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• Agile project management, agile development: early integration

  - by Matías Fidemraizer

  I believe that agile works if everything is agile. In software development area, in my opinion, if team members' code is integrated early, code will be more in sync and this has a lot of pros: Early integration helps team members to avoid painful merges. Encourages better coding habits, because everyone makes sure that they don't break co-workers' code everyday. Both developers and architects (code reviewers) may detect bad design decisions or just wrong development directions in real-time, preventing useless work. Actually I'm talking about getting the latest version of code base and checking-in your own code to the source control in a daily basis. When you start your coding day (i.e. you arrive to your work), your first action is updating your code base with the latest version from the source control. In the other hand, when you're about an hour to leave from your work and go home, your last action is checking-in your code to the source control and be sure that your day work doesn't break the project's build process. Rather than updating and checking-in your code once you finished an entire task, I believe the best approach is fixing small and flexible personal milestones and checking-in the code once you finish one of these. I really believe that this coding approach fits better in the agile project management concept. Do you know some document, blog post, wiki, article or whatever that you can suggest me that could be in sync with my opinion?. And, do you find any problem working with this approach?. Thank you in advance.

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• Update to SQL Server Configuration Scripting Utility

  - by Bill Graziano

  Last spring I released a utility to script SQL Server configuration information on CodePlex.  I’ve been making small changes in this application as my needs have changed.  The application is a .NET 2.0 console application.  This utility serves two needs for me.  First it helps with disaster recovery.  All server level objects (logins, jobs, linked servers, audits) are scripted to a single file per object type.  This enables the scripts to be easily run against a DR server.  If these are checked into source control you can view the history of the script and find out what changed and when. The second goal is to capture what changed inside a database.  Objects inside a database (tables, stored procedures, views, etc.) are each scripted to their own file.  This makes it easier to track the changes to an object over time.  This does include permissions and role membership so you can capture security changes.  My assumption is that a database backup is the primary method of disaster recovery for databases so this utility is designed to capture changes to objects.  You can find the full list of changes from the original on the Downloads page on CodePlex.

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• Paying it Forward

  - by Liam McLennan

  You’re a talented guy (or girl). You’ve done alright. Years of hard work and stick-to-it-ive-ness have paid off and left you with plenty and an opportunity to make a positive difference to someone else. And then there are people with less than they need. Sometimes all they need to help themselves is a start. Opportunity International provide micro financing to help people grow their small businesses so that they can afford food, shelter, water and education. microfinance to solve poverty   MonsoonerOrLater This June, Chris, Angus (my brother) and I are travelling to India, entering into a rickshaw race and raising money for charity (Opportunity International and Round Table India). The Deccan Odyssey is a nine day rally, racing up the coast of India from Goa to Mumbai in a three wheeled motorbike. If you would like to support us, please make a tax deductable donation via our secure site at GoFundraise. For more information take a look at the MonsoonerOrLater site. If you live in Brisbane come along to An Evening With MonsoonerOrLater. The entry fee includes a three-course Indian meal, live music, henna tattooist, chilli eating competition, best bollywood dance off, Dhalsim Vs Dhalsim Street fighter, Delhi Belly Bet, Auctions and Prizes. All profits go to our charities: Round Table India and Opportunity International.

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• OpenGL profiling with AMD PerfStudio 2

  - by Aurus

  I'm rendering just a really small amount of polygons for my UI but however I still tried to increase the FPS. In the end I removed redundant calls which increased the FPS. I really don't want to lose FPS for nothing so I keep looking for more improvements. The first thing I noticed is the "huge" time where no calls are made before SwapBuffer (the black one). Well I know that OpenGL works asynchronous so SwapBuffer has to wait until everything is done. But shouldn't PerfStudio mark this time also as black ? Correct me If I am wrong. The second thing I noticed is that some glUniform2f calls just take longer (the brown ones). I mean they should all upload 2floats to the GPU how can the time be so different from call to call. The program isn't even changed or something like that. I also tried to look at other programs like gDebugger or CodeXL but they often crashed and they show less statistics (only # of calls or redundant calls etc.) EDIT: I also realized that the draw calls also have different durations, which was obvious for me but sometimes drawing more vertices is faster than drawing less vertices.

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• Cross platform development query

  - by Ian

  I'm a Microsoft developer mainly, but there are a couple of small-ish projects I'd like to fiddle with which would benefit from being cross platform. The platforms I want to target are: Windows, Linux, Mac, Android and preferably iPhone, web (running in a browser). I need 3D (Around the level of support seen in something like Minecraft (I'm not writing Minecraft)), some networking. I'm pretty certain Java would work on all except iPhone. Looking at the "related questions" above it's offered up QT (no browser or phone afaik) and also HTML/CSS/Javascript (3D? package for desktop?) The other alternative is to have seperate versions for seperate platforms, developed with some common code where possible. That option isn't something I know anything about. Does anyone have experience of this sort of conundrum? I figured here was better than SO, because I imagine there are compromises which extend beyond technical choice. Finally, this is not a commercial operation, so some of the very expensive cross platform tools are out of the question unless they offer some sort of community edition. Thanks for your time.

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• github team workflow - to fork or not?

  - by aporat

  We're a small team of web developers currently using subversion but soon we're making a switch to github. I'm looking at different types of github workflows, and we're not sure if the whole forking concept in github for each developer is such a good idea for us. If we use forks, I understand each developer will have his own private remote & local repositories. I'm worried it will make pushing changesets hard and too complex. Also, my biggest concern is that it will force each developer to have 2 remotes: origin (which is the remote fork) and an upstream (which is used to "sync" changes from the main repository). Not sure if it's such a easy way to do things. This is similar to the workflow explained here: https://github.com/usm-data-analysis/usm-data-analysis.github.com/wiki/Git-workflow If we don't use forks, we can probably get by fine by using a central repo creating a branch for each task we're working on, and merge them into the development branch on the same repository. It means we won't be able to restrict merging of branches and might be a little messy to have many branches on the central repository. Any suggestions from teams who tried both workflow?

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• Visual Studio 2010 editor painfully slow [closed]

  - by Daniel Gehriger

  I'm running out of patience with MS VisualStudio 2010: I'm working on a solution containing ~50 C++ projects. When using the editor, I experience a lag of 1 - 2 seconds whenever I move the cursor to a different line, or when I move to a different window, or generally when the editor losses and gains focus. I went through a whole series of optimizations, to no avail: installed all hotfixes for VS2010 disabled all add-ins and extensions disabled Intellisense deleted all temporary files created by VS2010 disabled hardware acceleration unloaded all but 15 projects disabled tracking changes closed all but one window and so on. This is on a Dual Core machine with SSD harddrive (verified throughput 100MB/s), enough free space on HD, Windows 7 Pro 32-bit with 3GB of RAM and most of it still free. Whenever I type a letter, CPU usage of devenv.exe goes to 50 - 90% in process monitor for 1 - 2 seconds before returning to 5%. I used Process Explorer to analyze registry and file system access, and I only notice frequent accesses to the .sln file (which is quiet small), and a few registry reads, but nothing that would raise a red flag. I don't have this problem with solutions containing less projects, so I'm inclined to think that it's related to the number of projects. For your information, the entire solution has been migrated over the years from VS2005 to VS2008 to now VS2010. Does anyone have any ideas what else I could do to resume work on this project, other than returning to VS2008?

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• In a 2D platform game, how to ensure the player moves smoothly over sloping ground?

  - by Kovsa

  See image: http://i41.tinypic.com/huis13.jpg I'm developing a physics engine for a 2D platform game. I'm using the separating axis theorem for collision detection. The ground surface is constructed from oriented bounding boxes, with the player as an axis aligned bounding box. (Specifically, I'm using the algorithm from the book "Realtime Collision Detection" which performs swept collision detection for OBBs using SAT). I'm using a fairly small (close to zero) restitution coefficient in the collision response, to ensure that the dynamic objects don't penetrate the environment. The engine mostly works fine, it's just that I'm concerned about some edge cases that could possibly occur. For example, in the diagram, A, B and C are the ground surface. The player is heading left along B towards A. It seems to me that due to inaccuracy, the player box could be slightly below the box B as it continues up and left. When it reaches A, therefore, the bottom left corner of the player might then collide with the right side of A, which would be undesirable (as the intention is for the player to move smoothly over the top of A). It seems like a similar problem could happen when the player is on top of box C, moving left towards B - the most extreme point of B could collide with the left side of the player, instead of the player's bottom left corner sliding up and left above B. Box2D seems to handle this problem by storing connectivity information for its edge shapes, but I'm not really sure how it uses this information to solve the problem, and after looking at the code I don't really grasp what it's doing. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

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• XNA texture stretching at extreme coordinates

  - by Shaun Hamman

  I was toying around with infinitely scrolling 2D textures using the XNA framework and came across a rather strange observation. Using the basic draw code: spriteBatch.Begin(SpriteSortMode.Deferred, null, SamplerState.PointWrap, null, null); spriteBatch.Draw(texture, Vector2.Zero, sourceRect, Color.White, 0.0f, Vector2.Zero, 2.0f, SpriteEffects.None, 1.0f); spriteBatch.End(); with a small 32x32 texture and a sourceRect defined as: sourceRect = new Rectangle(0, 0, Window.ClientBounds.Width, Window.ClientBounds.Height); I was able to scroll the texture across the window infinitely by changing the X and Y coordinates of the sourceRect. Playing with different coordinate locations, I noticed that if I made either of the coordinates too large, the texture no longer drew and was instead replaced by either a flat color or alternating bands of color. Tracing the coordinates back down, I found the following at around (0, -16,777,000): As you can see, the texture in the top half of the image is stretched vertically. My question is why is this occurring? Certainly I can do things like bind the x/y position to some low multiple of 32 to give the same effect without this occurring, so fixing it isn't an issue, but I'm curious about why this happens. My initial thought was perhaps it was overflowing the coordinate value or some such thing, but looking at a data type size chart, the next closest below is an unsigned short with a range of about 32,000, and above is an unsigned int with a range of around 2,000,000,000 so that isn't likely the cause.

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• Using Coherence API to get POF bytes

  - by Bruno.Borges

  Someone raised the question on how to use the Coherence API to get the bytes of an object in POF (Portable Object Format) programatically. So I came up with this small code that shows the very cool API simple usage :-)   SimplePofContext spc = new SimplePofContext();    spc.registerUserType(0, User.class, new UserSerializer());    // consider UserSerializer as an implementation of PofSerializer            User u = new User();    u.setId(21);    u.setName("Some Name");    u.setEmail("[email protected]");            ByteArrayOutputStream baos = new ByteArrayOutputStream();    DataOutput dataOutput = new DataOutputStream(baos);    BufferOutput bufferOutput = new WrapperBufferOutput(dataOutput);    spc.serialize(bufferOutput, u);            byte[] byteArray = baos.toByteArray();    System.out.println(Arrays.toString(byteArray));  Easy, isn't?

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• Ubuntu doesn't load, can't even open a terminal to type commands, even after boot repair

  - by Sky

  When I start Ubuntu I only get my desktop picture and am unable to open a terminal to type any commands. When I try a Guest session all I get is a red Ubuntu backdrop, nothing else. I tried boot repair but no improvement. Summary information following boot repair: http://paste.ubuntu.com/8109809/ I can paste some of it here if someone can tell me which part of it is relevant. This all occurred after I tried to remove compizconfig (which I might not have completed), because it's been using up my CPU (running at 50-60% with compiz at the top in System monitor. My laptop has been running very slow since installing Ubuntu so I've been trying to fix that, also website videos play slow and the startup of Ubuntu has been faulty. I also installed a proprietory Nvidia driver (304) before this launcher issue occurred, in an effort to fix my video problem (didn't help anything). Laptop is Dell 620m with Intel Core 2; 1.83GHz, 2 GB RAM, Ubuntu 14.04 (new to Linux); 66GB Ubuntu partition. Everything works fine on the small XP partition of my laptop, but I've moved all my files to the larger Ubuntu portion. I wanted to try some answers I found to similar questions but they all seem to involve commands in a terminal and I can't open a terminal. How can I get the launcher back, along with access to my programmes etc? Thank you for any help.

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• Detecting collision between ball (circle) and brick(rectangle)?

  - by James Harrison

  Ok so this is for a small uni project. My lecturer provided me with a framework for a simple brickbreaker game. I am currently trying to overcome to problem of detecting a collision between the two game objects. One object is always the ball and the other objects can either be the bricks or the bat. public Collision hitBy( GameObject obj ) { //obj is the bat or the bricks //the current object is the ball // if ball hits top of object if(topX + width >= obj.topX && topX <= obj.topX + obj.width && topY + height >= obj.topY - 2 && topY + height <= obj.topY){ return Collision.HITY; } //if ball hits left hand side else if(topY + height >= obj.topY && topY <= obj.topY + obj.height && topX + width >= obj.topX -2 && topX + width <= obj.topX){ return Collision.HITX; } else return Collision.NO_HIT; } So far I have a method that is used to detect this collision. The the current obj is a ball and the obj passed into the method is the the bricks. At the moment I have only added statement to check for left and top collisions but do not want to continue as I have a few problems. The ball reacts perfectly if it hits the top of the bricks or bat but when it hits the ball often does not change directing. It seems that it is happening toward the top of the left hand edge but I cannot figure out why. I would like to know if there is another way of approaching this or if people know where I'm going wrong. Lastly the collision.HITX calls another method later on the changes the x direction likewise with y.

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• Web Development Environment: How to distribute edited hosts files over bunch of mac machines?

  - by Alex Reds

  I am doing some research to prepare some web development environment for our small(10ppl and growing) new office. User Case: For each new web project usually we create new alias on an Apache server someproject.companywebsite From my understanding in order to see this website locally for all the rest of our team(including mangers and directors) they will need to edit hosts file (e.g. "192.168.1.10 someproject.companywebsite"), and like that each time for a new project(can be 2-5 each week) Solution: And I looking for a solution how to edit this hosts file only once and distribute it over all mac machines in our network at once or much more flawlessly than poking around with each machine every time over and over again. Is that possible? Or that a very wrong way of doing that? Perhaps we better set up own local dns server and point to it our router? Though own dns server a bit concerns me because of might be some network interruption and others lags, if you know what I mean. Or perhaps there are another workflows for that? What's the best way for such things? So I'll be so grateful to hear some advices from experienced admins. I couldn't find that info on internet, so if you know where to read about it, point me in a right direction. Thank you in advance Alex

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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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• Simple monitoring of a Raspberry Pi powered screen - Part 2

  - by Chris Houston

  If you have read my previous blog post Raspberry Pi entrance signed backed by Umbraco - Part 1 which describes how we used a Raspberry Pi to drive an Entrance sign for QV Offices you will have seen I mentioned a follow up post about monitoring the sign.As the sign is mounted in the entrance of the building on the ground floor and the reception is on the 1st floor, this meant that if there was a fault of any kind showing on the screen, the first person to see this was inevitably one of QV Offices' clients as they walked into the building.Although the QV Offices' team were able to check the Umbraco website address that the sign uses, this did not always mean that everything was working as expected. We noticed a couple of times that the sign had Wifi issues (it is now hard wired) and this caused the Chromium browser to render a 404 error when it tried to refresh the screen.The simple monitoring solutionWe added the following line to our refresh script, so that after the sign had been refreshed a screen shot of the Raspberry Pi would be taken:import -display :0 -window root ~/screenshot.jpgFinally we wrote a small Crontab task that ran on a QV Offices Mac that grabs this screen shot and saved it on the desktop, admittedly we have used a package that it not mega secure, but in reality this is an internal system that only runs an office sign, so we are not to concerned about it being hacked.*/5 * * * * /usr/local/bin/sshpass -p 'password' /usr/bin/scp [email protected]:screenshot.jpg Desktop/QVScreenShot.jpgAs the file icon updates, if the image changes, this gives a quick visual indication of the status of the sign, if for some reason the icon does not look correct the QV Offices administrator can just click on the file to see the exact image currently displayed on the sign.Sometimes a quick and easy solution is better than a more complex and expensive one.

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• What's the best project management software for internal dev. 5 man shop

  - by P.Brian.Mackey

  I work for a large corporation, but we do small intranet web application development. Our project management tracking sucks. Its custom software built by a jr. intern. For what its worth, our development style is akin to agile, but there's nothing set in stone...very customer oriented approach. I need project tracking that meets the criteria: Intranet, internal products. Mostly maintenance, some new development. 5 developers 12 products 1 hands-off manager. He really just wants to know estimated man hours, due date for dev, QA and release. Along with a short description of the project. Free or super cheap. Bonus Simple pretty UI. Think pretty charts. Hope I covered everything. Please ask for any clarification. If you read dreaming in code, the company uses some project tracking software that sounds pretty sweet. Note, we do have Team Foundation Server. I already tried pushing its use as PM tracking, but its too complicated. I can't get people to sit and train. So this software has to be easy.

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• Business Accelerators for Oracle BI Applications

  - by Mike.Hallett(at)Oracle-BI&EPM

  "Using the Oracle Business Accelerators across projects …, our deliveries are now 50% faster than traditional implementations.” "Oracle Application Implementation is now within reach for Small to Medium Businesses who want a faster, cheaper & better … implementation.   Oracle Business Accelerators (OBA) has made it possible.” Find out more @ OBA for BI Applications   {partner single sign-on required} Oracle Business Accelerator (OBA) kits are now available for BI Applications, configured for both: ·        E-Business Suite, and ·        JD Edwards E1. This has resources to help partners to sell and deliver tightly scoped OBI-Application implementation projects with low risk and high margin in a few weeks; with huge potential to up-sell many add on services to your delighted client. For example, select “Oracle BI Applications ” & “E-Business Suite - R12.1.1”, and then the “OBA Project Consultant” gets the following self-guided tutorials and access to a comprehensive delivery kit:

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• deep expertise in one technology or not so deep understanding of many technologies

  - by district

  Hello everyone. I started to feel a little bit confused recently about my career path as software developer, about what I do, what I know and do I need it. I am 21 years now and I have 3 years of experience. I've been dealing with java/C++ projects, Servlet/JSP/JSF, desktop QT, also some mobile development (Symbian, Android) I work for a quite a small company, around 20 developers with different projects. I'm also a student. The problem is that I'm not sure if I'm taking the right road here. I'm starting to work with new technology every few months. I don't have deep understanding in any of these and I'm not sure if this is what I need. I will probably not become an expert in any of these. The other path is maybe to start working for a big company which use one set of technologies and become an expert. What's your opinion on this topic ? What is more valuable ?

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• What decent email client would you recommend (at least better than Thunderbird)?

  - by matteo

  I've used Thunderbird for years. I keep a huge number of emails. I move them to folders to organize or archive them, but I don't delete anything so I have hundreds of thousands of messages. I like the way TB is conceived, and the way it works as long as the volume of data is small. But it just doesn't scale. It has a lot of ridiculous design flaws such that, for example, any time consuming operation blocks the whole UI completely (and you don't even know for how long) as if everything was implemented in a single monolythic all-tasks-are-blocking way. I'm tired of it. So what is the alternative that you would recommend as an email client program with all the usual basic features one expects from any email client program? Important: I mainly use POP3, much much more than IMAP, and my main account is on gmail. This question is not intended to be a rant against TB (I admit it is, as a side effect); I have highlighted its weaknesses BECAUSE the answer I'm looking for is a recomendation for a program that doesn't suffer from these issues.

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• Finding links among many written and spoken thoughts

  - by Peter Fren

  So... I am using a digital voice recorder to record anything I see important, ranging from business to private, from rants to new business ideas. Every finalized idea is one wma-file. I wrote a program to sort the wma-files into folders. From time to time I listen to the wma-files, convert them to text(manually) and insert them into a mindmap with mindmanager, which I sort hierarchically by area and type in turn. This works very well, no idea is being lost, when I am out of ideas for a special topic, I listen to what I said and can get started again. What could a search system look like that finds links between thoughts(written in the mindmap and in the wma files) or in general gives me good search results even when the keyword I searched for is not present but a synonym of it or related topic(for instance flower should output entries containing orchid aswell, even if they contain orchid but not the very keyword flower). I prefer something ready-made but small adjustments to a given system are fine aswell. How would you approach this task?

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• Understanding Box2d Restitution & Bouncing

  - by layzrr

  I'm currently trying to implement basketball bouncing into my game using Box2d (jBox2d technically), but I'm a bit confused about restitution. While trying to create the ball in the testbed first, I've run into infinite bouncing, as described in this question, however obviously not using my own implementation. The Box2d manual describes restitution as follows: Restitution is used to make objects bounce. The restitution value is usually set to be between 0 and 1. Consider dropping a ball on a table. A value of zero means the ball won't bounce. This is called an inelastic collision. A value of one means the ball's velocity will be exactly reflected. This is called a perfectly elastic collision. My confusion lies in that I am still getting infinite bouncing with restitution values at 0.75/0.8. The same behavior can be seen in the testbed under Collision Watching - Varying Restitution, on the 6th and 7th balls. I believe the last one has restitution of 1, which makes sense, but I don't understand why the second to last ball bounces infinitely (as is happening with my working basketball I've created). I am looking to understand the restitution concept more fully, as well as look for a solution to infinite bouncing with the Box2d framework. My instinct was to sleep objects that appeared to be moving in very small increments, but this seems like a misuse of the engine. Should I just work with lower restitution values altogether?

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• django & postgres linux hosting (with SSH access) recommendations

  - by Justin Grant

  We're looking for a good place to host our custom Django app (a fork of OSQA) and its postgresql backend. Requirements include: Linux Python 2.6 or (ideally) Python 2.7 Django 1.2 Postgres 8.4 or later DB backup/restore handled by the hoster, not us OS & dev-platform-stack patching/maintenance handled by the hoster, not us SSH access (so we can pull source code from GitHub, so we can install python eggs, etc.) ability to set up cron jobs (e.g. to send out dail email updates) ability to send up to 10K emails/day good performance (not ganged up with a zillion other sites on one CPU, not starved for RAM) FTP or SCP access to web logs dedicated public IP SSL support Costs under $1000/month for a relatively small site (<5M pageviews/month) Good customer service We already have a prototype site running on EC2 on top of a Bitnami DjangoStack. The problem is that we have to patch the OS, patch postgres, etc. We'd really prefer a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering, like Heroku offers for Rails apps, where all we need to worry about is deploying our code instead of worrying about system software patching and maintenance. Google App Engine is closest to what we're looking for, but they don't offer relational DB access (not yet at least). Anyone have a recommendation?

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• Metaphor for task synchronization [closed]

  - by nkint

  I'm looking for a metaphor. A friend of mine taught me to use metaphors from nature, everyday life, math, and use them to design my projects. They can help in creating a better design or better understanding or the problem, and they are cool. Now I'm working on a project with hardware and micro-controllers in C. For convenience, I have decided to use multiple micro-controllers as co-processor units for real-time (the slaves) and a master. This has saved me a lot of headache: I can code the main logic in the master without paying too much attention to super optimizing everything; I don't care if I need some blocking-call; I don't worry about serial communication with the computer. I just send messages to the slaves and they are super fast super in real time. I like my design and it seems to work well. So here are the important concepts that I'm trying capture in the metaphor: hierarchy of processing Not using one big brain but rather several small, distributed brain units using distributed power or resources I'm looking for a good metaphor for this concept of having one unit synchronize the work of all the others. Preferably, the metaphor would come from nature, biology, or zoology.

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• Introducing a (new) test method to a team

  - by Jon List

  A couple of months ago i was hired in a new job. (I'm fresh out of my Masters in software engineering) The company mainly consists of ERP consultants, but I was hired in their fairly small web department (6 developers), our main task is ERP/ecom integration (ERP-integrated web shops). The department is growing, and recently my manager asked me to start thinking about introducing tests to the team, i love a challenge, but frankly I'm a bit scared (I'm the least experience member of the team). Currently the method of testing is clicking around in the web shop and asking the customer if the products are there, if they look okay, and if orders are posted correctly to the ERP. We are getting a lot of support cases on previous projects, where a customer or a customer's customer have run into errors, which - i suppose - is why my manager wants more structured testing. Off the top of my head, I though of some (obvious?) improvements, like looking at the requirement specification, having an issue tracker, enabling team members to register their time on a "tests"-line on the budget, and to circulate tasks amongst members of the team. But as i see it we have three main challenges: general website testing. (javascript, C#, ASP.NET and CMS integration tests) (live) ERP integration testing (customers rarely want to pay for test environments). adopting a method in the team I like the responsibility, but I am afraid that I'm in a little bit over my head. I expect that my manager expects me to set up some kind of workshop for the team where I present some techniques and ideas and where we(the team) can find some solutions together. What I learned in school was mostly unit testing and program verification, not so much testing across multiple systems and applications. What I'm looking for here, is references/advice/pointers/anecdotes; anything that might help me to get smarter and to improve the current method of my team. Thanks!! (TL;DR: read the bold parts)

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• How do you KISS?

  - by Conor

  The KISS principle is a highly quoted design mantra. The aim of this principle is to stamp out unnecessary complexity on a project. This is a good thing, saving time, energy and money. It can lead to a relatively stress free implementation and a simple, elegant, maintainable end product. A lot of discussion on KISS provides mechanisms to simplify requirements, design and implementation. Things that spring to mind include: avoid scope creep; simple obvious design and code; minimal run-time dependencies; refactoring to maintain simplicity; etc. However there are a lot of implicit things that we do to KISS. Examples: small team sizes; minimal management layers; tidy desk; mastery of a single IDE; clear concise error messages; scripts to automate/encapsulate tasks; etc Why KISS practices do you apply? How have they been of benefit? I'm especially interested in non-obvious practices.

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