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• DOAG 2012 and Educause 2012

  - by Chris Kawalek

  Oracle understands the value of desktop virtualization and how customers have really embraced it as a top tier method to deliver access to applications and data. Just as supporting operating systems other than Windows in the enterprise desktop space started to become necessary perhaps 5-7 years ago, supporting desktop virtualization with VDI, application virtualization, thin clients, and tablet access is becoming necessary today in 2012. Any application strategy needs to have a secure mobile component, and a solution that gives you a holistic strategy across both mobile and fixed-asset (i.e., desktop PCs) devices is crucial to success. This means it's probably useful to learn about desktop virtualization, even if it's not in your typical area of responsibility. A good way to do that is at one of the many trade shows where we exhibit. Here are two examples:  DOAG 2012 Conference + Exhibition The DOAG Conference is fast approaching, starting November 20th in Nuremberg, Germany. If you've been reading this blog for a while, you might remember that we attended last year as well. This conference is fantastic for us because we get to speak directly to users of Oracle products. In many cases, those DBAs, IT managers, and other infrastructure folks are looking for ways to deal with the burgeoning BYOD model, as well as ways of streamlining their standard desktop and access technologies. We have a couple of sessions where you can learn a great deal about how Oracle can help with these points. Session Schedule (look under "Infrastruktur & Hardware") The two sessions focused on desktop virtualization are: Oracle VDI Best Practice unter Linux (Oracle VDI Best Practice Under Linux) Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Implementierungen und Praxiserfahrungen (Virtual Desktop Infrastructures Implementations and Best Practices) We will also have experts on hand at the booth to answer your questions on using desktop virtualization. If you're at the show, please stop by and say hello to our team there! Educause 2012  Another good example is Educause. We've gone the last few years to show off a slough of education oriented applications and capabilities in the Oracle product portfolio. And every year, we display those applications through Oracle desktop virtualization. This means the demonstration can easily be setup ahead of time and replicated out to however many "demo pods" that we have available. There's no need for our product teams to setup individual laptops for demos -- we can display a standardized Windows desktop virtual machine with their apps all ready to go on a whole bunch of devices like your standard trade show laptop, our Sun Ray Clients, and iPad. Educause 2012 just wrapped, so we're sorry we missed you this year. But there is always next year! Until then, here are a few pictures from this year's show: You can also watch this video to see how Catholic Education Australia uses Oracle Secure Global Desktop to help cope with the ever changing ways that people access their applications.  -Chris 

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• Time calculation between openGL update calls.

  - by Vijayendra

  In XNA, the system calls update and draw function with the time information. This contains information such as how much time has passed since last update was called. This makes easy to integrate time and do animation calculation accordingly. But I dont see any such mechanism in openGL. I see openGL requires programmers to have their own implementation which could be buggy or inefficient. Is there any standard (and efficient) code that demonstrate this practice in openGL?

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• Has any hobbyist attempted to make a simple VGA-graphics based operating system in machine code?

  - by Bigyellow Bastion

  I mean real bare bones, bare machine here(no Linux kernel, pre-existing kernel, or any bootloader). I mean honestly write the bootloading software in direct microarchitecture-specific machine opcode, host the operating system, interrupts, I/O, services, and graphical software and all hardware interaction, computation, and design entirely in binary. I know this is quite the leap here, but I was thinking to practice first in x86 assembly (not binary) 16-bit style. Any ideas?

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• Fokedvenc BI és DW blogjaim 7: Oracle Data Warehousing

  - by Fekete Zoltán

  A következo tartalmas blogot ajánlom a nyájas olvasó figyelmébe: The Data Warehouse Insider: http://blogs.oracle.com/datawarehousing/ Az adattárház általános fogalmaitól és a bevezetések és tervezés "best practice" legjobb gyakorlati tapasztalatokig. Témák: csillagsémák, particionálás, OLAP, 3NF, párhuzamos feldolgozások, adatbetöltés, ETL-ELT, adatmodellek, rendezvények, Exadata, Database Machine, tömörítés, adatbányászat, ügyféltörténetek,...

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• Oracle Certification Exam Strategies

  - by Paul Sorensen

  We ran across an article from the Transcender team that provides some great tips and strategies for taking Oracle Certification exams from the Trancender team. Transcender - along with Self Test Software, are official providers of Oracle Certification practice tests, and have many options available to help you prepare for your actual exam. Their recent article "Oracle Exam Strategies" has a number of good tips for which anyone preparing to take an exam should find useful. Thanks,QUICK LINKS:Oracle Certification Web SiteOracle Certification: Steps To Become CertifiedOracle Certification: Preparation Strategies

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• Easy Steps to Make Money Flipping Websites

  To make money flipping websites is the practice of buying a domain and then reselling it at a profit. The process is transparent and as uncomplicated as it sounds. The only difficult thing about this technique is packing value into the website so that the money you stand to earn will be enough to keep you comfortable while the person moves on to developing another site. This is not an ideal option to make money for newbies in Internet marketing though.

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• Is there a tool that allows site users to schedule meetings with each other? [closed]

  - by Andrew Min

  I'm the webmaster for a debate team, and we're trying to find a tool that allows us to have multiple team members say when they're available and see who else is available during those timeslots for one-on-one practice rounds. I suppose we could use something like Doodle, but that would involve recreating the Doodle every week. There are many scheduling tools available, but they're usually built so that you can sign up to meet with a specific individual (think a doctor or a professor's office hours), whereas you could be paired with ANY individual.

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• Infix vs Prefix Notation - Which do you prefer?

  - by Jetti

  I have been learning Clojure and looking at Scheme and CL which introduced me to the world of prefix notation. At first I didn't like it but it is still starting to grow on me. To be honest though, there are still long calculations that are difficult for me to understand but I think that is an issue of me needing more exposure/practice and I'll get it. But that leads me to the question: Which type of notation do you prefer and why?

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• Outlying DBAs

  - by steveh99999

  Read an interesting book recently, ‘Outliers – the story of success’ by Malcolm Gladwell. There’s a good synopsis of the book here on wikipedia. I don’t want to write in detailed review of the book, but it’s well worth a read. There were a couple of sections which I thought were possibly relevant to IT professionals and DBAs in particular. Firstly, ‘the 10,000 hour rule’, in this section Gladwell asserts that to be a real ‘elite performer’ takes 10,000 hours of practice. ‘Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good, it’s the thing you do that makes you good’.  He gives many interesting examples – the Beatles, Bill Gates etc – but I was wondering could this be applied to DBAs ? If it takes 10,000 hours to be a really elite DBA – how long does that really take ? 8 hours a day makes 1250 days. If we assume that most DBAs work around 230 days a year – then it takes around 5 and a half years to become an elite DBA.   But how much time per day does a DBA spend actually doing DBA work ? Certainly it’s my experience that the more experienced I get as a DBA, the less time I seem to spend actually doing DBA work – ie meetings, change-control meetings, project planning, liasing with other teams, appraisals etc.  Is it more accurate to assume that a DBA spends half their time actually doing ‘real’ DBA work – or is that just my bad luck ?   So, in reality, I’d argue it can take at least 5 1/2 and more likely closer to 10 years to become an elite DBA. Why do I keep receiving CVs for senior DBAs with 2-4 years actual DBA experience ? In the second section I found particularly interesting, Gladwell writes about analysis of plane crashes and the importance of in-cockpit communications. He describes a couple of crashes involving Korean Airlines – where co-pilots were often deferrential to pilots, and unwilling to openly criticise their more senior colleagues or point out errors when things were going badly wrong… There’s a better summary of Gladwell’s concepts on mitigation  here – but to apply this to a DBA role… If you are a DBA and you do not agree with  a decision of one of your superiors, then it’s your duty as a DBA to say what you think is wrong, before it’s too late…  Obviously there’s a fine line between constructive criticism and moaning, but a good senior DBA or manager should be able to take well-researched criticism\debate from a more junior DBA.   Is this really possible ?

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• dist-upgrade of diskless ubuntu

  - by ChosSimbaOne

  I am currently PXE booting a bunch a machine, via the diskless function in ubuntu. What is the best practice when upgrading the image from 10.04 LTS to 12.04 LTS? I've currently made a copy of the image with cp -arpv to ensure that i can switch back to the old image, if something is wrong in the new image. However do-release-upgrade is not available in the diskeless image. Any good ideas on what to do? Best regards.

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• Success with E-Business Suite Release 12 Implementations: Intelligroup, Inc.

  Want to learn more about implementing Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12? Listen to this Srinivas Krishna, Sr. Intelligroup is a global provider of outsourcing services including application management and support services, infrastructure management services, innovative consulting, technology, and implementation services. Learn more at: http://www.intelligroup.com/Direction – Oracle Practice, Intelligroup, Inc discuss customer experiences and benefits from Release 12 implementations.

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• Storing game objects with generic object information

  - by Mick

  In a simple game object class, you might have something like this: public abstract class GameObject { protected String name; // other properties protected double x, y; public GameObject(String name, double x, double y) { // etc } // setters, getters } I was thinking, since a lot of game objects (ex. generic monsters) will share the same name, movement speed, attack power, etc, it would be better to have all that information shared between all monsters of the same type. So I decided to have an abstract class "ObjectData" to hold all this shared information. So whenever I create a generic monster, I would use the same pre-created "ObjectData" for it. Now the above class becomes more like this: public abstract class GameObject { protected ObjectData data; protected double x, y; public GameObject(ObjectData data, double x, double y) { // etc } // setters, getters public String getName() { return data.getName(); } } So to tailor this specifically for a Monster (could be done in a very similar way for Npcs, etc), I would add 2 classes. Monster which extends GameObject, and MonsterData which extends ObjectData. Now I'll have something like this: public class Monster extends GameObject { public Monster(MonsterData data, double x, double y) { super(data, x, y); } } This is where my design question comes in. Since MonsterData would hold data specific to a generic monster (and would vary with what say NpcData holds), what would be the best way to access this extra information in a system like this? At the moment, since the data variable is of type ObjectData, I'll have to cast data to MonsterData whenever I use it inside the Monster class. One solution I thought of is this, but this might be bad practice: public class Monster extends GameObject { private MonsterData data; // <- this part here public Monster(MonsterData data, double x, double y) { super(data, x, y); this.data = data; // <- this part here } } I've read that for one I should generically avoid overwriting the underlying classes variables. What do you guys think of this solution? Is it bad practice? Do you have any better solutions? Is the design in general bad? How should I redesign this if it is? Thanks in advanced for any replies, and sorry about the long question. Hopefully it all makes sense!

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• The Buzz at the JavaOne Bookstore

  - by Janice J. Heiss

  I found my way to the JavaOne bookstore, a hub of activity. Who says brick and mortar bookstores are dead? I asked what was hot and got two answers: Hadoop in Practice by Alex Holmes was doing well. And Scala for the Impatient by noted Java Champion Cay Horstmann also seemed to be a fast seller. Hadoop in PracticeHadoop is a framework that organizes large clusters of computers around a problem. It is touted as especially effective for large amounts of data, and is use such companies as  Facebook, Yahoo, Apple, eBay and LinkedIn. Hadoop in Practice collects nearly 100 Hadoop examples and presents them in a problem/solution format with step by step explanations of solutions and designs. It’s very much a participatory book intended to make developers more at home with Hadoop.The author, Alex Holmes, is a senior software engineer with more than 15 years of experience developing large-scale distributed Java systems. For the last four years, he has gained expertise in Hadoop solving Big Data problems across a number of projects. He has presented at JavaOne and Jazoon and is currently a technical lead at VeriSign.At this year’s JavaOne, he is presenting a session with VeriSign colleague, Karthik Shyamsunder called “Java: A Perfect Platform for Data Science” where they will explain how the Java platform has emerged as a perfect platform for practicing data science, and also talk about such technologies as Hadoop, Hive, Pig, HBase, Cassandra, and Mahout. Scala for the ImpatientSan Jose State University computer science professor and Java Champion Cay Horstmann is the principal author of the highly regarded Core Java. Scala for the Impatient is a basic, practical introduction to Scala for experienced programmers. Horstmann has a presentation summarizing the themes of his book on at his website. On the final page he offers an enticing summary of his conclusions:* Widespread dissatisfaction with Java + XML + IDEs               --Don't make me eat Elephant again * A separate language for every problem domain is not efficient               --It takes time to master the idioms* ”JavaScript Everywhere” isn't going to scale* Trend is towards languages with more expressive power, less boilerplate* Will Scala be the “one ring to rule them”?* Maybe              --If it succeeds in industry             --If student-friendly subsets and tools are created The popularity of both books echoed comments by IBM Distinguished Engineer Jason McGee who closed his part of the Sunday JavaOne keynote by pointing out that the use of Java in complex applications is increasingly being augmented by a host of other languages with strong communities around them – JavaScript, JRuby, Scala, Python and so forth. Java developers increasingly must know the strengths and weaknesses of such languages going forward.

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• Benefits of Behavior Driven Development

  - by Aligned

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/Aligned/archive/2013/07/26/benefits-of-behavior-driven-development.aspxContinuing my previous article on BDD, I wanted to point out some benefits of BDD and since BDD is an extension of Test Driven Development (TDD), you get those as well. I’ll add another article on some possible downsides of this approach. There are many articles about the benefits of TDD and they apply to BDD. I’ve pointed out some here and copied some of the main points for each article, but there are many more including the book The Art of Unit Testing by Roy Osherove. http://geekswithblogs.net/leesblog/archive/2008/04/30/the-benefits-of-test-driven-development.aspx (Lee Brandt) Stability Accountability Design Ability Separated Concerns Progress Indicator http://tddftw.com/benefits-of-tdd/ Help maintainers understand the intention behind the code Bring validation and proper data handling concerns to the forefront. Writing the tests first is fun. Better APIs come from writing testable code. TDD will make you a better developer. http://www.slideshare.net/dhelper/benefit-from-unit-testing-in-the-real-world (from Typemock). Take a look at the slides, especially the extra time required for TDD (slide 10) and the next one of the bugs avoided using TDD (slide 11). Less bugs (slide 11) about testing and development (13) Increase confidence in code (14) Fearlessly change your code (14) Document Requirements (14) also see http://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2013/06/01/roc-rocks.aspx Discover usability issues early (14) All these points and articles are great and there are many more. The following are my additions to the benefits of BDD from using it in real projects for my company. July 2013 on MSDN - Behavior-Driven Design with SpecFlow Scott Allen did a very informative TDD and MVC module, but to me he is doing BDDCompile and Execute Requirements in Microsoft .NET ~ Video from TechEd 2012 Communication I was working through a complicated task that the decision tree kept growing. After writing out the Given, When, Then of the scenario, I was able tell QA what I had worked through for their initial test cases. They were able to add from there. It is also useful to use this language with other developers, managers, or clients to help make informed decisions on if it meets the requirements or if it can simplified to save time (money). Thinking through solutions, before starting to code This was the biggest benefit to me. I like to jump into coding to figure out the problem. Many times I don't understand my path well enough and have to do some parts over. A past supervisor told me several times during reviews that I need to get better at seeing "the forest for the trees". When I sit down and write out the behavior that I need to implement, I force myself to think things out further and catch scenarios before they get to QA. A co-worker that is new to BDD and we’ve been using it in our new project for the last 6 months, said “It really clarifies things”. It took him awhile to understand it all, but now he’s seeing the value of this approach (yes there are some downsides, but that is a different issue). Developers’ Confidence This is huge for me. With tests in place, my confidence grows that I won’t break code that I’m not directly changing. In the past, I’ve worked on projects with out tests and we would frequently find regression bugs (or worse the users would find them). That isn’t fun. We don’t catch all problems with the tests, but when QA catches one, I can write a test to make sure it doesn’t happen again. It’s also good for Releasing code, telling your manager that it’s good to go. As time goes on and the code gets older, how confident are you that checking in code won’t break something somewhere else? Merging code - pre release confidence If you’re merging code a lot, it’s nice to have the tests to help ensure you didn’t merge incorrectly. Interrupted work I had a task that I started and planned out, then was interrupted for a month because of different priorities. When I started it up again, and un-shelved my changes, I had the BDD specs and it helped me remember what I had figured out and what was left to do. It would have much more difficult without the specs and tests. Testing and verifying complicated scenarios Sometimes in the UI there are scenarios that get tricky, because there are a lot of steps involved (click here to open the dialog, enter the information, make sure it’s valid, when I click cancel it should do {x}, when I click ok it should close and do {y}, then do this, etc….). With BDD I can avoid some of the mouse clicking define the scenarios and have them re-run quickly, without using a mouse. UI testing is still needed, but this helps a bunch. The same can be true for tricky server logic. Documentation of Assumptions and Specifications The BDD spec tests (Jasmine or SpecFlow or other tool) also work as documentation and show what the original developer was trying to accomplish. It’s not a different Word document, so developers will keep this up to date, instead of letting it become obsolete. What happens if you leave the project (consulting, new job, etc) with no specs or at the least good comments in the code? Sometimes I think of a new scenario, so I add a failing spec and continue in the same stream of thought (don’t forget it because it was on a piece of paper or in a notepad). Then later I can come back and handle it and have it documented. Jasmine tests and JavaScript –> help deal with the non-typed system I like JavaScript, but I also dislike working with JavaScript. I miss C# telling me if a property doesn’t actually exist at build time. I like the idea of TypeScript and hope to use it more in the future. I also use KnockoutJs, which has observables that need to be called with ending (), since the observable is a function. It’s hard to remember when to use () or not and the Jasmine specs/tests help ensure the correct usage.   This should give you an idea of the benefits that I see in using the BDD approach. I’m sure there are more. It talks a lot of practice, investment and experimentation to figure out how to approach this and to get comfortable with it. I agree with Scott Allen in the video I linked above “Remember that TDD can take some practice. So if you're not doing test-driven design right now? You can start and practice and get better. And you'll reach a point where you'll never want to get back.”

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• Is it a bad idea to list every function/method argument on a new line and why?

  - by dgnball

  I work with someone who, every time they call a function they put the arguments on a new line e.g. aFunction( byte1, short1, int1, int2, int3, int4, int5 ) ; I find this very annoying as it means the code isn't very compact, so I have to scan up and down more to actually make any sense of the logic. I'm interested to know whether this is actually bad practice and if so, how can I persuade them not to do it?

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• What should I do to scale out an high-traffic website?

  - by makerofthings7

  What Best Practices should be undertaken for a Website that needs to "scale out" to handle capacity? This is especially relevant now that people are considering the cloud, but may be missing out on the fundamentals. I'm interested in hearing about anything you consider a best practice from development-level tasks, to infrastructure, to management. Use your best judgement when posting multiple answers, since it may make sense to post them separately for voting purposes. (hint: you'll likely get more reputation points for many small answers than one large answer)

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• What do you do when practical problems get in the way of practical goals?

  - by P.Brian.Mackey

  UPDATE Source control is good to use. Sometimes, real world issues make it impractical to use. For example: If the team is not used to using source control, training problems can arise If a team member directly modifies code on the server, various issues can arise. Merge problems, lack of history, etc Let's say there's a project that is way out of sync. The physical files on the server differ in unknown ways over ~100 files. Merging would take not only a great knowledge of the project, but is also well beyond the ability to complete in the given time. Other projects are falling out of sync. Developers continue to have a distrust of source control and therefore compound the issue by not using source control. Developers argue that using source control is wasteful because merging is error prone and difficult. This is a difficult point to argue, because when source control is being so badly mis-used and source control continually bypassed, it is error prone indeed. Therefore, the evidence "speaks for itself" in their view. Developers argue that directly modifying source control saves time. This is also difficult to argue. Because the merge required to synchronize the code to start with is time consuming, across ~10 projects. Permanent files are often stored in the same directory as the web project. So publishing (full publish) erases these files that are not in source control. This also drives distrust for source control. Because "publishing breaks the project". Fixing this (moving stored files out of the solution subfolders) takes a great deal of time and debugging as these locations are not set in web.config and often exist across multiple code points. So, the culture persists itself. Bad practice begets more bad practice. Bad solutions drive new hacks to "fix" much deeper, much more time consuming problems. Servers, hard drive space are extremly difficult to come by. Yet, user expectations are rising. What can be done in this situation?

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• O'Reilly 50% off selected Training Kit Ebooks to July 5, 2012 at 23:59 PT

  - by TATWORTH

  At http://shop.oreilly.com/category/deals/msp-training-kit-owo.do?code=WKMSPTK, there is 50% off a selection of Microsoft Press Training Kit ebooks" Make the most of your study time with Microsoft Press Training Kit ebooks. Work at your own pace through a series of lessons and reviews that fully cover exam objectives. Then, reinforce and apply your knowledge to real-world case scenarios and practice exercises to maximize your performance on the exams. For one week only, you can save 50% on these ebooks"

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• Testing Workflows &ndash; Test-First

  - by Timothy Klenke

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/TimothyK/archive/2014/05/30/testing-workflows-ndash-test-first.aspxThis is the second of two posts on some common strategies for approaching the job of writing tests.  The previous post covered test-after workflows where as this will focus on test-first.  Each workflow presented is a method of attack for adding tests to a project.  The more tools in your tool belt the better.  So here is a partial list of some test-first methodologies. Ping Pong Ping Pong is a methodology commonly used in pair programing.  One developer will write a new failing test.  Then they hand the keyboard to their partner.  The partner writes the production code to get the test passing.  The partner then writes the next test before passing the keyboard back to the original developer. The reasoning behind this testing methodology is to facilitate pair programming.  That is to say that this testing methodology shares all the benefits of pair programming, including ensuring multiple team members are familiar with the code base (i.e. low bus number). Test Blazer Test Blazing, in some respects, is also a pairing strategy.  The developers don’t work side by side on the same task at the same time.  Instead one developer is dedicated to writing tests at their own desk.  They write failing test after failing test, never touching the production code.  With these tests they are defining the specification for the system.  The developer most familiar with the specifications would be assigned this task. The next day or later in the same day another developer fetches the latest test suite.  Their job is to write the production code to get those tests passing.  Once all the tests pass they fetch from source control the latest version of the test project to get the newer tests. This methodology has some of the benefits of pair programming, namely lowering the bus number.  This can be good way adding an extra developer to a project without slowing it down too much.  The production coder isn’t slowed down writing tests.  The tests are in another project from the production code, so there shouldn’t be any merge conflicts despite two developers working on the same solution. This methodology is also a good test for the tests.  Can another developer figure out what system should do just by reading the tests?  This question will be answered as the production coder works there way through the test blazer’s tests. Test Driven Development (TDD) TDD is a highly disciplined practice that calls for a new test and an new production code to be written every few minutes.  There are strict rules for when you should be writing test or production code.  You start by writing a failing (red) test, then write the simplest production code possible to get the code working (green), then you clean up the code (refactor).  This is known as the red-green-refactor cycle. The goal of TDD isn’t the creation of a suite of tests, however that is an advantageous side effect.  The real goal of TDD is to follow a practice that yields a better design.  The practice is meant to push the design toward small, decoupled, modularized components.  This is generally considered a better design that large, highly coupled ball of mud. TDD accomplishes this through the refactoring cycle.  Refactoring is only possible to do safely when tests are in place.  In order to use TDD developers must be trained in how to look for and repair code smells in the system.  Through repairing these sections of smelly code (i.e. a refactoring) the design of the system emerges. For further information on TDD, I highly recommend the series “Is TDD Dead?”.  It discusses its pros and cons and when it is best used. Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD) Whereas TDD focuses on small unit tests that concentrate on a small piece of the system, Acceptance Tests focuses on the larger integrated environment.  Acceptance Tests usually correspond to user stories, which come directly from the customer. The unit tests focus on the inputs and outputs of smaller parts of the system, which are too low level to be of interest to the customer. ATDD generally uses the same tools as TDD.  However, ATDD uses fewer mocks and test doubles than TDD. ATDD often complements TDD; they aren’t competing methods.  A full test suite will usually consist of a large number of unit (created via TDD) tests and a smaller number of acceptance tests. Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) BDD is more about audience than workflow.  BDD pushes the testing realm out towards the client.  Developers, managers and the client all work together to define the tests. Typically different tooling is used for BDD than acceptance and unit testing.  This is done because the audience is not just developers.  Tools using the Gherkin family of languages allow for test scenarios to be described in an English format.  Other tools such as MSpec or FitNesse also strive for highly readable behaviour driven test suites. Because these tests are public facing (viewable by people outside the development team), the terminology usually changes.  You can’t get away with the same technobabble you can with unit tests written in a programming language that only developers understand.  For starters, they usually aren’t called tests.  Usually they’re called “examples”, “behaviours”, “scenarios”, or “specifications”. This may seem like a very subtle difference, but I’ve seen this small terminology change have a huge impact on the acceptance of the process.  Many people have a bias that testing is something that comes at the end of a project.  When you say we need to define the tests at the start of the project many people will immediately give that a lower priority on the project schedule.  But if you say we need to define the specification or behaviour of the system before we can start, you’ll get more cooperation.   Keep these test-first and test-after workflows in your tool belt.  With them you’ll be able to find new opportunities to apply them.

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• Basic SEO Mistakes

  Search engine optimization mistakes are quite common, and they are made by both seasoned SEO experts, and those who are new to it alike. Search engine optimization is a precise practice, thus there is no such thing as a tiny SEO mistake. The reason for this is that all SEO mistakes, big or small, all produce repercussions, which could affect the ranking if your website in one way or another.

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• How useful are Lisp macros?

  - by compman

  Common Lisp allows you to write macros that do whatever source transformation you want. Scheme gives you a hygienic pattern-matching system that lets you perform transformations as well. How useful are macros in practice? Paul Graham said in Beating the Averages that: The source code of the Viaweb editor was probably about 20-25% macros. What sorts of things do people actually end up doing with macros?

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• Test-driven Database Development – Why Bother?

  Test-Driven Development is a practice that can bring many benefits, including better design, and less-buggy code, but is it relevant to database development, where the process of development tends to me much more interactive, and the culture more test-oriented? Greg reviews the support for TDD for Databases, and suggests that it is worth giving it a try for the range of advantages it can bring to team-working.

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• Kalculate = math + fun

  - by Devin A. Rychetnik

  Kalculate is a you vs. the Internet style game for math lovers. The rules are simple: answer as many math problems as you can in 90 seconds. At the end of each round, Kalculate will tally up all the scores and show you where you ranked relative to others currently playing.Tip: answering 3 questions in 10 seconds earns you a score multiplier      If you prefer to just practice and stay out of the competition, there's an offline mode that allows you to play solo.Kalculate is free (ad-supported) and can be downloaded here.

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• Dadaism and Agility

  - by alexhildyard

  We all have our little bugbears, and something that has given me particular pause over the years is the place of Agility in the software development life cycle. While I have seen it used successfully on both small and Enterprise-level projects, I have also seen many instances in which long-standing technical debt has also originated under its watch. Ironically the problem in such cases seems to me not that the practitioners in question have failed to follow due process (Test, Develop, Refactor -- a common "what" of Agile), but basically that they have missed the point (the "why" of Agile). It's probably a sign of my age that I'm much more interested in the "why" than the "what", since I feel that the latter falls out naturally from the former, but that this is not a reciprocal relationship.Consider Dadaism, precursor to the Surrealist movement in the early part of the twentieth century. Anyone could stand up and proclaim he or she was Dada; anyone could write cut-ups, or pull words out a hat, or produce gibberish on duelling typewriters under the inspiration of Dada. And all that took place at such performances was a manifestation of Dada, and all the artefacts that resulted were also Dada. Hence one commentator's engimatic observation that 'when one speaks of Dada, then one speaks of Dada. But when one does not speak of Dada, one still speaks of Dada.'What is Dada? Literally, Dada is what you say it is. But that's also missing the point. Dada is about erecting a framework within which utterances like this are valid; Dada is about preparing a stage for itself. Dadaism exemplifies the purity of a process-driven ideology -- in fact an ideology that is almost pure process, with nothing extraneous in the way of formal method, and while perhaps Agile delivery should not embrace the liberties of Dadaism too literally, some of the similarities nevertheless are salutary.Agile -- like Dada -- is an attitude; it is about *being* agile; it is not really about doing a specific set of things that are somehow *part* of being Agile. It is an abstract base rather than an implementation, a characteristic rather than a factor. It is the pragmatic response to the need for change in the face of partial information, ephemeral requirements and a healthy dose of systematic uncertainty. In practice this will usually mean repeatedly making the smallest useful changes to a system, recognising that systems evolve, and that all change carries risk. It will usually mean that instead of investing effort in future-proofing a system against a known technology roadmap, one instead invests one's energies in the daily repetition and incremental development of processes best designed to accommodate change quickly. But though it may mean these things in practice, it isn't actually *about* either of these things; it's about the mindset, the attitude that conceives of such responses as sensible solutions given the larger and ultimately unclassifiable thing that constitutes the development lifecycle of a specific project.

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• Is it okay for programmers to be given the task of outlining database requirements?

  - by L'Ingenu

  In my current job, dba's and programmers are divided in tasks. Any code that needs to be written in procedures dba's write, and programmers do only application code. The strange thing is that whenever a task needs to be defined/specced, programmers get the task, and we have to define all the procedures needed and what they should return. Is this a common practice in software development? Are programmers generally the ones tasked with building requirements for the database side?

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