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• O'reilly certification in PHP worth it?

  - by editzombie

  I asked this question over on stack overflow but I didn't realise it wasn't really the place for not so technical questions. I've seen quite a few related threads on this forum so I thought I'd try and get some feedback here: This is my first time asking a question on this forum, though I´ve read it a lot. I apologise if this is repeating a thread. I´m interested in getting into web development. I am a video editor by trade but living in Spain the way things are at the moment its very difficult to find work. I have some very basic knowledge of HTML and CSS and a little bit of flash and have designed a few little personal websites myself. I also worked for a online marketing production company where I worked a little on blog design in Blogger amongst other social media. So thats my background, but I´m trying to expand my skills and get into web development as a career or in general part of my skill base, I was thinking particularly about PHP/MySQL. I have worked a little on some of the Lynda.com tutorials and have invested in a book (Sams Teach Yourself PHP, MySQL and Apache). I´m still finding it very difficult to progress. I know I should really try some practice projects (any reccomendations would be welcome). But I was also thinking about doing one of the O´Reilly certification courses and was wondering whether it would be worthwhile for a noob like me. I hear that the courses are associated with an American University which I guess gives it more clout. Any other thoughts you guys have about how to make progress in learning web development would be fantasic. Thanks in advance.

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• Cheap ways to do scaling ops in shader?

  - by Nick Wiggill

  I've got an extensive world terrain that uses vec3 for the vertex position attribute. That's good, because the terrain has endless gradations due to the use of floating point. But I'm thinking about how to reduce the amount of data uploaded to the GPU. For my terrain, which uses discrete / grid-based vertex positions in x and z, it's pretty clear that I can replace my vec3s (floats, really) with shorts, halving the per-vertex position attribute cost from 12 bytes each to 6 bytes. Considering I've got little enough other vertex data, and an enormous amount of terrain data to push into the world, it's a major gain. Currently in my code, one unit in GLSL shaders is equal to 1m in the world. I like that scale. If I move over to using shorts, though, I won't be able to use the same scale, as I would then have a very blocky world where every step in height is an entire metre. So I see these potential solutions to scale the positional data correctly once it arrives at the vertex shader stage: Use 10:1 scaling, i.e. 1 short unit = 1 decimetre in CPU-side code. Do a division by 10 in the vertex shader to scale incoming decimetre values back to metres. Arbirary (non-PoT) divisions tend to be slow, however. Use (some-power-of-two):1 scaling (eg. 8:1), which enables the use of a bitshift (eg. val >> 3) to do the division... not sure how performant this is in shaders, though. Not as intuitive to read values, but possibly quite a bit faster than div by a non-PoT value. Use a texture as lookup table. I've heard that this is really fast. Or whatever solutions others can offer to achieve the same results -- minimal vertex data with sensible scaling.

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• Creating new games on Android and/or iPhone

  - by James Clifton

  I have a succesfull facebook poker game that is running very nicely, now some people have asked if I can port this to other platforms - mainly mobile devices (and I have been asked to make a tablet version, do I really need a seperate version?) I am currently a PHP programmer (and game designer) and I simply dont' have the time to learn Android and other languages - so I have decided to pay third parties to program them (if viable). The information I need to know is what programming language is needed for the following four devices - Android mobile phone, iPhone, iPad and tablets? Can they all run off a central sql database? If they can't then i'm not interested :( Do any of these run FLASH? Have I covered all my main bases here? For example if a person programs for a ANDROID mobile phone is that to much differant to an ANDROID tablet? They will have slightly differant graphics (because the tablet has a greater screen area might as well use it) but do they need to be started from scratch? Same goes for iPhone/iPad, do they really need to be programmed differantly if the only differance is the graphics?

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• hd0 out of disk error results to low graphics mode

  - by msPeachy

  Yesterday, I have reinstalled Ubuntu due to a error: hd0 out of disk on boot. Everything went fine, I've installed apps, perform updates and upgraded the kernel. I've even restarted it a few times just to check if I would encounter boot issues and was glad that everything was working perfectly, then powered it down. The next morning when I boot, I got this error: hd0 out of disk error. Press any key to continue... again! After pressing a key, it took 10 minutes for the Ubuntu logo to appear with it's 5 dots. After another 5 minutes, Ubuntu started checking the disk and displayed a message that / has errors, I pressed F to fix the errors. After which Ubuntu tells me that /tmp is not yet ready for mounting so I pressed S to skip mounting it, then Ubuntu restarted. On boot I saw the error: hd0 out of disk error. Press any key to continue... again. This time it took only a minute for the Ubuntu logo to appear and after another minute a dialog box appeared with the following message: The system is running in low-graphics mode. Your screen, graphics card, and input settings could not be detected correctly. You will have to configure these yourself. What would you like to do? Run in low-graphics mode for just one session Reconfigure graphics Troubleshoot the error Exit to console login Whichever option I choose I ended up with a console prompt: grub-editenv: error: cannot read the file /boot/grub/grubenv. _ I can't do anything on this console, whatever I type nothing happens. I've rebooted several times and I get same error every time. I don't quite understand what is wrong with Ubuntu or with my installation. I've encountered this hd0 out of disk error several times already and always ended up reinstalling. I'd really really appreciate it if you guys can help me fix this. Thank you and good day.

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• At the end of my rope

  - by hvgotcodes

  I am a contractor to a big company. Currently, there are three developers on the project, myself included. The problem is the other 2 developers don't really get it. By "it" i mean the following: They don't understand the best practices for the technology we are using. After 6 months of me and others giving them examples there are terrible anti-patterns being used. They are "copy and paste" programmers that produce primarily spaghetti code. They constantly break things, implementing changes but not doing a basic smoke test to see if all is good They refuse/rarely to ask for code-reviews. They refuse/rarely even do basic things like formatting code. No documentation on any classes (jsdocs) Afraid to delete code that doesn't do anything Leave commented code blocks everywhere even though we have version control. I find myself getting more and more frustrated as I format others code, fix bugs, discover functionality that is broken, and create abstractions to remove the spaghetti. I really don't know what to do. I try not to get to frustrated, but it's just a mess. I like these people as people, but I feel like the coding situation is so bad that I could move faster if they simply browsed the web all day. Would it be out of line to ask our manager to review the others svn commit access; commits can only be done after a review by someone who is knowledgeable in what we are doing? As a contractor, I'm not sure if that's the best move. Is there a subtle/not so subtle way of making it clear how many things I am fixing?

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• backlight doesn't work on acer 5732z tried everything I can find

  - by Dude Random21

  Ok if you can solve my problem you're really really good. I want to run ubuntu 12.04 on my acer aspire 5732z I know (from research) that these computer's have issues with the backlight on ubuntu. So I tried a couple of solutions: The "sudo lightdm restart" method. I get no change at all. The "sudo setpci -s 00:02.0 F4.B=30" method. This so far has been the most effective, I first tried it in the F1 console right away I get the screen back, problem is going back to the desktop it goes back to being black. So I tried it from a terminal window and it works as well but as soon as I unplug my external monitor the screen turns black again and doesn't come back. If I plug the monitor back in the screen stays black and the only thing I see is the mouse pointer. From here I go back into console (which I am able to see) and reboot from there. The "sudo sed -i 's/GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=""/GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="acpi_osi=Linux"/g' /etc/default/grub" method. This one I got no instant change and after reboot still no change. I'm open to pretty much any suggestions you may have.

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• Ubuntu 12.04 Network Manager: unable to save manual setting to set up a static ip

  - by Andy

  I am fairly familiar with setting up servers, and ubuntu is generally my flavor of choice, but I just installed 12.04 desktop and I am seeing some behavior in network manager that is really puzzling. The network connection works fine if I leave it set on dhcp, but I would like a static IP address for my new web server. When I go into network manager and edit the connection for the one and only NIC I can select MANUAL from the dropdown menu but as soon as I do the Save button becomes greyed out. Even after filling out all fields for the connection it is still grey and I am unable to save the static IP connection information. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. I'm hoping there is just some new setting that I am unaware of.... On another note, if I stop the network manager and go edit the interfaces file (and the appropriate hosts/routes/dns files), I do get a static ip address assigned and I can contact my server from the outside, however, the server cannot find the internet. Can't ping even its own ip... I can ping the loopback interface though. I'm really confused on this one. Hoping someone can offer some help.

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• Can't Log Into Ubuntu 12.04

  - by Razick

  Yesterday, after turning on Ubuntu, I logged into a Gnome session. A few minutes later, I tried switching to Unity for a change. Unfortunately, the background and my desktop icons loaded, but the system bar and launcher failed to load even after several minutes. Unity had always worked fine for me. I then tried the guest account, and it worked fine on both Unity and Gnome. However, the problem with my account got worse; I couldn't log into any desktop at all anymore. I would type in my password and press enter and it would just sit there doing nothing. The computer no longer responded in any way, so I had to hold the power button and reboot. The same problem happened repeatedly. Earlier today, I tried to get on again. I found that I hadthe same problem, when I tried to log in, the computer no longer locked up, but instead flashed a black screen with theconsole output and what seemed to be an error message before returning to the log in screen. It was to quick for me to read, about 1/4-1/2 second. I'd really appreciate some help as I have some important files that are not backed up yet. I can't transfer the files to a new account, or even make a new account because I tried taking the password off my account so now I can't authenticate from the guest to perform root functions. I'd really appreciate some help as I have some important files that are not backed up yet. Thanks.

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• Neural network input preprocessing

  - by TND

  It's clear that the effectiveness of a neural network depends strongly on the format you give it to work with. You want to preprocess it into the most convenient form you can algorithmically get to, so that the neural network doesn't have to account for that itself. I'm working on a little project that (surprise!) is going to be using neural networks. My future goal is to eventually use NEAT, which I'm really excited about. Anyway, one of my ideas involves moving entities in continuous 2D space, from a top-down perspective (this would be a really cool game AI). Of course, unless these guys are blind, they're going to be able to see the world around them. There's a lot of different ways this information could be fed into the network. One interesting but expensive way is to simply render a top-down "view" of things, with the entities as dots on the picture, and feed that in. I was hoping for something much simpler to use (at least at first), such as a list of the x (maybe 7 or so) nearest entities and their position in relative polar coordinates, orientation, health, etc., but I'm trying to think of the best way to do it. My first instinct was to order them by distance, which would inherently also train the neural network to consider those more "important". However, I was thinking- what if there's two entities that are nearly the same distance away? They could easily alternate indexes in that list, confusing the network. My question is, is there a better way of representing this? Essentially, the issue is the network needs a good way of keeping track of who's who, while knowing (by being inputted) relevant information about the list of entities it can see. Thanks!

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• What will be the better way for data retrieval on application that needs to handle limited amount of data?

  - by Milanix

  Just moved this question from Stack Overflow. Since, adding my code snippets itself would make this question really long. Instead, I am pretty interested in knowing a better ways for data retrieval on application that needs to handle limited amount of data which isn't updated regularly. Let's take this example: I am writing an application which gets a schedule as an XML from server. I have written a logic in order to parse XML version and update database only if the version is newer than the local version. Although the update is checked automatically/manually on daily basis based on user preference, the actual version update happens only once per few months or so. Since, this is done by some other authority which doesn't provide API but, rather inform publicly on their changes. The actual XML contains a "(n number of groups)(days in a week) (n number of schedule)" . The group is usually 6 and the number of schedule is usually 2. So basically there would usually be only around 100 strings. Now although I have used SQLite at the moment. I want to know how to make update on database. Should I show progress dialog that the application is updating and exit the app when it's done? Since, my updates are infrequent i don't think this will really harm user experience but, is there any better ways to do it? Because I don't want update to be made when user is searching which is done using database. This will cause an database already open exception. At least I have faced this problem before. Is it better to rather parse XML every time when user wants to view certain things or to use SQLite? Since, I make lots of use of adapter in my app to create lists, will that degrade the performance?

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• Still Alive&hellip;

  - by MOSSLover

  As Glados would say at the end of Portal “I’m still alive…”.  I am around, but I’m just not posting as frequently as I should.  I am trying to get acclimated to my new job, planning SharePoint Saturday New York City and Women in SharePoint plus trying to lead a normal life doing normal chores and hang out with my boyfriend.  What does this mean?  Well I’m trying to cut back to one or two events a month, which will include Heartland Developer Conference, Best Practices Conference, SPS Ozarks, SPS NYC (not speaking, running), and maybe SPS Denver and/or SPS East Bay.  So with the new job acclimation the blog suffers and twitter is getting less loven.  I’m only posting on twitter at night.  I will try to blog when I can as I see more 2010 and 2007 things that I find interesting to share.  I guess when you are a new employee you try to figure out what’s going on the first few months.  It’s really hard to post on SharePoint issue while that happens.  I’m really sorry guys and I will try harder to post at least a couple times a month (and maybe moderate comments  slightly better).  I hope that you all have a good weekend.

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• You've been working on a platform for as long as you remember. Not anymore. How does it feel?

  - by Shinnok

  How does it feel to work on a platform for as long as you remember, you've been encouraged to innovate, to improve and give all in day and night for that platform, be it either an operating system, a hardware architecture or a software framework/library and then be forced to switch bases because that platform has been abandoned over the night? It has happened before, many times, for eg. to SGI/IRIX and more recently to SUN/Open Solaris and now Nokia/Symbian. Have you been part of such a shift? If so then please share the story and describe your feelings at that time and if it is the case, how did you manage the situation? Reorientation? Giving up on the field and turned to other things you've been constantly putting aside like family? Many did so(for eg. people at Netscape). You may not think of it being such a big deal, but it is, after you've been working 10 to 20+ years on a platform/technology and then be faced to switch your expertise and mindset, the feeling tends to become really strong and some people really give up this crazy field and start enojoying a normal life. Would love to hear your stories.

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• Why does my fan run so hard on my Dell XPS 15z?

  - by Kilhoffer

  I recently bought a Dell XPS 15z. It came with Windows 7 Home Premium, but I really wanted to try out Ubuntu on it. I ran the Windows installer and was surprised how smooth the process was. Within 10 minutes, I had a dual boot setup with Ubuntu 11.10. It boots into Ubuntu just fine and everything seems to work. I've read a lot about problems with touchpad and wireless, but honestly, I've had none of those issues. The only thing that's really bothering me is the fan constantly runs fast. Under Windows, it rarely ever came on and when it did, it wasnt spinning that fast. What could be going on under Ubuntu that would cause this? I want to get that under control because I want to use Ubuntu as my primary OS and screw Windows. Any help would be much appreciated! Note: I've read that others have set acpi=false, but I have not made any changes to the default installation. Should I make that change?

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• Testing a codebase with sequential cohesion

  - by iveqy

  I've this really simple program written in C with ncurses that's basically a front-end to sqlite3. I would like to implement TDD to continue the development and have found a nice C unit framework for this. However I'm totally stuck on how to implement it. Take this case for example: A user types a letter 'l' that is captured by ncurses getch(), and then an sqlite3 query is run that for every row calls a callback function. This callback function prints stuff to the screen via ncurses. So the obvious way to fully test this is to simulate a keyboard and a terminal and make sure that the output is the expected. However this sounds too complicated. I was thinking about adding an abstraction layer between the database and the UI so that the callback function will populate a list of entries and that list will later be printed. In that case I would be able to check if that list contains the expected values. However, why would I struggle with a data structure and lists in my program when sqlite3 already does this? For example, if the user wants to see the list sorted in some other way, it would be expensive to throw away the list and repopulate it. I would need to sort the list, but why should I implement sorting when sqlite3 already has that? Using my orginal design I could just do an other query sorted differently. Previously I've only done TDD with command line applications, and there it's really easy to just compare the output with what I'm expected. An other way would be to add CLI interface to the program and wrap a test program around the CLI to test everything. (The way git.git does with it's test-framework). So the question is, how to add testing to a tightly integrated database/UI.

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• Why does my mic boost automatically go to 100 on every boot?

  - by Ben

  When my computer turns on, it automatically sets the "mic boost" sound setting to 100. This causes a loud static sound in my speakers. I can manually go to alsamixer and turn the mic boost down manually, but I would prefer it if I didn't have to do this every time I turn the computer on. I've tried running sudo alsactl store after fixing the settings, and this does save them, but I have to run sudo alsactl restore to restore the settings. This means that I have to manually fix the sound every time I start the computer anyway, so it isn't really a fix. I tried putting sudo alsactl restore in my startup programs, but that didn't seem to fix anything. I'm running Ubuntu 12.04, but I started having this problem before upgrading from 11.10. I'm using a Sony Vaio laptop. I'm not really sure what made it start; it seemed like I just started having the problem randomly one day. Any help would be appreciated! Edit: here is the output from running amixer: http://paste.ubuntu.com/1060080/

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• Why job postings always looking for "rockstars?"

  - by Xepoch

  I have noticed a recent trend in requesting programmers who are rockstars. I get it, they're looking for someone who is really good at what they do. But why (pray) make the reference to a rockstar? Do these companies really want these traits as a real rockstar? Party all night and wake up to take care of quick business in the morning? Substance abuse, Narcissism with celebrity, Compensation well exceeding their management, Excellent at putting on a short-lived show, Entertainment instead of value, 1 hit (project) wonders or single-genre performers, Et cetera What is wrong with Senior or Principal Software Engineer who has an established and proven passion for the business? Rather do we mean quite the opposite, someone who: rolls up the sleeves and gets to work, takes appropriate direction and helps influence teams, programs in lessons' learned and proper practices, provides timely communication to the whole team, can code and understand multiple languages, understands the science and theory behind computation, Is there a trend to diversify the software engineering ranks? How many software rockstars can you hire before your band starts breaking up? Sure, there are lots of folks doing this stuff on their own, maybe even a rare few who do coding for show, but I wager the majority is for business. I don't see ads for rockstar accountants, or rockstar machinists, or rockstart CFOs. What makes the software programmer and their hiring departments lean towards this kind of job title?

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• Start building websites using Java

  - by Alex coady

  I'm a web developer and I've used PHP, along with MySQL, Javascript, jQuery etc; all of which I'm very confident with and can use on a professional level. What I'm wanting to do however, is to start using Java instead of PHP as I'm creating sites that need to be scalable. I really need a starting point. I can program in Java, I understand the language but have never used it for the web. Links, tutorials, examples would be a great help. I have also considered using Scala (the language Twitter is written in).. but don't really understand the benefits. Please no jargon; I need clear information that essentially takes me through the process of creating a very simple website using Java; I'm more than capable of building the site once that's done.. I think. I've previously used Eclipse so if assume I can. Thanks in advance!

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• Is it better to specialize in a single field I like, or expand into other fields to broaden my horizons?

  - by Oak

  This is a dilemma about which I have been thinking for quite a while. I'm a graduate student and my topics of interest are programming language design, code analysis, compilation, etc. So far, this field has been very interesting and rewarding for me, so I was thinking about finding a job in that field and continuing to specialize in it. I feel like it's a relatively solid field which won't "get out of style" anytime soon. I've always thought that in such complex fields it's better to be a real expert than just another guy who superficially understand what the experts are talking about. On the other hand, I feel that by specializing this way I really limit my future option. I have always been a strong believer in multidisciplinary approaches to problems. Maybe I should go search for a general programming job in which I could gain experience in other fields, as well as occasionally apply my favorite field for solving problems. Specializing in only one or two fields can prevent me from thinking outside the box and cause stagnation. I would really like to hear more opinions about this choice. The truth is I'm already leaning towards one of the choices, so basic psychology says nothing will change my mind, but I would still love to hear some feedback.

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• Finding the best practice for a game simulating tool

  - by Tougheart

  I'm studying Java right now, and I'm thinking of this tool as my practice project. The game is "League of Legends" in case anyone knows it, I'm not actually simulating the game as in simulating game play, I'm just trying to create a tool that can compare different champions to each other based on their own abilities and items bought inside the game. The game basics are: Every player has a champion in a team of 5 players playing against another team. Each champion has a different set of abilities (usually 4) that s/he uses to do damage to opposing champions. Each champion gets stronger by buying different items, increasing the attack it deals or decreasing the damage received. What I want to do is to create a tool to be used outside the game enabling players to try out different builds for their champions and compare the figures against other champions they usually fight against. The goal is to enable players get a deeper understanding of the different item combinations (builds) that can be used during the games, instead of trying them out in real games which can be somehow very time consuming. What I'm stuck at is the best practice I should follow to make this possible using Java, I can't figure out which classes should inherit from which, should I make champions and items specs in the code or extracted from other files, specially that I'm talking about hundreds of items and champions to use in that tool. I'm self studying Java, and I don't have much practice at it, so I would really appreciate any broad guidelines regarding this, and sorry if my question doesn't fit here, I tried to follow the rules. English isn't my native language, so I'm really sorry if I wasn't clear enough, I would be more than happy to explain anything that's not understood.

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• Cannot access windows share

  - by Wrigley

  I have an accounting program specifically tailored to the IT industry, its called Fincon (exe based). It basically works on a client to server directory base system. the server is currently running on a windows 7 machine with a NTFS partition. I have installed Wine. Have the shared Windows directory mounted with what I assume is the correct command for such being (mount -tsmbfs //servername/sharedir /mnt/fincon -0 usename=username,password=password). I can see the shared dir although it does take a bit long to access it on the Ubuntu machine via the mapped directory but instant via normal network browsing. I have also set up the mapped directory to my D: drive in Wine and have pointed the fincon.ini to read server field from D: directly. Here's my issue, it seems that for some odd reason I cant write to the mapped directory from Ubuntu, yet I can with my Windows machines, the permissions are set correct on the Windows 7 share and I really dunno what I'm missing. I'm quite a Linux noob just switched yesterday. Thanks guys for any help in this would be quite appreciated. As I'm pulling out my hair here and really want to migrate my work PCs to a Linux OS as it just gives less issues than Windows does ever.

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• TechEd North America 2012-Day 4 #msTechEd #teched

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  I hadn’t time yesterday to write a blog post before of the beginning of the day and I recover now that I’m already back to Europe. I spent many hours at the Microsoft booth meeting people who asked questions about Tabular, Power View and PowerPivot. I have to say that I’m really glad so many people started using PowerPivot and of the large interest around Tabular. During my BISM: Multidimensional vs. Tabular I’ve been helped by Alberto during the demo (we joked about he was the demo monkey) and the feedback received are good. I tried to compare the strength and weakness of the two modeling options without spending time describing the area in which they are similar. During the days before I had many discussions about scenarios based on snapshots and I added a few slides to the presentation in order to cover this area that I thought was marginal but seems to be a very common one. To know more, watch the presentation when it will be available or wait for some article I’ll write in the future describing these patterns. In less than 10 days, I’ll be at TechEd Europe and I’m really looking forward to meet other Tabular developers and PowerPivot users there!

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• Getting started on Large Projects

  - by Mercfh

  So I just graduated from my College with a B.S. in Comp. Science (although it was a good school, we're the only accredited CS department in our state.....for w/e that means lol) I feel like im a decent programmer, not amazing....but not terrible. Anyways I got my first job about 2 weeks ago, it's a pretty entry level job: firmware development/tester (I know I know people look down on testers...but I gotta start somewhere). Anyways there isn't a whole lot of coding to be had right now (mostly simple stuff) but here soon I have the option of helping out with development (which is what I want to do) Thing is....I have NEVER worked on a huge project. I mean in school sure we had "group" projects but nothing really big. So I'm not super familiar with HUGE classes and such (main language was C++)....Is this something I'll just get used to with time? Some fellow students were used to that with internships and such...but I never got that chance. My job was mostly a "one man job" kinda thing. Mostly little things. Plus in class we never did huge projects anyways. So how do you guys I guess "plan" out these things? Do you use a whiteboard and plan out classes and such....or what. Also...another worry of mine is that I have to use google......ALOT for examples of code, because sometimes I just don't get how something works. Is this normal? It makes me feel sorta.....stupid I guess. I mean "technically" i've had 4-5 years coding experience......but it really only feels like I had 2 years of REAL experience. If that makes any sense? Thanks

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• Why is quicksort better than other sorting algorithms in practice?

  - by Raphael

  This is a repost of a question on cs.SE by Janoma. Full credits and spoils to him or cs.SE. In a standard algorithms course we are taught that quicksort is O(n log n) on average and O(n²) in the worst case. At the same time, other sorting algorithms are studied which are O(n log n) in the worst case (like mergesort and heapsort), and even linear time in the best case (like bubblesort) but with some additional needs of memory. After a quick glance at some more running times it is natural to say that quicksort should not be as efficient as others. Also, consider that students learn in basic programming courses that recursion is not really good in general because it could use too much memory, etc. Therefore (and even though this is not a real argument), this gives the idea that quicksort might not be really good because it is a recursive algorithm. Why, then, does quicksort outperform other sorting algorithms in practice? Does it have to do with the structure of real-world data? Does it have to do with the way memory works in computers? I know that some memories are way faster than others, but I don't know if that's the real reason for this counter-intuitive performance (when compared to theoretical estimates).

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• Where have I been for the last month?

  - by MarkPearl

  So, I have been pretty quiet for the last month or so. True, it has been holiday time and I went to Cape Town for a stunning week of sunshine and blue skies, but the second I got back home I spent the remainder of my holiday on my pc viewing tutorials on www.tekpub.com Craig Shoemaker, who I got in contact with because of his podcast, sent me a 1 month free subscription to the site and it has been really appreciated. I have done a lot of WPF programming in the past, but not any asp.net stuff and so I used the time to get a peek at asp.net mvc2 as well as a bunch of other technologies. I just wished I had more spare time to do the rest of the videos. While I didn’t understand all of what was being shown on the asp.net stuff (it required previous asp.net expertise), the site was a really good jump start to someone wanting to learn a new technology and broaden the horizons and I would highly recommend it, My only gripe is that in South Africa we have limited bandwidth and bandwidth speeds and so I spent a lot of my monthly bandwidth on the site and had to top up with my ISP several times because of the high quality video captures that the site did. I would have preferred to download the video’s, but apparently that is only available to people who have the yearly subscription fee. Other than that, great site and thanks a ton Craig!

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• My Windows Phone 7 experience: 45 days in

  - by Enrique Lima

  November 13th, 2010 was the day I got my Windows Phone 7.  It was an exciting day, a lot of anxiety too.  Over a phone? Sadly, yes! Being a Zune Pass subscriber, it was something worth looking forward too, being a consultant that relies and works with Microsoft technologies and having the option of OneNote (without converters and such) on my phone was a great thing too. Has that changed over 45 days?  No, not really.  But I find myself at the very same place I was with my iPhone, I don’t really use the music player as I spend enough time in front of a computer where I have Pandora and the Zune Desktop.  Or in a car with Satellite Radio.  As for OneNote, that keeps me hooked and with access to my notes no matter where I take them. The Device: Samsung Focus Likes: OneNote integration, Zune capabilities (just note my comment above), fast and smooth interface, calendar, tiles, the device itself. Dislikes: Heavy glitches in SharePoint interaction. And a very weird one I have experienced is, any pictures I get sent from an iPhone via email will register as an attachment but the pictures are not listed as the attachment once I open the message … weird!!  Then, of course, some apps have not made it to the platform (not sure they ever will … Pandora??!!??  Chase??!!??).  But those apps missing is not the phone, or Microsoft’s fault (IMO).  In summary, I am happy with it, and some of the missing apps have made me shift the way I work with the products or features affected … meaning I rely on my desktop stuff for that.

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