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• Do you feel underappreciated or resent the geek/nerd stigma?

  - by dotnetdev

  At work we have a piece of A4 paper with the number of everyone in the office. The structure of this document is laid out in rectangles, by department. I work for the department that does all the technical stuff. That includes support—bear in mind that the support staff isn't educated in IT but just has experience in PC maintenance and providing support to a system we resell but don't have source code access to, project manager, team leader, a network administrator, a product manager, and me, a programmer. Anyway, on this paper, we are labelled as nerds and geeks. I did take a little offence to this, as much as it is light hearted (but annoying and old) humour. I have a vivid image that a geek is someone who doesn't go out but codes all day. I code all day at home and at work (when I have something to code...), but I keep balance by going out. I don't know why it is only people who work with computers that get such a stigma. No other profession really gets the same stigma—skilled, technical, or whatever. An account manager (and this is hardly a skilled job) says, "Perhaps [MY NAME HERE] could write some geeky code tomorrow to add this functionality to the website." It is funny how I get such an unfair stigma but I am so pivotal. In fact, if it wasn't for me, the company would have nothing to sell so the account managers would be redundant! I make systems, they get sold, and this is what pays the wages. It's funny how the account managers get a commission for how many systems they sell, or manage to make clients resubscribe to. Yet I built the thing in the first place! On top of that, my brother says all I do is type stuff on a keyboard all day. Surely if I did, I'd be typing at my normal typing speed of 100wpm+ as if I am writing a blog entry. Instead, I plan as I code along on the fly if commercial pressures and time prohibit proper planning. I never type as if I'm writing normal English. There is more to our jobs than just typing code. And my brother is a pipe fitter with no formal qualifications in his name. I could easily, and perhaps more justifiably, say he just manipulates a spanner or something. Does you feel underappreciated or that a geek/nerd stigma is undeserved or unfair?

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• Should using Eval carry the same stigma as GoTo?

  - by JustSmith

  It is taught in every computer science class and written in many books that programmers should not use GoTo. There is even an xkcd comic about it. My question is have we reached a point where the same thing can be said about Eval? Where GoTo is not conductive for program flow and readability, Eval is the same for debugging, and program execution, and design. Should using Eval have the same stigma as GoTo, and same consequences as in the xkcd comic?

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• Libraries merged folder views

  - by Stigma

  So I pretty much love the Windows 7 Libraries feature, and saw one use for them that I thought would be perfect, but I can't seem to manage it. Basically, a merged view of different folder structures. Suppose I make a new generic library and add three locations to it: C:\Test\, D:\Test\ and D:\temp\Test\. Now, these may look somewhat okay as long as there are no duplicates in these folders. (It wants to group them based on the included directory, which one can work around by looking on google - I don't have the precise trick on hand I am afraid.) But when you get collisions and, say, two of those directories have a Sub directory in them, stuff becomes unusable (assuming Arrange by: Folder view). You'll have multiple folders listed named Sub, which is pretty useless when looking for data. I want folders to get 'merged', which ought to be possible somehow since it can create these merged views based on artist, album etc in other views. So all subdirectories that are double (and recursively checking for doubles inside those, etc) ought to be merged for as far the View is concerned. If files have a collision, I don't really care what happens - hide one, show both, filter out duplicates, whatever. (Although an option would be nice...) Anyhow, is there anyone who knows how to get such a 'merged folder structure' functionality for Libraries? It would be really useful for me.

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• Wiki-fying a text using LPeg

  - by Stigma

  Long story coming up, but I'll try to keep it brief. I have many pure-text paragraphs which I extract from a system and re-output in wiki format so that the copying of said data is not such an arduous task. This all goes really well, except that there are no automatic references being generated for the 'topics' we have pages for, which end up needing to be added by reading through all the text and adding it in manually by changing Topic to [[Topic]]. First requirement: each topic is only to be made clickable once, which is the first occurrence. Otherwise, it would become a really spammy linkfest, which would detract from readability. To avoid issues with topics that start with the same words Second requirement: overlapping topic names should be handled in such a way that the most 'precise' topic gets the link, and in later occurrences, the less precise topics do not get linked, since they're likely not correct. Example: topics = { "Project", "Mary", "Mr. Moore", "Project Omega"} input = "Mary and Mr. Moore work together on Project Omega. Mr. Moore hates both Mary and Project Omega, but Mary simply loves the Project." output = function_to_be_written(input) -- "[[Mary]] and [[Mr. Moore]] work together on [[Project Omega]]. Mr. Moore hates both Mary and Project Omega, but Mary simply loves the [[Project]]." Now, I quickly figured out a simple or complicated string.gsub() could not get me what I need to satisfy the second requirement, as it provides no way to say 'Consider this match as if it did not happen - I want you to backtrack further'. I need the engine to do something akin to: input = "abc def ghi" -- Looping over the input would, in this order, match the following strings: -- 1) abc def ghi -- 2) abc def -- 3) abc -- 4) def ghi -- 5) def -- 6) ghi Once a string matches an actual topic and has not been replaced before by its wikified version, it is replaced. If this topic has been replaced by a wikified version before, don't replace, but simply continue the matching at the end of the topic. (So for a topic "abc def", it would test "ghi" next in both cases.) Thus I arrive at LPeg. I have read up on it, played with it, but it is considerably complex, and while I think I need to use lpeg.Cmt and lpeg.Cs somehow, I am unable to mix the two properly to make what I want to do work. I am refraining from posting my practice attempts as they are of miserable quality and probably more likely to confuse anyone than assist in clarifying my problem. (Why do I want to use a PEG instead of writing a triple-nested loop myself? Because I don't want to, and it is a great excuse to learn PEGs.. except that I am in over my head a bit. Unless it is not possible with LPeg, the first is not an option.)

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• Asynchronous subprocess on Windows

  - by Stigma

  First of all, the overall problem I am solving is a bit more complicated than I am showing here, so please do not tell me 'use threads with blocking' as it would not solve my actual situation without a fair, FAIR bit of rewriting and refactoring. I have several applications which are not mine to modify, which take data from stdin and poop it out on stdout after doing their magic. My task is to chain several of these programs. Problem is, sometimes they choke, and as such I need to track their progress which is outputted on STDERR. pA = subprocess.Popen(CommandA, shell=False, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.PIPE) # ... some more processes make up the chain, but that is irrelevant to the problem pB = subprocess.Popen(CommandB, shell=False, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.PIPE, stdin=pA.stdout ) Now, reading directly through pA.stdout.readline() and pB.stdout.readline(), or the plain read() functions, is a blocking matter. Since different applications output in different paces and different formats, blocking is not an option. (And as I wrote above, threading is not an option unless at a last, last resort.) pA.communicate() is deadlock safe, but since I need the information live, that is not an option either. Thus google brought me to this asynchronous subprocess snippet on ActiveState. All good at first, until I implement it. Comparing the cmd.exe output of pA.exe | pB.exe, ignoring the fact both output to the same window making for a mess, I see very instantaneous updates. However, I implement the same thing using the above snippet and the read_some() function declared there, and it takes over 10 seconds to notify updates of a single pipe. But when it does, it has updates leading all the way upto 40% progress, for example. Thus I do some more research, and see numerous subjects concerning PeekNamedPipe, anonymous handles, and returning 0 bytes available even though there is information available in the pipe. As the subject has proven quite a bit beyond my expertise to fix or code around, I come to Stack Overflow to look for guidance. :) My platform is W7 64-bit with Python 2.6, the applications are 32-bit in case it matters, and compatibility with Unix is not a concern. I can even deal with a full ctypes or pywin32 solution that subverts subprocess entirely if it is the only solution, as long as I can read from every stderr pipe asynchronously with immediate performance and no deadlocks. :)

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• Moving from Test Automation to Development

  - by avgvstvs

  I'm in an interesting quandary. I've been doing test automation using QTP for about 1.5 years, and am in the slow process of switching to a developer role in my same company. I also begin my Master's in CS this fall. An old friend is trying to recruit me for a Sr. Test Automation position that could potentially pay me $23k more for the exact same thing I do now. But obviously I would defer moving to development. The new company is much more technical overall (I would be moving from financial services to industrial automation, and they have MANY more software dev roles available. I know traditionally QA type jobs carry an odd "danger" tag, but test automation is really a different beast. Does anyone have any experience moving from test automation to development? Does the QA stigma exist? The extra $$ would be nice, but not at the expense of my career. I should note that my Master's will be on Systems/parallel programming, so one thought is that I'll get automatic consideraton for development upon completing my Master's. I also work 6hrs/wk doing game development with a friend.

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• Does anyone actually use the phrase DHTML anymore?

  - by lafoaug

  I'm not sure if this is exactly appropriate but I have what I think is a interesting question. Does anyone actually use the phrase DHTML anymore in a professional environment? I came across the the word the other day for the first time in years and shuddered at the thought of it. To me the acronym Dynamic HTML just sounds so 1999, it brings me back to the days when I first discovered programming and web development and thought it was awesome to have scripts which modified the status bar and made things fly around the page. I for one have never used the phrase recently and would never dream of saying it in a professional environment to clients or colleges as I feel there is an amateur and dated stigma attached to it. What are your thoughts?

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