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• SnapBird Supercharges Your Twitter Searches

  - by ETC

  Twitter’s default search tool is a bit anemic. If you want to supercharge your Twitter search, fire up web-based search tool SnapBird and dig into your past tweets as well as those of friends and followers. Yesterday I was trying to find a tweet I’d sent some time last year regarding my search for an application that could count keystrokes for inclusion in my review of the app I finally found to fulfill the need, KeyCounter. Searching for it with Twitter’s search tool yielded nothing. One simple search at SnapBird and I nailed it. SnapBird requires no authentication to search public tweets (both your own and those of your friends and follows) but does require authentication in order to search through your sent and received direct messages. SnapBird is a free service. SnapBird Latest Features How-To Geek ETC Internet Explorer 9 RC Now Available: Here’s the Most Interesting New Stuff Here’s a Super Simple Trick to Defeating Fake Anti-Virus Malware How to Change the Default Application for Android Tasks Stop Believing TV’s Lies: The Real Truth About "Enhancing" Images The How-To Geek Valentine’s Day Gift Guide Inspire Geek Love with These Hilarious Geek Valentines MyPaint is an Open-Source Graphics App for Digital Painters Can the Birds and Pigs Really Be Friends in the End? [Angry Birds Video] Add the 2D Version of the New Unity Interface to Ubuntu 10.10 and 11.04 MightyMintyBoost Is a 3-in-1 Gadget Charger Watson Ties Against Human Jeopardy Opponents Peaceful Tropical Cavern Wallpaper

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• Applying to a company while personally working on a comparable project

  - by Developer Art

  That's going to be an unusual question but here it goes. I'm entertaining the thought to send my docs to a place which develops a large web project of a social type. Social meaning people, communities, interaction and all that usual stuff. The issue is that I myself am working on something that falls into the category of social in my private time. Now the question. Is it wise to apply there under these circumstances? I think there may be issues of intellectual ownership if I develop something similar that exists or will exist in that company's work. On the other hand, the web of full of social places (even this site is one of them), many of them utilize the same ideas and move in the same direction and it seems to work for everyone. It's hard to come up with something which hasn't been tried yet by somebody else so it's all basically reuse of the commonly available ideas and experience. What I'm working on is not a functional equivalent, it's rather largely off. There may be some intersections, but on a large scale this is not an equivalent. And whatever features might coincide, they already exist everywhere on the web anyway. Also technology stacks are entirely different so the issue with directly copying out parts of the code is probably not applicable. I plan to say it up front that I'm engaged in a personal project of mine and let them see if it represents a problem for them. What do you think? Am I making things up or is there really an issue?

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• canvas tile grid, hover effects, single tilesheet, etc

  - by user121730

  I'm currently in the process of building both the client and server side of an html5, canvas, and WebSocket game. This is what I have thus far for the client: http://jsfiddle.net/dDmTf/7/ Current obstacles The hover effect has no idea what to put back after the mouse leaves. Currently it's just drawing a "void" tile, but I can't figure out how to redraw a single tile without redrawing the whole map. How would I go about storing multiple layers within the map variable? I was considering just using a multi-dimensional array for each layer (similar to what you see as the current array), and just iterating through it, but is that really an efficient way of doing it? Side note The tile sheet being used for the jsfiddle display is only for development. I'll be replacing it as things progress in the engine. I hope you can help! Hopefully you guys can help me, I've been struggling to get through things, since I'm learning how things kind of stuff works as I go. If you guys have any pointers for my JavaScript, feel free. As I'm more or less learning advanced usage as I go, I'm sure I'm doing plenty of things wrong. Note: I will continue to update this post as the engine improves, but updating the jsfiddle link and updating the obstacles list by striking things that have been solved, or adding additions. Thanks!

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• Every file on cPanel got deleted (then restored hours later), and I have no idea why

  - by mcranston18

  I apologize in advance if I don't provide proper detail; I am new to server stuff and am looking for general advice about this issue: I was helping out a client doing web design last month. They have about a dozen static sites on one server. The sites are all built on Joomla, except one which I built on Wordpress. Everything was working fine last month when we did the redesign but all of a sudden this morning, every single file on their server got deleted: every web page, file, and all e-mail addresses. I phoned the hosting company (alliancewww.com) to ask, "why did every single file suddenly delete off the server?" They said, "because someone must have deleted it." I said, "well no one did." (Which I'm pretty damn sure no one did.) They said, "you can pay us to look into the problem." I authorized $150 for them to look into the problem. About an hour later, everything was magically re-instated. The host said they had a back-up of everything and just restored everything. What I'm wondering: Does anyone have recommendations of logs I can go through to investigate how the files got deleted in the first place? I've checked out their cPanel logs but found nothing. Is it likely that this is a mess-up on the host's part?

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• Are webhosts that require NS instead of a CNAME common?

  - by billpg

  I've just signed up with a webhost (which I prefer not to name) and I'm reasonably happy with it. The only nit was when I was ready to put a site online and I asked the support line to what name I should point my 'www' CNAME to. They responded that they don't do that and I need to set my domain's NS records for the hosting to work. "Why would you ever want to do it that way? Our service to you includes DNS and our servers are probably much better than the one your registrar provides." This was a bit of surprise as all of the other webhosts I've worked with happily support this. I've set up (eg) gallery.myfriend.example for friends by having them configure their DNS to CNAME 'gallery' to the name of a shared server at a webhost and the webhost does name-based hosting for 'gallery.myfriend.example'. (Of course, if the webhost ever tells me I'm being moved from A.webhost.example to B.webhost.example, it would be my responsibility to change where the CNAME points. Really good webhosts would instead create myname.webhost.example for the IP of whichever server my stuff happens to be on, so I'd never have to worry about keeping my CNAME up to date.) Is my impression correct, that most webhosts will happily support a service that begins with a CNAME hosted elsewhere, or is it really more common that webhosts will only provide a service if they control the DNS service too?

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• How to tell your boss that he's a bad programmer? [closed]

  - by Doe

  Possible Duplicate: How to tell your boss that his programming style is really bad? There was a question about the boss having a bad programming style (weird booleans, empty loops, etc.) Having a bad/weird style does not imply being a bad programmer, but my situation is different. My boss outputs some really nasty code for the project, on which we are working together (just two of us). Examples: functions that span over several screens (big screens - 1900 x 1200) Deeply nested Conditional and Loop statements (up to 10 levels!!) Too much static variables, singletons, and both (singleton class with all the methods and members also static) Sometimes the code committed to the version control system does not even compile! Copy-Paste code instead of separating it into an independent function. Fail all the deadlines. "This's [C#|Java|Python] it shouldn't be efficient, that's why we loop all over the haystack to find the needle." "This's C/C++, it's fast enough to loop all over the haystack to find the needle." There is much more to mention... But the worst is that I have to redo much of the stuff he does, my code, which I try to keep clean is often polluted with above-mentioned atrocities. He's reaching 30 soon, so all his skills are established, and I don't even know if it's possible to change something. I like the project, but sometimes I just want to quit...

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• proper way to creation multiple similiar buttons/panels

  - by JayAvon

  I have the below Code which i tried to do, but it only shows(the minus/plus button) on the last GirdLayout (Intelligence stat): JButton plusButton = new JButton("+"); JButton minusButton = new JButton("-"); statStrengthGridPanel = new JPanel(new GridLayout(1,3)); statStrengthGridPanel.add(minusButton); statStrengthGridPanel.add(new JLabel("10")); statStrengthGridPanel.add(plusButton); statConstitutionGridPanel = new JPanel(new GridLayout(1,3)); statConstitutionGridPanel.add(minusButton); statConstitutionGridPanel.add(new JLabel("10")); statConstitutionGridPanel.add(plusButton); statDexterityGridPanel = new JPanel(new GridLayout(1,3)); statDexterityGridPanel.add(minusButton); statDexterityGridPanel.add(new JLabel("10")); statDexterityGridPanel.add(plusButton); statIntelligenceGridPanel = new JPanel(new GridLayout(1,3)); statIntelligenceGridPanel.add(minusButton); statIntelligenceGridPanel.add(new JLabel("10")); statIntelligenceGridPanel.add(plusButton); I know I can do something like I did for the Panel names(have multiple ones), but I did not want to do that for the Panels in the first place. I am trying to use best practice and not have my code be repetitive. Any suggestions?? The goal is to have 4 stats, to assign points to, with decrement and increment buttons(I decided against sliders). Eventually I will have them have upper and lower limits, decrement the "unused" label, and all of that good stuff, but I just want to not be repetitive. Thanks for any help.

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• Microsoft releases Visual Studio 2010 SP1

  - by brian_ritchie

  Microsoft has been beta testing SP1 since December of last year.  Today, it was released to MSDN subscribers and will be available for public download on March 10, 2011.The service pack includes a slew of fixes, and a number of new features: Silverlight 4 supportBasic Unit Testing support for the .NET Framework 3.5Performance Wizard for SilverlightIntelliTrace for 64-bit and SharePointIIS Express supportSQL CE 4 supportRazor supportHTML5 and CSS3 support (IntelliSense and validation)WCF RIA Services V1 SP1 includedVisual Basic Runtime embeddingALM Improvements Of all the improvements, IIS Express probably has the largest impact on web developer productivity.  According to Scott Gu, it provides the following:It’s lightweight and easy to install (less than 10Mb download and a super quick install)It does not require an administrator account to run/debug applications from Visual Studio It enables a full web-server feature set – including SSL, URL Rewrite, Media Support, and all other IIS 7.x modules It supports and enables the same extensibility model and web.config file settings that IIS 7.x support It can be installed side-by-side with the full IIS web server as well as the ASP.NET Development Server (they do not conflict at all) It works on Windows XP and higher operating systems – giving you a full IIS 7.x developer feature-set on all OS platforms IIS Express (like the ASP.NET Development Server) can be quickly launched to run a site from a directory on disk.  It does not require any registration/configuration steps. This makes it really easy to launch and run for development scenarios.Good stuff indeed.  This will make our lives much easier.  Thanks Microsoft...we're feeling the love!  

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• Can't use SFML sprite drawing and OpenGL rendering at the same time

  - by Ken

  I'm using some SFML built in functions to draw sprites and text as an overlay on top of some OpenGL rending in an SFML RenderWindow. The opengl rendering appears fine until I add the code to draw the sprites or text. The sprite or text drawing causes the OpenGL stuff to disappear. The follow code show what I'm trying to do sf::RenderWindow window(sf::VideoMode(viewport.width,viewport.height,32), "SFML Window"); glMatrixMode(GL_PROJECTION); glLoadIdentity(); glOrtho(0,viewport.width,0,viewport.height,0,1); while (window.pollEvent(Event)) { //event handling... //begin drawing glClear(GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT | GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT); glBegin(GL_TRIANGLES); glColor3f(col.x,col.y,col.z); for(int i=0;i<3;i++) glVertex2f(pos.x+verts[i].x,pos.y+verts[i].y); glEnd(); // adding this line causes all the previous opengl triangles not to appear window.draw("Sometext"); window.display(); }

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• Internet Timeouts with TP-Link TL-WN821N v2 wireless usb stick

  - by user1622959

  A short time after accessing the internet, the browser/download times out. Before the timeout, the internet works OK briefly; afterwards, the wireless is still connected with a strong signal, but every internet access results in a timeout. When I leave the PC for a while, the internet is back just to timeout again as soon as I start using it. The same happens when I reconnect to the router. Also, when I surf the internet, it takes a couple of minutes until the timeout, but when I download something, it times out in a matter of seconds. The wireless adapter works just fine in Windows and internet via ethernet cable works just fine in Ubuntu. Does anyone have the same problem or knows a solution. I use Ubuntu 12.10 x64. The problem occurs since I installed ubuntu (which was a few days ago). Here some stuff that might be usefull: serus@serus-Ubuntu-PC:~$ lsusb Bus 002 Device 002: ID 0cf3:1002 Atheros Communications, Inc. TP-Link TL-WN821N v2 802.11n [Atheros AR9170] serus@serus-Ubuntu-PC:~$ lsmod Module Size Used by carl9170 82083 0 serus@serus-Ubuntu-PC:~$ modinfo carl9170 filename: /lib/modules/3.5.0-21- generic/kernel/drivers/net/wireless/ath/carl9170/carl9170.ko alias: arusb_lnx alias: ar9170usb firmware: carl9170-1.fw description: Atheros AR9170 802.11n USB wireless serus@serus-Ubuntu-PC:~$ iwconfig wlan0 IEEE 802.11bgn ESSID:"virginmedia0137463" Mode:Managed Frequency:2.462 GHz Access Point: A0:21:B7:F8:29:B6 Bit Rate=240 Mb/s Tx-Power=20 dBm Retry long limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off Power Management:off Link Quality=66/70 Signal level=-44 dBm Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0 Tx excessive retries:1399 Invalid misc:18 Missed beacon:0 serus@serus-Ubuntu-PC:~$ sudo lshw -C network *-network description: Wireless interface physical id: 1 bus info: usb@2:2 logical name: wlan0 serial: 00:27:19:bb:00:19 capabilities: ethernet physical wireless configuration: broadcast=yes driver=carl9170 driverversion=3.5.0-21-generic firmware=1.9.4 ip=192.168.0.6 link=yes multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11bgn

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• Is it a must to focus on one specific IT subject to be succesful?

  - by Ahmet Yildirim

  Lately I'm deeply disturbed by the thought that I'm still not devoted to one specific IT subject after so many years of doing it as a hobby. I've been in so many different IT related hobbies since I was 12. I have spent 8 years and now I'm 20 and just finished freshman year at Computer Eng. Just to summarize the variety: 3D Game Dev. and Modelling (Acknex, Irrlicht , OpenGL, GLES, 3DSMAX) Mobile App.Dev (Symbian, Maemo, Android) Electronis (Arduino) Web.Dev. (PHP, MYSQL, Javascript, Jquery, RaphaelJS, Canvas, Flash etc.) Computer Vision (OpenCV) I need to start making money. But I'm having problem to pick the correct IT business to do so. Is it a problem to have interest in so many different IT subjects?(in business world) I'm having a lot of fun by doing all those stuff from time to time. Other than making money I also noticed that having so many different interests is lowering my productivity. But I'm still having difficulty to pick one. I'm feeling close to all those subjects (time to time).

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• Coordinate spaces and transformation matrices

  - by Belgin

  I'm trying to get an object from object space, into projected space using these intermediate matrices: The first matrix (I) is the one that transforms from object space into inertial space, but since my object is not rotated or translated in any way inside the object space, this matrix is the 4x4 identity matrix. The second matrix (W) is the one that transforms from inertial space into world space, which is just a scale transform matrix of factor a = 14.1 on all coordinates, since the inertial space origin coincides with the world space origin. /a 0 0 0\ W = |0 a 0 0| |0 0 a 0| \0 0 0 1/ The third matrix (C) is the one that transforms from world space, into camera space. This matrix is a translation matrix with a translation of (0, 0, 10), because I want the camera to be located behind the object, so the object must be positioned 10 units into the z axis. /1 0 0 0\ C = |0 1 0 0| |0 0 1 10| \0 0 0 1/ And finally, the fourth matrix is the projection matrix (P). Bearing in mind that the eye is at the origin of the world space and the projection plane is defined by z = 1, the projection matrix is: /1 0 0 0\ P = |0 1 0 0| |0 0 1 0| \0 0 1/d 0/ where d is the distance from the eye to the projection plane, so d = 1. I'm multiplying them like this: (((P x C) x W) x I) x V, where V is the vertex' coordinates in column vector form: /x\ V = |y| |z| \1/ After I get the result, I divide x and y coordinates by w to get the actual screen coordinates. Apparenly, I'm doing something wrong or missing something completely here, because it's not rendering properly. Here's a picture of what is supposed to be the bottom side of the Stanford Dragon: Also, I should add that this is a software renderer so no DirectX or OpenGL stuff here.

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• Setting up a shared media drive

  - by Sam Brightman

  I want to have a shared media drive be transparently usable to all users, whilst also sticking to FHS and Ubuntu standards. The former takes priority if necessary. I currently mount it at /media/Stuff but /media is supposed to be for external media, I believe. The main issue is setting permissions so that access to read and write to the drive can be granted to multiple users working within the same directories. InstallingANewHardDrive seems both slightly confused and not what I want. It claims that this sets ownership for the top-level directory (despite the recursion flag): sudo chown -R USERNAME:USERNAME /media/mynewdrive And that this will let multiple users create files and sub-directories but only delete their own: sudo chgrp plugdev /media/mynewdrive sudo chmod g+w /media/mynewdrive sudo chmod +t /media/mynewdrive However, the group writeable bit does not seem to get inherited, which is troublesome for keeping things organised (prevents creation inside sub-folders originally made by another user). The sticky bit is probably also unwanted for the same reason, although currently it seems that one userA (perhaps the owner of the mount-point?) can delete the userB's files, but not vice-versa. This is fine, as long as userB can create files inside the directory of userA. So: What is the correct mount point? Is plugdev the correct group? Most importantly, how to set up permissions to maintain an organised media drive? I do not want to be running cron jobs to set permissions regularly!

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• Making efficeint voxel engines using "chunks"

  - by Wardy

  Concept I'm currently looking in to how voxel engines work with a view to possibly making one myself. I see a lot of stuff like this ... https://sites.google.com/site/letsmakeavoxelengine/home/chunks ... which talks about how to go about reducing the draw calls. What I can't seem to understand is how it actually saves draw call counts on the basis of the logic being something like this ... Without chunks foreach voxel in myvoxels DrawIfVisible() With Chunks foreach chunk in mychunks DrawIfVisible() which then does ... foreach voxel in myvoxels DrawIfVisible() So surely you saved nothing ?!?! You still make a draw call for each visible voxel do you not? A visible voxel needs a draw call in either scenario. The only real saving I can see is that the logic that evaluates a chunk will be able to determine if a large number of voxels are visible or not effectively saving a bit of "is this chunk visible" cpu time. But it's the draw calls that interest me ... The fewer of those, the faster the application. EDIT: In case it makes any difference I will probably be using XNA (DX not OpenGL) for my engine so don't consider my choice of example in the link above my choice of technology. But this question is such that I doubt it would matter.

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• General List of Common Programming Errors

  - by javamonkey79

  As one journey's from apprentice to journeyman to master I've noticed that one accumulates a list of best practices for things they've been bitten by. Personally, I write most of my stuff in java & SQL so my list tends to be slated towards them. I've accumulated the following: When doing list removal, always reverse iterate Avoid adding items to a list you are currently iterating on Watch out for NullPointerExceptions Now, I know there are language specific "common errors" links out there like this one. And I'm also aware of the pragmatic programmer tips, Martin Fowler's "code smells". Does anyone know of any good lists out there of things like I've listed above (re: list removal, adding items, etc). My guess is that there are some good QA folks out there that can probably throw me a bone here. I'm not looking for things the compiler can catch - I'm looking for common things that cause bugs. In the event that there isn't a list out there already then I welcome posting your own findings here. Thanks in advance!

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• How to adjust the appearance of the Unity in 12.10?

  - by piedro

  Now I updated to 12.10 and would like to adjust the desktop, well unity, appearance. I know there is the theme setting, but I cannot adjust the symbol theme or windows decoration with the systemsettings. I used to use the tool "unsettings" but it doesn't work with 12.10 anymore. Ubuntu Tweak used to be an option but at this point many features are broken and a lot of settings seem to mess up my system or they don't change anything at all (I understand that there has been a design settings change - gsettings, dconf, something ...) myunity has some options to change stuff but I couldn't find it for 12.10 ... not to forget "gnome-tweak-tool" which seems to work for most settings but not for all, e.g. it doesn't change the mouse cursor and the windows decorations do not show some decorations I'd like to use and I am also afraid of messing things up because it is supposed to be used in gnomeshell ... actually as I found out right now it really messes things up: fonts get inverted, suddenly high contrast accessibility setings are used in some windows, nautilus has white fonts on white background and even the login manager is a mess now ... So: How can I adjust the theme, symbol, decorations, fonts for the normal user and for the desktop and for the applications including the applications started as sudo user? I should mention that I upgraded from 12.04 and that some applications like synaptic completely ignore any settings ... sadly it is a mess, there was a time when gnome theming was really well done and very adjustable, I wonder what happened ... Just now I read that further development of Ubuntu Tweak has been stopped. The developer announced that he won't go any further with the software and the online services ... That is sad and destroys my hope for easy appearance editing just by waiting ... has been such a nice tool for 12.04 ... r.i.p.

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• System wide Proxy settings when on a windows network with a password

  - by sav

  I'm using Ubuntu on a windows network. I want to connect to the world wide web. I have followed the steps here which I have found very useful. However when I try to ping a website (eg: ping www.wikipedia.org) I get no reply. I can ping local computers on my network, but I need to go through our proxy to get to the world wide web. I can even browse wikipedia using firefox, I just needed to enter the proxy configuration script location and my username and password. I'm quite sure the reason I'm having this trouble is because I havn't entered a username and password. I'm not sure how to do this on a system wide level. ultimately I would like to be able to use package managers like synaptic but first I need them to be able to connect to the internet. EDIT As sugested I created a /etc/apt/apt.conf file like Acquire::http::Proxy "http://chrisav:[email protected]:8080"; Acquire::https::Proxy "https://chrisav:[email protected]:8080"; Acquire::ftp::Proxy "ftp://chrisav:[email protected]:8080"; Acquire::socks::Proxy "socks://chrisav:[email protected]:8080"; However I still cant ping wikipedia when I try installing stuff I get chris@chris-Ubuntu:~$ sudo apt-get install kate Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done E: Unable to locate package kate

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• How to fix the “Live INT automatically logs out”

  - by ybbest

  Problem: Live INT environment automatically logs out I am trying to setup the Authentication with Windows Live ID and followed this blog post ; I have a problem logging in to live INT web site. Whenever I try to log in (https://login.live-int.com/login.srf  this is the internal Live environment to be used in a dev. environment.), after entering valid email/password I get redirected to the logout page. I tried 2 different accounts (one with existing email address, and other one with newly created @hotmail-int.com address) and 3 different browsers so I’m sure that neither account nor the browser are the cause of this. I also tried to enter wrong password, and in that case I get the message that the password is wrong. Solution: All you need is the unique ID in order to add the user to SharePoint , you can get the ID without logging into the Live INT environment. I think the Live internal environment is not working correctly for some reasons , the reason I need to login to the Live internal environment is that I need to get the unique ID for the test account so that I can add the user to SharePoint. All the blogs I have come across require you to login in order to get the unique ID. However, I figured out another way of getting the unique ID without logging in. Steps are below: Register a new test account in the Live internal environment. Go to the SharePoint site collection that has  Live ID authentication enabled and select the LiveID INT(it will be different as you could name it differently when you set up the authentication provider) from the dropdown. Try login using the Internal Live account, you will get an Access Denied Error as below showing your  unique ID for the test account. Add that account to your SharePoint Group, boom, it works. I hope it will help anyone who needs to do this stuff in the future.

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• Review of TechEd 2012 - so far

  - by Stefan Barrett

  Disclaimer: probably going to next years TechEd.  (but not 100% sure) As with most TechEd's, this is not one of the best - but it's not bad.  Some impressions so far: The food is not bad, through perhaps not as much choice as in previous years.  The snacks, while a bit limited, are at least available.  The alumni lounge is ok, through perhaps not as good as last years.  Wifi is a bit worse than previous years - not really working in the big room, and a bit sporadic in the rest of the building. The device seems to make a big difference - the iPad seems to connect the easiest, while the iPhone & Lumia 800 are really struggling.  The real problem is the content - not as developer focused as in previous years.  This shows up in a number of different ways, for example while there is a visual studio booth, there is not much sign of anybody from the language teams.  This is one of few TechEd's where I don't feel very surprised about anything - seen most of the developer stuff in previews. One example where I was surprised was the pre-conf on c++ - its been years since I did any c++, but based on that session perhaps I should start again. While there are sessions, I'm not finding my schedule very challenged. For each time-slot there only seems to 1, or rarely 2, interesting sessions.  The focus seems to be on windows 8, Azure and the phone, which while interesting (might give win8 a go), are not enough.

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• What is a Coding Dojo?

  - by huwyss

  Recently i found out that there is a thing called "coding dojo". The point behind it is that software developers want to have a space to learn new stuff like processes, methods, coding details, languages, and whatnot in an environment without stress. Just for fun. No competition. No results required. No deadlines.Some days ago I joined the Zurich coding dojo. We were three programmers with different backgrounds.We gave ourselves the task to develop a method that takes an input value and returns its prime factors. We did pair programming and every few minutes we switched positions. We used test driven development. The chosen programming language was Ruby.I haven't really done TDD before. It was pretty interesting to see the algorithm develop following the testcases.We started with the first test input=1 then developed the most simple productive program that passed this very first test. Then we added the next test input=2 and implemented the productive code. We kept adding tests and made sure all tests are passed until we had the general solution.When we improved the performance of our code we saw the value of the tests we wrote before. Of course our first performance improvement broke several tests.It was a very interesting experience to see how other developers think and how they work. I will participate at the dojo again and can warmly recommend it to anyone. There are  coding dojos all over the world.Have fun!

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• What payment gateways do real customers really use when given the choice?

  - by ??????

  I would like to give customers the option of paying however they can whether that be through a proper gateway (e.g. SagePay) or through something else such as PayPal, Amazon Checkout or Google Checkout. Personally I have not bought anything through the Amazon Checkout except for on Amazon.co.uk and my PayPal buys have been limited. As for Google Checkout I have no idea what that is or how it works from a consumer perspective. I understand that people buying from smaller sites are happier to pay by PayPal as they have an account already and trust PayPal. As for Amazon Payments and Google Checkout, do people actually use them if given the choice? There are a lot of people on Kindles these days, happy to buy stuff via Amazon on their Kindle. Would Amazon Payments make sense to this growing crowd? With too many payment gateways on offer it might be confusing at the checkout. Does anyone know if this is a problem for genuine customers? I also have not seen many 'pay by Amazon Payments' icons on websites (you see PayPal all the time). Does advertising the fact that you can pay by Amazon Payments increase sales, e.g. to Kindle owners that have a nebulous book-buying account that 'their other half doesn't know about'?

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• Should we test all our methods?

  - by Zenzen

  So today I had a talk with my teammate about unit testing. The whole thing started when he asked me "hey, where are the tests for that class, I see only one?". The whole class was a manager (or a service if you prefer to call it like that) and almost all the methods were simply delegating stuff to a DAO so it was similar to: SomeClass getSomething(parameters) { return myDao.findSomethingBySomething(parameters); } A kind of boilerplate with no logic (or at least I do not consider such simple delegation as logic) but a useful boilerplate in most cases (layer separation etc.). And we had a rather lengthy discussion whether or not I should unit test it (I think that it is worth mentioning that I did fully unit test the DAO). His main arguments being that it was not TDD (obviously) and that someone might want to see the test to check what this method does (I do not know how it could be more obvious) or that in the future someone might want to change the implementation and add new (or more like "any") logic to it (in which case I guess someone should simply test that logic). This made me think, though. Should we strive for the highest test coverage %? Or is it simply an art for art's sake then? I simply do not see any reason behind testing things like: getters and setters (unless they actually have some logic in them) "boilerplate" code Obviously a test for such a method (with mocks) would take me less than a minute but I guess that is still time wasted and a millisecond longer for every CI. Are there any rational/not "flammable" reasons to why one should test every single (or as many as he can) line of code?

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• GeForce and Radeon: what is present condition of opensource and proprietary drivers?

  - by Septagram

  So, it'm about to buy a fresh videocard. Since I do most of my stuff on Linux, I wonder how well will either videocard perform. I recently had a good experience with GeForce 6600 with proprietary drivers and a less than satisfactory experience with Radeon 9000 a while ago. From my experience, proprietary drivers for GeForce used to work very well, while proprietary drivers for Radeon failed miserably. And opensource drivers were sloooow. A few months ago I found out that ATI opened their specifications, and a work on fully featured opensource driver is in progress. I prefer to use free software whenever possible, with the exception of games, so, if that driver is fast enough, feature-rich enough and reliable enough I'd very much like to try it out. I wish I could say that if I can just to basic things, like watch video, heavily use compiz and work with simple applications, this may be enough. I do most of my gaming under Windows anyway. However, there is a good chance I'll go into indie game development in a few months fulltime, so it should also be able to run not-so-very-demanding games (say Nexuiz). But if it isn't, I'd like to know, what to expect from proprietary drivers. Do recent proprietary drivers from NVIDIA and ATI work well? Are ATI drivers just as easy to install on Ubuntu as are NVIDIA drivers?

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• Learning node.js

  - by john smith

  I am not sure if this is the right place to ask but, I thought this was the most suitable. I recently graduated from university. Learned the full php stack; basically all the LAMP stuff, obviously without counting all the other subjects. Not even got my degree and this whole node.js booming out of nowhere. You can imagine how one can feel about this, the story is always the same: you never end learning, and studying. So I recently got my hands on node.js; reading books, tutorials, and everything imaginable on the internet. The problem is one and simple: this is nowhere near to having a teacher standing near you helping you understanding and solving your problems, especially when all you can do is post your doubts on a website and patiently wait for replies. It's not that it isn't good, it's just much slower than what I just expressed above. So, in short words: is there a place where one can find someone willing to teach you about such contents? This would obviously done via remote means, like skype and such. Can anyone here point me into the right direction? Or just downvote me for being in the wrong website? Thanks in advance.

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• Can too much abstraction be bad?

  - by m3th0dman

  As programmers I feel that our goal is to provide good abstractions on the given domain model and business logic. But where should this abstraction stop? How to make the trade-off between abstraction and all it's benefits (flexibility, ease of changing etc.) and ease of understanding the code and all it's benefits. I believe I tend to write code overly abstracted and I don't know how good is it; I often tend to write it like it is some kind of a micro-framework, which consists of two parts: Micro-Modules which are hooked up in the micro-framework: these modules are easy to be understood, developed and maintained as single units. This code basically represents the code that actually does the functional stuff, described in requirements. Connecting code; now here I believe stands the problem. This code tends to be complicated because it is sometimes very abstracted and is hard to be understood at the beginning; this arises due to the fact that it is only pure abstraction, the base in reality and business logic being performed in the code presented 1; from this reason this code is not expected to be changed once tested. Is this a good approach at programming? That it, having changing code very fragmented in many modules and very easy to be understood and non-changing code very complex from the abstraction POV? Should all the code be uniformly complex (that is code 1 more complex and interlinked and code 2 more simple) so that anybody looking through it can understand it in a reasonable amount of time but change is expensive or the solution presented above is good, where "changing code" is very easy to be understood, debugged, changed and "linking code" is kind of difficult. Note: this is not about code readability! Both code at 1 and 2 is readable, but code at 2 comes with more complex abstractions while code 1 comes with simple abstractions.

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