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• Learning Programming from scratch

  - by David542

  I am entirely new to programming, other than basic HTML/CSS knowledge. I want to learn programming as quickly and efficiently as possible, and I'm willing to put in the time (at least 70 hours a week). The reason I want to learn is because I have a startup that I've written a business plan for and have prototyped in Photoshop (both front-end and back-end pages). My goals is to have a prototype of the site up within 6 months. I have a good aptitude for math (A's in all math courses up through DiffEq and Linear Algebra). I assume learning programming from scratch can be a daunting task -- not because it is particularly difficult, but because there are so many areas and so much information. I want to make sure that I learn as efficiently as possible and have individuals (in addition to Google) to solicit advice from and that will help me when I get stuck or have questions. I know with other's help, my learning experience will be both more productive and enjoyable. What is the best way to find people that will help me in this? What are some good 'live' resources in addition to asking questions on Stack Overflow? Thank you very much for your time and help.

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• Understanding Asynchronous Programming with .NET Reflector

  - by Nick Harrison

  When trying to understand and learn the .NET framework, there is no substitute for being able to see what is going on behind at the scenes inside even the most confusing assemblies, and .NET Reflector makes this possible. Personally, I never fully understood connection pooling until I was able to poke around in key classes in the System.Data assembly. All of a sudden, integrating with third party components was much simpler, even without vendor documentation!With a team devoted to developing and extending Reflector, Red Gate have made it possible for us to step into and actually debug assemblies such as System.Data as though the source code was part of our solution. This maybe doesn’t sound like much, but it dramatically improves the way you can relate to and understand code that isn’t your own.Now that Microsoft has officially launched Visual Studio 2012, Reflector is also fully integrated with the new IDE, and supports the most complex language feature currently at our command: Asynchronous processing.Without understanding what is going on behind the scenes in the .NET Framework, it is difficult to appreciate what asynchronocity actually bring to the table and, without Reflector, we would never know the Arthur C. Clarke Magicthat the compiler does on our behalf.Join me as we explore the new asynchronous processing model, as well as review the often misunderstood and underappreciated yield keyword (you’ll see the connection when we dive into how the CLR handles async).Read more here

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• Smooth waypoint traversing

  - by TheBroodian

  There are a dozen ways I could word this question, but to keep my thoughts in line, I'm phrasing it in line with my problem at hand. So I'm creating a floating platform that I would like to be able to simply travel from one designated point to another, and then return back to the first, and just pass between the two in a straight line. However, just to make it a little more interesting, I want to add a few rules to the platform. I'm coding it to travel multiples of whole tile values of world data. So if the platform is not stationary, then it will travel at least one whole tile width or tile height. Within one tile length, I would like it to accelerate from a stop to a given max speed. Upon reaching one tile length's distance, I would like it to slow to a stop at given tile coordinate and then repeat the process in reverse. The first two parts aren't too difficult, essentially I'm having trouble with the third part. I would like the platform to stop exactly at a tile coordinate, but being as I'm working with acceleration, it would seem easy to simply begin applying acceleration in the opposite direction to a value storing the platform's current speed once it reaches one tile's length of distance (assuming that the tile is traveling more than one tile-length, but to keep things simple, let's just assume it is)- but then the question is what would the correct value be for acceleration to increment from to produce this effect? How would I find that value?

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• What is meant by, "A user shouldn't decide whether it is an Admin or not. The Privileges or Security system should."

  - by GlenPeterson

  The example used in the question pass bare minimum data to a function touches on the best way to determine whether the user is an administrator or not. One common answer was: user.isAdmin() This prompted a comment which was repeated several times and up-voted many times: A user shouldn't decide whether it is an Admin or not. The Privileges or Security system should. Something being tightly coupled to a class doesn't mean it is a good idea to make it part of that class. I replied, The user isn't deciding anything. The User object/table stores data about each user. Actual users don't get to change everything about themselves. But this was not productive. Clearly there is an underlying difference of perspective which is making communication difficult. Can someone explain to me why user.isAdmin() is bad, and paint a brief sketch of what it looks like done "right"? Really, I fail to see the advantage of separating security from the system that it protects. Any security text will say that security needs to be designed into a system from the beginning and considered at every stage of development, deployment, maintenance, and even end-of-life. It is not something that can be bolted on the side. But 17 up-votes so far on this comment says that I'm missing something important.

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• Kids and programming: ScratchKara

  - by Mike Pagel

  Ever now and then I kept wondering how to share with my kids the excitement of creating something with your computer. Of course, today this is a bit more difficult, as they have seen 3D animation games and well-edited websites. I guess that's why they weren't all that hyped when I found my first computer model at our local recycling facilities (an 8-bit Laser VZ-200 with rubber keys). When I finally got it up and running with an old analog TV set they finally asked whether we could play soccer on it. Needless to say that my showing them how it remembers some BASIC commands and lists and executes them did not make any impression. So the question is for real: How do you get today's kids excited about programming? And just recently I looked again for environments that allow even young kids (mine are 7 and 9 years old now) to do something and have fun. Obviously any real, text-oriented programming language wouldn't work well. To cut it short: Something really nice was built by University of Oldenburg: ScratchKara. It is the perfect mixture of Kara, a simulation of a little ladybug and Scratch, an authoring environment from MIT. ScratchKara allows kids to initially simply explore how the bug moves and turns by pressing the action buttons, then move towards sequencing commands through drag & drop, and eventually end up building algorithms with procedures and functions. Even through it is built for kids and beginners, the environment comes with debugging and refactoring, which I found more than amazing. My kids love it and I have to admit I keep thinking about how to solve a bit more advanced problems with this language, which does not allow you to store any state information (other than your call stack). Yes, I am hooked, too... Once the language is understood you can then move to one of the original Kara versions, where you can define the bug's behavior through finite statemachines, Turing tables, Java and other textual languages. And from there, anything is possible.

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• Olympics data available for all on Windows Azure SQL Database and Power View

  - by jamiet

  Are you looking around for some decent test data for your BI demos? Well, if so, Microsoft have provided some data about all medals won at the Olympics Games (1900 to 2008) at OlympicsData workbook - Excel, SSIS, Azure sample; it provides analysis over athletes, countries, medal type, sport, discipline and various other dimensions. The data has been provided in an Excel workbook along with instructions on how to load the data into a Windows Azure SQL Database using SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS). Frankly though, the rigmarole of standing up your own Windows Azure SQL Database ok, SQL Azure database, is both costly (SQL Azure isn’t free) and time consuming (the provided instructions aren’t exactly an idiot’s guide and getting SSIS to work properly with Excel isn’t a barrel of laughs either). To ease the pain for all you BI folks out there that simply want to party on the data I have loaded it all into the SQL Azure database that I use for hosting AdventureWorks on Azure. You can read more about AdventureWorks on Azure below however I’ll summarise here by saying it is a SQL Azure database provided for the use of the SQL Server community and which is supported by voluntary donations. To view the data the credentials you need are: Server mhknbn2kdz.database.windows.net  Database AdventureWorks2012 User sqlfamily Password sqlf@m1ly Type those into SSMS and away you go, the data is provided in four tables [olympics].[Sport], [olympics].[Discipline], [olympics].[Event] & [olympics].[Medalist]: I figured this would be a good candidate for a Power View report so I fired up Excel 2013 and built such a report to slice’n’dice through the data – here are some screenshots that should give you a flavour of what is available: A view of all the available data Where do all the gymastics medals go? Which countries do top ten all-time medal winners come from? You get the idea. There is masses of information here and if you have Excel 2013 handy Power View provides a quick and easy way of surfing through it. To save you the bother of setting up the Power View report yourself you can have the one that I took these screenshots from, it is available on my SkyDrive at OlympicsAnalysis.xlsx so just hit the link and download to play to your heart’s content. Party on, people! As I said above the data is hosted on a SQL Azure database that I use for hosting “AdventureWorks on Azure” which I first announced in March 2013 at AdventureWorks2012 now available for all on SQL Azure. I’ll repeat the pertinent parts of that blog post here: I am pleased to announce that as of today … [AdventureWorks2012] now resides on SQL Azure and is available for anyone, absolutely anyone, to connect to and use for their own means. This database is free for you to use but SQL Azure is of course not free so before I give you the credentials please lend me your ears eyes for a short while longer. AdventureWorks on Azure is being provided for the SQL Server community to use and so I am hoping that that same community will rally around to support this effort by making a voluntary donation to support the upkeep which, going on current pricing, is going to be $119.88 per year. If you would like to contribute to keep AdventureWorks on Azure up and running for that full year please donate via PayPal to [email protected] Any amount, no matter how small, will help. If those 50+ people that retweeted me beforehand all contributed $2 then that would just about be enough to keep this up for a year. If the community contributes more than we need then there are a number of additional things that could be done: Host additional databases (Northwind anyone??) Host in more datacentres (this first one is in Western Europe) Make a charitable donation That last one, a charitable donation, is something I would really like to do. The SQL Community have proved before that they can make a significant contribution to charitable orgnisations through purchasing the SQL Server MVP Deep Dives book and I harbour hopes that AdventureWorks on Azure can continue in that vein. So please, if you think AdventureWorks on Azure is something that is worth supporting please make a contribution. I’d like to emphasize that last point. If my hosting this Olympics data is useful to you please support this initiative by donating. Thanks in advance. @Jamiet

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• Understanding and memorizing git rebase parameters

  - by Robert Dailey

  So far the most confusing portion of git is rebasing onto another branch. Specifically, it's the command line arguments that are confusing. Each time I want to rebase a small piece of one branch onto the tip of another, I have to review the git rebase documentation and it takes me about 5-10 minutes to understand what each of the 3 main arguments should be. git rebase <upstream> <branch> --onto <newbase> What is a good rule of thumb to help me memorize what each of these 3 parameters should be set to, given any kind of rebase onto another branch? Bear in mind I have gone over the git-rebase documentation again, and again, and again, and again (and again), but it's always difficult to understand (like a boring scientific white-paper or something). So at this point I feel I need to involve other people to help me grasp it. My goal is that I should never have to review the documentation for these basic parameters. I haven't been able to memorize them so far, and I've done a ton of rebases already. So it's a bit unusual that I've been able to memorize every other command and its parameters so far, but not rebase with --onto.

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• When I shoot from a gun while walking, the bullet is off the center, but when stand still it's fine

  - by Vlad1k

  I am making a small project in Unity, and whenever I walk with the gun and shoot at the same time, the bullets seem to curve and shoot off 2-3 CMs from the center. When I stand still this doesn't happen. This is my main Javascript code: @script RequireComponent(AudioSource) var projectile : Rigidbody; var speed = 500; var ammo = 30; var fireRate = 0.1; private var nextFire = 0.0; function Update() { if(Input.GetButton ("Fire1") && Time.time > nextFire) { if(ammo != 0) { nextFire = Time.time + fireRate; var clone = Instantiate(projectile, transform.position, transform.root.rotation); clone.velocity = transform.TransformDirection(Vector3 (0, 0, speed)); ammo = ammo - 1; audio.Play(); } else { } } } I assume that these two lines need to be tweaked: var clone = Instantiate(projectile, transform.position, transform.root.rotation); clone.velocity = transform.TransformDirection(Vector3 (0, 0, speed)); Thanks in advanced, and please remember that I just started Unity, and I might have a difficult time understanding some things. Thanks!

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• Introducing the Oracle Linux Playground yum repo

  - by wcoekaer

  We just introduced a new yum repository/channel on http://public-yum.oracle.com called the playground channel. What we started doing is the following: When a new stable mainline kernel is released by Linus or GregKH, we internally build RPMs to test it and do some QA work around it to keep track of what's going on with the latest development kernels. It helps us understand how performance moves up or down and if there are issues, we try to help look into them and of course send that stuff back upstream. Many Linux users out there are interested in trying out the latest features but there are some potential barriers to do this. (1) in general, you are looking at an upstream development distribution, which means that everything changes both in userspace(random applications) and kernel. Projects like Fedora are very useful and someone that wants to just see how the entire distribution evolves with all the changes, this is a great way to be current. A drawback here, though, is that if you have applications that are not part of the distribution, there's a lot of manual work involved or they might just not work because the changes are too drastic. The introduction of systemd is a good example. (2) when you look at many of our customers, that are interested in our database products or applications, the starting point of having a supported/certified userspace/distribution, like Oracle Linux, is a much easier way to get your feet wet in seeing what new/future Linux kernel enhancements could do. This is where the playground channel comes into play. When you install Oracle Linux 6 (which anyone can download and use from http://edelivery.oracle.com/linux), grab the latest public yum repository file http://public-yum.oracle.com/public-yum-ol6.repo, put it in /etc/yum.repos.d and enable the playground repo : [ol6_playground_latest] name=Latest mainline stable kernel for Oracle Linux 6 ($basearch) - Unsupported baseurl=http://public-yum.oracle.com/repo/OracleLinux/OL6/playground/latest/$basearch/ gpgkey=http://public-yum.oracle.com/RPM-GPG-KEY-oracle-ol6 gpgcheck=1 enabled=1 Now, all you need to do : type yum update and you will be downloading the latest stable kernel which will install cleanly on Oracle Linux 6. Thus you end up with a stable Linux distribution where you can install all your software, and then download the latest stable kernel (at time of writing this is 3.6.7) without having to recompile a kernel, without having to jump through hoops. There is of course a big, very important disclaimer this is NOT for PRODUCTION use. We want to try and help make it easy for people that are interested, from a user perspective, where the Linux kernel is going and make it easy to install and use it and play around with new features. Without having to learn how to compile a kernel and without necessarily having to install a complete new distribution with all the changes top to bottom. So we don't or won't introduce any new userspace changes, this project really is around making it easy to try out the latest upstream Linux kernels in a very easy way on an environment that's stable and you can keep current, since all the latest errata for Oracle Linux 6 are published on the public yum repo as well. So one repository location for all your current changes and the upstream kernels. We hope that this will get more users to try out the latest kernel and report their findings. We are always interested in understanding stability and performance characteristics. As new features are going into the mainline kernel, that could potentially be interesting or useful for various products, we will try to point them out on our blogs and give an example on how something can be used so you can try it out for yourselves. Anyway, I hope people will find this useful and that it will help increase interested in upstream development beyond reading lkml by some of the more non-kernel-developer types.

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• Implementing `fling` logic without pan gesture recognizers

  - by KDiTraglia

  So I am trying to port over a simple game that I originally wrote to iphone into cocos2d-x. I've hit a minor bump however in implementing simple 'fling' logic I had in the iphone version that is difficult to port over to the c++. In iOS I could get the velocity of a pan gesture very easily: CGPoint velocity = [recognizer velocityInView:recognizer.view]; However now I basically only know where the touch began, where the touch ended, and all the touches that are logged in between. For now I logged all the pts onto a stack then pulled the last point and the 6th to last point (seemed to work the best), find the difference between those pts multiply by a constant and use that as the velocity. It works relatively well, but I'm wondering if anyone else has any better algorithms, when given a bunch of touch pts, to figure out a new speed upon releasing an object that feels natural (Note speed in my game is just a constant x and y, there's no drag or spin or anything tricky like that). Bonus points if anyone has figured out how to get pan gestures into the newest version (3.0 alpha) of cocos2d-x without losing ability to build cross platform.

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• What is the philosophy/reasoning behind C#'s Pascal-casing method names?

  - by Nocturne

  I'm just starting to learn C#. Coming from a background in Java, C++ and Objective-C, I find C#'s Pascal-casing its method-names rather unique, and a tad difficult to get used to at first. What is the reasoning and philosophy behind this? I'm guessing it is because of C# properties. Unlike in Objective-C, where method names can be exactly the same as an instance variables, this is not the case with C#. I would guess one of the goals with properties (as it is with most of the languages that support it) is to make properties truly indistinguishable from variables and methods. So, one can have an "int x" in C#, and the corresponding property becomes X. To ensure that properties and methods are indistinguishable, all method names I'm guessing are also therefore expected to start with an uppercase letter. (This is just my hypothesis based on what I know of C# so far—I'm still learning). I'm very curious to know how this curious guideline came into being (given that it's not something one sees in most other languages where method names are expected to start with a lowercase letter) (EDIT: By Pascal-casing, I mean PascalCase (which is basically camelCase but starting with a capital letter). Method names typically start with a lowercase letter in most languages)

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• Are R&D mini-projects a good activity for interns?

  - by dukeofgaming

  I'm going to be in charge of hiring some interns for our software department soon (automotive infotainment systems) and I'm designing an internship program. The main productive activity "menu" I'm planning for them consists of: Verification testing Writing Unit Tests (automated, with an xUnit-compliant framework [several languages in our projects]) Documenting Code Updating wiki Updating diagrams & design docs Helping with low priority tickets (supervised/mentored) Hunting down & cleaning compiler/run-time warnings Refactoring/cleaning code against our coding standards But I also have this idea that having them do small R&D projects would be good to test their talent and get them to have fun. These mini-projects would be: Experimental implementations & optimizations Proof of concept implementations for new technologies Small papers (~2-5 pages) doing formal research on the previous two points Apps (from a mini-project pool) These kinds of projects would be pre-defined and very concrete, although new ideas from the interns themselves would be very welcome. Even if a project is too big or is abandoned, the idea would also be to lay the ground work so they can be retaken by another intern or intern team. While I think this is good in concept, I don't know if it could be good in practice, as obviously this would diminish their productivity on "real work" (work with immediate value to the company), but I think it could help bring aboard very bright people and get them to want to stay in the future (which, I think, is the end goal for any internship program). My question here is if these activities are too open ended or difficult for the average intern to accomplish and if R&D is an efficient use of an interns time or if it makes more sense for to assign project work to interns instead.

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• How do I trust an off site application

  - by Pieter

  I need to implement something similar to a license server. This will have to be installed off site at the customers' location and needs to communicate with other applications at the customers' site (the applications that use the licenses) and an application running in our hosting center (for reporting and getting license information). My question is how to set this up in a way I can trust that: The license server is really our application and not something that just simulates it; and There is no "man in the middle" (i.e. a proxy or something that alters the traffic). The first thing I thought of was to use with client certificates and that would solve at least 2. However, what I'm worried about is that someone just decompiles (this is build in .NET) the license server, alters some logic and recompiles it. This would be hard to detect from both connecting applications. This doesn't have to be absolutely secure since we have a limited number of customers whom we have a trust relationship with. However, I do want to make it more difficult than a simple decompile/recompile of the license server. I primarily want to protect against an employee or nephew of the boss trying to be smart.

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• When module calling gets ugly

  - by Pete

  Has this ever happened to you? You've got a suite of well designed, single-responsibility modules, covered by unit tests. In any higher-level function you code, you are (95% of the code) simply taking output from one module and passing it as input to the next. Then, you notice this higher-level function has turned into a 100+ line script with multiple responsibilities. Here is the problem. It is difficult (impossible) to test that script. At least, it seems so. Do you agree? In my current project, all of the bugs came from this script. Further detail: each script represents a unique solution, or algorithm, formed by using different modules in different ways. Question: how can you remedy this situation? Knee-jerk answer: break the script up into single-responsibility modules. Comment on knee-jerk answer: it already is! Best answer I can come up with so far: create higher-level connector objects which "wire" modules together in particular ways (take output from one module, feed it as input to another module). Thus if our script was: FooInput fooIn = new FooInput(1, 2); FooOutput fooOutput = fooModule(fooIn); Double runtimevalue = getsomething(fooOutput.whatever); BarInput barIn = new BarInput( runtimevalue, fooOutput.someOtherValue); BarOutput barOut = barModule(BarIn); It would become with a connector: FooBarConnectionAlgo fooBarConnector = new fooBarConnector(fooModule, barModule); FooInput fooIn = new FooInput(1, 2); BarOutput barOut = fooBarConnector(fooIn); So the advantage is, besides hiding some code and making things clearer, we can test FooBarConnectionAlgo. I'm sure this situation comes up a lot. What do you do?

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• Join the Customer Experience Revolution

  - by Divya Malik

  By Suzy Meriwhether Customers want simple, consistent, and relevant experiences across all touchpoints and devices. Creating a great customer experience means delivering these qualities consistently over time across the entire customer lifecycle and enable businesses to attract more, retain more and sell more. Exceptional customer experiences create the loyalty, advocacy, and repeat business that drives success. Most successful companies would say that they try to create a good customer experience and have already invested in the systems, people, and training to develop it. So what’s missing? Why is it so much more difficult to meet customer expectations every day, in every way? How can you learn more? Join Oracle for a Live Event: Customer Experience Online Forum Participate in the Customer Experience Online Forum to hear from Bruce Temkin, a leading expert in customer experience, Anthony Lye, SVP of Oracle CRM, Marriott International, Nikon and other thought leaders to learn about the ROI of customer experience, what strategies leading brands use to win over customers, and how Oracle solutions can help you succeed in the Experience Revolution. I encourage you to register now for the half-day live event.

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• Is there an excuse for excessively short variable names?

  - by KChaloux

  This has become a large frustration with the codebase I'm currently working in; many of our variable names are short and undescriptive. I'm the only developer left on the project, and there isn't documentation as to what most of them do, so I have to spend extra time tracking down what they represent. For example, I was reading over some code that updates the definition of an optical surface. The variables set at the start were as follows: double dR, dCV, dK, dDin, dDout, dRin, dRout dR = Convert.ToDouble(_tblAsphere.Rows[0].ItemArray.GetValue(1)); dCV = convert.ToDouble(_tblAsphere.Rows[1].ItemArray.GetValue(1)); ... and so on Maybe it's just me, but it told me essentially nothing about what they represented, which made understanding the code further down difficult. All I knew was that it was a variable parsed out specific row from a specific table, somewhere. After some searching, I found out what they meant: dR = radius dCV = curvature dK = conic constant dDin = inner aperture dDout = outer aperture dRin = inner radius dRout = outer radius I renamed them to essentially what I have up there. It lengthens some lines, but I feel like that's a fair trade off. This kind of naming scheme is used throughout a lot of the code however. I'm not sure if it's an artifact from developers who learned by working with older systems, or if there's a deeper reason behind it. Is there a good reason to name variables this way, or am I justified in updating them to more descriptive names as I come across them?

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• Importing tab delimited file into array in Visual Basic 2013 [migrated]

  - by JaceG

  I am needing to import a tab delimited text file that has 11 columns and an unknown number of rows (always minimum 3 rows). I would like to import this text file as an array and be able to call data from it as needed, throughout my project. And then, to make things more difficult, I need to replace items in the array, and even add more rows to it as the project goes on (all at runtime). Hopefully someone can suggest code corrections or useful methods. I'm hoping to use something like the array style sMyStrings(3,2), which I believe would be the easiest way to control my data. Any help is gladly appreciated, and worthy of a slab of beer. Here's the coding I have so far: Imports System.IO Imports Microsoft.VisualBasic.FileIO Public Class Main Dim strReadLine As String Private Sub Form1_Load(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles MyBase.Load Dim sReader As IO.StreamReader = Nothing Dim sRawString As String = Nothing Dim sMyStrings() As String = Nothing Dim intCount As Integer = -1 Dim intFullLoop As Integer = 0 If IO.File.Exists("C:\MyProject\Hardware.txt") Then ' Make sure the file exists sReader = New IO.StreamReader("C:\MyProject\Hardware.txt") Else MsgBox("File doesn't exist.", MsgBoxStyle.Critical, "Error") End End If Do While sReader.Peek >= 0 ' Make sure you can read beyond the current position sRawString = sReader.ReadLine() ' Read the current line sMyStrings = sRawString.Split(New Char() {Chr(9)}) ' Separate values and store in a string array For Each s As String In sMyStrings ' Loop through the string array intCount = intCount + 1 ' Increment If TextBox1.Text <> "" Then TextBox1.Text = TextBox1.Text & vbCrLf ' Add line feed TextBox1.Text = TextBox1.Text & s ' Add line to debug textbox If intFullLoop > 14 And intCount > -1 And CBool((intCount - 0) / 11 Mod 0) Then cmbSelectHinge.Items.Add(sMyStrings(intCount)) End If Next intCount = -1 intFullLoop = intFullLoop + 1 Loop End Sub

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• How can I gather client's data on Google App Engine without using Datastore/Backend Instances too much?

  - by ruslan

  One of the projects I'm working on is online survey engine. It's my first big commercial project on Google App Engine. I need your advice on how to collect stats and efficiently record them in DataStore without bankrupting me. Initial requirements are: After user finishes survey client sends list of pairs [ID (int) + PercentHit (double)]. This list shows how close answers of this user match predefined answers of reference answerers (which identified by IDs). I call them "target IDs". Creator of the survey wants to see aggregated % for given IDs for last hour, particular timeframe or from the beginning of the survey. Some surveys may have thousands of target/reference answerers. So I created entity public class HitsStatsDO implements Serializable { @Id transient private Long id; transient private Long version = (long) 0; transient private Long startDate; @Parent transient private Key parent; // fake parent which contains target id @Transient int targetId; private double avgPercent; private long hitCount; } But writing HitsStatsDO for each target from each user would give a lot of data. For instance I had a survey with 3000 targets which was answered by ~4 million people within one week with 300K people taking survey in first day. Even if we assume they were answering it evenly for 24 hours it would give us ~1040 writes/second. Obviously it hits concurrent writes limit of Datastore. I decided I'll collect data for one hour and save that, that's why there are avgPercent and hitCount in HitsStatsDO. GAE instances are stateless so I had to use dynamic backend instance. There I have something like this: // Contains stats for one hour private class Shard { ReadWriteLock lock = new ReentrantReadWriteLock(); Map<Integer, HitsStatsDO> map = new HashMap<Integer, HitsStatsDO>(); // Key is target ID public void saveToDatastore(); public void updateStats(Long startDate, Map<Integer, Double> hits); } and map with shard for current hour and previous hour (which doesn't stay here for long) private HashMap<Long, Shard> shards = new HashMap<Long, Shard>(); // Key is HitsStatsDO.startDate So once per hour I dump Shard for previous hour to Datastore. Plus I have class LifetimeStats which keeps Map<Integer, HitsStatsDO> in memcached where map-key is target ID. Also in my backend shutdown hook method I dump stats for unfinished hour to Datastore. There is only one major issue here - I have only ONE backend instance :) It raises following questions on which I'd like to hear your opinion: Can I do this without using backend instance ? What if one instance is not enough ? How can I split data between multiple dynamic backend instances? It hard because I don't know how many I have because Google creates new one as load increases. I know I can launch exact number of resident backend instances. But how many ? 2, 5, 10 ? What if I have no load at all for a week. Constantly running 10 backend instances is too expensive. What do I do with data from clients while backend instance is dead/restarting?

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• Get Unlimited Oracle Training for Your Team for an Entire Year

  - by KJones

  Written By Amit Kumar, Senior Director Oracle University Digital Training  Oracle University has been in the training business for a long time (over 30 years!) and has worked with many Oracle customers over the years.  We understand that getting your teams trained on the latest Oracle technologies is not always easy. Training becomes more challenging when you have remote teams, team members with different skill levels or experienced team members who just need the content that covers the latest product features. It can also be challenging to predict your training needs for the year, making it all the more difficult to provide training in a timely manner. Oracle Unlimited Learning Subscription is the Answer We’ve listened to our customers and we’ve worked hard to put together a flexible training solution that enables team members to get the training that addresses their individual needs, right when they need it. This new Oracle Unlimited Learning Subscription provides teams with one year of unlimited access to: •    All of Oracle's Training On Demand video courses for in-depth product training •    All of Oracle's Learning Streams, which provide fresh product content from Oracle experts for continuous learning •    Live connections with Oracle's top instructors  •    Dedicated labs for hands-on practice The Oracle Unlimited Learning Subscription is 100% digital, giving you maximum flexibility. It simplifies how you plan and budget for your team training.  Learning Oracle and staying connected with Oracle really has never been easier. Take a tour and contact your Oracle University representative today to learn more and request a demo. 

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• Use a custom domain and point to Tumblr blog

  - by jskye

  My domain mydomain.com is registered with GoDaddy. I wish to host my Tumblr blog on this domain with Nearly Free Speech hosting. My active nameservers at GoDaddy already point to my authoritative ones at Nearly Free Speech which is working. However I'm baffled as to how to get my correct configuration to point to my Tumblr. Preferably I'd like (A) my domain http://mydomain.com to host the blog and have http://www.mydomain.com redirect also to http://mydomain.com. If this is too difficult my next preference is (B) to have http://www.mydomain.com host the blog whilst http://mydomain.com redirects to http://www.mydomain.com My third preference is to have (C) a sub-domain like http://tumblr.mydomain.com or http://tumblr.mydomain.com to host the blog and I guess have http://mydomain.com and http://www.mydomain.com both redirect to it. I've tried having two aliases mydomain.com and www.mydomain.com pointing to my permanent Nearly Free Speech IP at mydomain.nfshost.com and when I try to add: (1) an A record pointing mydomain.com to the IP 66.6.44.4 as per Tumblr's instructions it tells me I already have the bare domain as an alias so I cant do that. (2) the A record on the www.mydomain.com alias. I can do this with either www.mydomain.com set as an alias or not. But when I tried this with mydomain.com set as the canonical name the result when visiting either mydomain.com or www.mydomain.com was both of them continually redirecting to each other until an error was thrown. So I was wondering if there is a ninja that could save me some hair-pulling and tell me the correct way to config A, or else B, or else C.

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• How to handle new domain names?

  - by michael

  I have a new product which I'll call a pen ink reloader. I have a website using my products name, for example, www.inkywink.com which I want to have accessed by searches for keywords such as "pen ink", "pen out of ink" "ink for pens" etc. , since nobody knows that a pen ink reloader exists. I see that its quite difficult to get on front page for these keywords since they have lots of competition. However I notice that the exact phrases I want to rank highly for are available as domains. I purchase "www.penink.com" and "penoutofink.com" which for arguments sake are highly searched and the perfect keywords to get eyes on my money site www.inkywink.com . Two questions: 1. What is my best option to leverage those names so that they appear near top of searches so that I can get traffic to my money site? Do I just have them redirect 301 to inkywink.com or should I create small original content on each with links to my main site? 2. If I just have them redirected to inkywink.com, am I able to use keywords in metatag and headers for each site separately or do they all automatically obtain the same headers and tags as the site to which theyre redirected ? Thanks to anyone who can help as I'm a real newbie to all this.

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• What technical test should I give to a job candidate

  - by Romain Braun

  I'm not sure if this is the right stackexhange website, but : I have three candidates coming in tomorrow. One has 15 years of experience in PHP, and the two others have about 1 year of experience in PHP/ frontend development. For the last ones I was thinking about a test where they would have to develop a web app allowing users to manage other users, as in : Display a list of users, display a single user, modify an user, and add extended properties to an user. This way it would feature html, css, js, ajax, php and SQL. Do you think this would be a good test? What test should I give to the first one? He needs something much more difficult, I guess. I'm also listening, if you have any advice/ideas about what makes a good developer, and what I should pay attention to in the guys' codes. I was also considering thinking outside of the box, more algorithm-related, and asked him to make the fastest function to tell if a number is a prime number, because there are a lot of optimizations you can apply to such a function. They have one day to do it.

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• Multiplayer online game engine/pipeline

  - by Slav

  I am implementing online multiplayer game where client must be written in AS3 (Flash) to embed game into browser and server in C++ (abstract part of which is already written and used with other games). Networking models may differ from each other, but currently I'm looking toward game's logic run on both client and server parts but they're written on different languages while it's not the main problem. My previous game (pretty big one - was implemented with efforts of ~5 programmers in 1.5 years) was mainly "written" within electronic tables as structured objects with implemented inheritance: was written standalone tool which generated AS3 and C++ (languages of platforms to which the game was published) using specified electronic tables file (.xls or .ods). That file contained ~50 tables with ~50 rows and ~50 columns each and was mainly written by game designers which do not know any programming languages. But that game was single-player. Having declared problem with my currently implementing MMO, I'm looking toward some vast pipeline, where will be resolved such problems like: game objects descriptions (which starships exist within game, how much HP they have, how fast move, what damage deal...) actions descriptions (what players or NPCs can do: attack each other, collect resources, build structures, move, teleport, cast spells) - actions are transmitted through server between clients influences (what happens when specified action applied on specified object, e.i "Ship A attacked Ship B: field "HP" of Ship B reduced by amount of field "damage" of Ship A" Influences can be much more difficult, yes, e.i. "damage is twice it's size when Ship has =5 allies around him in a 200 units range during night" and so on. If to be able to write such logic within some "design document" it will be easily possible to: let designers to do their job without programmer's intervention or any bug-prone programming validate described logic transfer (transform, convert) to any programming language where it will be executed Did somebody worked on something like that? Is there some tools/engines/pipelines which concernes with it? How to handle all of this problems simultaneously in a best way or do I properly imagine my tasks and problems to myself?

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• Building Enterprise Smartphone App &ndash; Part 4: Application Development Considerations

  - by Tim Murphy

  This is the final part in a series of posts based on a talk I gave recently at the Chicago Information Technology Architects Group.  Feel free to leave feedback. Application Development Considerations Now we get to the actual building of your solutions.  What are the skills and resources that will be needed in order to develop a smartphone application in the enterprise? Language Knowledge One of the first things you need to consider when you are deciding which platform language do you either have the most in house skill base or can you easily acquire.  If you already have developers who know Java or C# you may want to use either Android or Windows Phone.  You should also take into consideration the market availability of developers.  If your key developer leaves how easy is it to find a knowledgeable replacement? A second consideration when it comes to programming languages is the qualities exposed by the languages of a particular platform.  How well does that development language and its associated frameworks support things like security and access to the features of the smartphone hardware?  This will play into your overall cost of ownership if you have to create this infrastructure on your own. Manage Limited Resources Everything is limited on a smartphone: battery, memory, processing power, network bandwidth.  When developing your applications you will have to keep your footprint as small as possible in every way.  This means not running unnecessary processes in the background that will drain the battery or pulling more data over the airwaves than you have to.  You also want to keep your on device in as compact a format as possible. Mobile Design Patterns There are a number of design patterns that have either come to life because of smartphone development or have been adapted for this use.  The main pattern in the Windows Phone environment is the MVVM (Model-View-View-Model).  This is great for overall application structure and separation of concerns.  The fun part is trying to keep that separation as pure as possible.  Many of the other patterns may or may not have strict definitions, but some that you need to be concerned with are push notification, asynchronous communication and offline data storage. Real estate is limited on smartphones and even tablets. You are also limited in the type of controls that can be represented in the UI. This means rethinking how you modularize your application. Typing is also much harder to do so you want to reduce this as much as possible.  This leads to UI patterns.  While not what we would traditionally think of as design patterns the guidance each platform has for UI design is critical to the success of your application.  If user find the application difficult navigate they will not use it. Development Process Because of the differences in development tools required, test devices and certification and deployment processes your teams will need to learn new way of working together.  This will include the need to integrate service contracts of back-end systems with mobile applications.  You will also want to make sure that you present consistency across different access points to corporate data.  Your web site may have more functionality than your smartphone application, but it should have a consistent core set of functionality.  This all requires greater communication between sub-teams of your developers. Testing Process Testing of smartphone apps has a lot more to do with what happens when you lose connectivity or if the user navigates away from your application. There are a lot more opportunities for the user or the device to perform disruptive acts.  This should be your main testing concentration aside from the main business requirements.  You will need to do things like setting the phone to airplane mode and seeing what the application does in order to weed out any gaps in your handling communication interruptions. Need For Outside Experts Since this is a development area that is new to most companies the need for experts is a lot greater. Whether these are consultants, vendor representatives or just development community forums you will need to establish expert contacts. Nothing is more dangerous for your project timelines than a lack of knowledge.  Make sure you know who to call to avoid lengthy delays in your project because of knowledge gaps. Security Security has to be a major concern for enterprise applications. You aren't dealing with just someone's game standings. You are dealing with a companies intellectual property and competitive advantage. As such you need to start by limiting access to the application itself.  Once the user is in the app you need to ensure that the data is secure at all times.  This includes both local storage and across the wire.  This means if a platform doesn’t natively support encryption for these functions you will need to find alternatives to secure your data.  You also need to keep secret (encryption) keys obfuscated or locked away outside of the application. People can disassemble the code otherwise and break your encryption. Offline Capabilities As we discussed earlier one your biggest concerns is not having connectivity.  Because of this a good portion of your code may be dedicated to handling loss of connection and reconnection situations.  What do you do if you lose the network?  Back up all your transactions and store of any supporting data so that operations can continue off line. In order to support this you will need to determine the available flat file or local data base capabilities of the platform.  Any failed transactions will need to support a retry mechanism whether it is automatic or user initiated.  This also includes your services since they will need to be able to roll back partially completed transactions.  What ever you do, don’t ignore this area when you are designing your system. Deployment Each platform has different deployment capabilities. Some are more suited to enterprise situations than others. Apple's approach is probably the most mature at the moment. Prior to the current generation of smartphone platforms it would have been Windows CE. Windows Phone 7 has the limitation that the app has to be distributed through the same network as public facing applications. You mark them as private which means that they are only accessible by a direct URL. Unfortunately this does not make them undiscoverable (although it is very difficult). This will change with Windows Phone 8 where companies will be able to certify their own applications and distribute them.  Given this Windows Phone applications need to be more diligent with application access in order to keep them restricted to the company's employees. My understanding of the Android deployment schemes is that it is much less standardized then either iOS or Windows Phone. Someone would have to confirm or deny that for me though since I have not yet put the time into researching this platform further. Given my limited exposure to the iOS and Android platforms I have not been able to confirm this, but there are varying degrees of user involvement to install and keep applications updated. At one extreme the user just goes to a website to do the install and in other case they may need to download files and perform steps to install them. Future Bluetooth Today we use Bluetooth for keyboards, mice and headsets.  In the future it could be used to interrogate car computers or manufacturing systems or possibly retail machines by service techs.  This would open smartphones to greater use as a almost a Star Trek Tricorder.  You would get you all your data as well as being able to use it as a universal remote for just about any device or machine. Better corporation controlled deployment At least in the Windows Phone world the upcoming release of Windows Phone 8 will include a private certification and deployment option that is currently not available with Windows Phone 7 (Mango). We currently have to run the apps through the Marketplace certification process and use a targeted distribution method. Platform independent approaches HTML5 and JavaScript with Web Service has become a popular topic lately for not only creating flexible web site, but also creating cross platform mobile applications.  I’m not yet convinced that this lowest common denominator approach is viable in most cases, but it does have it’s place and seems to be growing.  Be sure to keep an eye on it. Summary From my perspective enterprise smartphone applications can offer a great competitive advantage to many companies.  They are not cheap to build and should be approached cautiously.  Understand the factors I have outlined in this series, do you due diligence and see if there is a portion of your business that can benefit from the mobile experience. del.icio.us Tags: Architecture,Smartphones,Windows Phone,iOS,Android

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• VBScript and Xpath excluding duplicates [closed]

  - by Malachi

  I am trying to pull names from an XML Document using a vbscript. XML Document structure <Aliases> <Alias PartyType="DF" CaseID="000000" NameType=""> Name Name</Alias> <Alias PartyType="DF" CaseID="000000" NameType=""> Name Name</Alias> <Alias PartyType="DF" CaseID="000000" NameType=""> Name Name</Alias> ... </Aliases> the XML File might have 100 rows with the same name coming from several different CaseID's because for this part of my vbscript I am trying to pull all the different Names from all cases, but here is the issue, I don't want to return duplicates. is there a way to do this with an xPath Expression or should I try to do this with VBScript? EDIT I am pretty sure that I am going to have to do this with VBScript. Would it be Faster and more efficient to solve this issue in VBScript, xPath, or in populating the XML I am retrieving information from ( this might prove more difficult than the other two options ) I am also asking a Similar question on stackoverflow

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