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• Companies and Ships

  - by TechnicalWriting

  I have worked for small, medium, large, and extra large companies and they have something in common with ships. These metaphors have been used before, I know, but I will have a go at them.The small company is like a speed boat, exciting and fast, and can turn on a dime, literally. Captain and crew share a lot of the work. A speed boat has a short range and needs to refuel a lot. It has difficulty getting through bad weather. (Small companies often live quarter to quarter. By the way, if a larger company is living quarter to quarter, it is taking on water.)The medium company is is like a battleship. It can maneuver, has a longer range, and the crew is focused on its mission. Its main concern are the other battleships trying to blow it out of the water, but it can respond quickly. Bad weather can jostle it, but it can get through most storms.The large company is like an aircraft carrier; a floating city. It is well-provisioned and can carry a specialized load for a very long range. Because of its size and complexity, it has to be well-organized to be effective and most of its functions are specialized (with little to no functional cross-over). There are many divisions and layers between Captain and crew. It is not very maneuverable; it has to set its course well in advance and have a plan of action.The extra large company is like a cruise liner. It also has to be well-organized and changes in direction are often slow. Some of the people are hard at work behind the scenes to run the ship; others can be along for the ride. They sail the same routes over and over again (often happily) with the occasional cosmetic face-lift to the ship and entertainment. It should stay in warm, friendly waters and avoid risky speed through fields of ice bergs.I have enjoyed my career on the various Ships of Technical Writing, but I get the most of my juice from the battleship where I am closer to the campaign and my contributions have the greater impact on success.Mark Metcalfewww.linkedin.com/in/MarkMetcalfe

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• How to set up VirtualBox Bridged Network on Windows 7 Host?

  - by Tong Wang

  I have virtualbox running on a Windows 2008 server, with a guest running ubuntu 10.04. The ubuntu guest is given a static IP of 192.168.1.4, which also has openssh installed. The guest has bridged network setup, I can ping 192.168.1.4 from any machine in the LAN, the ubuntu guest can also access the LAN. However, when I try to PuTTY into the ubuntu machine, I always get "connection refused". Below are some setup details: ubuntu IP: 192.168.1.4 hosts.allow sshd : 192.168.1.38 hosts.deny ALL : ALL when I the following command, I can see that sshd is listening on port 22: lsof -i tcp:22 Any idea? EDIT: It turned out to be a wrong VirtualBox Bridged Network setup. I give the Ubuntu guest a static IP of 192.168.1.4 (assigned to eth0). Then in the Windows 7 host, in the Network and Sharing Center, there is a new connection named "VirtualBox Host-Only Network" after the bridge is setup, that connection is again given the same static IP of 192.168.1.4. Once I change the "VirtualBox Host-Only Network" to automatically obtain an IP address, it's getting a different IP address of 169.254.249.70(Tentative). And now I can SSH into 192.168.1.4 with no problem, even without touching hosts.allow and hosts.deny. I've also noticed that in the properties windows (see screenshot below) of the "VirtualBox Host-Only Network", the second checkbox, "VirtualBox Bridged Networking Driver" is unchecked. While the same checkbox of the physical NIC (that is bridged to) is checked. So my further question is: is this how VBox bridged networking supposed to be setup? Any rationale behind this? I'd appreciate if someone could provide some explaination on VBox bridged networking setup on Windows host and I'll accept it as an answer.

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• Draw contour around object in Opengl

  - by Maciekp

  I need to draw contour around 2d objects in 3d space. I tried drawing lines around object(+points to fill the gap), but due to line width, some part of it(~50%) was covering object. I tried to use stencil buffer, to eliminate this problem, but I got sth like this(contour is green): http://goo.gl/OI5uc (sorry I can't post images, due to my reputation) You can see(where arrow points), that some parts of line are behind object, and some are above. This changes when I move camera, but always there is some part, that is covering it. Here is code, that I use for drawing object: glColorMask(1,1,1,1); std::list<CObjectOnScene*>::iterator objIter=ptr->objects.begin(),objEnd=ptr->objects.end(); int countStencilBit=1; while(objIter!=objEnd) { glColorMask(1,1,1,1); glStencilFunc(GL_ALWAYS,countStencilBit,countStencilBit); glStencilOp(GL_REPLACE,GL_KEEP,GL_REPLACE ); (*objIter)->DrawYourVertices(); glStencilFunc(GL_NOTEQUAL,countStencilBit,countStencilBit); glStencilOp(GL_KEEP,GL_KEEP,GL_REPLACE); (*objIter)->DrawYourBorder(); ++objIter; ++countStencilBit; } I've tried different settings of stencil buffer, but always I was getting sth like that. Here is question: 1.Am I setting stencil buffer wrong? 2. Are there any other simple ways to create contour on such objects? Thanks in advance. EDIT: 1. I don't have normals of objects. 2. Object can be concave. 3. I can't use shaders(see below why).

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• SEO title tag and earning a high rank on search engines [closed]

  - by Josh White

  Possible Duplicate: What are the best ways to increase your site's position in Google? One of the most basic SEO techiniques is including accurate description below 64 characters in the tags of each page. I was wondering if is considered ethical SEO to set up the contents based on a search keyword for example. So if the user searches for 'apples pictures' for example, then the title of the webpage would be 'apple pictures'. Note that the search keywords accurately describe my website contents because the title will always relate to the body of the webpage and 85-90% of the terms searched for will return corresponding results. Is this considered a good seo practice and is it ethical? Also, can someone explain what the idea is behind "linking"? I read somewhere that it is a good seo practice to link other websites and it is good when other websites link you. Does this mean that I should include as many links to other websites as possible (that are somehow relevant to my websites goal), also if I joined forums/services and posted my website url in the signature, would that still be considered other websites linking me?

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• Adult Swim Brings Their Programming Lineup to iOS Devices

  - by ETC

  If you’re a fan of the programming lineup on Adult Swim–such as Family Guy, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, and The Boondocks–you can now get the entire lineup for free on your iOS device. Adult Swim’s new iOS app streams Adult Swim’s programming lineup including popular shows such as Robot Chicken, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Family Guy, The Boondocks, Metalocalypse. Hit up the link below to read more and grab a free copy. Adult Swim [iTunes App Store via Download Squad] Latest Features How-To Geek ETC What Can Super Mario Teach Us About Graphics Technology? Windows 7 Service Pack 1 is Released: But Should You Install It? How To Make Hundreds of Complex Photo Edits in Seconds With Photoshop Actions How to Enable User-Specific Wireless Networks in Windows 7 How to Use Google Chrome as Your Default PDF Reader (the Easy Way) How To Remove People and Objects From Photographs In Photoshop Make Efficient Use of Tab Bar Space by Customizing Tab Width in Firefox See the Geeky Work Done Behind the Scenes to Add Sounds to Movies [Video] Use a Crayon to Enhance Engraved Lettering on Electronics Adult Swim Brings Their Programming Lineup to iOS Devices Feel the Chill of the South Atlantic with the Antarctica Theme for Windows 7 Seas0nPass Now Offers Untethered Apple TV Jailbreaking

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• Microsoft Access as a Weapon of War

  - by Damon

  A while ago (probably a decade ago, actually) I saw a report on a tracking system maintained by a U.S. Army artillery control unit.  This system was capable of maintaining a bearing on various units in the field to help avoid friendly fire.  I consider the U.S. Army to be the most technologically advanced fighting force on Earth, but to my terror I saw something on the title bar of an application displayed on a laptop behind one of the soldiers they were interviewing: Tracking.mdb Oh yes.  Microsoft Office Suite had made it onto the battlefield.  My hope is that it was just running as a front-end for a more proficient database (no offense Access people), or that the soldier was tracking something else like KP duty or fantasy football scores.  But I could also see the corporate equivalent of a pointy-haired boss walking into a cube and asking someone who had piddled with Access to build a database for HR forms.  Except this pointy-haired boss would have been a general, the cube would have been a tank, and the HR forms would have been targets that, if something went amiss, would have been hit by a 500lb artillery round. Hope that solider could write a good query :)

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• Display Problems running Ubuntu 12.04 in Windows VMware Player

  - by Alex Reynolds

  I am posting this again because I have changed to VMWare Player and I discovered something new. I am running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Guest) in VMWare Player 6.0.2 on Windows 7 64-bit Host. I have VMWare Tools installed properly. I am running MATE but the problem persists when I change (to and from) xfce, gnome, mate a-- and back again I had been using this for a couple of years without any graphics issues. After an Ubuntu update (typical) -- my video is corrupt and will not refresh correctly. My desktop icons are "mirrored" and when I open a terminal window (for instance) -- sometimes -- the window appears multiple times. Of course, only one is the real image. It seems to be a refresh problem. When I move an active window around the screen the "older" images "erase" and my icons (for instance) are in the correct location. For instance, I can move the terminal around a pretty corrupted window and the screen behind it is repainted correctly. NEW: Next, I got the idea to try and Remote Desktop in to the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Guest OS from my Windows 7 64-bit Host. Once working, and connected via Win RDC -- using MATE as default in my /etc/xrdp/startws.sh -- my video is not corrupted and works fine (as in the past). Any ideas about what is going on ? or how to fix this ?

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• Will people respect a Masters of Science in IT w/software engineering concentration from RPI?

  - by twneale

  Here's my thing: I got my undergraduate degree in political science, then a law degree. Then I figured out that I love programming and I'm pretty good at it too. It's fun and rewarding enough for me that I'd prefer to do it for a living over almost any form of pure law practice. So I'm looking at getting a masters degree to put some weight behind a possible career switch. If I actually want to develop software (web, in particular), would people in programming circles respect a master's of science in IT? Specifically, consider as an example the MS in IT from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (with a concentration in software engineering). Here's the home page: http://www.rpi.edu/IT/graduate/masters_program.html In particular, I mean to draw a contrast between IT as specifically contemplated by the RPI masters program (an interdisciplinary tech/business program) and other MS degrees in computer science or software engineering that focus more on the science and technical aspects. I guess I want to make sure that other programmers would respect my credentials and not consider me as different or underqualified based on the connotations of the phrase "IT". I believe RPI has an unimpeachable reputation for hard science, and the program seems excellent, but it still matters to me how people in industry would perceive it.

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• How can I ensure my Collada model fits on an iPhone screen?

  - by rakeshNS

  Hi I am new to game development. I see many examples and tried myself like displaying triangle, cube etc. Now I am looking to render a Collada object. So I created a Collada object using Google Sketch up and trying to render that now. But the thing I am not understanding is, in all examples the vertices are between -1.0 and +1.0 values. But when I looked into that Collada file, the vertices were ranging from -30.0 to 90.0. I know any vertices greater than 1.0 will not display on iPhone. So can you pleas tell my the secret behind converting Object coordinate to normalized vector coordinate? My previous triangle defined as struct Vertex{ float Position[3]; float Color[4]; }; const Vertex Vertices[] = { {{-0.5, -0.866}, {1, 1, 0.5f, 1}}, {{0.5, -0.866}, {1, 1, 0.5, 1}}, {{0, 1}, {1, 1, 0.5, 1}}, {{-0.5, -0.866}, {0.5f, 0.5f, 0.5f}}, {{0.5, -0.866}, {0.5f, 0.5f, 0.5f}}, {{0, -0.4f}, {0.5f, 0.5f, 0.5f}}, }; And now triangle from collada is const Vertex Vertices[] = { {{39.4202092, 90.1263924, 0.0000000}, {1, 1, 0.5f, 1}}, {{-20.2205588, 90.1263924, 0.0000000}, {1, 1, 0.5, 1}}, {{-20.2205588, 176.3763924, 0.0000000}, {1, 1, 0.5, 1}}, {{-20.2205588, 176.3763924, 0.0000000}, {1, 1, 0.5, 1}}, {{-20.2205588, 90.1263924, 0.0000000}, {1, 1, 0.5, 1}}, {{39.4202092, 90.1263924, 0.0000000}, {1, 1, 0.5, 1}}, };

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• Ranking players depending on decision making during a game

  - by tabchas

  How would I go about a ranking system for players that play a game? Basically, looking at video games, players throughout the game make critical decisions that ultimately impact the end game result. Is there a way or how would I go about a way to translate some of those factors (leveling up certain skills, purchasing certain items, etc.) into something like a curve that can be plotted on a graph? This game that I would like to implement this is League of Legends. Example: Player is Level 1 in the beginning. Gets a kill very early in the game (he gets gold because of the kill and it increases his "power curve"), and purchases attack damage (gives him more damage which also increases his "power curve". However, the player that he killed (Player 2), buys armor (counters attack damage). This slightly increases Player 2's own power curve, and reduces Player 1's power curve. There's many factors I would like to take into account. These relative factors (example: BECAUSE Player 2 built armor, and I am mainly attack damage, it lowers my OWN power curve) seem the hardest to implement. My question is this: Is there a certain way to approach this task? Are there similar theoretical concepts behind ranking systems that I should read up on? I've seen the ELO system, but it doesn't seem what I want since it simply takes into account wins and losses.

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• How to deal with a CEO making all technical decision but with little technical knowledge ?

  - by anonymous

  Hi, Question posted anonymously for obvious reasons. I am working in a company with a dev group of 5-6 developers, and I am in a situation which I have a hard time dealing with. Every technical choice (language, framework, database, database scheme, configuration scheme, etc...) is decided by the CEO, often without much rationale. It is very hard to modify those choices, and his main argument consists in "I don't like this", even though we propose several alternative with detailed pros/cons. He will also decide to rewrite from scratch our core product without giving a reason why, and he never participates to dev meetings because he considers it makes things slower... I am already looking at alternative job opportunities, but I was wondering if there anything we (the developers) could do to improve the situation. Two examples which shocked me: he will ask us to implement something akin to configuration management, but he reject any existing framework because they are not written in the language he likes (even though the implementation language is irrelevant). He also expects us to be able to write those systems in a couple of days, "because it is very simple". he keeps rewriting from scratch on his own our core product because the current codebase is too bad (codebase whose design was his). We are at our third rewrite in one year, each rewrite worse than the previous one. Things I have tried so far is doing elaborate benchmarks on our product (he keeps complaining that our software is too slow, and justifies rewrites to make it faster), implement solutions with existing products as working proof instead of just making pros/cons charts, etc... But still 90 % of those efforts go to the trashbox (never with any kind of rationale behind he does not like it, again), and often get reprimanded because I don't do exactly as he wants (not realizing that what he wants is impossible).

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• Process Improvement and the Data Professional

  - by BuckWoody

  Don’t be afraid of that title – I’m not talking about Six Sigma or anything super-formal here. In many organizations, there are more folks in other IT roles than in the Data Professional area. In other words, there are more developers, system administrators and so on than there are the “DBA” role. That means we often have more to do than the time we need to do it. And, oddly enough, the first thing that is sacrificed is process improvement – the little things we need to do to make the day go faster in the first place. Then we get even more behind, the work piles up and…well, you know all about that. Earlier I challenged you to find 10-30 minutes a day to study. Some folks wrote back and asked “where do I start”? Well, why not be super-efficient and combine that time with learning how to make yourself more efficient? Try out a new scripting language, learn a new tool that automates things or find out ways others have automated their systems. In general, find out what you’re doing and how, and then see if that can be improved. It’s kind of like doing a performance tuning gig on yourself! If you’re pressed for time, look for bite-sized articles (like the ones I’ve done here for PowerShell and SQL Server) that you can follow in a “serial” fashion. In a short time you’ll have a new set of knowledge you can use to make your day faster. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• CLR and C# Learning Materials

  - by Gerry O'Brien

  Have you ever found that one book or resource that just brings it all home?  Seriously.  These are rare finds when you read the content and all the stars seem to align, you have those "Ah ha!" moments. Well, I have found that book and it is CLR via C#, Third Edition by Jeffrey Richter.  If you're not familiar with Wintellect, look them up.  This book is published by Microsoft Press and is the third edition of this title.  I'm in chapter 5 at the moment and already I have a better understanding of the CLR and how things work.  I'm a former Visual Basic MVP and C# is a language I learned as a result of projects I worked on at a software development company a few years ago.  Like a lot of VB programmers, I never went deep into the workings of the "behind the scenes" aspects and just focused on the applications. My next possible career move involves a deeper knowledge of the CLR and a .NET language.  This book is one that I will have my bookshelf for reference long after I have read that last page. Gerry

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• Disaster Recovery Example

  Previously, I use to work for a small internet company that sells dental plans online. Our primary focus concerning disaster prevention and recovery is on our corporate website and private intranet site. We had a multiphase disaster recovery plan that includes data redundancy, load balancing, and off-site monitoring. Data redundancy is a key aspect of our disaster recovery plan. The first phase of this is to replicate our data to multiple database servers and schedule daily backups of the databases that are stored off site. The next phase is the file replication of data amongst our web servers that are also backed up daily by our collocation. In addition to the files located on the server, files are also stored locally on development machines, and again backed up using version control software. Load balancing is another key aspect of our disaster recovery plan. Load balancing offers many benefits for our system, better performance, load distribution and increased availability. With our servers behind a load balancer our system has the ability to accept multiple requests simultaneously because the load is split between multiple servers. Plus if one server is slow or experiencing a failure the traffic is diverted amongst the other servers connected to the load balancer allowing the server to get back online. The final key to our disaster recovery plan is off-site monitoring that notifies all IT staff of any outages or errors on the main website encountered by the monitor. Messages are sent by email, voicemail, and SMS. According to Disasterrecovery.org, disaster recovery planning is the way companies successfully manage crises with minimal cost and effort and maximum speed compared to others that are forced to make decision out of desperation when disasters occur. In addition Sun Guard stated in 2009 that the first step in disaster recovery planning is to analyze company risks and factor in fixed costs for things like hardware, software, staffing and utilities, as well as indirect costs, such as floor space, power protection, physical and information security, and management. Also availability requirements need to be determined per application and system as well as the strategies for recovery.

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• How successful is GPL in reaching its goals?

  - by StasM

  There are, broadly, two types of FOSS licenses when it relates to commercial usage of the code - let's say the GPL-type and the BSD-type. The first is, broadly, restrictive about commercial usage (by usage I also mean modification and redistribution, as well as creating derived works, etc.) of the code under the license, and the second is much more permissive. As I understand, the idea behind GPL-type licenses is to encourage people to abandon the proprietary software model and instead convert to the FOSS code, and the license is the instrument to entice them to do so - i.e. "you can use this nice software, but only if you agree to come to our camp and play by our rules". What I want to ask is - was this strategy successful so far? I.e. are there any major achievements in the form of some big project going from closed to open because of GPL or some software being developed in the open only because GPL made it so? How big is the impact of this strategy - compared, say, to the world where everybody would have BSD-type licenses or release all open-source code under public domain? Note that I am not asking if FOSS model is successful - this is beyond question. What I am asking is if the specific way of enticing people to convert from proprietary to FOSS used by GPL-type and not used by BSD-type licenses was successful. I also don't ask about the merits of GPL itself as the license - just about the fact of its effectiveness.

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• unreachable subnet in one direction

  - by Carl Michaud

  I'm unable to route traffic to a subnet in my home. Here's my topology: INET <- Router A <- Router B <- WIFI AP where: Router A - ARRIS TG862G/CT (from comcast) - WAN DHCP, LAN 10.0.0.99 Router B - Linksys WRT400N with DD-WRT - WAN 10.0.0.12 , LAN 10.0.1.1 I was able to use DD-WRT to configure a static route for the 10.0.1.x network back to the 10.0.0.x network. But I'm not sure if i can do the reverse on the ARRIS router and was looking for suggestions on how to fix that. I've set things up this wasy because I am using OpenDNS to mange internet content for my kids and of course I wasn't able to configure DNS to my liking on Router A either. So at present I'm using Router A on 10.0.0.x to provide a private unfiltered WIFI AP (no ssid broadcast) that I use for netflix only and then I use router B to provide a filtered WIFI AP for the rest of my WIFI devices on 10.0.1.x. However I would like to be able to connect to my 10.0.1.x devices from the internet via dynamic dns; but I can't see anything behind router B this way. Thoughts?

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• Weird behavior when using pointers [migrated]

  - by Kinan Al Sarmini

  When I run this code on MS VS C++ 2010: #include <iostream> int main() { const int a = 10; const int *b = &a; int *c = (int *)b; *c = 10000; std::cout << c << " " << &a << std::endl; std::cout << *c << " " << a << " " << *(&a) << std::endl; return 0; } The output is: 0037F784 0037F784 10000 10 10 The motivation for writing that code was this sentence from "The C++ Programming Language" by Stroustrup: "It is possible to explicitly remove the restrictions on a pointer to const by explicit type conversion". I know that trying to modify a constant is conceptually wrong, but I find this result quite weird. Can anyone explain the reason behind it?

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• ASP.NET design not SOLID

  - by w0051977

  SOLID principles are described here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOLID_%28object-oriented_design%29 I am developing a large ASP.NET app. The previous developer created a few very large classes each with lots of different purposes. It is very difficult to maintain and extend. The classes are deployed to the web server along with the code behind files etc. I want to share a small amount of the app with another application. I am considering moving all of the classes of the ASP.NET web app to a DLL, so the small subset of functionality can be shared. I realise it would be better to only share the classes which contain code to be shared but because of the dependencies this is proving to be very difficult e.g. class A contains code that should be shared, however class A contains references to classes B, C, D, E, F, G etc, so class A cannot be shared on its own. I am planning to refactor the code in the future. As a temporary solution I am planning to convert all the classes into a single class library. Is this a bad idea and if so, is there an alternative? as I don't have time to refactor at the moment.

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• My computer may have been compromised, what should I do?

  - by InkBlend

  A few weeks ago, my machine (lets call it "main") was logged into wirelessly from an unauthorized host, probably using ssh. I did not detect the intrusion until a few days ago, and my machine is completely shut down. I found the login using this line from last: myusername pts/1 ipad Tue Oct 15 22:23 - 22:25 (00:02) Needless to say, not only does no one in my family own an iPad, but almost none of my friends do, either. This makes me suspect that whoever was behind this changed the hostname of their machine. Additionally, I discovered this line in the last output on another machine of mine ("secondary"): myusername pts/2 :0 Tue Oct 15 22:23 - 22:23 (00:00) This line coincides with the timestamp from main, which has password-less ssh access (through keys) to secondary. Is it possible that whoever broke in to main has also rooted secondary? How can I prevent this from happening again? Are there logs that I can look through to determine exactly how main was accessed (I am the only user on the system and have a very strong password)? Is it at all possible that this is just a weird bug that occurred? Should I, and where should I start looking for rootkits and/or keyloggers? In short, what should I do?

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• Am I programming too slow?

  - by Jonn

  I've only been a year in the industry and I've had some problems making estimates for specific tasks. Before you close this, yes, I've already read this: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/648/how-to-respond-when-you-are-asked-for-an-estimate and that's about the same problem I'm having. But I'm looking for a more specific gauge of experiences, something quantifiable or probably other programmer's average performances which I should aim for and base my estimates. The answers range from weeks, and I was looking more for an answer on the level of a task assigned for a day or so. (Note that this doesn't include submitting for QA or documentations, just the actual development time from writing tests if I used TDD, to making the page, before having it submitted to testing) My current rate right now is as follows (on ASP.NET webforms): Right now, I'm able to develop a simple data entry page with a grid listing (no complex logic, just Creating and Reading) on an already built architecture, given one full day's (8 hours) time. Adding complex functionality, and Update and Delete pages add another full day to the task. If I have to start the page from scratch (no solution, no existing website) it takes me another full day. (Not always) but if I encounter something new or haven't done yet it takes me another full day. Whenever I make an estimate that's longer than the expected I feel that others think that I'm lagging a lot behind everyone else. I'm just concerned as there have been expectations that when it's just one page it should take me no more than a full day. Yes, there definitely is more room for improvement. There always is. I have a lot to learn. But I would like to know if my current rate is way too slow, just average, or average for someone no longer than a year in the industry.

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• Sprite sorting issues

  - by TheBroodian

  I apologize for the vague title, I'm not sure how else to phrase this problem. I am using tIDE to assist me in my game's world development. To give a dynamic effect to map layers within tIDE, it has events that can be wired up to draw sprites before or after the draw of layers, to create foreground or background effects during runtime. This all works fine and well, however, the only way that I understand that this works, is by calling tIDE's internal spritebatch to create this effect. This creates a problem for me, because within tIDE's source code, its spritebatch's call block is set to SpriteSortMode.Deferred, and my characters have particle elements that I would like to draw in front of and behind themselves, via a drawdepth value. I can use a separate instance of spritebatch and call my character's draw method, and set sprite sorting there, but then my character is drawn ontop of all layers in my tIDE map. Which is even worse to me than my particles not being drawn as I want them to be. So, in summary, I want all of my crap to work, but at the moment the only way I can figure to do that is to ghetto rig the spritebatch within my characters' draw methods by calling a spritebatch.End();, then starting a new call to Begin() with SpriteSortMode.BackToFront, doing all of my characters' draw logic, and then calling another spritebatch.End(); followed once again by a new spritebatch.Begin(). Obviously that is pretty undesirable, but I don't know any other feasible alternatives. Anybody got any wisdom they could impart unto me as to how I could handle this?

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• Applications: Some more marble fun!

  - by TechTwaddle

  Well, yesterday night I was watching a tutorial on XNA when I came across this neat little trick. It was a simple XNA application with a Windows Phone logo in it and whenever the user clicked on the device the logo would move towards the click point, and I couldn't resist experimenting with the marble (; The code is written in C# using CF3.5. Here is a video of the demo,   You probably noticed that the motion of the marble towards the click point (destination) is not linear. The marble starts off with a high velocity and slows down as it reaches its destination. This is achieved by making the speed of the marble a function of the distance between marble's current position and the destination, so as the marble approaches the destination point, the distance between them reduces and so does the speed, until it becomes zero. More on the code and the logic behind it in the next post. What I'd like to do next is, instead of making the marble stop at the click point, it should continue to move beyond it, bounce around the screen a few times and eventually come to a stop after a while. Let's see how that goes.

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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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• Friday tips #2

  - by Chris Kawalek

  Welcome to our second Friday tips blog! You can ask us questions using the hash tag #AskOracleVirtualization on Twitter and we'll do our best to answer them. Today we've got a VDI related question on linked clones: Question: I want to use linked clones with Oracle Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. What are my options? Answer by John Renko, Consulting Developer, Oracle: First, linked clones are available with the Oracle VirtualBox hypervisor only. Second, your choice of storage will affect the rest of your architecture. If you are using a SAN presenting ISCSI LUNS, you can have linked clones with a Oracle Enterprise Linux based hypervisor running VirtualBox. OEL will use OCFS2 to allow VirtualBox to create the linked clones. Because of the OCFS2 requirement, a Solaris based VirtualBox hypervisor will not be able to support linked clones on remote ISCSI storage. If you using the local storage option on your hypervisors, you will have linked clones with Solaris or Linux based hypervisors running VirtualBox. In all cases, Oracle Virtual Desktop Infrastructure makes the right selection for creating clones - sparse or linked - behind the scenes. Plan your architecture accordingly if you want to ensure you have the higher performing linked clones.

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• Skip CodedUI Tests, use Selenium for Web Automation

  - by Aligned

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/Aligned/archive/2013/10/31/skip-codedui-tests-use-selenium-for-web-automation.aspxI recently joined a team that was using Agile Methodologies to create a new product. They have a working beta product after 10 or so 2 week sprints and already had UI’s that had changed several times as they went through iterations of their UI. As a result, the QA team was falling behind with automated tests and I was tasked to help them catch up and expand their tests. The project is a website. I heard many complaints about how hard it is to work with CodedUI (writing our own code, not relying on the recorder as we wanted re-usable and more maintainable code) then it took me 4+ hours to fix one issue. It was hard to traverse the key and debugging the objects with breakpoints… I said out loud “there has to be a better way or a framework the uses jQuery to run through the tests.” Plus it seemed really slow (wait… finding the object … wait… start putting in text…). Plus some tests would randomly fail on the test agents (using the test settings and an automated build, they are run on VMs using Microsoft test agents). Enough complaining. Selenium to the rescue (mostly). The lead QA guy decided to try it out and we haven’t turned back. We are now running tests in Chrome and Firefox and they run a lot faster. We had IE running to, but some of the tests were running fine locally, but hanging on the test agents. I’ll add some hints and lessons learned in a later post.

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