 20% of Spanish users –out of the total holders of Bank Accounts in the country- is familiar with the use of a Web Site to consult their bank accounts”, the project aims also to reverse this situation helping people to learn making a heavy use of the Video in the gaming context. In general Banking presenters seem to agree that Gamification techniques are helping to increase the time spent on the Web. Gamification and Health Using Gamification techniques for chronic illness rehabilitation was another topic of the World Congress. Here you can find some ideas and experiences What can games do for the health (In Spanish) I have personally started my own mental-health gaming project at http://www.lumosity.com/ Gamification in the Enterprise I really recommend Reading this excellent post of Ultan ÓBroin my Introduction to Gamification and Applications. Employee´s motivation and learning are experiencing a 360º turn and it looks than some of us will become soon the Dragon of the year instead of the Employee of the Year. Using Web 2.0 Tools for Gamification Projects  What type of tools do we need for a quick-win Gamification project? To certain extend Gamification can be considered an evolution of the participative Web. Badging, avatars, points and awards, leader boards, progress charts, virtual currencies, gifting and giving challenges and quests are common components and elements. The Web is offering new development frameworks to that purpose as this Avatar Framework from Paypal or Badgeville to include in web applications. Besides, tools to create communities around a game are required to comment, share and vote players as well as for an efficient multimedia management. Due to its entirely open architecture, its community features, and its multimedia and imaging solutions is were I see WebCenter as a tool helping brands to success. Link to Sources & Recommended Readings YouTube Video of BBVAGame presentation Where To Apply Gamification In Your Incentive Jim Calhoun Cancer Challenge Ride and Walkh For my Spanish Readers El aburrimiento es el enemigo número uno del éxito

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  • Ongoing confusion about ivars and properties in objective C

    - by Earl Grey
    After almost 8 months being in ios programming, I am again confused about the right approach. Maybe it is not the language but some OOP principle I am confused about. I don't know.. I was trying C# a few years back. There were fields (private variables, private data in an object), there were getters and setters (methods which exposed something to the world) ,and properties which was THE exposed thing. I liked the elegance of the solution, for example there could be a class that would have a property called DailyRevenue...a float...but there was no private variable called dailyRevenue, there was only a field - an array of single transaction revenues...and the getter for DailyRevenue property calculated the revenue transparently. If somehow the internals of daily revenue calculation would change, it would not affect somebody who consumed my DailyRevenue property in any way, since he would be shielded from getter implementation. I understood that sometimes there was , and sometimes there wasn't a 1-1 relationship between fields and properties. depending on the requirements. It seemed ok in my opinion. And that properties are THE way to acces the data in object. I know the difference betweeen private, protected, and public keyword. Now lets get to objectiveC. On what factor should I base my decision about making someting only an ivar or making it as a property? Is the mental model the same as I describe above? I know that ivars are "protected" by default, not "private" asi in c#..But thats ok I think, no big deal for my presnet level of understanding the whole ios development. The point is ivars are not accesible from outside (given i don't make them public..but i won't). The thing that clouds my clear understanding is that I can have IBOutlets from ivars. Why am I seeing internal object data in the UI? *Why is it ok?* On the other hand, if I make an IBOutlet from property, and I do not make it readonly, anybody can change it. Is this ok too? Let's say I have a ParseManager object. This object would use a built in Foundation framework class called NSXMLParser. Obviously my ParseManager will utilize this nsxmlparser's capabilities but will also do some additional work. Now my question is, who should initialize this NSXMLParser object and in which way should I make a reference to it from the ParseManager object, when there is a need to parse something. A) the ParseManager -1) in its default init method (possible here ivar - or - ivar+ppty) -2) with lazyloading in getter (required a ppty here) B) Some other object - who will pass a reference to NSXMLParser object to the ParseManager object. -1) in some custom initializer (initWithParser:(NSXMLPArser *) parser) when creating the ParseManager object.. A1 - the problem is, we create a parser and waste memory while it is not yet needed. However, we can be sure that all methods that are part ot ParserManager object, can use the ivar safely, since it exists. A2 - the problem is, the nsxmlparser is exposed to outside world, although it could be read only. Would we want a parser to be exposed in some scenario? B1 - this could maybe be useful when we would want to use more types of parsers..i dont know... I understand that architectural requirements and and language is not the same. But clearly the two are in relation. How to get out of that mess of my? Please bear with me, I wasn't able to come up with a single ultimate question. And secondly, it's better to not scare me with some superadvanced newspeak that talks about some crazy internals (what the compiler does) and edge cases.

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  • Handling "related" work within a single agile work item

    - by Tesserex
    I'm on a project team of 4 devs, myself included. We've been having a long discussion on how to handle extra work that comes up in the course of a single work item. This extra work is usually things that are slightly related to the task, but not always necessary to accomplish the goal of the item (that may be an opinion). Examples include but are not limited to: refactoring of the code changed by the work item refactoring code neighboring the code changed by the item re-architecting the larger code area around the ticket. For example if an item has you changing a single function, you realize the entire class now could be redone to better accommodate this change. improving the UI on a form you just modified When this extra work is small we don't mind. The problem is when this extra work causes a substantial extension of the item beyond the original feature point estimation. Sometimes a 5 point item will actually take 13 points of time. In one case we had a 13 point item that in retrospect could have been 80 points or more. There are two options going around in our discussion for how to handle this. We can accept the extra work in the same work item, and write it off as a mis-estimation. Arguments for this have included: We plan for "padding" at the end of the sprint to account for this sort of thing. Always leave the code in better shape than you found it. Don't check in half-assed work. If we leave refactoring for later, it's hard to schedule and may never get done. You are in the best mental "context" to handle this work now, since you're waist deep in the code already. Better to get it out of the way now and be more efficient than to lose that context when you come back later. We draw a line for the current work item, and say that the extra work goes into a separate ticket. Arguments include: Having a separate ticket allows for a new estimation, so we aren't lying to ourselves about how many points things really are, or having to admit that all of our estimations are terrible. The sprint "padding" is meant for unexpected technical challenges that are direct barriers to completing the ticket requirements. It is not intended for side items that are just "nice-to-haves". If you want to schedule refactoring, just put it at the top of the backlog. There is no way for us to properly account for this stuff in an estimation, since it seems somewhat arbitrary when it comes up. A code reviewer might say "those UI controls (which you actually didn't modify in this work item) are a bit confusing, can you fix that too?" which is like an hour, but they might say "Well if this control now inherits from the same base class as the others, why don't you move all of this (hundreds of lines of) code into the base and rewire all this stuff, the cascading changes, etc.?" And that takes a week. It "contaminates the crime scene" by adding unrelated work into the ticket, making our original feature point estimates meaningless. In some cases, the extra work postpones a check-in, causing blocking between devs. Some of us are now saying that we should decide some cut off, like if the additional stuff is less than 2 FP, it goes in the same ticket, if it's more, make it a new ticket. Since we're only a few months into using Agile, what's the opinion of all the more seasoned Agile veterans around here on how to handle this?

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  • Is the Internet Making us Smarter or Not?

    - by BuckWoody
    I’ve been reading recently about an exchange among some very bright folks, some who posit that the Internet with its instant-on, sometimes-right, big-statement-wins mentality is making people think in a more shallow way, teaching us to rely on others as experts and diluting our logical thought process. Others state that it broadens our perspective and extends our mental reach. Whenever I see this kind of exchange on two ends of a spectrum, I begin to wonder if both sides might be correct.   I can certainly say that I have changed my way of learning, reading, and social interactions because of the Internet. And my tolerance for reading long missives has indeed gone down. I tend to (mentally and literally) “bookmark” things I never seem to have time to get back to. But I also agree that I’ve been exposed to thoughts, ideas and people I never would have encountered any other way. So how to deal with this dichotomy?   Well, I’m going to go off and think about it. No, I’m really going to go off for a full week to a cabin I’ve rented in a National Forest in the Midwest. It has no indoor plumbing, phones, Internet connections or anything else – only a bed to sleep in and a place to cook a little. I’m taking one book, some paper, and a guitar with me and that’s it. I plan to spend my days walking, reading a little, playing a little on the guitar, but mostly just thinking. Those of you who know me might find this unusual. I’m an always-on, hyper-caffeinated, overly-busy, connected person. I haven’t taken a vacation in five years, at least for more than two or three days at a time. Even then, I keep us on the move constantly – our vacations aren’t cruises or anything like that. I check e-mail, post and all that. When I’m not on vacation, I live with and leverage lots of technology, and work with those that do the same. This, however, is a really “unplugged” event, and I’m hoping that it will let me unpack the things I’ve been stuffing in my head. I plan to spend a lot of time on a single subject, writing notes, thinking, and writing more notes.   So after I post tomorrow's “quote of the day” I’ll be “going dark” for a week. No twitter, FaceBook, LinkedIn, e-mail, chat, none of my five blogs will get updated, and I’ll have to turn in my two articles for InformIT.com early. I won’t have access to my college class portal, so my students will be without me for a week. I will really be offline. I’ll see you in a week – hopefully a little more educated. See you then.   Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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  • Is the Internet Making us Smarter or Not?

    - by BuckWoody
    I’ve been reading recently about an exchange among some very bright folks, some who posit that the Internet with its instant-on, sometimes-right, big-statement-wins mentality is making people think in a more shallow way, teaching us to rely on others as experts and diluting our logical thought process. Others state that it broadens our perspective and extends our mental reach. Whenever I see this kind of exchange on two ends of a spectrum, I begin to wonder if both sides might be correct.   I can certainly say that I have changed my way of learning, reading, and social interactions because of the Internet. And my tolerance for reading long missives has indeed gone down. I tend to (mentally and literally) “bookmark” things I never seem to have time to get back to. But I also agree that I’ve been exposed to thoughts, ideas and people I never would have encountered any other way. So how to deal with this dichotomy?   Well, I’m going to go off and think about it. No, I’m really going to go off for a full week to a cabin I’ve rented in a National Forest in the Midwest. It has no indoor plumbing, phones, Internet connections or anything else – only a bed to sleep in and a place to cook a little. I’m taking one book, some paper, and a guitar with me and that’s it. I plan to spend my days walking, reading a little, playing a little on the guitar, but mostly just thinking. Those of you who know me might find this unusual. I’m an always-on, hyper-caffeinated, overly-busy, connected person. I haven’t taken a vacation in five years, at least for more than two or three days at a time. Even then, I keep us on the move constantly – our vacations aren’t cruises or anything like that. I check e-mail, post and all that. When I’m not on vacation, I live with and leverage lots of technology, and work with those that do the same. This, however, is a really “unplugged” event, and I’m hoping that it will let me unpack the things I’ve been stuffing in my head. I plan to spend a lot of time on a single subject, writing notes, thinking, and writing more notes.   So after I post tomorrow's “quote of the day” I’ll be “going dark” for a week. No twitter, FaceBook, LinkedIn, e-mail, chat, none of my five blogs will get updated, and I’ll have to turn in my two articles for InformIT.com early. I won’t have access to my college class portal, so my students will be without me for a week. I will really be offline. I’ll see you in a week – hopefully a little more educated. See you then.   Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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  • Best approach to depth streaming via existing codec

    - by Kevin
    I'm working on a development system (and game) intended for games set mostly in static third-person views. We produce our scenery by CG and photographic techniques. Our background art is rendered off-line by a production-grade renderer. To allow the runtime imagery to properly interact with the background art, I wrote a program to convert from depth output by Mental Ray into a texture, and a pixel shader to draw a quad such that the Z data comes from the texture. This technique is working out very well, but now we've decided that some of the camera angle changes between scenes should be animated. The animation itself is straightforward to produce from our CG models. We intend to encode it to some HD video codec such as H.264. The problem is that in order to maintain our runtime imagery on the screen, the depth buffer will need to be loaded for each video frame. Due to the bandwidth, the video's depth data will need to be compressed efficiently. I've looked into methods for performing temporal compression of depth info and found an interesting research paper here: http://web4.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/j.kautz/publications/depth-streaming.pdf The method establishes a mapping between 16-bit depth values and YCbCr values. The mapping is tuned to the properties of existing video codecs in order to maximize precision of the decoded depths after the YCbCr has undergone video compression. It allows an existing, unmodified video codec to be used on the backend. I'm looking at how to pull this off with the least possible work. (This design change was unplanned.) Our game engine itself is native C++, presently for Win32 and DirectX, although we've worked hard to keep platform dependence segregated because we intend other ports. We don't have motion video facilities in the engine yet but will ultimately need that anyway for cinematics. I was planning on using some off-the-shelf motion video solution we can plug into our engine, and haven't chosen one yet. This new added requirement makes selecting one harder since, among other things, we'll now need to bypass colourspace conversion on one of the streams, and also will need to be playing two streams simultaneously in lockstep, on top of in some cases audio on one of them (for the cinematics). I'm also wondering if it's possible (or even useful) to do the conversion from YCbCr to depth in a pixel shader, or if it's better to just do it in CPU and separately load the resulting depth values into a locked tex. The conversion unfortunately does involve branching logic per-pixel. (There are more naive mappings that don't need branching, but they produce inferior results.) It could be reduced to a table lookup but the table would be 32MB. Programming is second-nature to me but I'm not that experienced with pix shaders and have zero knowledge of off-the-shelf video solutions. I'd therefore be interested in advice from others who may have dealt more with depth streaming, pixel shaders, and/or off-the-shelf codecs, regarding how feasible the proposed application is and what off-the-shelf video systems out there would best get along with this usage case.

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  • Learn Many Languages

    - by Jeff Foster
    My previous blog, Deliberate Practice, discussed the need for developers to “sharpen their pencil” continually, by setting aside time to learn how to tackle problems in different ways. However, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, a contested and somewhat-controversial concept from language theory, seems to hold reasonably true when applied to programming languages. It states that: “The structure of a language affects the ways in which its speakers conceptualize their world.” If you’re constrained by a single programming language, the one that dominates your day job, then you only have the tools of that language at your disposal to think about and solve a problem. For example, if you’ve only ever worked with Java, you would never think of passing a function to a method. A good developer needs to learn many languages. You may never deploy them in production, you may never ship code with them, but by learning a new language, you’ll have new ideas that will transfer to your current “day-job” language. With the abundant choices in programming languages, how does one choose which to learn? Alan Perlis sums it up best. “A language that doesn‘t affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing“ With that in mind, here’s a selection of languages that I think are worth learning and that have certainly changed the way I think about tackling programming problems. Clojure Clojure is a Lisp-based language running on the Java Virtual Machine. The unique property of Lisp is homoiconicity, which means that a Lisp program is a Lisp data structure, and vice-versa. Since we can treat Lisp programs as Lisp data structures, we can write our code generation in the same style as our code. This gives Lisp a uniquely powerful macro system, and makes it ideal for implementing domain specific languages. Clojure also makes software transactional memory a first-class citizen, giving us a new approach to concurrency and dealing with the problems of shared state. Haskell Haskell is a strongly typed, functional programming language. Haskell’s type system is far richer than C# or Java, and allows us to push more of our application logic to compile-time safety. If it compiles, it usually works! Haskell is also a lazy language – we can work with infinite data structures. For example, in a board game we can generate the complete game tree, even if there are billions of possibilities, because the values are computed only as they are needed. Erlang Erlang is a functional language with a strong emphasis on reliability. Erlang’s approach to concurrency uses message passing instead of shared variables, with strong support from both the language itself and the virtual machine. Processes are extremely lightweight, and garbage collection doesn’t require all processes to be paused at the same time, making it feasible for a single program to use millions of processes at once, all without the mental overhead of managing shared state. The Benefits of Multilingualism By studying new languages, even if you won’t ever get the chance to use them in production, you will find yourself open to new ideas and ways of coding in your main language. For example, studying Haskell has taught me that you can do so much more with types and has changed my programming style in C#. A type represents some state a program should have, and a type should not be able to represent an invalid state. I often find myself refactoring methods like this… void SomeMethod(bool doThis, bool doThat) { if (!(doThis ^ doThat)) throw new ArgumentException(“At least one arg should be true”); if (doThis) DoThis(); if (doThat) DoThat(); } …into a type-based solution, like this: enum Action { DoThis, DoThat, Both }; void SomeMethod(Action action) { if (action == Action.DoThis || action == Action.Both) DoThis(); if (action == Action.DoThat || action == Action.Both) DoThat(); } At this point, I’ve removed the runtime exception in favor of a compile-time check. This is a trivial example, but is just one of many ideas that I’ve taken from one language and implemented in another.

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  • Dealing with "Coder's Block" (or blank form syndrome)

    - by robsoft
    I know this is the sort of somewhat open-ended question that we're discouraged from asking, but there are lots of open-ended questions around already, and this is something quite relevant to me right now. Do you ever get those times when you're about to start work on a new function/feature of an established system, and you get "coder's block"?. It's like a mental freeze at the sight of a large, completely unpopulated dialog, or an empty code file with just the stub reference headers etc. Do you ever have that 'ulp' moment that seems to sap all your momentum and leave you wide open to distractions (surfing the web for inspiration, checking out 'crackoverflow' etc)? Not that I'd wish it on anyone, but hopefully some of you do, and hopefully some of you can suggest tips or strategies for overcoming the situation, regaining your momentum and becoming productive again. I usually try to reduce what I'm about to do down to absurdly small steps, in the hope that as the job becomes just a series of 'doh' tasks, I'll kickstart myself into working through them. However sometimes, particularly when a deadline is looming, I'll get overwhelmed by this approach as I realise I probably don't have enough time to do all of those tiny steps properly. Those are the darkest moments, (often literally) just before dawn! This situation can be particularly crippling if you mostly work alone, too. Any thoughts or suggestions? Any methods that you found helpful yourself?

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