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  • OOP for unit testing : The good, the bad and the ugly

    - by Jeff
    I have recently read Miško Hevery's pdf guide to writing testable code in which its stated that you should limit your classes instanciations in your constructors. I understand that its what you should do because it allow you to easily mock you objects that are send as parameters to your class. But when it comes to writing actual code, i often end up with things like that (exemple is in PHP using Zend Framework but I think it's self explanatory) : class Some_class { private $_data; private $_options; private $_locale; public function __construct($data, $options = null) { $this->_data = $data; if ($options != null) { $this->_options = $options; } $this->_init(); } private function _init() { if(isset($this->_options['locale'])) { $locale = $this->_options['locale']; if ($locale instanceof Zend_Locale) { $this->_locale = $locale; } elseif (Zend_Locale::isLocale($locale)) { $this->_locale = new Zend_Locale($locale); } else { $this->_locale = new Zend_Locale(); } } } } Acording to my understanding of Miško Hevery's guide, i shouldn't instanciate the Zend_Local in my class but push it through the constructor (Which can be done through the options array in my example). I am wondering what would be the best practice to get the most flexibility for unittesing this code and aswell, if I want to move away from Zend Framework. Thanks in advance

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  • local install of wp site brought down from host - home page is ok but other pages redirect to wamp config page

    - by jeff
    local install of wp site brought down from host - home page is ok but other pages redirect to wamp config page. I got all local files from host to www dir under local wamp. I got database from host and loaded to new local db and used this tool to adjust site_on_web.com to "localhost/site_on_local" now the home page works great and can login to admin page but when click on reservations page and others of site then site just goes to the wamp server config page even though the url shows correctly as localhost/site_on_local/reservations my htaccess file is this # BEGIN WordPress <IfModule mod_rewrite.c> RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule . /index.php [L] </IfModule> # END WordPress and rewrite-module is checked in the php-apache-apache modules setting. now when I uncheck the rewrite-module is checked in the php-apache-apache modules setting or I clear out the whole htaccess file then the pages just goto Not Found The requested URL /ritas041214/about-ritas/ was not found on this server. Please help as I am unsure now about my process to move local site up and down and be able to make it work and without this I am lost...

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  • POP Forums will be at Mix!

    - by Jeff
    If you've never been to Mix, you're missing out on what is arguably one of the best conferences that Microsoft does. I'm not just saying that because I work here... I felt that way before, having been to most of them. The breadth of people and disciplines make it a really exciting event that pushes it well beyond the "Redmond bubble," as I like to call it. You should go.In any case, there's an Open Source Fest happening the night before Mix starts, on Monday, from 6 to 9 p.m. There will be people there representing a ton of great projects, some as enormous as Umbraco, as well as people doing SDK's, controls and other neat stuff. Best of all, you get to vote for your favorites. Unless your favorite is Orchard, because Microsoft is sponsoring that directly. Or if it's POP Forums, not because Microsoft is sponsoring it, but because that's where I work in my day job. No prizes for me! Come by and say hello. I think the app will be nearly final by then, and it's already running on MouseZoom, one of my little side projects.The quality and diversity of open source projects around the Microsoft stack just keeps getting better. Our platform is also pretty great at running stuff we don't make. This will be a pretty exciting Mix. Can't wait!

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  • Open source adventures with... wait for it... Microsoft

    - by Jeff
    Last week, Microsoft announced that it was going to open source the rest of the ASP.NET MVC Web stack. The core MVC framework has been open source for a long time now, but the other pieces around it are also now out in the wild. Not only that, but it's not what I call "big bang" open source, where you release the source with each version. No, they're actually committing in real time to a public repository. They're also taking contributions where it makes sense. If that weren't exciting enough, CodePlex, which used to be a part of the team I was on, has been re-org'd to a different part of the company where it is getting the love and attention (and apparently money) that it deserves. For a period of several months, I lobbied to get a PM gig with that product, but got nowhere. A year and a half later, I'm happy to see it finally treated right. In any case, I found a bug in Razor, the rendering engine, before the beta came out. I informally sent the bug info to some people, but it wasn't fixed for the beta. Now, with the project being developed in the open, I was able to submit the issue, and went back and forth with the developer who wrote the code (I met him once at a meet up in Bellevue, I think), and he committed a fix. I tried it a day later, and the bug was gone. There's a lot to learn from all of this. That open source software is surprisingly efficient and often of high quality is one part of it. For me the win is that it demonstrates how open and collaborative processes, as light as possible, lead to better software. In other words, even if this were a project being developed internally, at a bank or something, getting stakeholders involved early and giving people the ability to respond leads to awesomeness. While there is always a place for big thinking, experience has shown time and time again that trying to figure everything out up front takes too long, and rarely meets expectations. This is a lesson that probably half of Microsoft has yet to learn, including the team I was on before I split. It's the reason that team still hasn't shipped anything to general availability. But I've seen what an open and iterative development style can do for teams, at Microsoft and other places that I've worked. When you can have a conversation with people, and take ideas and turn them into code quickly, you're winning. So why don't people like winning? I think there are a lot of reasons, and they can generally be categorized into fear, skepticism and bad experiences. I can't give the Web stack teams enough credit. Not only did they dream big, but they changed a culture that often seems immovable and hopelessly stuck. This is a very public example of this culture change, but it's starting to happen at every scale in Microsoft. It's really interesting to see in a company that has been written off as dead the last decade.

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  • Developer – Cross-Platform: Fact or Fiction?

    - by Pinal Dave
    This is a guest blog post by Jeff McVeigh. Jeff McVeigh is the general manager of Performance Client and Visual Computing within Intel’s Developer Products Division. His team is responsible for the development and delivery of leading software products for performance-centric application developers spanning Android*, Windows*, and OS* X operating systems. During his 17-year career at Intel, Jeff has held various technical and management positions in the fields of media, graphics, and validation. He also served as the technical assistant to Intel’s CTO. He holds 20 patents and a Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. It’s not a homogenous world. We all know it. I have a Windows* desktop, a MacBook Air*, an Android phone, and my kids are 100% Apple. We used to have 2.5 kids, now we have 2.5 devices. And we all agree that diversity is great, unless you’re a developer trying to prioritize the limited hours in the day. Then it’s a series of trade-offs. Do we become brand loyalists for Google or Apple or Microsoft? Do we specialize on phones and tablets or still consider the 300M+ PC shipments a year when we make our decisions on where to spend our time and resources? We weigh the platform options, monetization opportunities, APIs, and distribution models. Too often, I see developers choose one platform, or write to the lowest common denominator, which limits their reach and market success. But who wants to be ?me too”? Cross-platform coding is possible in some environments, for some applications, for some level of innovation—but it’s not all-inclusive, yet. There are some tricks of the trade to develop cross-platform, including using languages and environments that ?run everywhere.” HTML5 is today’s answer for web-enabled platforms. However, it’s not a panacea, especially if your app requires the ultimate performance or native UI look and feel. There are other cross-platform frameworks that address the presentation layer of your application. But for those apps that have a preponderance of native code (e.g., highly-tuned C/C++ loops), there aren’t tons of solutions today to help with code reuse across these platforms using consistent tools and libraries. As we move forward with interim solutions, they’ll improve and become more robust, based, in no small part, on our input. What’s your answer to the cross-platform challenge? Are you fully invested in HTML5 now? What are your barriers? What’s your vision to navigate the cross-platform landscape?  Here is the link where you can head next and learn more about how to answer the questions I have asked: https://software.intel.com/en-us Republished with permission from here. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL Tagged: Intel

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  • Website misclassified by websense

    - by Jeff Atwood
    I received the following email from a user of one of our websites: This morning I tried to log into example.com and I was blocked by websense at work because it is considered a "social networking" site or something. I assume the websense filter is maintained by a central location, so I'm hoping that by letting you guys know you can get it unblocked. per Wikipedia, Websense is web filtering or Internet content-control software. This means one (or more) of our sites is being miscategorized by websense as "social networking" and thus disallowed for access at any workplace that uses websense to control what websites their users can and cannot access during work hours. (I know, they are monsters!) How do we dispute this websense classification error, as our websites should generally be considered "information technology" and never "social networking"? How do we know what category websense has put our sites in, so we can pro-actively make sure they're not wrong?

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  • How do you demo software with No UI in the Sprint Review?

    - by Jeff Martin
    We are doing agile software development, basically following Scrum. We are trying to do sprint reviews but finding it difficult. Our software is doing a lot of data processing and the stories often are about changing various rules around this. What are some options for demoing the changes that occurred in the sprint when there isn't a UI or visible workflow change, but instead the change is a subtle business rule on a processing job that can take 10s of minutes or even a couple of hours?

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  • Renewed

    - by Jeff Certain
    I just got a nice little e-mail from Microsoft. Despite the timing, it’s not an April Fools joke… I’ve been renewed as an MVP for another year. Congrats to all the other MVPs being renewed today.

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  • Is it time to drop Courier from your monospace font stacks?

    - by Jeff
    I've been fine-tuning my font stacks lately and was wondering if it's safe to drop Courier from my monospace font stack yet? Would you feel comfortable dropping it? Of course, monospace is my final fallback. Note 1: OS Testbed: WinXP, WinVista, Win7, iPhone, iPad Based on my research, these browsers now substitute Courier New for Courier by default: IE9+ Chrome 2+ Firefox 10+ Safari 3.1+ iDevices Note 2: The default "font-family: monospace;" renders as Courier New in every browser I've tested, from IE6 through the latest iPhone/iPad devices. EDIT: One exception is Opera 12, which renders Consolas on Win. Opera 10 renders Courier New. Note 3: I've noticed that Courier refuses to render with any font smoothing (anti-aliasing) in any browser I've tested, regardless of system and/or browser display settings. Probably because it's an old bitmap font. This could be because of my system setup, however.

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  • Know a little of a lot or a lot of a little? [closed]

    - by Jeff V
    Possible Duplicate: Is it better to specialize in a single field I like, or expand into other fields to broaden my horizons? My buddy and I who have been programming for 13 years or so were talking this morning and a question that came up was is it better to know a little of a lot (i.e. web, desktop, VB.Net, C#, jQuery, PHP, Java etc.) or is it better to know a lot of a little (meaning expert in something). The context of this question is what makes someone a senior programmer? Is it someone that has been around the block a few times and has been in many different situations or one that is locked in to a specific technology that is super knowledgeable in that one technology? I see pro's and con's of both scenarios.. Just wondering what others thought.

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  • A good way to build a game loop in OpenGL

    - by Jeff
    I'm currently beginning to learn OpenGL at school, and I've started making a simple game the other day (on my own, not for school). I'm using freeglut, and am building it in C, so for my game loop I had really just been using a function I made passed to glutIdleFunc to update all the drawing and physics in one pass. This was fine for simple animations that I didn't care too much about the frame rate, but since the game is mostly physics based, I really want to (need to) tie down how fast it's updating. So my first attempt was to have my function I pass to glutIdleFunc (myIdle()) to keep track of how much time has passed since the previous call to it, and update the physics (and currently graphics) every so many milliseconds. I used timeGetTime() to do this (by using <windows.h>). And this got me to thinking, is using the idle function really a good way of going about the game loop? My question is, what is a better way to implement the game loop in OpenGL? Should I avoid using the idle function?

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  • Is there such thing as a "theory of system integration"?

    - by Jeff
    There is a plethora of different programs, servers, and in general technologies in use in organizations today. We, programmers, have lots of different tools at our disposal to help solve various different data, and communication challenges in an organization. Does anyone know if anyone has done an serious thinking about how systems are integrated? Let me give an example: Hypothetically, let's say I own a company that makes specialized suits a'la Iron Man. In the area of production, I have CAD tools, machining tools, payroll, project management, and asset management tools to name a few. I also have nice design space, where designers show off their designs on big displays, some touch, some traditional. Oh, and I also have one of these new fangled LEED Platinum buildings and it has number of different computer controlled systems, like smart window shutters that close when people are in the room, a HVAC system that adjusts depending on the number of people in the building, etc. What I want to know is if anyone has done any scientific work on trying to figure out how to hook all these pieces together, so that say my access control system is hooked to my payroll system, and my phone system allowing my never to swipe a time card, and to have my phone follow me throughout the building. This problem is also more than a technology challenge. Every technology implementation enables certain human behaviours, so the human must also be considered as a part of the system. Has anyone done any work in how effectively weave these components together? FYI: I am not trying to build a system. I want to know if anyone has thoroughly studied the process of doing a large integration project, how they develop their requirements, how they studied the human behaviors, etc.

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  • Update

    - by Jeff Certain
    This blog has been pretty quiet for a year now. There's a few reasons for that. Probably the biggest reason is that I view this as a space where I talk about .NET things. Or software development. While I've been doing the latter for the past year, I haven't been doing the former.Yes, I took a trip to the dark side. I started with Ning 11 months ago, in Palo Alto, CA. I had the chance to work with an incredibly talented group of software engineers... in PHP and Java.That was definitely an eye-opening experience, in terms of technology, process, and culture. It was also a pretty good example of how acquisitions can get interesting. I'll talk more about this, I'm sure.Last week, I started with a company called Dynamic Signal. I'm a "Back End Engineer" now. Also a very talented team of people, and I'm delighted to be working with them. We're a Microsoft shop. After a year away, I'm very happy to be back. Coming back to .NET is an easy transition, and one that has me being fairly productive straight out of the gate.(Some of you may have noticed, my last post was more than a year ago. Yes, it's safe to infer that I didn't get renewed as an MVP. Fair deal; I didn't do nearly as much this year as I have in the past. I'll be starting to speak again shortly, and hope to be re-awarded soon.)At any rate, now that I'm back in the .NET space, you can expect to hear more from me soon!

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  • Standard ratio of cookies to "visitors"?

    - by Jeff Atwood
    As noted in a recent blog post, We see a large discrepancy between Google Analytics "visitors" and Quantcast "visitors". Also, for reasons we have never figured out, Google Analytics just gets larger numbers than Quantcast. Right now GA is showing more visitors (15 million) on stackoverflow.com alone than Quantcast sees on the whole network (14 million): Why? I don’t know. Either Google Analytics loses cookies sometimes, or Quantcast misses visitors. Counting is an inexact science. We think this is because Quantcast uses a more conservative ratio of cookies-to-visitors. Whereas Google Analytics might consider every cookie a "visitor", Quantcast will only consider every 1.24 cookies a "visitor". This makes sense to me, as people may access our sites from multiple computers, multiple browsers, etcetera. I have two closely related questions: Is there an accepted standard ratio of cookies to visitors? This is obviously an inexact science, but is there any emerging rule of thumb? Is there any more accurate way to count "visitors" to a website other than relying on browser cookies? Or is this just always going to be kind of a best-effort estimation crapshoot no matter how you measure it?

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  • AJI Software is now a Microsoft Gold Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Partner

    - by Jeff Julian
    Our team at AJI Software has been hard at work over the past year on certifications and projects that has allowed us to reach Gold Partner status in the Microsoft Partner Program.  We have focused on providing services that not only assist in custom software development, but process analysis and mentoring.  I definitely want to thank each one of our team members for all their work.  We are currently the only Microsoft Gold ALM Partner for a 500 mile radius around Kansas City. If you or your team is in need of assistance with Team Foundation Server, Agile Processes, Scrum Mentoring, or just a process/team assessment, please feel free to give us a call.  We also have practices focused on SharePoint, Mobile development (iOS, Android, Windows Mobile), and custom software development with .NET.  Technorati Tags: Gold Partner,ALM,Scrum,TFS,AJI Software

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  • Software development is (mostly) a trade, and what to do about it

    - by Jeff
    (This is another cross-post from my personal blog. I don’t even remember when I first started to write it, but I feel like my opinion is well enough baked to share.) I've been sitting on this for a long time, particularly as my opinion has changed dramatically over the last few years. That I've encountered more crappy code than maintainable, quality code in my career as a software developer only reinforces what I'm about to say. Software development is just a trade for most, and not a huge academic endeavor. For those of you with computer science degrees readying your pitchforks and collecting your algorithm interview questions, let me explain. This is not an assault on your way of life, and if you've been around, you know I'm right about the quality problem. You also know the HR problem is very real, or we wouldn't be paying top dollar for mediocre developers and importing people from all over the world to fill the jobs we can't fill. I'm going to try and outline what I see as some of the problems, and hopefully offer my views on how to address them. The recruiting problem I think a lot of companies are doing it wrong. Over the years, I've had two kinds of interview experiences. The first, and right, kind of experience involves talking about real life achievements, followed by some variation on white boarding in pseudo-code, drafting some basic system architecture, or even sitting down at a comprooder and pecking out some basic code to tackle a real problem. I can honestly say that I've had a job offer for every interview like this, save for one, because the task was to debug something and they didn't like me asking where to look ("everyone else in the company died in a plane crash"). The other interview experience, the wrong one, involves the classic torture test designed to make the candidate feel stupid and do things they never have, and never will do in their job. First they will question you about obscure academic material you've never seen, or don't care to remember. Then they'll ask you to white board some ridiculous algorithm involving prime numbers or some kind of string manipulation no one would ever do. In fact, if you had to do something like this, you'd Google for a solution instead of waste time on a solved problem. Some will tell you that the academic gauntlet interview is useful to see how people respond to pressure, how they engage in complex logic, etc. That might be true, unless of course you have someone who brushed up on the solutions to the silly puzzles, and they're playing you. But here's the real reason why the second experience is wrong: You're evaluating for things that aren't the job. These might have been useful tactics when you had to hire people to write machine language or C++, but in a world dominated by managed code in C#, or Java, people aren't managing memory or trying to be smarter than the compilers. They're using well known design patterns and techniques to deliver software. More to the point, these puzzle gauntlets don't evaluate things that really matter. They don't get into code design, issues of loose coupling and testability, knowledge of the basics around HTTP, or anything else that relates to building supportable and maintainable software. The first situation, involving real life problems, gives you an immediate idea of how the candidate will work out. One of my favorite experiences as an interviewee was with a guy who literally brought his work from that day and asked me how to deal with his problem. I had to demonstrate how I would design a class, make sure the unit testing coverage was solid, etc. I worked at that company for two years. So stop looking for algorithm puzzle crunchers, because a guy who can crush a Fibonacci sequence might also be a guy who writes a class with 5,000 lines of untestable code. Fashion your interview process on ways to reveal a developer who can write supportable and maintainable code. I would even go so far as to let them use the Google. If they want to cut-and-paste code, pass on them, but if they're looking for context or straight class references, hire them, because they're going to be life-long learners. The contractor problem I doubt anyone has ever worked in a place where contractors weren't used. The use of contractors seems like an obvious way to control costs. You can hire someone for just as long as you need them and then let them go. You can even give them the work that no one else wants to do. In practice, most places I've worked have retained and budgeted for the contractor year-round, meaning that the $90+ per hour they're paying (of which half goes to the person) would have been better spent on a full-time person with a $100k salary and benefits. But it's not even the cost that is an issue. It's the quality of work delivered. The accountability of a contractor is totally transient. They only need to deliver for as long as you keep them around, and chances are they'll never again touch the code. There's no incentive for them to get things right, there's little incentive to understand your system or learn anything. At the risk of making an unfair generalization, craftsmanship doesn't matter to most contractors. The education problem I don't know what they teach in college CS courses. I've believed for most of my adult life that a college degree was an essential part of being successful. Of course I would hold that bias, since I did it, and have the paper to show for it in a box somewhere in the basement. My first clue that maybe this wasn't a fully qualified opinion comes from the fact that I double-majored in journalism and radio/TV, not computer science. Eventually I worked with people who skipped college entirely, many of them at Microsoft. Then I worked with people who had a masters degree who sucked at writing code, next to the high school diploma types that rock it every day. I still think there's a lot to be said for the social development of someone who has the on-campus experience, but for software developers, college might not matter. As I mentioned before, most of us are not writing compilers, and we never will. It's actually surprising to find how many people are self-taught in the art of software development, and that should reveal some interesting truths about how we learn. The first truth is that we learn largely out of necessity. There's something that we want to achieve, so we do what I call just-in-time learning to meet those goals. We acquire knowledge when we need it. So what about the gaps in our knowledge? That's where the most valuable education occurs, via our mentors. They're the people we work next to and the people who write blogs. They are critical to our professional development. They don't need to be an encyclopedia of jargon, but they understand the craft. Even at this stage of my career, I probably can't tell you what SOLID stands for, but you can bet that I practice the principles behind that acronym every day. That comes from experience, augmented by my peers. I'm hell bent on passing that experience to others. Process issues If you're a manager type and don't do much in the way of writing code these days (shame on you for not messing around at least), then your job is to isolate your tradespeople from nonsense, while bringing your business into the realm of modern software development. That doesn't mean you slap up a white board with sticky notes and start calling yourself agile, it means getting all of your stakeholders to understand that frequent delivery of quality software is the best way to deal with change and evolving expectations. It also means that you have to play technical overlord to make sure the education and quality issues are dealt with. That's why I make the crack about sticky notes, because without the right technique being practiced among your code monkeys, you're just a guy with sticky notes. You're asking your business to accept frequent and iterative delivery, now make sure that the folks writing the code can handle the same thing. This means unit testing, the right instrumentation, integration tests, automated builds and deployments... all of the stuff that makes it easy to see when change breaks stuff. The prognosis I strongly believe that education is the most important part of what we do. I'm encouraged by things like The Starter League, and it's the kind of thing I'd love to see more of. I would go as far as to say I'd love to start something like this internally at an existing company. Most of all though, I can't emphasize enough how important it is that we mentor each other and share our knowledge. If you have people on your staff who don't want to learn, fire them. Seriously, get rid of them. A few months working with someone really good, who understands the craftsmanship required to build supportable and maintainable code, will change that person forever and increase their value immeasurably.

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  • Automated Website Testing/Sanity/Quality

    - by Jeff
    I am thinking about building a tool that starts from the root of a webpage and traverses the entire website gathering a list of resources such as CSS/HTML/Javascript files and then runs CSS/Javascript Lint + HTML Validator + Broken Link Finder. Before I start building something like this, I was wondering if this exists already? Thanks. I already searched Google quite a bit and couldn't find much.

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  • Page appears indexed in Google but not findable for any search terms?

    - by Jeff Atwood
    (Note that I am going to use screenshots here because I suspect writing about this will change the behavior over time.) If you do a Google search for uiviewcontroller best practices either with or without the quotes, you end up with results like this: Note that none of these pages resolve to the actual Stack Overflow question containing those words in the title. They resolve to either a) sites that are mirroring our creative commons data and correctly pointing back to the source question without nofollow, as properly specified by our attribution requirements or b) our own internal links to the question, but not the actual question itself. The actual page with the title ... Custom UIView and UIViewController best practices? ... does exist at this URL ... http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3300183/custom-uiview-and-uiviewcontroller-best-practices ... and apparently it is present in Google's index! But why does it not appear when we search for uiviewcontroller best practices ? We know that Google contains this page in its index Our search terms match the title of the question Stack Overflow has much higher pagerank than the other sites that are mirroring this question under Creative Commons I don't get it. What are we doing wrong here?

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  • Where can I find the supported way to deploy hadoop on precise?

    - by Jeff McCarrell
    I want to set up a small (6 node) hadoop/hive/pig cluster. I see the work in the juju space on charms; however, the current status of deploying a single charm per node will not work for me. I see ServerTeam Hadoop which talks about re-packaging the bigtop packages. The cloudera CDH3 installation guide talks about Maverick and Lucid, but not precise. What am I missing? Is there a straight forward way to deploy hadoop/hive/pig on 6 nodes that does not involve building from tarballs?

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  • Deliberate Practice

    - by Jeff Foster
    It’s easy to assume, as software engineers, that there is little need to “practice” writing code. After all, we write code all day long! Just by writing a little each day, we’re constantly learning and getting better, right? Unfortunately, that’s just not true. Of course, developers do improve with experience. Each time we encounter a problem we’re more likely to avoid it next time. If we’re in a team that deploys software early and often, we hone and improve the deployment process each time we practice it. However, not all practice makes perfect. To develop true expertise requires a particular type of practice, deliberate practice, the only goal of which is to make us better programmers. Everyday software development has other constraints and goals, not least the pressure to deliver. We rarely get the chance in the course of a “sprint” to experiment with potential solutions that are outside our current comfort zone. However, if we believe that software is a craft then it’s our duty to strive continuously to raise the standard of software development. This requires specific and sustained efforts to get better at something we currently can’t do well (from Harvard Business Review July/August 2007). One interesting way to introduce deliberate practice, in a sustainable way, is the code kata. The term kata derives from martial arts and refers to a set of movements practiced either solo or in pairs. One of the better-known examples is the Bowling Game kata by Bob Martin, the goal of which is simply to write some code to do the scoring for 10-pin bowling. It sounds too easy, right? What could we possibly learn from such a simple example? Trust me, though, that it’s not as simple as five minutes of typing and a solution. Of course, we can reach a solution in a short time, but the important thing about code katas is that we explore each technique fully and in a controlled way. We tackle the same problem multiple times, using different techniques and making different decisions, understanding the ramifications of each one, and exploring edge cases. The short feedback loop optimizes opportunities to learn. Another good example is Conway’s Game of Life. It’s a simple problem to solve, but try solving it in a functional style. If you’re used to mutability, solving the problem without mutating state will push you outside of your comfort zone. Similarly, if you try to solve it with the focus of “tell-don’t-ask“, how will the responsibilities of each object change? As software engineers, we don’t get enough opportunities to explore new ideas. In the middle of a development cycle, we can’t suddenly start experimenting on the team’s code base. Code katas offer an opportunity to explore new techniques in a safe environment. If you’re still skeptical, my challenge to you is simply to try it out. Convince a willing colleague to pair with you and work through a kata or two. It only takes an hour and I’m willing to bet you learn a few new things each time. The next step is to make it a sustainable team practice. Start with an hour every Friday afternoon (after all who wants to commit code to production just before they leave for the weekend?) for month and see how that works out. Finally, consider signing up for the Global Day of Code Retreat. It’s like a daylong code kata, it’s on December 8th and there’s probably an event in your area!

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  • New Feature! Automatic Categories for Geekswithblogs.net

    - by Jeff Julian
    One of the features we have been working on is a way to categorize posts without the need of all our bloggers getting on the same page with what categories we have and making them select the categories.  Johnny Kauffman, one of our team members at AJI Software, developed what we call the Sherlock Project over the past few months.  Sherlock is a category suggestion engine based on the content within the posts.  Now, after a post is published, Sherlock will investigate the content and come up with the suggested categories that content fits in.  This will now allow you to go to the specific topics you are interested in and see all the related posts. This is just the beginning, so many more opportunities will arise now that we have our content organized.  One of the first features I will be adding is RSS feeds for each category and sub category.  If you are into ALM, we will have a feed for that! I hope you enjoy these and the engine will continue to get better as we start testing the data.  I hope you are as excited about this as I am :D.  Technorati Tags: Geekswithblogs.net,Categories,Sherlock

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  • Learn Many Languages

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

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  • Podcast with AJI about iOS development coming from a .NET background

    - by Tim Hibbard
    I talked with Jeff and John from AJI Software the other day about developing for the iOS platform. We chatted about learning Xcode and Objective-C, provisioning devices and the app publishing process. We all have a .NET background and made lots of comparisons between the two platforms/ecosystems/fanbois. They even let me throw in a plug for Christian Radio Locator. Jeff was my first contact with the Kansas City .NET community. It was probably about 10 years ago. He pushed me to talk more (and rescued me from my first talk that bombed) and blog more. One time a group of us took a 16 hour car trip to South Carolina for a code camp and live podcasted the whole thing. Good times.Listen to the show Click here to subscribe to more AJI Reports in the future.

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  • open source database project

    - by Jeff V
    What is the best way to build an open source database? I would like to build a database of all vehicles and the related maintenance information (i.e Oil Weight, Quantity, Tire Pressure, Windshield wipers etc). Currently this information is fragmented or just not put on line in an open way. Once collection began I would want to import into a DB and then be able to distribute freely. Is there a process (site or group) that I can start gathering this information in a reliable and verifiable way? Is there any issues that I should watch out for?

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  • Best Ruby Git library?

    - by Jeff Welling
    Which is the best Git library in Ruby to use? Git, Grit, Rugged, Other? Background: I'm the current maintainer of TicGit-ng which is a distributed offline ticket system built on git, and I've read and heard over and over again that Grit is the one I should use because it supersedes the Git gem, but there seems to be either a lack of documentation or a lack of features because myself and others have failed in trying to switch from the deprecated-but-functional Git to the newer Grit gem.

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