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• View Link inConsistency

  - by Abhishek Dwivedi

  What is View Link Consistency? When multiple instances (say VO1, VO2, VO3 etc) of an EO-based VO are based on the same underlying EO, a new row created in one of these VO instances (say VO1)can be automatically added (without re-query) to the row sets of the others (VO2, VO3 etc ). This capability is known as the view link consistency. This feature works for any VO for which it is enabled, regardless of whether they are involved in a view link or not. What causes View Link inConsistency? Unless jbo.viewlink.consistent  is disabled for this VO (or globally), or setAssociationConsistent(false) is applied, any of the following can cause View Link inConsistency.  1. setWhereClause 2. Unreferenced secondary EO 3. findByViewCriteria() 4. Using view link accessor row set Why does this happen - View Link inConsistency? Well, there can be one of the following reasons. a. In case of 1 & 2, the view link consistency flag is disabled on that view object. b. As far as 3 is concerned, findByViewCriteria is used to retrieve a new row set to process programmatically without changing the contents of the default row set. In this case, unlike previous cases, the view link consistency flag is not disabled, meaning that the changes in the default row set would be reflected in the new row set.  However, the opposite doesn't hold true. For instance, if a row is deleted from this new row set, the corresponding row in the default row set does not get deleted. In one of my features, which involved deletion of row(s), I resolved the view link inconsistency issue by replacing findByViewCriteria by applyViewCriteria. b. For 4, it's similar to 3 - whenever a view link accessor row set is retrieved, a new row set is created. Now, creating new row set does not mean re-executing the query each time, only creating a new instance of a RowSet object with its default iterator reset to the "slot" before the first row. Also, please note that this new row set always originates from an internally created view object instance, not one you that added to the data model. This internal view object instance is created as needed and added with a system-defined name to the root application module. Anyway, the very reason a distinct, internally-created view object instance is used is to guarantee that it remains unaffected by developer-related changes to their own view objects instances in the data model.

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• Simple method for reliably detecting code in text?

  - by Jeff Atwood

  GMail has this feature where it will warn you if you try to send an email that it thinks might have an attachment. Because GMail detected the string see the attached in the email, but no actual attachment, it warns me with an OK / Cancel dialog when I click the Send button. We have a related problem on Stack Overflow. That is, when a user enters a post like this one: my problem is I need to change the database but I don't won't to create a new connection. example: DataSet dsMasterInfo = new DataSet(); Database db = DatabaseFactory.CreateDatabase("ConnectionString"); DbCommand dbCommand = db.GetStoredProcCommand("uspGetMasterName"); This user did not format their code as code! That is, they didn't indent by 4 spaces per Markdown, or use the code button (or the keyboard shortcut ctrl+k) which does that for them. Thus, our system is accreting a lot of edits where people have to go in and manually format code for people that are somehow unable to figure this out. This leads to a lot of bellyaching. We've improved the editor help several times, but short of driving over to the user's house and pressing the correct buttons on their keyboard for them, we're at a loss to see what to do next. That's why we are considering a Google GMail style warning: Did you mean to post code? You wrote stuff that we think looks like code, but you didn't format it as code by indenting 4 spaces, using the toolbar code button or the ctrl+k code formatting command. However, presenting this warning requires us to detect the presence of what we think is unformatted code in a question. What is a simple, semi-reliable way of doing this? Per Markdown, code is always indented by 4 spaces or within backticks, so anything correctly formatted can be discarded from the check immediately. This is only a warning and it will only apply to low-reputation users asking their first questions (or providing their first answers), so some false positives are OK, so long as they are about 5% or less. Questions on Stack Overflow can be in any language, though we can realistically limit our check to, say, the "big ten" languages. Per the tags page that would be C#, Java, PHP, JavaScript, Objective-C, C, C++, Python, Ruby. Use the Stack Overflow creative commons data dump to audit your potential solution (or just pick a few questions in the top 10 tags on Stack Overflow) and see how it does. Pseudocode is fine, but we use c# if you want to be extra friendly. The simpler the better (so long as it works). KISS! If your solution requires us to attempt to compile posts in 10 different compilers, or an army of people to manually train a bayesian inference engine, that's ... not exactly what we had in mind.

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• Should library classes be wrapped before using them in unit testing?

  - by Songo

  I'm doing unit testing and in one of my classes I need to send a mail from one of the methods, so using constructor injection I inject an instance of Zend_Mail class which is in Zend framework. Example: class Logger{ private $mailer; function __construct(Zend_Mail $mail){ $this->mail=$mail; } function toBeTestedFunction(){ //Some code $this->mail->setTo('some value'); $this->mail->setSubject('some value'); $this->mail->setBody('some value'); $this->mail->send(); //Some } } However, Unit testing demands that I test one component at a time, so I need to mock the Zend_Mail class. In addition I'm violating the Dependency Inversion principle as my Logger class now depends on concretion not abstraction. Does that mean that I can never use a library class directly and must always wrap it in a class of my own? Example: interface Mailer{ public function setTo($to); public function setSubject($subject); public function setBody($body); public function send(); } class MyMailer implements Mailer{ private $mailer; function __construct(){ $this->mail=new Zend_Mail; //The class isn't injected this time } function setTo($to){ $this->mailer->setTo($to); } //implement the rest of the interface functions similarly } And now my Logger class can be happy :D class Logger{ private $mailer; function __construct(Mailer $mail){ $this->mail=$mail; } //rest of the code unchanged } Questions: Although I solved the mocking problem by introducing an interface, I have created a totally new class Mailer that now needs to be unit tested although it only wraps Zend_Mail which is already unit tested by the Zend team. Is there a better approach to all this? Zend_Mail's send() function could actually have a Zend_Transport object when called (i.e. public function send($transport = null)). Does this make the idea of a wrapper class more appealing? The code is in PHP, but answers doesn't have to be. This is more of a design issue than a language specific feature

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• How and when to ask for a pay raise?

  - by Nico

  When should one ask for a pay raise? Will I know when the time is right for a pay raise? or should I just think "I deserve a pay raise for X and Y." When would be a moment to ask for a pay grade? For instance, if you are in a company that outsources to others, could it be the right moment to ask when they move you to a different physical workplace? Maybe a few weeks/months after you started working as a consultant at the client? Should you ask for one after engaging new technologies or something you've never worked with before? In short, should you ask for a raise for a "business motive" (they move you, they assign you new responsibilities), a "professional motive" (you are required to learn new languages or technologies), or a "personal motive" (you are having twins, your mother died and you need to arrange the funeral), or are all of the above potentially valid motives? How should one ask for it? Asking for a pay raise can be difficult for some people, how you deal with this? Do you just walk up to your manager and tell him "I need more money", "I think I deserve a pay raise"? Do you suggest you might have other offers on the table? Couldn't this be counterproductive if you actually really want to stay in the company you are in (because you like the environment, made a few friends, and like all the features they give you besides your pay grade; say: free sodas, parties, after-offices that happen pretty often, a ps3 you can grab when you are tired or want to chill out, courses, english classes, football games, etc, etc. [these would be my reasons not to leave]). I mean, how would you ask for a pay raise, effectively, but without pretending to threaten to leave the company if you don't get it? Because you don't actually want to. How would you deal with their answer? If they tell you they don't think you deserve a raise, would you ask for their reasons, would you get furious and trash the room? If they give you their reasons why they think you don't deserve a pay raise yet, would you discuss this with them or just take their opinion as factual? What if they ask you how much more you think you deserve to be being paid? Should you have thought this before-hand, or expect them to set the new grade? If they do agree to a pay raise, should you expect extra work to be thrown your way, or should everything remain the same, except your pay grade?

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• The challenge of giving a positive No

  - by MarkPearl

  I find it ironic that the more I am involved in the software industry, the more apparent it becomes that soft skills are just as if not more important than the technical abilities of a developer. One of the biggest challenges I have faced in my career is in managing client expectations to what one can deliver and being able to work with multiple clients. If I look at where things commonly go pear shaped, one area features a lot is where I should have said "No" to a request, but because of the way the request was made I ended up saying yes. Time and time again this has caused immense pain. Thus, when I saw on Amazon that they had a book titled "The power of a positive no" by William Ury I had to buy it and read it. In William's book he explains an approach to saying No that while extremely simple does change the way a No is presented. In essence he talks of a pattern the Yes! > No > Yes? Pattern. 1. Yes! -> positively and concretely describing your core interests and values 2. No. -> explicitly link your no to this YES! 3. Yes? -> suggest another positive outcome or agreement to the other person Let me explain how I understood it. If you are working on a really important project and someone asks you to do add a quick feature to another project, your Yes! would be to the more important project, which would mean a No to the quick feature, and an option for your Yes? may be an alternative time when you can look at it.. An example of an appropriate response would be... It is really important that I keep to the commitment that I made to this customer to finish his project on time so I cannot work on your feature right now but I am available to help you in a weeks time. William then goes on to explain the type of behaviour a person may display when the no is received. He illustrates this with a diagram called the curve of acceptance. William points out that if you are aware of the type of behaviour you can expect it empowers you to stay true to your no. Personally I think reading and having an understanding of the “soft” side of things like saying no is invaluable to a developer.

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• Why do some user agents have spam urls in them?

  - by Erx_VB.NExT.Coder

  If you go to (say) the last 100 entries (visits) to the botsvsbrowsers.com website (exact link, feel free to take a look: http://www.botsvsbrowsers.com/recent/listings/index.html ), you'd notice that almost every User Agent that has the keywords "Opera" and "Presto" inside them, will almost certainly have a web link (URL/Web Address) inside it, and it won't just be a normal web address, but a HTML anchor tag/link to that address. Why is this so, I could not even find a single discussion about it on the internet, nowhere, I tried varying my search terms many times. If the user agent contains the words "Opera" and "Presto" it doesnt mean it will have this weblink, but it means there is about an 80% change that it will. A typical anchor tag/link inside a user agent will look like this: Mozilla/4.0 <a href="http://osis-uk.co.uk/disabled-equipment">disability equipment</a> (Windows NT 5.1; U; en) Presto/2.10.229 Version/11.60 If you check it out at the website, http://www.botsvsbrowsers.com/recent/listings/index.html you will notice that the back and forward arrows are in there unescaped format. This isn't just true for botsvsbrowsers, but several other user agent listing sites. I'm really confused and feel line I'm in a room full of 10,000 people and am the only one seeing this ghost :). If I'm doing statistical analysis, should I include or exclude this type of user agent from my listing (ie: are these just normal users who've set their user agents to attempt to drive some traffic to their sites as they browser the web), or is there something else going on? The fact that it is so consistent in terms of its format leads me to believe that it is an automated process (the setting or alteration of the user agent) so I cannot decide or understand the process by which this change is made (I know how to change a user agent), but unsure which program or facility is doing this, especially since it is exclusive to Opera (Presto) user agents that are beyond I think an 8 or 9 point something browser version. I've run some statistical tests, parsing entries from all over the place, writing custom programs, to get a better understanding of this. Keep in mind that I see normal URL's in user agents infrequently, they are just text such as +http://www.someSite.com appended to a user agent normally, especially if its a crawler or bot it provided its service URL, this is normal and isnt done with an embedded link (A HREF=) etc, so I'm not talking about "those".

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• Should UTF-16 be considered harmful?

  - by Artyom

  I'm going to ask what is probably quite a controversial question: "Should one of the most popular encodings, UTF-16, be considered harmful?" Why do I ask this question? How many programmers are aware of the fact that UTF-16 is actually a variable length encoding? By this I mean that there are code points that, represented as surrogate pairs, take more than one element. I know; lots of applications, frameworks and APIs use UTF-16, such as Java's String, C#'s String, Win32 APIs, Qt GUI libraries, the ICU Unicode library, etc. However, with all of that, there are lots of basic bugs in the processing of characters out of BMP (characters that should be encoded using two UTF-16 elements). For example, try to edit one of these characters: 𝄞 (U+1D11E) MUSICAL SYMBOL G CLEF 𝕥 (U+1D565) MATHEMATICAL DOUBLE-STRUCK SMALL T 𝟶 (U+1D7F6) MATHEMATICAL MONOSPACE DIGIT ZERO 𠂊 (U+2008A) Han Character You may miss some, depending on what fonts you have installed. These characters are all outside of the BMP (Basic Multilingual Plane). If you cannot see these characters, you can also try looking at them in the Unicode Character reference. For example, try to create file names in Windows that include these characters; try to delete these characters with a "backspace" to see how they behave in different applications that use UTF-16. I did some tests and the results are quite bad: Opera has problem with editing them (delete required 2 presses on backspace) Notepad can't deal with them correctly (delete required 2 presses on backspace) File names editing in Window dialogs in broken (delete required 2 presses on backspace) All QT3 applications can't deal with them - show two empty squares instead of one symbol. Python encodes such characters incorrectly when used directly u'X'!=unicode('X','utf-16') on some platforms when X in character outside of BMP. Python 2.5 unicodedata fails to get properties on such characters when python compiled with UTF-16 Unicode strings. StackOverflow seems to remove these characters from the text if edited directly in as Unicode characters (these characters are shown using HTML Unicode escapes). WinForms TextBox may generate invalid string when limited with MaxLength. It seems that such bugs are extremely easy to find in many applications that use UTF-16. So... Do you think that UTF-16 should be considered harmful?

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• How can I solve this SAT edge case?

  - by ssb

  I have an SAT implementation that basically works, and the fact that it works is what's giving me a few headaches. Basically there are some situations where using the SAT doesn't quite give me my intended result. One of these involves movement across multiple collision objects. Or to put it another way, if I have several collision boxes lined up next to each other such as to create something like a wall or a floor, movement along that surface while constantly applying force into that surface sometimes causes hangups, i.e. the player stops moving. This illustration shows what I mean: The 2 boxes on the bottom represent a floor, and the box on top/in the middle represents what my player is doing. There are several squares lined up as world obstacles to create some kind of wall, and if I move to the left across this surface while holding the down key then the issue arises. It only happens at the exact dividing point between two blocks. It only happens when moving to the left. At any rate I think I know why it happens, but I don't know how to solve it. Basically when I update my player movement I consider which directions are pressed, naturally, so if down is pressed I will add the speed to the Y component, and so on. But due to the way my SAT is implemented, when the penetration into the shape is the same from both sides it just goes with the smallest axis that it finds first, and it checks collisions against objects in the order that they were created because it goes through a foreach loop on the list of collidable objects. So this all adds up to the effect of if I'm moving to the left over a series of boxes while holding down, it will resolve me back to the right out of the first box and then up out of the box to the right of it, and this continues as long as the penetration is the same. The odd part is that this doesn't happen every time, which I am going to attribute to some oddity regarding multiplying velocity by the game time and causing some minor discrepancies between the lengths. Ultimately what this boils down to is that it will keep resolving me to the right and up, but this is technically expected behavior. All the solutions I can think of only address the symptoms of this problem and not the actual cause, such as not using many blocks to create walls or shapes, which is an option I'd like to keep open. I could also change which axis my algorithm defaults to, but that would just cause problems when going up/down along the walls. What can I do to fix this?

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• How can I convert a 2D bitmap (Used for terrain) to a 2D polygon mesh for collision?

  - by Megadanxzero

  So I'm making an artillery type game, sort of similar to Worms with all the usual stuff like destructible terrain etc... and while I could use per-pixel collision that doesn't give me collision normals or anything like that. Converting it all to a mesh would also mean I could use an existing physics library, which would be better than anything I can make by myself. I've seen people mention doing this by using Marching Squares to get contours in the bitmap, but I can't find anything which mentions how to turn these into a mesh (Unless it refers to a 3D mesh with contour lines defining different heights, which is NOT what I want). At the moment I can get a basic Marching Squares contour which looks something like this (Where the grid-like lines in the background would be the Marching Squares 'cells'): That needs to be interpolated to get a smoother, more accurate result but that's the general idea. I had a couple ideas for how to turn this into a mesh, but many of them wouldn't work in certain cases, and the one which I thought would work perfectly has turned out to be very slow and I've not even finished it yet! Ideally I'd like whatever I end up using to be fast enough to do every frame for cases such as rapidly-firing weapons, or digging tools. I'm thinking there must be some kind of existing algorithm/technique for turning something like this into a mesh, but I can't seem to find anything. I've looked at some things like Delaunay Triangulation, but as far as I can tell that won't correctly handle concave shapes like the above example, and also wouldn't account for holes within the terrain. I'll go through the technique I came up with for comparison and I guess I'll see if anyone has a better idea. First of all interpolate the Marching Squares contour lines, creating vertices from the line ends, and getting vertices where lines cross cell edges (Important). Then, for each cell containing vertices create polygons by using 2 vertices, and a cell corner as the 3rd vertex (Probably the closest corner). Do this for each cell and I think you should have a mesh which accurately represents the original bitmap (Though there will only be polygons at the edges of the bitmap, and large filled in areas in between will be empty). The only problem with this is that it involves lopping through every pixel once for the initial Marching Squares, then looping through every cell (image height + 1 x image width + 1) at least twice, which ends up being really slow for any decently sized image...

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• What can a Service do on Windows?

  - by Akemi Iwaya

  If you open up Task Manager or Process Explorer on your system, you will see many services running. But how much of an impact can a service have on your system, especially if it is ‘corrupted’ by malware? Today’s SuperUser Q&A post has the answers to a curious reader’s questions. Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites. The Question SuperUser reader Forivin wants to know how much impact a service can have on a Windows system, especially if it is ‘corrupted’ by malware: What kind malware/spyware could someone put into a service that does not have its own process on Windows? I mean services that use svchost.exe for example, like this: Could a service spy on my keyboard input? Take screenshots? Send and/or receive data over the internet? Infect other processes or files? Delete files? Kill processes? How much impact could a service have on a Windows installation? Are there any limits to what a malware ‘corrupted’ service could do? The Answer SuperUser contributor Keltari has the answer for us: What is a service? A service is an application, no more, no less. The advantage is that a service can run without a user session. This allows things like databases, backups, the ability to login, etc. to run when needed and without a user logged in. What is svchost? According to Microsoft: “svchost.exe is a generic host process name for services that run from dynamic-link libraries”. Could we have that in English please? Some time ago, Microsoft started moving all of the functionality from internal Windows services into .dll files instead of .exe files. From a programming perspective, this makes more sense for reusability…but the problem is that you can not launch a .dll file directly from Windows, it has to be loaded up from a running executable (exe). Thus the svchost.exe process was born. So, essentially a service which uses svchost is just calling a .dll and can do pretty much anything with the right credentials and/or permissions. If I remember correctly, there are viruses and other malware that do hide behind the svchost process, or name the executable svchost.exe to avoid detection. Have something to add to the explanation? Sound off in the comments. Want to read more answers from other tech-savvy Stack Exchange users? Check out the full discussion thread here.

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• Android Touch Event Collision Detection

  - by chrissb

  I'm relatively new to both Java and Android, so hopefully the problem I'm having is stemming from something pretty minor that I've overlooked. I've got a (very early stage) game that I've started working on, for Android using Java. At this stage, when the user touches the screen, if they touched a point at which there is an enemy, the enemies health is decreased and they become immobile (for the current implementation at least). The issue that I'm having is that the touch detection doesn't always seem to work. I've got a testing sprite set up that goes to the eventX and eventY coordinates of the touch down event, and it always seems to collide with the enemy object. Yet, the enemy doesn't always register as being hit, and sometimes a hit is registered when the sprite indicates the touch coordinates were outside of the enemies bounding box. I realise that this probably doesn't mean much without any code, so here's what I've got so far. Be gentle, as this is literally my first attempt at something more than basic movement etc. First off, the MainGamePanel class registers the touch event, and informs the levelmanager class (which is what I set up to monitor/handle enemies) public boolean onTouchEvent(MotionEvent event) { if (event.getAction() == MotionEvent.ACTION_DOWN){ levelManager.handleActionDown((int)event.getX(), (int)event.getY()); targetX=event.getX(); targetY=event.getY(); } if (event.getAction() == MotionEvent.ACTION_MOVE) { //the gestures } if (event.getAction() == MotionEvent.ACTION_UP) { //touch was released } return true; } From there, in the levelmanager class the touch event is passed on to all of the enemies within a list array: public static void handleActionDown(int eventX,int eventY){ hit=false; for (enemy1 en : enemy1array){ en.handleActionDown(eventX, eventY); } } The rest of the collision code is handled within the enemies handleActionDown function: public void handleActionDown(int eventX, int eventY) { if(eventX>this.x-enemy1bitmap.getWidth() && eventX<this.x+enemy1bitmap.getWidth() && eventY>this.y-enemy1bitmap.getHeight() && eventY<this.x+enemy1bitmap.getHeight()){ takeDamage(1); levelmanager.setHit(); } } I should probably be using getWidth()/2 and getHeight()/2 for it to be more accurate, but I expanded the area to test this - although I've noticed no improvement. At this stage, the games detection over whether or not the enemy is hit is spotty at best. Generally it takes two or three attempts before a collision is successfully registered, even though the sprite that is being used for testing and set to the eventX and eventY coordinates always indicates that the collision should have worked. Hopefully someone can steer me in the right direction here, and if more information is needed, ask away! Cheers, -Chris

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• Oracle Tutor: *** CAUTION to Word .docx Users ***

  - by [email protected]

  Microsoft released a security update KB969604 for Office 2007 (around June 2009) This update causes document variables within Word docx files to be scrambled. This update might still be pushed out via Office 2007 updates DO NOT save files as docx using MS OFFICE 2007 until you apply the MS hotfix # 970942 available here If you are using Windows XP with Office 2003 or Office 2000 and have installed an older Office 2007 compatibility pack, documents saved as docx may also cause the scrambled document variables. Installing the 2007 compatibility pack published on 1/6/2010 (version 4) will prevent the document variables from becoming corrupt. Those on Windows 2000 may not be able to install the latest compatibility pack, or the compatibility pack may not function properly. This situation will hopefully be rectified in the coming months. What is a document variable? Document variables store data inside the document, invisible to the user. The Tutor software uses them when converting the document to HTML and when creating the flowchart, just to name a couple of uses. How will you know if a document's variables are scrambled? The difficulty in diagnosing the issue is that the symptoms can take myriad forms. There isn't a single error message or a single feature that one can point to and say, "test for the problem by doing this." The best clue about the error is seeing any kind of string in an error message that has garbage characters, question marks, xml code snippets, or just nonsense. Such as "Language ?????????????xlr;lwlerkjl could not be found." It is also possible to see the corrupted data in the footers of the Word docs. And, just because the footers look correct does not mean that the document variables are not corrupted. The corruption problem does not occur in every document variable in the document, just some of them. Often it is less than a quarter of them. What is the difference between docx files and doc files? Office 2007 uses Office Open XML formats with .docx and .docm filename extensions. - Docx is an Office Open XML word document. - Docm is a macro enabled Office Open XML document. This means the file structure behind the scenes is quite different from the binary file formats used prior to Office 2007 such as .doc, .dot, .xls, and .ppt. Solution Summary: For Windows XP and Word 2007: Install the hotfix, or save files as *.doc For Windows XP and Word 2000 and 2003: Install the latest compatibility pack or save files as *.doc For Windows 2000 with Word 2000 or 2003, do not use any compatibility pack, save files as *.doc Emily Chorba Principle Product Manager for Oracle Tutor

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• Windows8, JavaScript and HTML5 - A good thing?

  - by Albers

  Most of us have seen the Windows 8 news regarding support for native HTML5/JavaScript applications. The press has pushed this as a potential threat to the .NET developer community because JavaScript and HTML5 were called "our new developer platform". The press release refers to "Web-connected and Web-powered apps built using HTML5 and JavaScript that have access to the full power of the PC.".Microsoft has also been hush on details related to these comments. Before we buy the hype and start worrying about a world where we drop our Visual Studio licenses and buy DreamWeaver - let's think about how Windows 8 HTML/JavaScript applications would be implemented. The HTML5 spec offers support for offline applications, but this won't offer the OS-integrated experience the press release refers to. MS has to be planning a way to extend access beyond the traditional JavaScript feature set. Microsoft has a similar option today: HTML Applications or HTAs. They come close to required features, but HTAs need ActiveX or Java integration to provide the promised OS-level access. I'm guessing that Microsoft's future OS strategy isn't built on developers cranking out ActiveX controls or Java applets. So where is Microsoft headed? One possibility is that MS builds a new JavaScript framework from the ground up outside their current APIs. Another idea would be for Microsoft to add support for JavaScript as a first class .NET language using the Dynamic Language Runtime. A solution based on the DLR could be integrated into an HTA-like model to provide the promised access, along with the full range of features in .NET Framework. Security comes included in the Framework. And the work necessary to support this integration would tie in nicely with the effort MS has recently made providing better JavaScript and HTML5 support in Visual Studio 2010. As a bonus, a full-fledged JavaScript DLR implementation would allow single language web solutions across client and server (think node.js) and would appeal to developers who are familiar with JavaScript but have less experience with the Microsoft tech stack. We will all get a better picture after the Build conference in September. But in the mean time we know that Microsoft has a reputation for providing strong developer support. We might want to reserve our harshest judgement and consider that the press release could hint at new opportunities for .NET development.

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• How do software projects go over budget and under-deliver?

  - by Carlos

  I've come across this story quite a few times here in the UK: NHS Computer System Summary: We're spunking £12 Billion on some health software with barely anything working. I was sitting the office discussing this with my colleagues, and we had a little think about. From what I can see, all the NHS needs is a database + middle tier of drugs/hospitals/patients/prescriptions objects, and various GUIs for doctors and nurses to look at. You'd also need to think about security and scalability. And you'd need to sit around a hospital/pharmacy/GPs office for a bit to figure out what they need. But, all told, I'd say I could knock together something with that kind of structure in a couple of days, and maybe throw in a month or two to make it work in scale. * If I had a few million quid, I could probably hire some really excellent designers to make a maintainable codebase, and also buy appropriate hardware to run the system on. I hate to trivialize something that seems to have caused to much trouble, but to me it looks like just a big distributed CRUD + UI system. So how on earth did this project bloat to £12B without producing much useful software? As I don't think the software sounds so complicated, I can only imagine that something about how it was organised caused this mess. Is it outsourcing that's the problem? Is it not getting the software designers to understand the medical business that caused it? What are your experiences with projects gone over budget, under delivered? What are best practices for large projects? Have you ever worked on such a project? EDIT *This bit seemed to get a lot of attention. What I mean is I could probably do this for say, 30 users, spending a few tens of thousands of pounds. I'm not including stuff I don't know about the medical industry and government, but I think most people who've been around programming are familiar with that kind of database/front end kind of design. My point is the NHS project looks like a BIG version of this, with bells and whistles, notably security. But surely a budget millions of times larger than mine could provide this?

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• Win7 is not a tablet OS, no matter what the boys in Redmond think.

  - by John Conwell

  Despite what execs at Microsoft think, Windows 7 is NOT a tablet OS.  Just because you can install some software (or OS) on a device, doesn't mean that device is meant to run that software.  This seems to be the step that the non-engineer execs at Microsoft have seem to not understood.  In order to seamlessly work with a device, the software needs to be designed with that device in mind.  That has been the problem with the Windows PDA platform, the Windows Mobil platform, and now with trying to force fit Windows 7 on a tablet.  Its just not designed for that style of interaction.   Windows is designed to be interacted with via a mouse and keyboard.  In fact, it is brilliant at that.  But, It is NOT designed to be interacted with by your fingers.  And that is why the Windows tablet failed 10 years ago, and why it will fail today.  Its not the hardware's fault like Microsoft claimed 10 years ago.  Its the User Interaction design that failed. And this is why the iPhone and Android OS's work wonderfully on a tablet.  The user interaction was designed for small screens, navigated by big fat fingers.  I love these OS's and how I interact with them.  And when I play with a touch screen Windows 7 device, I am feel like I'm playing with a brittle wana-be.  And its not the hardware's fault.  The touchscreen is very responsive.  I actually like the hardware.  But the OS and the software are just not designed to be interacted with, with my big fat fingers.  In order to be successful, Microsoft needs to start from scratch, and build a platform AND SOFTWARE specifically for use by fingers.  Thats why everyone was so excited when they though Microsoft was going to release the Courier tablet.  Because it looked like a totally different platform.  Something that might actually work.  But Windows 7...I hate to burst your bubble, but you are not a touch platform.

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• Backup Azure Tables with the Enzo Backup API

  - by Herve Roggero

  In case you missed it, you can now backup (and restore) Azure Tables and SQL Databases using an API directly. The features available through the API can be found here: http://www.bluesyntax.net/backup20api.aspx and the online help for the API is here: http://www.bluesyntax.net/EnzoCloudBackup20/APIIntro.aspx. Backing up Azure Tables can’t be any easier than with the Enzo Backup API. Here is a sample code that does the trick: // Create the backup helper class. The constructor automatically sets the SourceStorageAccount property StorageBackupHelper backup = new StorageBackupHelper("storageaccountname", "storageaccountkey", "sourceStorageaccountname", "sourceStorageaccountkey", true, "apilicensekey"); // Now set some properties… backup.UseCloudAgent = false;                                       // backup locally backup.DeviceURI = @"c:\TMP\azuretablebackup.bkp";    // to this file backup.Override = true; backup.Location = DeviceLocation.LocalFile; // Set optional performance options backup.PKTableStrategy.Mode = BSC.Backup.API.TableStrategyMode.GUID; // Set GUID strategy by default backup.MaxRESTPerSec = 200; // Attempt to stay below 200 REST calls per second // Start the backup now… string taskId = backup.Backup(); // Use the Environment class to get the final status of the operation EnvironmentHelper env = new EnvironmentHelper("storageaccountname", "storageaccountkey", "apilicensekey"); string status = env.GetOperationStatus(taskId);   As you can see above, the code is straightforward. You provide connection settings in the constructor, set a few options indicating where the backup device will be located, set optional performance parameters and start the backup. The performance options are designed to help you backup your Azure Tables quickly, while attempting to keep under a specific threshold to prevent Storage Account throttling. For example, the MaxRESTPerSec property will attempt to keep the overall backup operation under 200 rest calls per second. Another performance option if the Backup Strategy for Azure Tables. By default, all tables are simply scanned. While this works best for smaller Azure Tables, larger tables can use the GUID strategy, which will issue requests against an Azure Table in parallel assuming the PartitionKey stores GUID values. It doesn’t mean that your PartitionKey must have GUIDs however for this strategy to work; but the backup algorithm is tuned for this condition. Other options are available as well, such as filtering which columns, entities or tables are being backed up. Check out more on the Blue Syntax website at http://www.bluesyntax.net.

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• Pathfinding for fleeing

  - by Philipp

  As you know there are plenty of solutions when you wand to find the best path in a 2-dimensional environment which leads from point A to point B. But how do I calculate a path when an object is at point A, and wants to get away from point B, as fast and far as possible? A bit of background information: My game uses a 2d environment which isn't tile-based but has floating point accuracy. The movement is vector-based. The pathfinding is done by partitioning the game world into rectangles which are walkable or non-walkable and building a graph out of their corners. I already have pathfinding between points working by using Dijkstras algorithm. The use-case for the fleeing algorithm is that in certain situations, actors in my game should perceive another actor as a danger and flee from it. The trivial solution would be to just move the actor in a vector in the direction which is opposite from the threat until a "safe" distance was reached or the actor reaches a wall where it then covers in fear. The problem with this approach is that actors will be blocked by small obstacles they could easily get around. As long as moving along the wall wouldn't bring them closer to the threat they could do that, but it would look smarter when they would avoid obstacles in the first place: Another problem I see is with dead ends in the map geometry. In some situations a being must choose between a path which gets it faster away now but ends in a dead end where it would be trapped, or another path which would mean that it wouldn't get that far away from the danger at first (or even a bit closer) but on the other hand would have a much greater long-term reward in that it would eventually get them much further away. So the short-term reward of getting away fast must be somehow valued against the long-term reward of getting away far. There is also another rating problem for situations where an actor should accept to move closer to a minor threat to get away from a much larger threat. But completely ignoring all minor threats would be foolish, too (that's why the actor in this graphic goes out of its way to avoid the minor threat in the upper right area): Are there any standard solutions for this problem?

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• Need help with a complex 3d scene (using Ogre and bullet)

  - by Matthias

  In my setup there is a box with a hole on one side, and a freely movable "stick" (or bar, tube). This stick can be inserted/moved through the hole into the box. This hole is exactly as wide as the diameter of the stick. In reality, when you would now hold the end of the stick in your hand and move the hand left/right or up/down, the other end of the stick, which is inside the box, would move into the opposite direction of your hand movement (because the stick is affixed at the pivot point where it is entering the box through the hole). (I hope you understand what I mean so far.) Now I need to simulate such a setup in a 3d program. I have already successfully developed an Ogre3d framework for this application, including bullet. But what I don't know is how I can implement in my program what I have described above. This application must include two more features: The scene camera is attached to the end of the stick that is inserted into the box. So when the user would move the mouse (to control "his" end of the stick outside the box), then the camera attached to the stick would move in the opposite direction, as described above. The stick has some length, and the user can push it further into the box, or pull it closer to him again. That means of course that the max. radius on which the end of the stick inside the box can move depends on how far the stick is pushed into the box. Thus, the more the stick is pushed into the box, the larger the max. radius of this end of the stick with the camera will be. I understand this is maybe quite a complex thing, so I don't expect any real source code here. I already have the Ogre and bullet part as said up and running, as well as a camera attached to the stick. This works fine. What I don't know though is how I can simulate the setup described above. Especially the requirement that the stick is affixed at the position of the hole on the box, where it is inserted into the box. Any ideas how I could approach to implement the described setup?

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• How do I import my first sprites?

  - by steven_desu

  Continuing from this question (new question - now unrelated) So I have a thorough background in programming already (algorithms, math, logic, graphing problems, etc.) however I've never attempted to code a game before. In fact, I've never had anything more than minimal input from a user during the execution of a program. Generally input was given from a file or passed through console, all necessary functions were performed, then the program terminated with an output. I decided to try and get in on the world of game development. From several posts I've seen around gamedev.stackexchange.com XNA seems to be a favorite, and it was recommended to me when I asked where to start. I've downloaded and installed Visual Studio 2010 along with the XNA Framework and now I can't seem to get moving in the right direction. I started out looking on Google for "xna game studio tutorial", "xna game development beginners", "my first xna game", etc. I found lots of crap. The official "Introduction to Game Studio 4.0" gave me this (plus my own train of thought happily pasted on top thanks to MSPaint): http://tinypic.com/r/2w1sgvq/7 The "Get Additional Help" link (my best guess, since there was no "Continue" or "Next" link) lead me to this page: http://tinypic.com/r/2qa0dgx/7 I tried every page. The forum was the only thing that seemed helpful, however searching for "beginner", "newbie", "getting started", "first project", and similar on the forums turned up many threads with specific questions that are a bit above my level ("beginner to collision detection", for instance) Disappointed I returned to the XNA Game Studio home page. Surely their own website would have some introduction, tutorial, or at least a useful link to a community. EVERYTHING on their website was about coding Windows Phone 7.... Everything. http://tinypic.com/r/10eit8i/7 http://tinypic.com/r/120m9gl/7 Giving up on any official documentation after a while, I went back to Google. I managed to locate www.xnadevelopment.com. The website is built around XNA Game Studio 3.0, but how different can 3.0 be from 4.0?.... Apparently different enough. http://tinypic.com/r/5d8mk9/7 http://tinypic.com/r/25hflli/7 Figuring that this was the correct folder, I right-clicked.... http://tinypic.com/r/24o94yu/7 Hmm... maybe by "Add Content Reference" they mean "Add a reference to an existing file (content)"? Let's try it (after all- it's my only option) http://tinypic.com/r/2417eqt/7 At this point I gave up. I'm back. My original goal in my last question was to create a keyboard-navigable 3D world (no physics necessary, no logic or real game necessary). After my recent failures my goal has been revised. I want to display an image on the screen. Hopefully in time I'll be able to move it with the keyboard.

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• How to get tens of millions of pages indexed by Google bot?

  - by Chris Adragna

  We are currently developing a site that currently has 8 million unique pages that will grow to about 20 million right away, and eventually to about 50 million or more. Before you criticize... Yes, it provides unique, useful content. We continually process raw data from public records and by doing some data scrubbing, entity rollups, and relationship mapping, we've been able to generate quality content, developing a site that's quite useful and also unique, in part due to the breadth of the data. It's PR is 0 (new domain, no links), and we're getting spidered at a rate of about 500 pages per day, putting us at about 30,000 pages indexed thus far. At this rate, it would take over 400 years to index all of our data. I have two questions: Is the rate of the indexing directly correlated to PR, and by that I mean is it correlated enough that by purchasing an old domain with good PR will get us to a workable indexing rate (in the neighborhood of 100,000 pages per day). Are there any SEO consultants who specialize in aiding the indexing process itself. We're otherwise doing very well with SEO, on-page especially, besides, the competition for our "long-tail" keyword phrases is pretty low, so our success hinges mostly on the number of pages indexed. Our main competitor has achieved approx 20MM pages indexed in just over one year's time, along with an Alexa 2000-ish ranking. Noteworthy qualities we have in place: page download speed is pretty good (250-500 ms) no errors (no 404 or 500 errors when getting spidered) we use Google webmaster tools and login daily friendly URLs in place I'm afraid to submit sitemaps. Some SEO community postings suggest a new site with millions of pages and no PR is suspicious. There is a Google video of Matt Cutts speaking of a staged on-boarding of large sites, too, in order to avoid increased scrutiny (at approx 2:30 in the video). Clickable site links deliver all pages, no more than four pages deep and typically no more than 250(-ish) internal links on a page. Anchor text for internal links is logical and adds relevance hierarchically to the data on the detail pages. We had previously set the crawl rate to the highest on webmaster tools (only about a page every two seconds, max). I recently turned it back to "let Google decide" which is what is advised.

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• Common SOA Problems by C2B2

  - by JuergenKress

  SOA stands for Service Oriented Architecture and has only really come together as a concrete approach in the last 15 years or so, although the concepts involved have been around for longer. Oracle SOA Suite is based around the Service Component Architecture (SCA) devised by the Open SOA collaboration of companies including Oracle and IBM. SCA, as used in SOA suite, is designed as a way to crystallise the concepts of SOA into a standard which ensures that SOA principles like the separation of application and business logic are maintained. Orchestration or Integration? A common thing to see with many people who are beginning to either build a new SOA based infrastructure, or move an old system to be service oriented, is confusion in the purpose of SOA technologies like BPEL and enterprise service buses. For a lot of problems, orchestration tools like BPEL or integration tools like an ESB will both do the job and achieve the right objectives; however it’s important to remember that, although a hammer can be used to drive a screw into wood, that doesn’t mean it’s the best way to do it. Service Integration is the act of connecting components together at a low level, which usually results in a single external endpoint for you to expose to your customers or other teams within your organisation – a simple product ordering system, for example, might integrate a stock checking service and a payment processing service. Process Orchestration, however, is generally a higher level approach whereby the (often externally exposed) service endpoints are brought together to track an end-to-end business process. This might include the earlier example of a product ordering service and couple it with a business rules service and human task to handle edge-cases. A good (but not exhaustive) rule-of-thumb is that integrations performed by an ESB will usually be real-time, whereas process orchestration in a SOA composite might comprise processes which take a certain amount of time to complete, or have to wait pending manual intervention. BPEL vs BPMN For some, with pre-existing SOA or business process projects, this decision is effectively already made. For those embarking on new projects it’s certainly an important consideration for those using Oracle SOA software since, due to the components included in SOA Suite and BPM Suite, the choice of which to buy is determined by what they offer. Oracle SOA suite has no BPMN engine, whereas BPM suite has both a BPMN and a BPEL engine. SOA suite has the ESB component “Mediator”, whereas BPM suite has none. Decisions must be made, therefore, on whether just one or both process modelling languages are to be used. The wrong decision could be costly further down the line. Design for performance: Read the complete article here. SOA & BPM Partner Community For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Facebook Wiki Technorati Tags: C2B2,SOA best practice,SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,Community,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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• Software Architecture and MEF composition location

  - by Leonardo

  Introduction My software (a bunch of webapi's) consist of 4 projects: Core, FrontWebApi, Library and Administration. Library is a code library project that consists of only interfaces and enumerators. All my classes in other projects inherit from at least one interface, and this interface is in the library. Generally speaking, my interfaces define either Entities, Repositories or Controllers. This project references no other project or any special dlls... just the regular .Net stuff... Core is a class-library project where concrete implementation of Entities and Repositories. In some cases i have more than 1 implementation for a Repository (ex: one for azure table storage and one for regular Sql). This project handles the intelligence (business rules mostly) and persistence, and it references only the Library. FrontWebApi is a ASP.NET MVC 4 WebApi project that implements the controllers interfaces to handle web-requests (from a mobile native app)... It references the Core and the Library. Administration is a code-library project that represents a "optional-module", meaning: if it is present, it provides extra-features (such as Access Control Lists) to the application, but if its not, no problem. Administration is also only referencing the Library and implementing concrete classes of a few interfaces such as "IAccessControlEntry"... I intend to make this available with a "setup" that will create any required database table or anything like that. But it is important to notice that the Core has no reference to this project... Development Now, in order to have a decoupled code I decide to use IoC and because this is a small project, I decided to do it using MEF, specially because of its advertised "composition" capabilities. I arranged all the imports/exports and constructors and everything, but something is quite not perfect in my "mental-visualisation": Main Question Where should I "Compose" the objects? I mean: Technically, the only place where real implementation access is required is in the Repositories, because in order to retrieve data from wherever, entities instances will be necessary, and in all other places. The repositories could also provide a public "GetCleanInstanceOf()" right? Then all other places will be just fine working with the interfaces instead of concrete classes... Secondary Question Should "Administration" implement the concrete object for "IAccessControlGeneralRepository" or the Core should?

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• What are some good realistic programming related movies (docu-dramas, documentaries, accurate fiction, etc)?

  - by EpsilonVector

  A while ago I asked this question and the result was this. Following the response I got in the meta question I'm re-asking the question with new guidelines to focus it on the direction I wanted it to have originally. ================================================================== The guidelines are as follows: by "programming related" I mean movies from which we can learn about stuff like the development process, or history of software/computers, or programming culture. In other words, they must be grounded in the industry. No tangential stuff. Good entries answer as many of the following criteria as possible: Teach you about the history of the industry, or the development process, or teach you about important industry related topics (software patents for example) Are based on real life events, companies, people, practices, and they are the main focus of the movie After watching them, you feel like you understand or know something about the programmers' world that you didn't before (or you can see how someone could have such a response). You can point to it and say "this faithfully represents the industry/programmer culture at some point in time". This might be something you would show laymen to explain to them what "your people" are like and what is it that you do. Examples for good entries include: Pirates of Silicon Valley- the story of how Microsoft and Apple started the industry. Revolution OS- The story of Linux's rise to fame, and a pretty good cover of the Free Software/Open Source world. Aardvark'd: 12 Weeks with Geeks- development process. Examples for bad entries: Movies who's sole relevance is that they can be appreciated by programmers. The point of this question is not to be "what are some good movies" with "for a programmer" appended to it. Just because the writers got a few computer jokes right in itself doesn't make it about the industry. Movies where there's a computer related element, but are not about the industry. For example, 24 (the TV series). It's a product of the information age but it isn't actually about it. Another example is movies where there's a really cool programmer character, but are overall about something completely different. Likewise, The Big Bang Theory is not about physics, even though they have a cool physicist as a character. Science fiction, even if it draws ideas from computers. For example, the Matrix trilogy. Movies that you can't point to them and say: this is a faithful representation of our world (at some point in time). If you can't do that then it doesn't mirror the industry. Keep it one entry per answer so that the voting could sort the entries out.

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• Error installing RVM

  - by Dbugger

  I am following this guide, but this is the output I receive. What am the problem? dbugger@mercury:~$ \curl -sSL https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable --rails Downloading https://github.com/wayneeseguin/rvm/archive/stable.tar.gz Upgrading the RVM installation in /home/dbugger/.rvm/ RVM PATH line found in /home/dbugger/.profile /home/dbugger/.bashrc /home/dbugger/.zshrc. RVM sourcing line found in /home/dbugger/.bash_profile /home/dbugger/.zlogin. Upgrade of RVM in /home/dbugger/.rvm/ is complete. # Enrique, # # Thank you for using RVM! # We sincerely hope that RVM helps to make your life easier and more enjoyable!!! # # ~Wayne, Michal & team. In case of problems: http://rvm.io/help and https://twitter.com/rvm_io Upgrade Notes: * No new notes to display. rvm 1.25.27 (stable) by Wayne E. Seguin <[email protected]>, Michal Papis <[email protected]> [https://rvm.io/] Searching for binary rubies, this might take some time. No binary rubies available for: ubuntu/14.04/x86_64/ruby-2.1.2. Continuing with compilation. Please read 'rvm help mount' to get more information on binary rubies. Checking requirements for ubuntu. Installing requirements for ubuntu. Updating system.......... Installing required packages: gawk, libreadline6-dev, libssl-dev, libyaml-dev, libsqlite3-dev, sqlite3.... Error running 'requirements_debian_libs_install gawk libreadline6-dev libssl-dev libyaml-dev libsqlite3-dev sqlite3', showing last 15 lines of /home/dbugger/.rvm/log/1401804140_ruby-2.1.2/package_install_gawk_libreadline6-dev_libssl-dev_libyaml-dev_libsqlite3-dev_sqlite3.log ++ /scripts/functions/utility : __rvm_try_sudo() 405 > sudo -p '%p password required for '\''apt-get --no-install-recommends --yes install gawk libreadline6-dev libssl-dev libyaml-dev libsqlite3-dev sqlite3'\'': ' apt-get --no-install-recommends --yes install gawk libreadline6-dev libssl-dev libyaml-dev libsqlite3-dev sqlite3 Reading package lists... Building dependency tree... Reading state information... Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable distribution that some required packages have not yet been created or been moved out of Incoming. The following information may help to resolve the situation: The following packages have unmet dependencies: libssl-dev : Depends: libssl1.0.0 (= 1.0.1f-1ubuntu2) but 1.0.1f-1ubuntu2.1 is to be installed E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages. ++ /scripts/functions/utility : __rvm_try_sudo() 405 > return 100 ++ /scripts/functions/requirements/ubuntu : requirements_debian_libs_install() 36 > return 100 Requirements installation failed with status: 100.

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• Default values - are they good or evil?

  - by Andrew

  The question about default values in general - default return function values, default parameter values, default logic for when something is missing, default logic for handling exceptions, default logic for handling the edge conditions etc. For a long time I considered default values to be a "pure evil" thing, something that "cloaks the catastrophe" and results in a very hard do find bugs. But recently I started to think about default values as some sort of a technical debt ... which is not a straight bad thing but something that could provide some "short term financing" get us to survive the project (how many of us could afford to buy a house without taking out the mortgage?). When I say a "short term" - I don't mean - "do something quickly first and do refactor it out later before it hits the production". No - I am talking about relying on a hardcoded default values in a production software. Granted - it could cause some issues, but what if it only going to cause a single trouble in a whole year. Again - I am talking about the "average" mainstream software here (not a software for a nuclear power station) - the average web site or a UI application for the accounting software, meaning that people lives are not at stake, nor millions of dollars. Again, from my experience, business users would rather live with the software which "works somehow", rather then wait for a perfect one. And the use of default values helps a lot if you develop a software in a RAD style. But again - the longest debug sessions I have spent were because of the bugs introduced by a default value which either stopped being "a default" along the way or because a small subsystem has recently been upgraded and as a result of this upgrade it does not handle the default correctly (e.g. empty list vs null, or null string vs empty string). So my question is - are the default values good or evil. And if they are a technical debt - how do measure up how much you can borrow so you can afford the repayments? Would really appreciate any input. Cheers. EDIT: If I am using the default values as a way to cut the corners during the development - and if the corners cutting results in a bugs and issues - what is the methodology to recover from these issues?

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