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• Career advice: stay with PHP or start a new career in something else ( .Net?)

  - by Christian P

  I'm planning on moving to NY in 6-12 months tops, so I'm forced to find a new job. When I'm planing to start my life in another city it's also probably a good time to think about career changes. I've found a lot of different opinions about PHP vs .Net vs Java and this is not topic here. I don't want to start a new fight about which language is better. Knowing programming language is not the most important thing for being a software developer. To be a really good developer you need to know OOP, design patterns, testing... and language is just a tool to make things happen. So back to my question. I have mixed experience in IT - 1 year as an IT support guy (Windows administration and support), around 2 years of experience in embedded programming (VB.Net 2005) and for the last 2 years I'm working with PHP/MySQL. I have worked with Magento web shop, assisted in some projects in Symfony, modified few Drupal sites. My main concerns are following: Do I continue to improve my skills in PHP e.g. to start learning some major PHP framework like Zend, Symfony maybe get some PHP certification. Or do I start learning .NET or Java. I'm more familiar to .NET so I'll probably choose it if choice falls between .NET and Java ( or you could convince me to choose Java :). Career-wise, I don't know what is the best choice. Learning new framework and language is more time consuming then improving my existing skills in PHP. But with .NET you have a lot of possibilities (Windows 7 Phone development, Silverlight, WPF) and possibly bigger chances to find better jobs. PHP jobs are less payed then .NET, at least, according to my researches (correct me if I'm wrong). But if I start now with .NET I'm just a beginner and my salary will be low. I need at least 2+ years of experience in some language to even try to find some job that is paying higher than $50-60k in NY. My main goal in next 2-3 years is to try to find a job in a $60-80k category. Don't get me wrong, I'm not just chasing money, but money is an important factor when you're trying to start a family. I'm 27 years old and I feel that there isn't a lot of room for wrong decisions regarding my career, so any advice will be very welcome. Update Thank you all for spending time to help me with my problem. All of the answers and comments have been very helpful. I have decided to stick with PHP but also to learn C# and Silverlight 4. We'll see where the life will take me.

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• Desparately Need Help: After a mishap, a folder shows 0 files in it

  - by bobby

  I'm hoping some of you guys may be able to shed some light on this scenario: I had a odt document on which I was working from one of many files in a folder among many on an internal hard-drive. Some kind of glitch occured and the document crashed (this could have been some kind of power charge whilst another hard drive was being unmounted). As I looked into the folders surrounding the folder in which my odt document was stored, they start to show 0 files in them. I immediately switched off the PC and then re-started. Upon the re-start, the folders would show the 1,000s of files I've stored in them and then within 5 minutes, as I started to back them up, freeze, cut-off the process of transfer. When I tried to open anything on the internal hard-drive, be it an avi film, an mp3, a cbr or a word doc, they all showed blank or would work. Some folders had vastly less files showing. Eventually, things calmed down. I closed the PC, checked that the connections were in firmly, gave it a vacuum and restarted the PC. All the files eventually showed up and I started to back them up (which I'd brought a hard drive for anyway but been distracted and not done). All folders show except the one which contained the document I was working on at the time of the trouble. Strangely, it was one that should itself full on several occasions on restarts. It shows zero files now. Properties shows zero files and zero space taken by it. Yet when I drop a file into this folder by pasting it in, it disappears too. Opening the folder, there is nothing there. But if I paste that document again, the PC asks would I like to replace the existing file with the same name (that I can't see), when I click yes, the file appears. When I exit, the folder shows the 0 files in the folder. Going back into the folder, it has disappeared again. I'm hoping that someone can help give me tips to recover the files in the folder, it would be greatly, greatly appreciated. All other films, music, comics, documents show and are fine!

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• Who Are the BI Users in Your Neighborhood?

  - by [email protected]

  By Brian Dayton on March 19, 2010 10:52 PM Forrester's Boris Evelson recently wrote a blog titled "Who are the BI Personas?" that I enjoyed for a number of reasons. It's a quick read, easy to grasp and (refreshingly) focuses on the users of technology VS the technology. As Evelson admits, he meant to keep the reference chart at a high-level because there are too many different permutations and additional sub-categories to make such a chart useful. For me, I wouldn't head into the technical permutations but more the contextual use of BI and the issues that users experience. My thoughts brought up more questions than answers such as: Context: - HOW: With the exception of the "Power User" persona--likely some sort of business or operations analyst? - WHEN: Are they using the information to make real-time decisions on the front lines (a customer service manager or shipping/logistics VP) or are they using this information for cumulative analysis and business planning? Or both? - WHERE: What areas of the business are more or less likely to rely on BI across an organization? Human Resources, Operations, Facilities, Finance--- and why are some more prone to use data-driven analysis than others? Issues: - DELAYS & DRAG ON IT?: One of the persona characteristics Evelson calls out is a reliance on IT. Every persona except for the "Power User" has a heavy reliance on IT for support. What business issues or delays does that cause to users? What is the drag on IT resources who could potentially be creating instead of reporting? - HOW MANY CLICKS: If BI is being used within the context of a transaction (sales manager looking for upsell opportunities as an example) is that person getting the information within the context of that action or transaction? Or are they minimizing screens, logging into another application or reporting tool, running queries, etc.? Who are the BI Users in your neighborhood or line of business? Do Evelson's personas resonate--and do the tools that he calls out (he refers to it as "BI Style") resonate with what your personas have or need? Finally, I'm very interested if BI use is viewed as a bolt-on...or an integrated part of your daily enterprise processes?

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• Has test driven development (TDD) actually benefited a real world project?

  - by James

  I am not new to coding. I have been coding (seriously) for over 15 years now. I have always had some testing for my code. However, over the last few months I have been learning test driven design/development (TDD) using Ruby on Rails. So far, I'm not seeing the benefit. I see some benefit to writing tests for some things, but very few. And while I like the idea of writing the test first, I find I spend substantially more time trying to debug my tests to get them to say what I really mean than I do debugging actual code. This is probably because the test code is often substantially more complicated than the code it tests. I hope this is just inexperience with the available tools (RSpec in this case). I must say though, at this point, the level of frustration mixed with the disappointing lack of performance is beyond unacceptable. So far, the only value I'm seeing from TDD is a growing library of RSpec files that serve as templates for other projects/files. Which is not much more useful, maybe less useful, than the actual project code files. In reading the available literature, I notice that TDD seems to be a massive time sink up front, but pays off in the end. I'm just wondering, are there any real world examples? Does this massive frustration ever pay off in the real world? I really hope I did not miss this question somewhere else on here. I searched, but all the questions/answers are several years old at this point. It was a rare occasion when I found a developer who would say anything bad about TDD, which is why I have spent as much time on this as I have. However, I noticed that nobody seems to point to specific real-world examples. I did read one answer that said the guy debugging the code in 2011 would thank you for have a complete unit testing suite (I think that comment was made in 2008). So, I'm just wondering, after all these years, do we finally have any examples showing the payoff is real? Has anybody actually inherited or gone back to code that was designed/developed with TDD and has a complete set of unit tests and actually felt a payoff? Or did you find that you were spending so much time trying to figure out what the test was testing (and why it was important) that you just tossed out the whole mess and dug into the code?

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• How can I create a flexible system for tiling a 2D RPG map?

  - by CptSupermrkt

  Using libgdx here. I've just finished learning some of the basics of creating a 2D environment and using an OrthographicCamera to view it. The tutorials I went through, however, hardcoded their tiled map in, and none made mention of how to do it any other way. By tiled map, I mean like Final Fantasy 1, where the world map is a grid of squares, each with a different texture. So for example, I've got a 6 tile x 6 tile map, using the following code: Array<Tile> tiles = new Array<Tile>(); tiles.add(new Tile(new Vector2(0,5), TileType.FOREST)); tiles.add(new Tile(new Vector2(1,5), TileType.FOREST)); tiles.add(new Tile(new Vector2(2,5), TileType.FOREST)); tiles.add(new Tile(new Vector2(3,5), TileType.GRASS)); tiles.add(new Tile(new Vector2(4,5), TileType.STONE)); tiles.add(new Tile(new Vector2(5,5), TileType.STONE)); //... x5 more times. Given the random nature of the environment, for loops don't really help as I have to start and finish a loop before I was able to do enough to make it worth setting up the loop. I can see how a loop might be helpful for like tiling an ocean or something, but not in the above case. The above code DOES get me my final desired output, however, if I were to decide I wanted to move a piece or swap two pieces out, oh boy, what a nightmare, even with just a 6x6 test piece, much less a 1000x1000 world map. There must be a better way of doing this. Someone on some post somewhere (can't find it now, of course) said to check out MapEditor. Looks legit. The question is, if that is the answer, how can I make something in MapEditor and have the output map plug in to a variable in my code? I need the tiles as objects in my code, because for example, I determine whether or not a tile is can be passed through or collided with based on my TileTyle enum variable. Are there alternative/language "native" (i.e. not using an outside tool) methods to doing this?

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• Does it make the game more fun when the user is forced to progress thru the levels sequentially rather than letting them pick and play?

  - by BeachRunnerJoe

  Hello. For the first time in my game, I'm stuck with a real design dilemma. I guess that's a good thing ;) I'm building a word puzzle game that has five levels, each with 30 puzzles. Currently, the user has to solve one puzzle at a time before moving to the next. However, I'm finding the user occasionally gets stuck on a puzzle, at which point they can no longer play until they solve it. This is obviously bad because many people will just quit playing the game and delete the app since they get frustrated and can't play any other puzzles until the current puzzle is solved. The only elegant solution I can find to helping the player get unstuck is changing the design of the game to allow the users to pick any puzzle to play at any time. This way, if they get stuck, they can come back to it later and at least they have other puzzles to play in the meantime. It's my opinion, however, that this new flow design doesn't make the game as fun as the original flow design where the player has to complete a puzzle before moving to the next. To me, it's like anything else, when you only have one of something, it's more enjoyable, but when you have 30 of something, it's far less enjoyable. In fact, when I present the user with 30 puzzles to choose from that they need to solve before unlocking the next level, it almost seems as tho I'm making them feel like it's work they have to do. I even had a tester voluntarily tell me that being forced to complete a puzzle before moving to the next is more motivating. My questions are... Do you agree/disagree? Do you have any suggestions for how I can help the player get unstuck? Thanks so much in advance for your thoughts! EDIT: I should mention that I've already considered a few other solutions to helping the user get unstuck, but none of them seem like good ideas. They are... Add more hints: Currently, the user gets two hints per puzzle. If I increase the hint count, it only makes the game more easy and still leaves the possibility of the user getting stuck. Add a "Show Solution" button: This seems like a bad idea because it's my opinion this takes the fun out of the game for many people who would probably otherwise solve the puzzle if they didn't have the quick option to see the solution.

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• How to apply effects that occur (or change) over time to characters in a game?

  - by Joshua Harris

  So assume that I have a system that applies Effects to Characters like so: public class Character { private Collection<Effect> _effects; public void AddEffect (Effect e) { e.ApplyTo(this); _effects.Add(e); } public void RemoveEffect (Effect e) { e.RemoveFrom(this); _effects.Remove(e); } } public interface Effect { public void ApplyTo (Character character); public void RemoveFrom (Character character); } Example Effect: Armor Buff for 5 seconds. void someFunction() { // Do Stuff ... Timer armorTimer = new Timer(5 seconds); ArmorBuff armorbuff = new ArmorBuff(); character.AddEffect(armorBuff); armorTimer.Start(); // Do more stuff ... } // Some where else in code public void ArmorTimer_Complete() { character.RemoveEffect(armorBuff); } public class ArmorBuff implements Effect { public void applyTo(Character character) { character.changeArmor(20); } public void removeFrom(Character character) { character.changeArmor(-20); } } Ok, so this example would buff the Characters armor for 5 seconds. Easy to get working. But what about effects that change over the duration of the effect being applied. Two examples come to mind: Damage Over Time: 200 damage every second for 3 seconds. I could mimic this by applying an Effect that lasts for 1 second and has a counter set to 3, then when it is removed it could deal 200 damage, clone itself, decrement the counter of the clone, and apply the clone to the character. If it repeats this until the counter is 0, then you got a damage over time ability. I'm not a huge fan of this approach, but it does describe the behavior exactly. Degenerating Speed Boost: Gain a speed boost that degrades over 3 seconds until you return to your normal speed. This is a bit harder. I can basically do the same thing as above except having timers set to some portion of a second, such that they occur fast enough to give the appearance of degenerating smoothly over time (even though they are really just stepping down incrementally). I feel like you could get away with only 12 steps over a second (maybe less, I would have to test it and see), but this doesn't seem very elegant to me. The only other way to implement this effect would be to change the system so that the Character checks the _effects collection for effects that alter any of the properties any time that they are being used. I could handle this in functions like getCurrentSpeed() and getCurrentArmor(), but you can imagine how much of a hassle it would be to have that kind of overhead every time you want to do a calculation with movement speed (which would be every time you move your character). Is there a better way to deal with these kinds of effects or events?

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• The Minimalist's Approach to Content Governance

  - by Kellsey Ruppel

  This week on the blog, we want to focus on the content lifecylce and how important it is to have the tools in place to be able to properly manage all te phases of the content lifecylce. John Brunswick has some great advice when it comes to this topic, so expect to hear a lot from him this week! Originally posted by John Brunswick. Let's be honest - content governance is far from an exciting topic. BUT the potential of a very small intranet team creating and maintaining a platform that provides an organization with relevant, high value information, helping workers to get their jobs done with greater accuracy and in less time is exciting. It is easy to quickly start producing content, but the challenge is ensuring that the environment is easy to navigate and use on the third week and during the third year.   What can be done to bridge this gap? Over the next few blog entries let's take a pragmatic, minimalistic view of a process that can help any team manage a wealth of unstructured information. Based on an earlier article that I wrote around Portal Governance, I am going to focus on using technology as much as possible to support the governance of content with minimal involvement from users. The only certainty about content production is that business users are not fans of maintaining content. Maintenance is overhead and is a long-term investment thats value will possibly not be realized under the current content creator's watch. To add context to how we will use technical tools in this process, each post will highlight one section of the content lifecycle process as outlined below Content Lifecycle Stages 1. Request - Understand the education, purpose, resource and success criteria for content 2. Create - Determine access and workflow for content 3. Manage - Understand ownership and review cycles 4. Retire - Act on thresholds established during the request stage Within each state we will also elaborate as to 1. Why - why would we entertain doing this? 2. How - the steps that are needed to make it happen 3. Impact - what is the net benefit or loss based on the process Over the course of this week, we will dive deep into the stages and the minimal amount of time, effort and process within each to make some meaningful gains in the improvement of user experience and productivity in their search for information. It might be a stretch to say that we can make content governance exciting, but hopefully it can end up being painless and paying dividends. And if you'd like to hear first hand from a customer that is managing their content lifecycle with Oracle WebCenter, be sure to join us on Wednesday for this webcast "ResCare Solves Content Lifecycle Challenges with Oracle WebCenter"!

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• The partition table is corrupt

  - by Tim

  I have a corrupt the partition table on the laptop that is running Ubunutu 10.4. Before the partition table was corrupt I had the following partitions: 2 primary partitions: 1st - NTFS 2nd - Extended 4 logical partitons that are built within 2nd extended: 1st NTFS (68 Gib) 2nd Linux (19 Gib) 3rd Swap (1.4 Gib) 4th Linux (24 Gib) The physical order of these partitions was the following: ( 4th Linux ) - ( 1st NTFS ) - ( 2nd Linux ) - ( 3rd Swap ) The logical order of the partition was different: ( 1st NTFS ) - ( 2nd Linux ) - ( 3rd Swap ) ( 4th Linux ) NTFS partition was big and it resided between 2 Linux partitions, neither of these partitions had enough space to install Oracle 11g. Therefore, I decided to a) either move the NTFS partion to the left or b) remove it completely and extend partition where Linux resides. As I tool I have chosen GParted. But unfortunately it was not able to move the partition because he found that in NTFS partition there are some blocks that are referenced multiple times. Also it was not able to remove the partition neither, because in this case the partitions that follow it ( 2nd Linux ) - ( 3rd Swap ) have to be in his opinion also removed, because the organization of extended partition is a linked list. Since GParted was not able to do such thing I was trying to find another tool. I found diskdrake tool on PSLinuxOS distribution of linux. That tool silently deleted ( 1st NTFS ) partition and I thought that everything was fine. But diskdrake has damaged the partition in a way that I am not able either to boot from the hard disk nor to see the partitions with GParted and even with diskdrake itself! Fortunately I have a live CD of Ubuntu 8.10 and I am able to boot and see hard disk. I have 2 ideas how I can solve the problem: 1) Manually change disk partitions and point them to the correct partitions. 2) Create partition table with GParted that as much as possible is the same with the previous one I find the 2nd approach less time consuming but some data will be lost because of it is not possible to place borders of the partitions exactly how it was before. And moreover I am not sure if such approach would work, for example, if the OS is able to locate files after repartitioning. I feel like that it will but not 100% sure. Are there some ideas how the problem may be solved?

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• I didn't mean to become a database developer, but now I am. Should I stop or try to get better?

  - by pretlow majette

  20 years ago I couldn't afford even a cheap POS program when I opened my first surf shop in the Virgin Islands. I bought a copy of Paradox (remember that?) in 1990 and spent months in a back room scratching out a POS application. Over many iterations, including a switch to Access (2000)/SQL Server (2003), I built a POS and backoffice solution that runs four stores with multiple cash registers, a warehouse and office. Until recently, all my stores were connected to the same LAN (in a small shopping center) and performance wasn't an issue. Now that we've opened a location in the States that's changed. Connecting to my local server via the internet has slowed that locations application to a crawl. This is partly due to the slow and crappy dsl service we have in the Virgin Islands, and partly due to my less-than-professional code and sql. With other far-away stores in the works, I need a better solution. I like my application. My staff knows it well, and I'm not inclined to take on the expense of a proper commercial solution. So where does that leave me? I should probably host my sql online to sidestep the slow dsl here. I think I can handle cleaning up my SQL querries to speed that up a bit. What about Access? My version seems so old, but I don't like the newer versions with the 'ribbon'. There are so many options... Should I be learning Visual Studio with an eye on moving completely to the web? Will my VBA skills help me at all there? I don't have the luxury of a year at the keyboard to figure it out anymore. What about dotnetnuke, sharepoint, or lightswitch? They all seem like possibilities, but even understanding their capabilities is daunting. I'm pretty deep into it, but maybe I should bail and hire a consultant or programmer. That sounds expensive tho, and there's no guarantee there either... Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Or, if anybody is interested in buying a small chain of surf shops...

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• Showing ZFS some LOVE

  - by Kristin Rose

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} L is for the way you look at us, and O because we’re Oracle, but V is very, very, extra ordinary, and E, well that’s obvious… E is because Oracle’s new Sun ZFS Storage Appliance is Excellent, and here at OPN, we like spell out the obvious!  If you haven’t already heard, the Sun ZFS Appliance has “A simple, GUI-driven setup and configuration, solid price-performance and world-class Oracle support behind it. The CRN Test Center recommends the Sun ZFS Storage”. Read more about what CRN said here. Oracle's Sun ZFS Appliance family delivers enterprise-class network attached storage (NAS) capabilities with leading Oracle integration, simplicity, efficiency, performance, and TCO.  The systems offer an easy way to manage and expand your storage environment at a lower cost, with more efficiency, better data integrity, and higher performance when compared with competitive NAS offerings. Did we mention that set up, including configuring, will take you less than an hour since it all comes in one box and is so darn simple to use? So if you L-O-V-E what you’re hearing about Oracle’s Sun Z-F-S, learn more by watching the video below, and visiting any of our available resources . It Had to Be You, The OPN Communications Team

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• Oracle Linux Partner Pavilion Spotlight - Part II

  - by Ted Davis

  As we draw closer to the first day of Oracle OpenWorld, starting in less than a week, we continue to showcase some of our premier partners exhibiting in the Oracle Linux Partner Pavilion ( Booth #1033). We have Independent Hardware Vendors, Independent Software Vendors and Systems Integrators that show the breadth of support in the Oracle Linux and Oracle VM ecosystem. In today's post we highlight three additional Oracle Linux / Oracle VM Partners from the pavilion. Micro Focus delivers mainframe solutions software and software delivery tools with its Borland products. These tools are grouped under the following solutions: Analysis and testing tools for JDeveloper Micro Focus Enterprise Analyzer is key to the success of application overhaul and modernization strategies by ensuring that they are based on a solid knowledge foundation. It reveals the reality of enterprise application portfolios and the detailed constructs of business applications. COBOL for Oracle Database, Oracle Linux, and Tuxedo Micro Focus Visual COBOL delivers the next generation of COBOL development and deployment. Itbrings the productivity of the Eclipse IDE to COBOL, and provides the ability to deploy key business critical COBOL applications to Oracle Linux both natively and under a JVM. Migration and Modernization tooling for mainframes Enterprise application knowledge, development, test and workload re-hosting tools significantly improves the efficiency of business application delivery, enabling CIOs and IT leaders to modernize application portfolios and target platforms such as Oracle Linux. When it comes to Oracle Linux database environments, supporting high transaction rates with minimal response times is no longer just a goal. It’s a strategic imperative. The “data deluge” is impacting the ability of databases and other strategic applications to access data and provide real-time analytics and reporting. As such, customer demand for accelerated application performance is increasing. Visit LSI at the Oracle Linux Pavilion, #733, to find out how LSI Nytro Application Acceleration products are designed from the ground up for database acceleration. Our intelligent solid-state storage solutions help to eliminate I/O bottlenecks, increase throughput and enable Oracle customers achieve the highest levels of DB performance. Accelerate Your Exadata Success With Teleran. Teleran’s software solutions for Oracle Exadata and Oracle Database reduce the cost, time and effort of migrating and consolidating applications on Exadata. In addition Teleran delivers visibility and control solutions for BI/data warehouse performance and user management that ensure service levels and cost efficiency.Teleran will demonstrate these solutions at the Oracle Open World Linux Pavilion: Consolidation Accelerator - Reduces the cost, time and risk ofof migrating and consolidation applications on Exadata. Application Readiness – Identifies legacy application performance enhancements needed to take advantage of Exadata performance features Workload Accelerator – Identifies and clusters workloads for faster performance on Exadata Application Visibility and Control - Improves performance, user productivity, and alignment to business objectives while reducing support and resource costs. Thanks for reading today's Partner Spotlight. Three more partners will be highlighted tomorrow. If you missed our first Partner Spotlight check it out here.

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• Looking for recommendations for a server-side newsletter program

  - by Sparky672

  Hello- I'm currently using a server-side SQL based mailing list program called Php-List on multiple sites and it works fairly well. But installation and setup is quite cumbersome, quirky and the interface is not well organized... neither is the code... with pieces all over the place in random fashion. Customizing the "look & feel" and full site integration are both tedious and painful. Upgrading the version is made more complex since multiple edits need to be manually transferred each time. Also, probably due to a poor English translation, descriptions and instructions within certain areas of the user interface are contradictory and unclear. You just have to play with it and remember what you did last time it worked. It's supposed to be so my customers can send out their own newsletters... after supplying a written tutorial, about half of them seem to stumble through it okay and the other half just hire me to do it for them. So not quite easy enough for most average people to use. I'm looking for something that's as easy for them as using a blog or discussion forum. It also must be easier to set up and integrate into a site than Php-List. I have no problem getting dirty and writing CSS or HTML by hand. Nor do I have any problem editing the program code. Perhaps what I'm looking for is a solution that is more organized, a better GUI, and template or "skin" based. Therefore, if I spend many hours customizing a skin, I can simply update the program and re-use my custom skin without having to reproduce the tedious setup over and over. (I currently maintain a list of about 25 things I must manually edit or add to multiple files in multiple directories each time I install or upgrade Php-List) A great example of what I'm looking for is very much like WordPress or phpBB. They're both easy to install and customize yet powerful and packed full of features. They're also VERY well organized making customization less painful. So enough yammering for now... anyone know of something, besides Php-List, with many of the same features as Php-List; maintaining a mailing list with a server-side database, custom sign-up pages, automatic opt-in opt-out, allowing custom HTML newsletter templates, etc? Thank-you!

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• How is a switch statement better than a series of if statements? [closed]

  - by user1276078

  Possible Duplicate: Should I use switch statements or long if…else chains? I'm working on a small program that will conduct an Insertion Sort. A number will be inputted through the keyboard and stored in a variable I called "num." I've decided to use a switch statement in order to obtain the number inputted. switch( e.getKeyCode() ) { case KeyEvent.VK_0: num = 0; break; case KeyEvent.VK_1: num = 1; break; case KeyEvent.VK_2: num = 2; break; case KeyEvent.VK_3: num = 3; break; case KeyEvent.VK_4: num = 4; break; case KeyEvent.VK_5: num = 5; break; case KeyEvent.VK_6: num = 6; break; case KeyEvent.VK_7: num = 7; break; case KeyEvent.VK_8: num = 8; break; case KeyEvent.VK_9: num = 9; break; } I realized one other course of action could have been to use a set of if statements. if( e.getKeyCode() == KeyEvent.VK_0 ) num = 0; else if( e.getKeyCode() == KeyEvent.VK_1 ) num = 1; etc. for every number up until 9. I then wondered what the essential difference is between a switch statement and a series of if statements. I know it saves space and time to write, but it's not that much. So, my question is, aside from the space, does a switch statement differ from a series of if statments in any way? Is it faster, less error-prone, etc.? This question really doesn't affect my code that much. I was just wondering. Also, this question pertains to the JAVA language, not any other programming language.

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• How can we unify business goals and technical goals?

  - by BAM

  Some background I work at a small startup: 4 devs, 1 designer, and 2 non-technical co-founders, one who provides funding, and the other who handles day-to-day management and sales. Our company produces mobile apps for target industries, and we've gotten a lot of lucky breaks lately. The outlook is good, and we're confident we can make this thing work. One reason is our product development team. Everyone on the team is passionate, driven, and has a great sense of what makes an awesome product. As a result, we've built some beautiful applications that we're all proud of. The other reason is the co-founders. Both have a brilliant business sense (one actually founded a multi-million dollar company already), and they have close ties in many of the industries we're trying to penetrate. Consequently, they've brought in some great business and continue to keep jobs in the pipeline. The problem The problem we can't seem to shake is how to bring these two awesome advantages together. On the business side, there is a huge pressure to deliver as fast as possible as much as possible, whereas on the development side there is pressure to take your time, come up with the right solution, and pay attention to all the details. Lately these two sides have been butting heads a lot. Developers are demanding quality while managers are demanding quantity. How can we handle this? Both sides are correct. We can't survive as a company if we build terrible applications, but we also can't survive if we don't sell enough. So how should we go about making compromises? Things we've done with little or no success: Work more (well, it did result in better quality and faster delivery, but the dev team has never been more stressed out before) Charge more (as a startup, we don't yet have the credibility to justify higher prices, so no one is willing to pay) Extend deadlines (if we charge the same, but take longer, we'll end up losing money) Things we've done with some success: Sacrifice pay to cut costs (everyone, from devs to management, is paid less than they could be making elsewhere. In return, however, we all have creative input and more flexibility and freedom, a typical startup trade off) Standardize project management (we recently started adhering to agile/scrum principles so we can base deadlines on actual velocity, not just arbitrary guesses) Hire more people (we used to have 2 developers and no designers, which really limited our bandwidth. However, as a startup we can only afford to hire a few extra people.) Is there anything we're missing or doing wrong? How is this handled at successful companies? Thanks in advance for any feedback :)

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• Analysing SQLBits Feedback

  - by jamiet

  Earlier this week I received all the feedback that people offered on my session at SQLBits 7 in York – “SSIS Dataflow Performance Tuning” (the video is available online if you wish to see it). As you may have gathered from previous posts on this blog and my less-SQLy-focused Wordpress blog I am a big fan of collecting and tracking both personal and public data and session feedback lends itself very well to tracking because it is quantitative rather than qualitative; by that I mean attendees are invited to provide marks out of ten rather than (or, in the case of SQLBits, as well as) written comments. The SQLBits feedback is also useful because they use a consistent format – the same questions are asked each time – this means it is particularly easy to to track whether the scores that people give are trending up or down. I suspect that somewhere the SQLBits organisers have a big Analysis Services cube (ok, perhaps its an Excel pivot table) that allows them to analyse these scores per conference, speaker, track etc.… and there’s no reason that we as session speakers cannot do the same thing. To that end I have started to store my feedback in an Excel spreadsheet of my own which in the interests of transparency is available for public viewing (only a web browser required) on SkyDrive at http://cid-550f681dad532637.office.live.com/view.aspx/Public/Misc/Personal%20SQLBits%20Session%20Feedback.xlsx. I have used a pivot table to aggregate all that feedback and here is a screenshot: I am hereby making a public plea to the SQLBits organisers (on the off-chance that they are reading) to please continue to keep the feedback format consistent in the future and I encourage them to publish all of the feedback in an anonymised form. I would also encourage anyone doing conference speaking to track their conference feedback in the same way that I am doing so that you get an insight into whether or not you are improving over time. It is not difficult to setup and maintaining it as you do more sessions takes very little effort. Storing feedback data like this leads me to wider thoughts about well-known conventions and data format standardisation. Let’s imagine a utopia where there were a standard set of questions for capturing session feedback that were leveraged at every conference regardless of subject matter, location or culture; that would give rise to immense cross-conference and cross-discipline analysis – the data analyst in me goes giddy at the thought of it. It is scenarios like this that drive my interest both in data formats such as iCalendar, microformats and RDF, and in emerging movements such as the semantic web and linked data, all things which I have written about in the past. I don’t know whether we will ever reach the stage where every piece of data has structured, descriptive metadata associated with it but I live in hope. @Jamiet

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• How to be successfull at BDD Specifications Workshops?

  - by sigo

  Today we tried to introduce BDD in our software development process by having a specification workshop. For this workshop we had 2 developers, 1 tester and 1 business analyst. The workshop lasted 1h30 and by the end of it we managed to figure out some BDD scenarios for our new feature. We tried to focus on finding the scenarios that we could miss, and the difficult ones. At the end of the workshop some people were actually unhappy with the workshop. One developer felt he wasted his time as he was used to be given out the scenarios directly by the business analyst and review them with her. The business analyst didn't feel confident with our scenario coverage (Had a feeling that we could have missed out other important stuff) but more importantly felt that this workshop was also a waste of time as she could have figured out all these scenarios by herself and in a shorter period of time. So my question is how that kind of workshop can actually work. In the theory, given you have a new feature to develop, you put the tree 'amigos' (dev/tester/ba) in the same room so that they can collaborate together on writing the differents requirements for the new feature using examples. I can see all the benefits from that. Specially in term of knowledge sharing and common product/end goal/done vision. But in practice, we still think it is more cost effective to first have a BA to work on his own on the examples and only then to have the scenarios to be reviewed/reworked by the 3 'amigos'. By having the BA to work on his own, we actually feel more confident that we are less going to miss out stuff + we still get to review the scenarios afterward to double check. We don't think than simple brainstorming/deliberate discovery is actually enought to seriously cover all the requirement for a feature. The business analyst is actually the best person for that kind of stuff. The thing we just do is to review what she wrote and see if then we have a common understanding (which could then lead to rewrite some of her scenarios or add new ones she could have missed). This workshop lasted 1h30, and by the end of it, we didn't feel confident enought about wha we did...sure we could have spent more time on it but honestly most people get exhausted after 1h30 of brainstorming. So how can you get that to work effectively in practice ?

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• Good, simple reasons for having multiple environments

  - by smp7d

  Throughout my career I had worked at companies that had a collection of different environments for different purposes. We always had more or less our desktop environment, a test environment, a QA environment, a staging environment and a production environment. This went for both servers/applications and any data sources we were using. When I started at my current company I found that 90% of the apps were either developed on a desktop environment against production data sources or developed directly on the production server depending on the platform. I wasn't fazed because I was hired in part to make changes to improve the way the development team functioned, which was clear from my interview process. We slowly started to turn the philosophy and pretty soon, most of the apps could be run in either a desktop, test or production environment. Not too long after that staging came around as well. Now most of our developers see the benefit of this methodology and defend it vigilantly. However, we have a number of legacy apps that never got migrated. We also have a number of legacy programmers who think of this as a waste of time. Unfortunately, we got lip service but never full buy-in from management. We got what we thought was a commitment to invest substantially in this about a year ago, but nothing materialized despite the considerable planning that we put into it. Now we are finding that we need more and more environments. We need help from the server/network administration teams for setup and we need participation from the business stakeholders to support the release cycle. We are at a place now where a project can function what I consider "normally" only if you have the right people on the project and the time to set up the proper environments. I'd love to present a complete argument, but management really has no time and interest in hearing me out until there is a critical issue. I can't really articulate the benefits simply as it always just seemed second nature to me. I was wondering if there are any good, simple, irrefutable reasons for the separation of environments that would get managers with no development experience to get behind this idea. Are there any good resources/literature on the topic?

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• Moms on Mobile: Are They Way Ahead of You?

  - by Mike Stiles

  You may have no idea how much and how fast moms are embracing mobile. Of all the demographics that can be targeted by marketers, moms have always been at or near the top of the list. And why not? They’re running households, they’re all over town, they’re making buying decisions, and they’re influencing family and friends. They, out of necessity, become masters of efficiency and time management. So when a technology tool, like mobile, comes along that assists with that efficiency and time management, we would obviously expect them to take advantage of it. So if it’s obvious, why are so many big, sophisticated brands left choking on the dust of moms who have zoomed past them in the adoption of mobile, and social on mobile? Let’s break down some hard truths as presented by a Mojiava report: -Moms spend 6.1 hours per day on average on their smartphones – more than magazines, TV or radio. -46% took action after seeing a mobile ad. -51% self-identify as “addicted” to their smartphone. -Households with an income of $25K-$50K have about the same mobile penetration among moms as those with incomes of $50K-$75K. So mobile is regarded as a necessity for middle-class moms. -Even moms without smartphones spend 2.5 hours on average per day on some connected mobile device. -Of moms with such devices, 9.8% have an iPad, 9.5% a Kindle and 5.7% an iPod Touch. -Of tablet-owning moms, 97% bought something using their tablet in the last month. -31% spend over 10 hours per week on their tablet, but less than 2 hours per week on their PCs. -62% of connected moms use shopping apps. -46% want to get info on their mobile while in a store. -Half of connected moms use social on their mobile. And they’re engaged. 81% are brand fans, 86% post updates, and 84% comment. If women and moms are one of your primary targets and you find yourself with no strong social channels where content is driving engagement and relationship-building, with sites not optimized for mobile, or with no tablet or smartphone apps, you have been solidly left behind by your customers and prospects. And their adoption of mobile and social on mobile is only exponentially speeding up, not slowing down. How much sense does it make when your customer is ready to act on your mobile ad, wants to user your iPad app to buy something from you, wants to be your fan on Facebook, wants to get messages and deals from you while they’re in your store…but you’re completely absent? I’ll help you cheat on the test by giving you the answer…no sense at all. Catch up to momma.

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• Why can't the IT industry deliver large, faultless projects quickly as in other industries?

  - by MainMa

  After watching National Geographic's MegaStructures series, I was surprised how fast large projects are completed. Once the preliminary work (design, specifications, etc.) is done on paper, the realization itself of huge projects take just a few years or sometimes a few months. For example, Airbus A380 "formally launched on Dec. 19, 2000", and "in the Early March, 2005", the aircraft was already tested. The same goes for huge oil tankers, skyscrapers, etc. Comparing this to the delays in software industry, I can't help wondering why most IT projects are so slow, or more precisely, why they cannot be as fast and faultless, at the same scale, given enough people? Projects such as the Airbus A380 present both: Major unforeseen risks: while this is not the first aircraft built, it still pushes the limits if the technology and things which worked well for smaller airliners may not work for the larger one due to physical constraints; in the same way, new technologies are used which were not used yet, because for example they were not available in 1969 when Boeing 747 was done. Risks related to human resources and management in general: people quitting in the middle of the project, inability to reach a person because she's on vacation, ordinary human errors, etc. With those risks, people still achieve projects like those large airliners in a very short period of time, and despite the delivery delays, those projects are still hugely successful and of a high quality. When it comes to software development, the projects are hardly as large and complicated as an airliner (both technically and in terms of management), and have slightly less unforeseen risks from the real world. Still, most IT projects are slow and late, and adding more developers to the project is not a solution (going from a team of ten developer to two thousand will sometimes allow to deliver the project faster, sometimes not, and sometimes will only harm the project and increase the risk of not finishing it at all). Those which are still delivered may often contain a lot of bugs, requiring consecutive service packs and regular updates (imagine "installing updates" on every Airbus A380 twice per week to patch the bugs in the original product and prevent the aircraft from crashing). How can such differences be explained? Is it due exclusively to the fact that software development industry is too young to be able to manage thousands of people on a single project in order to deliver large scale, nearly faultless products very fast?

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• How can I optimize Apache to use 1GB of RAM on my website? [closed]

  - by Markon

  My VPS plan gives me 1GB of RAM burstable to 2GB. Of course I cannot use 2 GB, nor 1 GB, everyday, so I'm planning to optimize the performance of my webserver. The average of hits-per-hour is about 8'000-10'000. This means about 2 connections-per-second. Max hits-per-hour reached until now is about 60'000. That means about 16 connections-per-second. Unluckily my current apache configuration uses too much memory (when there are not connected clients - usually during the night - it uses about 1GB) so I've tried to customize the apache installation to fit to my needs. I'm using Ubuntu, kernel 2.6.18, with apache2-mpm-worker, since I've read it requires less memory, and fcgid ( + PHP). This is my /etc/apache2/apache2.conf: Timeout 45 KeepAlive on MaxKeepAliveRequests 100 KeepAliveTimeout 10 <IfModule mpm_worker_module> StartServer 2 MinSpareThreads 25 MaxSpareThreads 75 MaxClients 100 MaxRequestsPerChild 0 </IfModule> This is the output of ps aux: www-data 9547 0.0 0.3 423828 7268 ? Sl 20:09 0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start root 17714 0.0 0.1 76496 3712 ? Ss Feb05 0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start www-data 17716 0.0 0.0 75560 2048 ? S Feb05 0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start www-data 17746 0.0 0.1 76228 2384 ? S Feb05 0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start www-data 20126 0.0 0.3 424852 7588 ? Sl 19:24 0:02 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start www-data 24260 0.0 0.3 424852 7580 ? Sl 19:42 0:01 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start while this is ps aux for php5: www-data 7461 2.9 2.2 142172 47048 ? S 19:39 1:39 /usr/lib/cgi-bin/php5 www-data 23845 1.3 1.7 135744 35948 ? S 20:17 0:15 /usr/lib/cgi-bin/php5 www-data 23900 2.0 1.7 136692 36760 ? S 20:17 0:22 /usr/lib/cgi-bin/php5 www-data 27907 2.0 2.0 142272 43432 ? S 20:00 0:43 /usr/lib/cgi-bin/php5 www-data 27909 2.5 1.9 138092 40036 ? S 20:00 0:53 /usr/lib/cgi-bin/php5 www-data 27993 2.4 2.2 142336 47192 ? S 20:01 0:50 /usr/lib/cgi-bin/php5 www-data 27999 1.8 1.4 135932 31100 ? S 20:01 0:38 /usr/lib/cgi-bin/php5 www-data 28230 2.6 1.9 143436 39956 ? S 20:01 0:54 /usr/lib/cgi-bin/php5 www-data 30708 3.1 2.2 142508 46528 ? S 19:44 1:38 /usr/lib/cgi-bin/php5 As you can see it use a lot of memory. How can I reduce it to fit to just 1GB of RAM? PS: I also think about the switch to nginx, if Apache can't fit to my needs...

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• Are You Meeting Social Customer Service Expectations?

  - by Mike Stiles

  Whether it’s B2B or B2C, one sure path to repeat business is making sure your buyer has a memorably pleasant and successful customer service experience with you. If they get that kind of treatment consistently, that’s called a relationship. And those aren’t broken easily. Social customer service, driven by integrated SRM (social relationship management) technology, is the venue that can effectively connect customers not only to the brand, but to other customers. Positive experiences, once administered, don’t just rest with the recipient. They’re published in the form of public raves and peer-to-peer recommendation, a force far more actionable than push advertising. What’s more, your customers have come to expect access to you and satisfaction from you using social. An NM Incite study shows 83% of Twitter users and 71% of Facebook users expect to get an answer from brands the same day they post to them on their social assets. To make sure you’re responding, you’ve got to have a tech platform that’s set up to moderate and alert so you’ll know ASAP a customer needs help. The more integrated your social enterprise is, the faster you can not only respond, but respond with the answer they’re looking for, because your system is connected to the internal resources that can surface the answer or put wheels in motion to rectify the situation in the shortest amount of time possible. But if you go to the necessary lengths to make sure your customers feel valued and important, will they really reward you? The study says 71% of consumers who got quick and effective responses from companies they contacted via social were more likely to recommend the brand to their friends and followers. So yes, sweeping people off their feet pays big dividends in terms of word-of-mouth marketing. But you should be keenly aware of the reverse side of that coin. Give people a negative experience, either in real world or virtual customer service, and that message is highly likely to get amplified through social channels faster and louder. Only 36% of the NM Incite study’s respondents reported that their problems were solved quickly and effectively. 36%? That’s hardly an impressive number. It gets worse. 10% never got so much as a response - at all. Going back to the relationship analogy, companies that are this deep in the ditch where customer service is concerned are making their girl or boyfriends really easy for a competitor to steal. Given the technology tools and data available right now for having an intimate knowledge of the customer, what products they’ve purchased, likely problems with those products, effective resolutions to those problems, and follow-up communication to gauge satisfaction, there are fewer excuses than ever for making the lifeblood of your business feel like you couldn’t care less. @mikestiles

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• Security Alert for CVE-2012-4681 Released

  - by Eric P. Maurice

  Hi, this is Eric Maurice again! Oracle has just released Security Alert CVE-2012-4681 to address 3 distinct but related vulnerabilities and one security-in-depth issue affecting Java running in desktop browsers.  These vulnerabilities are: CVE-2012-4681, CVE-2012-1682, CVE-2012-3136, and CVE-2012-0547.  These vulnerabilities are not applicable to standalone Java desktop applications or Java running on servers, i.e. these vulnerabilities do not affect any Oracle server based software. Vulnerabilities CVE-2012-4681, CVE-2012-1682, and CVE-2012-3136 have each received a CVSS Base Score of 10.0.  This score assumes that the affected users have administrative privileges, as is typical in Windows XP.  Vulnerability CVE-20120-0547 has received a CVSS Base Score of 0.0 because this vulnerability is not directly exploitable in typical user deployments, but Oracle has issued a security-in-depth fix for this issue as it can be used in conjunction with other vulnerabilities to significantly increase the overall impact of a successful exploit. If successfully exploited, these vulnerabilities can provide a malicious attacker the ability to plant discretionary binaries onto the compromised system, e.g. the vulnerabilities can be exploited to install malware, including Trojans, onto the targeted system.  Note that this malware may in some instances be detected by current antivirus signatures upon its installation.  Due to the high severity of these vulnerabilities, Oracle recommends that customers apply this Security Alert as soon as possible.  Furthermore, note that the technical details of these vulnerabilities are widely available on the Internet and Oracle has received external reports that these vulnerabilities are being actively exploited in the wild.    Developers should download the latest release at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/index.html   Java users should download the latest release of JRE at http://java.com, and of course   Windows users can take advantage of the Java Automatic Update to get the latest release. For more information: The Advisory for Security Alert CVE-2012-4681 is located at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/security/alert-cve-2012-4681-1835715.html  Users can verify that they’re running the most recent version of Java by visiting: http://java.com/en/download/installed.jsp    Instructions on removing older (and less secure) versions of Java can be found at http://java.com/en/download/faq/remove_olderversions.xml   

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• Does it make the game more fun when the user is forced to progress through the levels sequentially rather than letting them pick and play?

  - by BeachRunnerJoe

  Hello. For the first time in my game, I'm stuck with a real design dilemma. I guess that's a good thing ;) I'm building a word puzzle game that has five levels, each with 30 puzzles. Currently, the user has to solve one puzzle at a time before moving to the next. However, I'm finding the user occasionally gets stuck on a puzzle, at which point they can no longer play until they solve it. This is obviously bad because many people will probably just quit playing the game and delete the app. The only elegant solution I can find to helping the player get unstuck is changing the design of the game to allow the users to pick any puzzle to play at any time. This way, if they get stuck, they can come back to it later and at least they have other puzzles to play in the meantime. It's my opinion, however, that this new flow design doesn't make the game as fun as the original flow design where the player has to complete a puzzle before moving to the next. To me, it's like anything else, when you only have one of something, it's more enjoyable, but when you have 30 of something, it's far less enjoyable. In fact, when I present the user with 30 puzzles to choose from, I'm concerned I might be making them feel like it's a lot of work they have to do and that's bad. I even had a tester voluntarily tell me that being forced to complete a puzzle before moving to the next is actually motivating. My questions are... Do you agree/disagree? Do you have any suggestions for how I can help the player get unstuck? Thanks so much in advance for your thoughts! EDIT: I should mention that I've already considered a few other solutions to helping the user get unstuck, but none of them seem like good ideas. They are... Add more hints: Currently, the user gets two hints per puzzle. If I increase the hint count, it only makes the game more easy and still leaves the possibility of the user getting stuck. Add a "Show Solution" button: This seems like a bad idea because it's my opinion this takes the fun out of the game for many people who would probably otherwise solve the puzzle if they didn't have the quick option to see the solution.

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• Trying to use stencils in 2D while retaining layer depth

  - by Steve

  This is a screen of what's going on just so you can get a frame of reference. http://i935.photobucket.com/albums/ad199/fobwashed/tilefloors.png The problem I'm running into is that my game is slowing down due to the amount of texture swapping I'm doing during my draw call. Since walls, characters, floors, and all objects are on their respective sprite sheet containing those types, per tile draw, the loaded texture is swapping no less than 3 to 5+ times as it cycles and draws the sprites in order to layer properly. Now, I've tried throwing all common objects together into their respective lists, and then using layerDepth drawing them that way which makes things a lot better, but the new problem I'm running into has to do with the way my doors/windows are drawn on walls. Namely, I was using stencils to clear out a block on the walls that are drawn in the shape of the door/window so that when the wall would draw, it would have a door/window sized hole in it. This is the way my draw was set up for walls when I was going tile by tile rather than grouped up common objects. first it would check to see if a door/window was on this wall. If not, it'd skip all the steps and just draw normally. Otherwise end the current spriteBatch Clear the buffers with a transparent color to preserve what was already drawn start a new spritebatch with stencil settings draw the door area end the spriteBatch start a new spritebatch that takes into account the previously set stencil draw the wall which will now be drawn with a hole in it end that spritebatch start a new spritebatch with the normal settings to continue drawing tiles In the tile by tile draw, clearing the depth/stencil buffers didn't matter since I wasn't using any layerDepth to organize what draws on top of what. Now that I'm drawing from lists of common objects rather than tile by tile, it has sped up my draw call considerably but I can't seem to figure out a way to keep the stencil system to mask out the area a door or window will be drawn into a wall. The root of the problem is that when I end a spriteBatch to change the DepthStencilState, it flattens the current RenderTarget and there is no longer any depth sorting for anything drawn further down the line. This means walls always get drawn on top of everything regardless of depth or positioning in the game world and even on top of each other as the stencil has to happen once for every wall that has a door or window. Does anyone know of a way to get around this? To boil it down, I need a way to draw having things sorted by layer depth while also being able to stencil/mask out portions of specific sprites.

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