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• Is it worth to learn Experimental Languages?

  - by Xander Lamkins

  I'm a young programmer who desires to work in the field someday as a programmer. I know Java, VB.NET and C#. I want to learn a new language (as I programmer, I know that it is valuable to extend what I know - to learn languages that make you think differently). I took a look online to see what languages were common. Everybody knows C and C++ (even those muggles who know so little about computers in general), so I thought, maybe I should push for C. C and C++ are nice but they are old. Things like Haskell and Forth (etc. etc. etc.) are old and have lost their popularity. I'm scared of learning C (or even C++) for this same reason. Java is pretty old as well and is slow because it's run by the JVM and not compiled to native code. I've been a Windows developer for quite a while. I recently started using Java - but only because it was more versatile and spreadable to other places. The problem is that it doesn't look like a very usable language for these reasons: It's most used purpose is for web application and cellphone apps (specifically Android) As far as actual products made with it, the only things that come to mind are Netbeans, Eclipse (hurrah for making and IDE with the language the IDE is for - it's like making a webpage for writing HTML/CSS/Javascript), and Minecraft which happens to be fun but laggy and bipolar as far as computer spec. support. Other than that it's used for servers but heck - I don't only want to make/configure servers. The .NET languages are nice, however: People laugh if I even mention VB.NET or C# in a serious conversation. It isn't cross-platform unless you use MONO (which is still in development and has some improvements to be made). Lacks low level stuff because, like Java with the JVM, it is run/managed by the CLR. My first thought was learning something like C and then using it to springboard into C++ (just to make sure I would have a strong understanding/base), but like I said earlier, it's getting older and older by the minute. What I've Looked Into Fantom looks nice. It's like a nice middleman between my two favorite languages and even lets me publish between the two interchangeably, but, unlike what I want, it compiles to the CLR or JVM (depending on what you publish it to) instead of it being a complete compile. D also looks nice. It seems like a very usable language and from multiple sources it appears to actually be better than C/C++. I would jump right with it, but I'm still unsure of its success because it obviously isn't very mainstream at this point. There are a couple others that looked pretty nice that focused on other things such as Opa with web development and Go by GOOGLE. My Question Is it worth learning these "experimental" languages? I've read other questions that say that if you aren't constantly learning languages and open to all languages that you aren't in the right mindset for programming. I understand this and I still might not quite be getting it, but in truth, if a language isn't going to become mainstream, should I spend my time learning something else? I don't want to learn old (or any going to soon be old) programming languages. I know that many people see this as something important, *but would any of you ever actually consider (assuming you didn't already know) FORTRAN? My goal is to stay current to make sure I'm successful in the future. Disclaimer Yes, I am a young programmer, so I probably made a lot of naive statements in my question. Feel free to correct me on ANYTHING! I have to start learning somewhere so I'm sure a lot of my knowledge is sketchy enough to have caused to incorrect statements or flaws in my thinking. Please leave any feelings you have in the comments.

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• Web.NET event coming in October

  - by Chris Massey

  If you’re a web developer in Europe (or would like an excuse to travel to Europe), you should definitely take a look at the Web.NET event coming in October. It’s being organized by two Italian web maestros (Simone Chiaretta and Ugo Lattanzi) and the session list looks fantastic. The event site pretty much speaks for itself, but here’s a quick version: It’s a free one-day event on October 20th, with a huge variety of great sessions by great speakers, all 100% focused on web development. There’s a pizza-fuelled hackathon in the evening; thrills, spills and hot new skills. It’s a great chance to network with the local (in relative terms) web development community. It’s free (although all donations are very greatly appreciated). It’s in Milan, darling. Here’s what you need to do: Go and register on www.webnetconf.eu, and vote on which sessions you think look the most interesting. I know this will be a difficult process – it’s *very* hard to choose – but persevere! Grab your place when the free tickets become available early next month (places are limited). Come to Milan in October, learn some new skills, meet some great people, and maybe build something awesome if you feel like staying up late. I’ll be there, and hopefully I’ll see you on the day.

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• Ways to dynamically render a real world 3d environment in Unity3D

  - by Jake M

  Using Unity3D and C# I am attempting to display a 3d version of a real world location. Inside my Unity3D app, the user will specify the GPS coordinates of a location, then my app will have to generate a 3d plane(anything doesn't have to be a plane) of that location. The plane will show a 500 metre by 500 metre 3d snapshot of that location. How would you suggest I achieve this in Unity3D? What methodology would you use to achieve this? NOTE: I understand that this is a very difficult endevour(to render real world locations dynamically in Unity3d) so I expect to perform many actions to achieve this. I just don't know of all the technologies out there and which would be best for my needs For example: Suggested methodology 1: Prompt user to specify GPS coords Use Google earth API and HTTP to programmatically obtain a .khm file describing that location(Not sure if google earth provides that capability does it?) Unzip the .khm so I have the .dae file Convert that file to a .3ds file using ??? third party converter(is there a converter that exists?) Import .3ds into Unity3D at runtime as a plane(is this possible)? Suggested methodology 2: Prompt user to specify GPS coords Use Google earth API and HTTP to programmatically obtain a .khm file describing that location(Not sure if google earth provides that capability does it?) Unzip the .khm so I have the .dae file Parse .dae file using my own C# parser I will write(do you think its possible to write a .dae parser that can parse the .dae into an array of Vector3 that describe the height map of that location?) Dynamically create a plane in Unity3D and populate it with my array/list of Vector3 points(is it possible to create a plane this way?) Maybe I am meant to create a mesh instead of a plane? Can you think of any other ways I could render a real world 3d environment in Unity3D?

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• Static "LoD" hack opinions

  - by David Lively

  I've been playing with implementing dynamic level of detail for rendering a very large mesh in XNA. It occurred to me that (duh) the whole point of this is to generate small triangles close to the camera, and larger ones far away. Given that, rather than constantly modifying or swapping index buffers based on a feature's rendered size or distance from the camera, it would be a lot easier (and potentially quite a bit faster), to render a single "fan" or flat wedge/frustum-shaped planar mesh that is tessellated into small triangles close to the near or small end of the frustum and larger ones at the far end, sort of like this (overhead view) (Pardon the gap in the middle - I drew one side and mirrored it) The triangle sizes are chosen so that all are approximately the same size when projected. Then, that mesh would be transformed to track the camera so that the Z axis (center vertical in this image) is always aligned with the view direction projected into the XZ plane. The vertex shader would then read terrain heights from a height texture and adjust the Y coordinate of the mesh to match a height field that defines the terrain. This eliminates the need for culling (since the mesh is generated to match the viewport dimensions) and the need to modify the index and/or vertex buffers when drawing the terrain. Obviously this doesn't address terrain with overhangs, etc, but that could be handled to a certain extent by including a second mesh that defines a sort of "ceiling" via a different texture. The other LoD schemes I've seen aren't particularly difficult to implement and, in some cases, are a lot more flexible, but this seemed like a decent quick-and-dirty way to handle height map-based terrain without getting into geometry manipulation. Has anyone tried this? Opinions?

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• How should I show shared resources during a Shared Resource game in the Galaxy Editor?

  - by Mag Roader

  One of my favorite ways to play the original StarCraft was in a "Team" game. In this game type, multiple players on the same "team" would share control, resources, supply, and even the same starting location. It was like playing as 1 player, only 2 humans were controlling it. It was a lot of fun. I want to do something very similar in StarCraft 2, but I need to create a custom map in the Galaxy Editor to do it. I found the editor can quite easily emulate this behavior. There is a Trigger action "Set Alliance for Player Group" to "...treat each other as Ally With Shared Vision, Control, And Spending." To use this, I create units for only 1 of the players, and then set all players to be allied with each other in this way. All the other players get no units and no resources. This makes it so 1 player is the actual owner of all the units and everyone else is tagging along with full control. This nearly works! The problem is that if I am not the actual owning player, I can't actually see how many minerals/gas/supply the team has. This makes it pretty difficult to build stuff. What would be the best way to display to the other players how many Minerals/Gas/Supply the team has?

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• IT Optimization Plan Pays Off For UK Retailer

  - by [email protected]

  I caught this article in ComputerworldUK yesterday. The headline talks about UK-based supermarket chain Morrisons is increasing their IT spend...OK, sounds good. Even nicer that Oracle is a big part of that. But what caught my eye were three things: 1) Morrison's truly has a long term strategy for IT. In this case, modernizing and optimizing how they use IT for business advantage. 2) Even in a tough economic climate, Morrison's views IT investments as contributing to and improving the bottom line. Specifically, "The investment in IT contributed to a 21 percent increase in Morrison's underlying profit.." 3) The phased, 3-year "Optimization Plan" took a holistic approach to their business--from CRM and Supply Chain systems to the underlying application infrastructure. On the infrastructure front, adopting a more flexible Service-Oriented Architecture enabled them to be more agile and adapt their business and Identity Management helped with sometimes mundane (but costly) issues like lost passwords and being able to document who has access to what. Things don't always turn out so rosy. And I know it was a long and difficult process...but it's nice to see a happy ending every once in a while.

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• Grading an algorithm: Readability vs. Compactness

  - by amiregelz

  Consider the following question in a test \ interview: Implement the strcpy() function in C: void strcpy(char *destination, char *source); The strcpy function copies the C string pointed by source into the array pointed by destination, including the terminating null character. Assume that the size of the array pointed by destination is long enough to contain the same C string as source, and does not overlap in memory with source. Say you were the tester, how would you grade the following answers to this question? 1) void strcpy(char *destination, char *source) { while (*source != '\0') { *destination = *source; source++; destionation++; } *destionation = *source; } 2) void strcpy(char *destination, char *source) { while (*(destination++) = *(source++)) ; } The first implementation is straightforward - it is readable and programmer-friendly. The second implementation is shorter (one line of code) but less programmer-friendly; it's not so easy to understand the way this code is working, and if you're not familiar with the priorities in this code then it's a problem. I'm wondering if the first answer would show more complexity and more advanced thinking, in the tester's eyes, even though both algorithms behave the same, and although code readability is considered to be more important than code compactness. It seems to me that since making an algorithm this compact is more difficult to implement, it will show a higher level of thinking as an answer in a test. However, it is also possible that a tester would consider the first answer not good because it's not readable. I would also like to mention that this is not specific to this example, but general for code readability vs. compactness when implementing an algorithm, specifically in tests \ interviews.

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• ArchBeat Link-o-Rama for 2012-06-27

  - by Bob Rhubart

  Resource Kit: Oracle Exadata for the Communications industry In addition to several customer case studies, in video and white paper formats, this resource kit also includes a technical overview of Oracle Exadata Database Machine and a product datasheet. Registration is required for those who don't already have a free Oracle.com membership account. Call for Nominations: Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation Awards 2012 - Win a free pass to #OOW12 These awards honor customers for their cutting-edge solutions using Oracle Fusion Middleware. Either a customer, their partner, or an Oracle representative can submit the nomination form on behalf of the customer. Submission deadline: July 17. Winners receive a free pass to Oracle OpenWorld 2012 in San Francisco. BPM – Disable DBMS job to refresh B2B Materialized View | Mark Nelson "If you are running BPM and you are not using B2B, you might want to disable the DBMS job that refreshes the B2B materialized view," says Fusion Middleware A-Team blogger Mark Nelson. Learn how in his short post. A Universal JMX Client for Weblogic –Part 1: Monitoring BPEL Thread Pools in SOA 11g | Stefan Koser A concise how-to from Oracle Fusion Middleware A-Team blogger Stefan Koser. Thought for the Day "There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult." — C. A. R. Hoare Source: SoftwareQuotes.com/

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• Dealing with institutionalized programmers.

  - by Singleton

  Some times programmers who work in a project for long time tend to get institutionalized. It is difficult to convince them with reasoning. Even if we manage to convince them they will be adamant to take suggestion on board. How do we handle the situation without developing friction in team? Institutionalized in terms of practices. I recently joined in a project where build &release process was made so complicated with unnecessary roadblocks. My suggestion was we can get rid of some of the development overheads(like filling few spreadsheets) just by integrating defect management and version controlling tools (both are IBM-Rational tools integration can be very easy and one-off effort). Also by using tools like Maven & Ant (project involves java and some COTS products) build & release can be simplified and reduce manual errors& intervention. I managed to convince and ready to put efforts for developing proof of concept. But the ‘Senior’ developer is not willing to take it on board. One reason could be the current process makes him valuable in team.

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• Why does my Messaging Menu code not work when split into functions?

  - by fluteflute

  Below are two python programs. They're exactly the same, except for one is split into two functions. However only the one that's split into two functions doesn't work - the second function doesn't work. Why would this be? Note the code is taken from this useful blog post. Without functions (works): import gtk def show_window_function(x, y): print x print y # get the indicate module, which does all the work import indicate # Create a server item mm = indicate.indicate_server_ref_default() # If someone clicks your server item in the MM, fire the server-display signal mm.connect("server-display", show_window_function) # Set the type of messages that your item uses. It's not at all clear which types # you're allowed to use, here. mm.set_type("message.im") # You must specify a .desktop file: this is where the MM gets the name of your # app from. mm.set_desktop_file("/usr/share/applications/nautilus.desktop") # Show the item in the MM. mm.show() # Create a source item mm_source = indicate.Indicator() # Again, it's not clear which subtypes you are allowed to use here. mm_source.set_property("subtype", "im") # "Sender" is the text that appears in the source item in the MM mm_source.set_property("sender", "Unread") # If someone clicks this source item in the MM, fire the user-display signal mm_source.connect("user-display", show_window_function) # Light up the messaging menu so that people know something has changed mm_source.set_property("draw-attention", "true") # Set the count of messages in this source. mm_source.set_property("count", "15") # If you prefer, you can set the time of the last message from this source, # rather than the count. (You can't set both.) This means that instead of a # message count, the MM will show "2m" or similar for the time since this # message arrived. # mm_source.set_property_time("time", time.time()) mm_source.show() gtk.mainloop() With functions (second function is executed but doesn't actually work): import gtk def show_window_function(x, y): print x print y # get the indicate module, which does all the work import indicate def function1(): # Create a server item mm = indicate.indicate_server_ref_default() # If someone clicks your server item in the MM, fire the server-display signal mm.connect("server-display", show_window_function) # Set the type of messages that your item uses. It's not at all clear which types # you're allowed to use, here. mm.set_type("message.im") # You must specify a .desktop file: this is where the MM gets the name of your # app from. mm.set_desktop_file("/usr/share/applications/nautilus.desktop") # Show the item in the MM. mm.show() def function2(): # Create a source item mm_source = indicate.Indicator() # Again, it's not clear which subtypes you are allowed to use here. mm_source.set_property("subtype", "im") # "Sender" is the text that appears in the source item in the MM mm_source.set_property("sender", "Unread") # If someone clicks this source item in the MM, fire the user-display signal mm_source.connect("user-display", show_window_function) # Light up the messaging menu so that people know something has changed mm_source.set_property("draw-attention", "true") # Set the count of messages in this source. mm_source.set_property("count", "15") # If you prefer, you can set the time of the last message from this source, # rather than the count. (You can't set both.) This means that instead of a # message count, the MM will show "2m" or similar for the time since this # message arrived. # mm_source.set_property_time("time", time.time()) mm_source.show() function1() function2() gtk.mainloop()

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• Making an advertising server ads from different ad networks

  - by John

  In India there are many ad-networks(other than Adsense) who pay per acquisition or per lead. So Javascript ad code is not required(as fraud clicks don't matter as long as one converts). So an ad network will have many companies and each company will have many banner sizes for ads. Also suddenly any ad may be stopped just because company's target has met. Which is a common nuisance since if we don't remove those url's then that company will get conversions for free. I've a dozen sites and removing the ads are difficult every now and then. Also CPA based ads may not convert at all. That means I'll need to remove non-performing ads regularly. I've gone through: How can I show multiple ad networks on my site? . I've also visited DFP solution but without Adsense they wouldn't let me open account. I want to make an ad server wherein I'll feed new ads (banner image + link for click). I want to maintain categories there like ( shoes, phones, books etc). So if an ad is paused - i'll simply remove/pause the ad there while other ads in the category keep running. Also changing ad code within sites will no more be required. For example - let me have an ad category "clothing" where I can add ads from different companies. So if one of my site requests an ad from there it'll randomly select an ad in this category and return it to site for display. Removing/adding ads within this category will not affect the site requesting those ads. Any idea how to implement it?

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• The Iron Bird Approach

  - by David Paquette

  It turns out that designing software is not so different than designing commercial aircraft.  I just finished watching a video that talked about the approach that Bombardier is taking in designing the new C Series aircraft.  I was struck by the similarities to agile approaches to software design.  In the video, Bombardier describes how they are using an Iron Bird to work through a number of design questions in advance of ever having a version of the aircraft that can ever be flown.  The Iron Bird is a life size replica of the plane.  Based on the name, I would assume the plane is built in a very heavy material that could never fly.  Using this replica, Bombardier is able to valid certain assumptions such as the length of each wire in the electric system.  They are also able to confirm that some parts are working properly (like the rudders).  They even go as far as to have a complete replica of the cockpit.  This allows Bombardier to put pilots in the cockpit to run through simulated take-off and landing sequences. The basic tenant of the approach seems to be Validate your design early with working prototypes Get feedback from users early, well in advance of finishing the end product   In software development, we tend to think of ourselves as special.  I often tell people that it is difficult to draw comparisons to building items in the physical world (“Building software is nothing like building a sky scraper”).  After watching this video, I am wondering if designing/building software is actually a lot like designing/building commercial aircraft.   Watch the video here (http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/video/video-selling-the-c-series/article4400616/)

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• On The Road with the HR Community

  - by Kathryn Perry

  A guest post by Steve Boese, Director, Talent Strategy, Oracle One of the best ways to connect with and to get a feel for what is on the minds of Human Resources leaders is to get out of the office and hit the road. I’ve had the great honor to attend and/or present at a number of events recently, including the massive SHRM Annual Conference, the HR Florida Conference, and Taleo World in Chicago. These events, and many others, offer solution providers, talent management professionals, business leaders, and even more casual observers of the Human Resources field with tremendous opportunities to connect, to share information, and to learn from each other. Attending the conferences also give people a sense of how they can improve and enhance their skills and knowledge, learn about the latest workforce technologies, and bring new and innovative ideas back to their organizations. And sure, the parties and conference swag can be pretty nice as well! If you attend a few of these industry events, one of the most beneficial by-products that you can emerge with -- whether you are on the front lines in HR at your organization, or as we are at Oracle, in the business of developing and delivering innovative and impactful technology solutions to our customers -- is to get a larger sense of the big ideas and major trends, concerns, and challenges facing organizations all across the landscape, and to be able to better understand how your strategies and solutions can be improved with this greater perspective. So what are HR folks discussing and debating? What questions and problems keep them up at night? What are the bloggers and large community of HR social media enthusiasts buzzing about? From my perspective some of the common themes you see over and again across the HR community break down (broadly), into three main areas: Talent attraction - How can we locate, attract, recruit, and hire the best talent possible? What new strategies, approaches, and technologies can help us in this critically important area? What role do external social networks like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter play in the increasingly competitive search for talent? Talent Retention - How can we make sure to keep that talent on our team? What engagement, development, recognition, and compensation tools can help us in this regard? How can we continue, (or become), an employer of choice? What is our unique and compelling employer value proposition? Talent Empowerment - How can we put our employees in the best position to succeed? What can we do to better align our talent with the organization’s mission and goals, while simultaneously providing the best and most driven to succeed individuals a clear path to achieve their career goals and aspirations? How can new technologies, particularly social and collaboration tools help in this area? While these are the ‘big themes’ that I know I have seen this year, certainly they are not really new, nor are they likely to fundamentally change in the next year or two. I think the reason is that at the core of any successful enterprise is a collection of smart, interested, engaged, challenged, and empowered group of people. And that was likely the case 10 or 20 years ago, and will probably be the case 10 or 20 years into the future. But what has changed, and what you can see -- evidenced by simply following the Twitter backchannel for an event and by reading some of the many fantastic HR blogs out there -- is that the HR professional's ability, along with technology solution providers like Oracle, to connect, to more openly share information with each other, and to make each other better in the process, (and to create new, improved, and more innovative solutions), has never been greater. And I think it is with this heretofore unprecedented level of opportunity to connect with other members of the community that HR professionals will be better equipped to help their organizations attract, retain, and empower their teams. We at Oracle HCM look forward to continuing to meet, engage, and connect with the HR community in the coming months. Until then -- follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

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• Search SSIS packages for table/column references

  - by Nigel Rivett

  A lot of companies now use TFS or some other system and keep all their packages in a single project. This means that a copy of all the packages will end up on your local disk. There is major failing with SSIS that it is sometimes quite difficult to find what a package is actually doing, what it accesses and what it affects. This is a simple dos script which will search through all packages in a folder for a string and write the names of found packages to an output file. Just copy the text to a .bat file (I use aaSearch.bat) in the folder with all the package scripts Change the output filename (twice), change the find string value and run it in a dos window. It works on any text file type so you can also search store procedure scripts – but there are easier ways of doing that. echo. > aaSearch_factSales.txt for /f “delims=” %%a in (‘dir /B /s *.dtsx’) do call :subr “%%a” goto:EOF :subr findstr “factSales” %1 if %ERRORLEVEL% NEQ 1 echo %1 >> aaSearch_factSales.txt goto:EOF

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• Changing the RSS and Dynamic Views layout when using Blogger as a Podcast index

  - by Stuart

  I'm trying to set up a podcast service at present. This is just a 'spare time' task - so I wanted a quick, easy way to do it. To get this working: I've ripped (with owner permission) some YouTube content across to MP3 and hosted this content on Azure Blob Storage. I've posted blog posts - with linked mp3 content - inside a Blogger website. I've registered the RSS feed with iTunes This all seems to be working OK - http://dotnetmobilepodcast.blogspot.co.uk/ However, when it comes to a couple of final touches, then I'm hitting problems. RSS I would like to add iTunes metadata to the RSS feed. However, I can't find any way to do this inside the Blogger system. To workaround this I've tried using FeedBurner with its StreamCast plugin. However, the output from FeedBurner doesn't seem to be accepted by iTunes - e.g. http://feeds.feedburner.com/MobileAppCSharpPodcasts leads to this very unhelpful 11111 message: Is there any other way I can get this iTunes metadata content into the Blogger RSS feed - e.g. maybe an alternative service or a Yahoo! Pipe? Showing the MP3 files in the Blog I'm trying to work out how to automatically display the linked enclosures inside the blog posts - do the blogger Dynamic Views don't seem to have any way of doing this? I've found the HTML in those views very difficult to follow. If necessary I can workaround this using manual entries into each blog post... but I'd prefer to do this programatically if I can.

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• The Power of Goals

  - by BuckWoody

  Every year we read blogs, articles, magazines, hear news stories and blurbs on making New Year’s Resolutions. Well, I for one don’t do that. I do something else. Each year, on January 1, my wife, daughter and I get up early - like before 6:00 A.M. - and find a breakfast place that’s open. When I used to live in Safety Harbor, Florida, that was the “Paradise Café”, which has some of the best waffles around…but I digress. We find that restaurant and have a great breakfast while everyone else is recuperating from the night before. And we bring along a worn leather book that we’ve been writing in since my daughter wasn’t even old enough to read. It’s our book of Goals. A resolution, as it is purely defined, is a decision to change, stop or start an action. It has a sense of continuance, and that’s the issue. Some people decide things like “I’m going to lose weight” or “I’m going to spend more time with my family or hobby”. But a goal is different. A goal tends to have a defined start and end point. It’s something that can be measured. So each year on January 1 we sit down with the little leather book and we make a few - and only a few - individual and family goals. Sometimes it’s to exercise three times a week at the gym, sometimes it’s to save a certain percentage of income, and sometimes it’s to give away some of our possessions or to help someone we know in a specific way. Each person is responsible for their own goals - coming up with them, and coming up with a plan to meet them. Then we write it down in the little leather book. But it doesn’t end there. Each month, we grab the little leather book and read out the goals from that year to each person with a question or two: How are you doing on your goal? And what are you doing about reaching it? Can I help? Am I helping? At the end of the year, we put a checkmark by the goals we reached, and an X by the ones we didn’t. There’s no judgment, there’s no statements, each person is just expected to handle the success or failure in their own way. We also have family goals, and those we work on together. This might seem a little “corny” to some people. “I don’t need to write goals down” they say, “I keep track in my head of the things I do all the time. That’s silly.” But let me give you a little challenge: find a book, get with your family, and write down the things you want to do by the next January 1. Each month, look at the book. You can make goals for your career, your education, your spiritual side, your family, whatever. But if you make your goals realistic, think them through, and think about how you will achieve them, you will be surprised by the power of written goals.

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• Learn Many Languages

  - by Phil Factor

  Around twenty-five years ago, I was trying to solve the problem of recruiting suitable developers for a large business. I visited the local University (it was a Technical College then). My mission was to remind them that we were a large, local employer of technical people and to suggest that, as they were in the business of educating young people for a career in IT, we should work together. I anticipated a harmonious chat where we could suggest to them the idea of mentioning our name to some of their graduates. It didn’t go well. The academic staff displayed a degree of revulsion towards the whole topic of IT in the world of commerce that surprised me; tweed met charcoal-grey, trainers met black shoes. However, their antipathy to commerce was something we could have worked around, since few of their graduates were destined for a career as university lecturers. They asked me what sort of language skills we needed. I tried ducking the invidious task of naming computer languages, since I wanted recruits who were quick to adapt and learn, with a broad understanding of IT, including development methodologies, technologies, and data. However, they pressed the point and I ended up saying that we needed good working knowledge of C and BASIC, though FORTRAN and COBOL were, at the time, still useful. There was a ghastly silence. It was as if I’d recommended the beliefs and practices of the Bogomils of Bulgaria to a gathering of Cardinals. They stared at me severely, like owls, until the head of department broke the silence, informing me in clipped tones that they taught only Modula 2. Now, I wouldn’t blame you if at this point you hurriedly had to look up ‘Modula 2′ on Wikipedia. Based largely on Pascal, it was a specialist language for embedded systems, but I’ve never ever come across it in a commercial business application. Nevertheless, it was an excellent teaching language since it taught modules, scope control, multiprogramming and the advantages of encapsulating a set of related subprograms and data structures. As long as the course also taught how to transfer these skills to other, more useful languages, it was not necessarily a problem. I said as much, but they gleefully retorted that the biggest local employer, a defense contractor specializing in Radar and military technology, used nothing but Modula 2. “Why teach any other programming language when they will be using Modula 2 for all their working lives?” said a complacent lecturer. On hearing this, I made my excuses and left. There could be no meeting of minds. They were providing training in a specific computer language, not an education in IT. Twenty years later, I once more worked nearby and regularly passed the long-deserted ‘brownfield’ site of the erstwhile largest local employer; the end of the cold war had led to lean times for defense contractors. A digger was about to clear the rubble of the long demolished factory along with the accompanying growth of buddleia and thistles, in order to lay the infrastructure for ‘affordable housing’. Modula 2 was a distant memory. Either those employees had short working lives or they’d retrained in other languages. The University, by contrast, was thriving, but I wondered if their erstwhile graduates had ever cursed the narrow specialization of their training in IT, as they struggled with the unexpected variety of their subsequent careers.

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• Evolution of mainstream programming languages: simplicity versus complexity.

  - by Giorgio

  I had posted this question on http://stackoverflow.com but I was suggested that it may be more appropriate to post it on this forum. I did a quick search on this site and it seems to me that this question has not been asked yet. Please give me a hint if the topic has been raised already by someone else. Update I have rephrased this question, removed personal opinions and made it shorter. I hope in this way it is better suited for this forum. By looking at the recent development of Java (Java 7) and C++ (C++0x) I see that new features are added to these languages. For sure this makes it easier to use certain programming idioms, adding to the productivity of developers. On the other hand, there might be the following risks A language becomes too big, complex, and difficult to understand. It lacks coherence in the design, e.g. if it mixes different paradigms like object-orientation and functional programming, which might not fit well together. Questions: what is more important to you as a developer: to have a rich language that captures a large collection of programming idioms or to have a small language that aims at coherence and simplicity (of course, with a good deal of libraries and tools accompanying it)? Or is it possible to have both? With respect to these issues: How do you judge the current evolutions of main-stream programming languages like Java or C++? Are they becoming too complex, less intuitive? Do they have enough features? Do they need more? Are they still easy enough to understand and use?

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• Be liberal in what you accept... or not?

  - by Matthieu M.

  [Disclaimer: this question is subjective, but I would prefer getting answers backed by facts and/or reflexions] I think everyone knows about the Robustness Principle, usually summed up by Postel's Law: Be conservative in what you send; be liberal in what you accept. I would agree that for the design of a widespread communication protocol this may make sense (with the goal of allowing easy extension), however I have always thought that its application to HTML / CSS was a total failure, each browser implementing its own silent tweak detection / behavior, making it near impossible to obtain a consistent rendering across multiple browsers. I do notice though that there the RFC of the TCP protocol deems "Silent Failure" acceptable unless otherwise specified... which is an interesting behavior, to say the least. There are other examples of the application of this principle throughout the software trade that regularly pop up because they have bitten developpers, from the top off my head: Javascript semi-colon insertion C (silent) builtin conversions (which would not be so bad if it did not truncated...) and there are tools to help implement "smart" behavior: name matching phonetic algorithms (Double Metaphone) string distances algorithms (Levenshtein distance) However I find that this approach, while it may be helpful when dealing with non-technical users or to help users in the process of error recovery, has some drawbacks when applied to the design of library/classes interface: it is somewhat subjective whether the algorithm guesses "right", and thus it may go against the Principle of Least Astonishment it makes the implementation more difficult, thus more chances to introduce bugs (violation of YAGNI ?) it makes the behavior more susceptible to change, as any modification of the "guess" routine may break old programs, nearly excluding refactoring possibilities... from the start! And this is what led me to the following question: When designing an interface (library, class, message), do you lean toward the robustness principle or not ? I myself tend to be quite strict, using extensive input validation on my interfaces, and I was wondering if I was perhaps too strict.

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• how do you remember programming related stuff?

  - by dan leadgy

  How do you remember programming related stuff? Did you get the feeling you did encounter the error you have now a few years ago and you could swear you knew the cause but now you forgot it? Did you work with the xsl's string parsing some time ago but now you can't remember exactly which are the string functions altogether from xsl and you have to start from scratch? Or perhaps you forget about some feature from Apache Commons like "filtering a collection by some predicate" that you surely used in the past. So how do you do it? I tried having a blog but when I develop apps, I never find the time to update the blog or write about my experiences. Also, using a wiki is a nice thing but then I found it difficult to keep a clean separation between them since many times I needed to change a blog post to add new information about that topic. This made me think that I actually should have put this topic in the wiki instead of the blog. Do you have any systems that help you remember about your programming experience? What's your setup?

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• Efficiency concerning thread granularity

  - by MaelmDev

  Lately, I've been thinking of ways to use multithreading to improve the speed of different parts of a game engine. What confuses me is the appropriate granularity of threads, especially when dealing with single-instruction-multiple-data (SIMD) tasks. Let's use line-of-sight detection as an example. Each AI actor must be able to detect objects of interest around them and mark them. There are three basic ways to go about this with multithreading: Don't use threading at all. Create a thread for each actor. Create a thread for each actor-object combination. Option 1 is obviously going to be the least efficient method. However, choosing between the next two options is more difficult. Only using one thread per actor is still running through every object in series instead of in parallel. However, are CPU's able to create and join threads in the granularity posed in Option 3 efficiently? It seems like that many calls to the OS could be really slow, and varying enormously between different hardware.

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• How to diagram custom programming languages, non textual?

  - by Adam

  I've used and created domain-specific languages before, plenty of times (e.g. using yacc/lex). Normally we'd start with grammar written in BNF, and a bunch of keywords. This is easy to do, easy to share. Recently, I've started working with diagrammatic programming languages - closest parallel is circuit-diagrams in electronics, where it's very difficult to express ideas in text, but very easy to express them in wiring-diagrams. This is a new and novel problem for me: how to efficiently express these mini-languages, and share concepts in them with colleagues? (i.e. how to whiteboard-program within them. Actual programming is easy - you have physical components to hand) Are there tools for this? Or good/best practices (e.g. equivalent of "always use BNF as starting point for your new DSL, and use tools like yacc to generate the parser, compiler, etc"). My googlefu is proving weak - all I get is false positives for wiring diagrams, and UML editors (since these are custom languages, UML doesn't seem to help)

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• Oracle Java Embedded Client 1.1 Released

  - by Roger Brinkley

  Yesterday an update release of Oracle Java Embedded Client (OJEC) 1.1 quietly slipped out door for general availability. Until last year it was pretty difficult to get your hands on either a Connected Limited Device Configuration (CLDC) for small devices or a Connected Device Configuration (CDC) for medium devices java implementation without a substantial initial commitment. But with the the release of OJWC (CLDC) and OJEC (CDC) last year that has changed. OJEC 1.1 is a binary distribution designed for installation on medium configurations which is a mid range processor requiring a  slow startup time, seamless upgrades, in a cost sensitive hardware environment  anywhere from 3.5mb to 8 mb. There are headless as well as headed versions available. It is intended for devices, such as Blu-­-ray Disc players, set-­-top boxes, residential gateways,VOIP phones, and similar. From a software point of view, OJEC is the Java runtime platform implementation of Connected Device Configuration (CDC v1.1, JSR-­-218), Foundation Profile (FP v1.1, JSR-­-219), and Personal Basis Profile (PBP v1.1, JSR-­-217)  and includes optional packages RMI (JSR 66), JDBC (JSR 169) and XML API for Java ME (JSR 280), and Java TV (JSR-­-927). New to this release is support for the XML API (JSR 280) and a number of bug fixes and performance enhancements, including an improved Just-in-Time (JIT) compilation for the x86 chipset architecture. The platforms supported include ArmV5, ArmV6/ArmV7, MIPS 32 74K, and X86 in headless mode. For embedded developers there are number of advantages to using Java and if you have shied away from the JavaME edition in the past I would encourage you to look into the updated version of OJEC 1.1.

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• Showing content from pages at different URL's (masking), possibly with .htaccess

  - by zigojacko

  If I have URL's like:- domain.com/category/widgets/filter/blue domain.com/category/widgets/filter/red And it is pretty difficult to reconstruct them to something like:- domain.com/category/blue-widgets domain.com/category/red-widgets Is there any way at all that I can use URL rewrites or anything else with .htaccess or on the server to display the URL's as the domain.com/category/blue-widgets on the domain.com/category/widgets/filter/blue page? I've looked into masking URL's but got nowhere and this has been something bugging me for almost 6 months now. Is there any way to achieve what I want to do? FYI: This is a Magento website and the above process, I am wanting to implement for potentially hundreds of URL's. Edit To respond to @kkugelmann's answer:- I couldn't get your proposed RewriteRule to make a difference at all in the .htaccess file so I started testing a few things in this .htaccess tester:- The proposed RewriteRule didn't work in this tester:- However, the following did:- But adding any of these RewriteRule's into the website's .htaccess file did not rewrite the URL at all... Edit2 By the way, if I add [R=301,L] to the end of the URL rewrite rule, it does actually then rewrite the rule, but of course 301 redirects it as well which is unwanted behaviour. Edit3 I found another question with the same issue... And an accepted answer that solved the problem which seemed to be something to do with using mod_proxy and the [P] tag on the rule (if I try this, the page 404's).

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• How to build a "traffic AI"?

  - by Lunikon

  A project I am working on right now features a lot of "traffic" in the sense of cars moving along roads, aircraft moving aroun an apron etc. As of now the available paths are precalculated, so nodes are generated automatically for crossings which themselves are interconnected by edges. When a character/agent spawns into the world it starts at some node and finds a path to a target node by means of a simply A* algorithm. The agent follows the path and ultimately reaches its destination. No problem so far. Now I need to enable the agents to avoid collisions and to handle complex traffic situations. Since I'm new to the field of AI I looked up several papers/articles on steering behavior but found them to be too low-level. My problem consists less of the actual collision avoidance (which is rather simple in this case because the agents follow strictly defined paths) but of situations like one agent leaving a dead-end while another one wants to enter exactly the same one. Or two agents meeting at a bottleneck which only allows one agent to pass at a time but both need to pass it (according to the optimal route found before) and they need to find a way to let the other one pass first. So basically the main aspect of the problem would be predicting traffic movement to avoid dead-locks. Difficult to describe, but I guess you get what I mean. Do you have any recommendations for me on where to start looking? Any papers, sample projects or similar things that could get me started? I appreciate your help!

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